News blurb on the front page of the WSJ (Friday, January 13):

A Justice Department opinion buttressed Obama’s contention that his recess appointments last week were constitutional.

Um, considering scandals such as Fast and Furious and the its handling of the 2008 voter intimidation case, wouldn’t that be like saying Newt Gingrich buttressed Herman Cain’s contention that there was no affair?

The White House response to the Solyndra subpoena has been referred to as “rejecting” and  “pushing back”.   In the days of the Nixon administration it would have been called stonewalling.

Stonewalling is the term I’ve used in comment sections in various places on the web.   But more recently I’ve read the subpoena and the exchange of letters.  (Links are at the web site of Fred Upton’s Energy and Commerce committee.)  I haven’t exactly changed my view of what’s happening, but I do think some of us have allowed this scuffle to distract us from the main point.

I still am amazed that the White House can have already produced 85,000 pages of documents and then complained that providing the rest could distract the President from his constitutional duties.   If there are that many documents, it  seems that the White House’s dealings with the Solyndra loan have been a distraction from the President’s constitutional duties from the beginning.

It’s also interesting that the most political of presidents, the president who uses a tax paid trip to bash Republicans while campaigning for his jobs bill, would find it in himself to complain that Upton’s committee was engaging in political partisanship.

The fact that the White House saw fit to time its rejection for the Friday night news dump suggests that it isn’t completely comfortable with its own behavior.

But why is it necessary for the Energy and Commerce committee to go through this subpoena exercise?    If it’s just to find some grounds for damaging President Obama’s re-election prospects, that’s not really behavior any better than the government’s funneling a $1 million consulting fee for evaluating the options to Lazard Ltd., one of the biggest DNC contributors.

The problem is that when the government gets in the loan business, there are vast opportunities for political corruption — opportunities for insider dealing in government funds.   The fact that it’s difficult to determine whether or not the White House was doing special deals for its friends is all the information that the committee needs.  It doesn’t need any more documents to know that it should terminate the opportunity for corruption by terminating the loan program.   Going after one particular President doesn’t do anything about the root problem.

“Excellent. I have for some time been saying the hubris of Obamacare’s invasion of our health care system is similar to the hubris of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. I thought I was the only one to notice, but this article explains it a lot more completely than I ever knew.”

Recently, Mr. Strauss-Kahn faced public-relations bungles. Last week, French media published a photo showing the IMF chief and his wife entering a Porsche Panamera, property of a French spokesman, during a layover in Paris. The photos rekindled a debate over whether Mr. Strauss-Kahn, known for a taste for fine food and luxurious vacations, was a true Socialist.

How is he not a socialist?   He doesn’t let the opinions of a lone individual, and especially not those of a hotel maid, interfere with grand plans for the reordering of society to make everyone equal, and in which there is a forceful governing class to make sure there are no exceptions.   He makes sure the middle class and poorer class are taxed to pay for bailouts in order to keep the governing class living in the style to which it has become accustomed, which is necessary in order to provide them with sufficient incentive and social position with which to enforce equality and egalitarianism.      He is the head of an organization that puts hard pressure on countries to accept bailouts, reminiscent of the ways in which 19th century treaty commissioners in America turned the screws on the Native Americans and forced them to take bailouts.

So I repeat, how is he not a true socialist?

In the Odgen incident, Sgt. Troy Burnett was found to have handled the situation appropriately, [County Attorney] Smith says. “This was a split-second decision. He acted according to his training.”

And it’s certainly no reason to allow homeowners to shoot illegal intruders in self-defense.

USA Today article:  “Critics knock no-knock police raids.”

The government doesn’t want us to have any secret transactions. Pay someone more than $10,000 in cash and the government wants to know what that’s all about. With the ObamaCare act, businesses are supposed to report any transaction over $600.

So if we can’t keep any secrets from the government, what good reason is there for the government to keep so many secrets from us?

I can understand that we don’t want secret military technology to fall into other hands. If we were at war, we wouldn’t the enemy to know about our strategizing. (Q. How do I know we’re not at war? A. Congress hasn’t declared any war that I’ve heard of.) But we’re not at war, so there isn’t a lot of information that needs to be kept so secret.

And I’m a bit suspicious of Rep. Peter King, anyhow.     Sounds to me like his call for WikiLeaks to be treated as a terrorist organization, besides being a stupid move that robs the term “terrorism” of any slight bit of meaning it may still have, is an excuse for him not to be spending time on his real job, which is to find  ways to cut spending and cut the deficit.

What I haven’t seen so far is any discussion about how these remarks — both the question and the answer — reveal a deep and dangerous misunderstanding of the proper purpose of government.

It’s not the proper job of the President and Congress to kick ass. It’s the job of the President to enforce the laws and bring violators to justice. If the laws are serving us badly, then it’s time to work to improve the laws and/or the enforcement mechanism.

I suppose some might say the “kick ass” remark is just a way of saying the same thing. But even if it were, which is doubtful given the history of this administration, it’s a bad way to say it became it promotes the idea of vigilante justice, of working outside the law.

We see this bad attitude in newspaper articles that, instead of informing us about regulatory mechanisms being proposed for, say, the banking industry, instead talk about whether or not the new laws are “tough.” But the question of whether they are tough distracts attention from the question of whether they are effective, predictable, and enforceable in a fair, corruption-free manner.

No, this isn’t the American ruling class trying to maintain its hegemony against the rise of tea party activism. These are Russian rulers who are afraid of motorists who are protesting against special road privileges for VIPs.

Just the same, the Russian government could use the services of our Bill Clinton. He knows how to deal with these types of people, if you know what I mean.

His step to the national stage brought police surveillance and a mix of pressure and courtship by officials worried that his horn-honking activism might ignite broader unrest. He recalls the swift reaction when a participant on his group’s online forum suggested setting a car on fire in Red Square. Within minutes, Mr. Kanayev was summoned to Criminal Police headquarters. “It was just a joke,” he says he told his interrogators.

A Kremlin political operative approached, he says, and promised time on state-run television if he would stop the caravans. Another official, Sergey Shishkarev, who heads parliament’s transport committee, says he has offered to shape some of Mr. Kanayev’s ideas on tax and safety issues into legislation but warned the activist “to work without fanaticism.”

WSJ link here

That must be what he meant back in 2005 when he said, “We need to rise above the “ends justify the means” mentality.”

The truly amazing part is how it managed to put out so many words without once mentioning Barak Obama’s actions in the direction of totalitarianism. It mentions Bush & Cheney quite a bit, and gives a fairly balanced account of what they did and didn’t do in the totalitarian direction. Richard Nixon gets a mention. But there is not a word about Barak Obama’s new detention policies that go farther than Bush’s ever did, or his politicization of the Justice Department, or his takeovers and attempted takeovers of various sectors of our economy, or his intolerance of dissenting viewpoints.

How could anyone who is not a partisan hack write such an otherwise balanced account without mentioning our current President, I wondered.

Then I got to thinking that it’s not so unusual after all. Slate is well known as a leftwing magazine. Young leftwingers are not very tolerant these days. If Levin wants to be able to be allowed to work, breed, and not have others treat him like a pariah, it’s probably not something he dares to talk about directly. He needs to talk in parables and circumlocutions to get his point across.

It’s not unlike in movies made in Soviet Russia. In those I’ve seen there is (to me, at least) a surprising amount of social commentary that would probably not have got past the censors if they had discussed the topics directly. So a comedy like Kin-Dza-Dza could be criticial of a government infested with bribe-takers and abusers of power — if the action took place on another planet.

That movie is probably not the greatest example, because Kin-Dza-Dza was released in 1986 when the Soviet Union was already much more open than it had been previously. But I happen to have the movie handy, including the above part where our heroes have just reached the point when they cannot take it anymore and have decided to fight back, starting by taking down the police officer who is helping himself to bribes.

Tarkovsky’s Solaris is probably a better example. It came out in 1972, a very different time, and it, too, got by with a lot by putting the setting on another planet. That way any messages wouldn’t strike too close to home.

Another example is in the 1973 TV series that Myra and I are currently watching: “Seventeen Moments in Spring”, which takes place in Nazi Germany. The English subtitles for the narrator for Göring’s words at the point of the above screenshot say, “Our concentration camps are humane instruments to save the enemies of national-socialism. If we don’t put them in camps, there will be a mob law. In such way, they’ll be completely reformed and realize our rightness”. Even in 1973 it was probably easier and more effective to talk about that than about the GULAG system of corrective labor from the same World War II period, which had very similar methods and purposes.

I’m not sure if the movie was really intended as social commentary, though. So far what I’ve seen of it is a very patriotic movie that doesn’t seem to be getting in digs at problems that include the producers’ own country. But I wonder if a viewer, perhaps living in the same household with former inmates from the GULAG, could help but think about how their own country once did such things, too.

This sort of indirect system of social commentary is of course not just a feature of Soviet Russia. Authors and producers in other countries have sometimes had to approach issues indirectly, too. And if you consider the type of people who usually read Slate, it’s probably something that happens in our country, too. The Josh Levin article may very well be an example.

Late note:  Also cross-posted to Kino Reticulator