Deadweight Delay and the Selfish Bastards

Our beloved Publius at Legal Fiction is being melodramatic. Not by much, but enough. Perhaps excessive viewings of the Rings Trilogy has short circuited the reality portion of his brain, I don't know. That's why I couldn't finish watching the first of those movies. Too much self-dignity got in the way of me enjoying any of it; with trolls and whatnot not really being my thing. I was always more of a sci-fi kind of guy.

But that's not what I'm writing about. No, I'm referring to Pub's post on the GOP leadership's recent breach of conduct concerning the Terry Schiavo incident. To be honest, Publius picked a poor time to stop sniffing blog, as I was really jonesin' for a legal fix, and his opinion was nowhere to be seen. I'm not one to trust the lawyer class, so I was really left hanging while he was off learning his true self. Oh well. He's back now. But unfortunately, he's gotten a bit daft since he left. Or maybe I just never noticed before.

Ok, well I wrote a whole bunch more. Several long paragraphs, trust me. But I really just didn't quite like it. It wasn't that it was bad. It was just very very long, and I hadn't even really gotten to my main point. Trust me, even by my standards it would have been long. It involved everything from fancy words like "hubris", to less fancy words like "hogwash". It was good, I guess. But too long, and it's very late and I knew that if I didn't finish it, I never would. So I just deleted it all. I probably should have saved it for another day, but this stuff's really a dime a dozen for me, and I can crank it out all day. So it's gone and I'm going to sum up (which itself is pretty long).

To sum up, Publius and his ilk are being melodramatic in regards to the perceived constitutional crisis regarding the GOP powergrab. American history is full of powerful men, making powerful moves; and nobody ever remembers their names. Like most politicians, our current bunch are small-minded people with small goals (themselves), and the only way they can emasculate the judicial branch is by accident. If you could somehow convince them of Pub's argument, they'd probably back down...or maybe it would convince them to go for it, I don't know. I just don't think that's what is happening. They're just concerned with upcoming elections and saving Deadweight Delay, and not with stripping powers from a branch of government they hope to stack.

You can always take separate events and try to find a trend which connects them all; but more often than not, the cigar is just a cigar.

Oh, and his idea of Burke conservatives is a bit much for most folks. He thinks it's about stopping men from grabbing too much power and mucking stuff up. That's too high-minded for my taste and suspect it was always his liberal side peeping out. I think most conservatives are just selfish and don't want to help out people they don't know (and some of the people they DO know, I'm sure). "Taxes are theft", is a favorite line by those who haven't the brains to notice how low tax rates in third-world nations are. Somehow, the irony of debating "tax theft" with an anonymous person over trillions of dollars worth of tax paid infrastructure seems lost on these people. I'm sure they would agree with Pub's Burke philosophy, just as they'd agree with any philosophy which would save them tax dollars without making them look selfish and/or greedy. The human mind knows no limits when it comes to inventing good reasons for bad actions.

To me, the problem that conservatives always had with government wasn't that it might become too powerful, but that it would interfere with the conservatives' own power; with "conservative" defined as the rich and powerful. Anyone worried about greedy men seizing power should want a well-functioning government to regulate men's personal desires. With its checks/balances and overwhelming bureaucracy, I trust the government more than I trust corporations. Which is exactly what Republicans don't want us to think. So they hire lots of smart guys to write lots of lofty ideas to justify this stuff, hoping it sticks; which was how they swindled the social conservatives into their party. But I just don't see how someone worried about "bad men" could possibly be against business regulation; which is one reason I doubt that there are too many of these Burke conservatives out there.

And while there are probably conservatives of both types, I'm sure mine outnumbers his. Hell, I'd like to see them in a fist-fight: the selfish conservatives versus the enlightened ones. Not because I know my group would win, but because I'd just like to see conservatives fight, that's all. I think that most folks want to believe that they have higher interests in mind, but they're really only in it for themselves. Maybe that makes me a Burkette too. But I wrote waaay more than I wanted to, and that's after deleting a whole bunch. I'm having trouble spelling straight, so I'm going to bed. You'll just have to imagine all the great stuff you missed.

Oh, and I'm not saying that the true conservatives aren't scared about the implications of the Schiavo incident. They should be. But I think it has to do more with the Pied Piper coming back for his due after he fulfilled his promise. Or should I have made a "deal with the devil" analogy. In either case, you get my point. The true conservatives invited the Social and Neo conservatives over to play, and now fear that they may have lost the whole party. It's all fun and games until you gain the power to fulfill promises. But damn, I ended up writing a bunch more.