From "Sad and Sadder Edition"

Morning Roundup: Sad and Sadder Edition

So. Quadruple amputees, go-go violence, Metro suicides, sex abuse cases, stabbings, resignations, police crashes, and antiquated racist epithets? If that's the best you can do for Morning Roundup, please go back to delaying it until 11:30am, please.

Anyway, with the Tea Party protesters safely ensconced in their trailer parks and residents eagerly awaiting the arrival of the IMF/World Bank protesters with cartons of air fresheners, I feel this is as good a time as any to make a calm, measured examination of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the two-party system and ask the question that V.I. Lenin asked over a hundred years ago: "What is to be done?"

Let me be so bold as to predict your first question: but where's the poop jokes? I ask a minute of your indulgence. What benefits a political movement to "make its voices heard" if that voice falls upon deaf ears, or minds so intellectual undernourished that it stares slackjawed in a feeble attempt to grasp whatever tedious political point that's trying to be made? I ask only because of the inevitable ad hominem attacks that protesters engender in this town. Whatever vague message they want to transmit is all but lost amid the sound and fury of street theater and marionette puppets and the juvenile antics of the so-called anarchists. "Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals" a wise man wrote on the side of a toilet, which, in lieu of what passes for current political discourse, I would amend to "...bong hit of the pseudointellectuals."

More's the pity that the intellectual giants behind these two (bowel) movements could not meet on the field of battle to exchange withering critiques, witty bon mots, and hilarious japes about the merits of trade unionism versus laissez-faire capitalism! Instead, we're treated to a sort of vague anti-establishmentism couched in terms of either patriotism-cum-jingoism or the tired, shopworn arguments that all property is theft. All of which serves to only marginalize whatever legitimate arguments either side could make about the expansion of government power and the lack of transparency among international financial institutions that borders on total opacity.

Considering the lack of a positive agenda that the right advances in lieu of the healthcare "debate," it ill behooves me to make such broad critiques without positing some alternative scenario. What follows is my Five Year Plan for Economic Justice:

1. Cut defense spending in half. Why should Americans kill Iraqis when Iraqis can do this for themselves? Put the National Guard to work rebuilding the levees and patrolling the streets of DC. The only way to meet the threat of wheelchair-bound double-amputees with shotguns is with Marine Corps snipers and heavy artillery.
2. Cut the marginal tax rate to Reagan-era levels. Twenty-nine years of creeping socialism and corporate welfare have resulted in a tanked economy, morbid obesity, and golden parachutes for corporate necrophiles. The only golden thing Bear Stearns execs should be getting is showers.
3. Cease all highway construction and redirect funds towards mass transit. If induced demand has taught us anything, it's that if you build a world-class Japanese Bullet Train, people will use it. This will spur the infill expansion of walkable communities to keep Fatty McFatFat from becoming Corpsy McDeadDead.
4. Annex Mexico, declare it the 51st State, and grant statehood to the District. This effectively eliminates 80% of the illegal immigration problem as well as that of having one extra star sticking out of the American flag. You also will finally start to get some decent Oaxacan cuisine in this dump.
5. Destroy all monsters. This should be self evident.

I know these views aren't popular, but I for one have never courted popularity. When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans suspended democracy and appointed one man to defend it. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villan.