Dead Trees versus Nurse Logs

Those able to get far enough outside their personal envelope as to care about the state of the union cannot but be astounded at the idea that there are some addicts who claim to want our new President to fail. Just think of that. This man was elected by a solid majority of the voters, in stark contrast to that lazy, incurious, narcissist who last occupied ("soiled" is more like it) the place. And was probably never the choice of the majority of US voters in the first place, I might add.

That strikes me as awfully close to traitorous, and certainly bearing no relation to patriotic.

There were a lot of us naifs who actually pulled for George the Clueless II after 9/11. I suspect many sensed that with this guy, actual leadership, rational decisionmaking, and anything resembling filling the role of a President was out of the question without a true groundswell, of unprecedented proportions.

Of course he was granted that, notwithstanding the fact that many of us knew he had never been properly-elected and had criminally violated the terms of his AF Reserve commitment. But it turned out that he had no intention of listening to or acting on behalf of the American people.

And how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Obama has inherited what must be the tallest and widest dung-heap ever in existence outside the imagination of tale-tellers, some of the best originating in the Middle East.

The previous administration was conspicuously disinterested in actual problem-solving on behalf of the country (vs. transfer of taxpayer dollars to the wealthy and re-election of lobbyist-owned politicians). Thus, as noted by Gail Collins in the Times last week ("The Dead Tree Theory"), sniping on the part of the left-over losers at rational, defensible programs like Obama's may be the most lofty behavior we can expect (h/t/ TPM):

Whenever a president gives a major address, like the one Barack Obama delivered to Congress this week, the opposition party delivers a rejoinder. Which American citizens always ignore. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s speech was, therefore, a kind of triumph. So bad, people actually paid attention!

We will pass over Jindal’s delivery, which sounded a little like a junior high schooler’s entry into the Chamber of Commerce “I Speak for Fiscal Restraint” contest. The content was the thing: a message to the nation that the Republicans were not going to have anything important or useful to say about the current economic crisis.

[ed: she's far too kind - idiocy on the Jindal level, exposed so prominently, inevitably and deservedly, has attracted some more blunt critiques, even among the right]

Absent any deep thoughts, the Republicans are going to complain about waste. The high point of Jindal’s address came when he laced into “wasteful spending” in the stimulus bill, and used as an example a $140 million appropriation for keeping an eye on the volcanoes in places like Alaska, where one is currently rumbling.

“Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.,” Jindal claimed.

I don’t know about you, but my reaction was: Wow, what a great stimulus plan. The most wasteful thing in it is volcano monitoring.

Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.

O.K., I’m done.

The Republicans can’t try to convince the country their ideas are better because of that intellectual bankruptcy problem. All they can do is make Barack Obama’s programs look feckless, plunging everyone into so much despair that by next summer the public will be ready to go live in caves and eat squirrel stew.

The waste argument is a perpetual winner because there will always be some. Years ago, when I was a reporter, I remember getting a call from a woman in the Bronx who was screaming: “They’re over on Moshulu Parkway planting dead trees!” Sure enough, a city work crew was digging holes along the side of the street and carefully sticking in brown and dried-up pieces of foliage. The men claimed the trees had simply lost their leaves for the winter — an explanation somewhat undermined by the fact that they were evergreens.

I’m telling you this because on Tuesday I was talking with a high-ranking Obama administration official about the stimulus plan. “There will be a dead tree planted, figuratively speaking,” he said somberly. “That will happen.”

How could it not? Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

The White House is trying to overcome this problem with a Transparency and Accountability Board, overseen by Vice President Joe Biden. It is supposed to reassure the public that the stimulus money isn’t being wasted. But some people within the administration are arguing that that isn’t enough, that the government needs to bombard people with examples of what’s being done right — like holding big rallies for all the schoolteachers whose jobs are saved by the stimulus.

Or — and I swear to you this is a real idea — inventing a kind of stimulus logo, like the old National Recovery Administration blue eagle, that could be posted on every federally funded project, as one official explained, “to show the public exactly what we’re doing.”

Let us skip over the fact that the National Recovery Administration is best remembered as the part of the New Deal that didn’t work. Because we are instantly fascinated by the idea of designing that logo. How about:

Erp the Economic Recovery Portuguese Water Dog — Sasha and Malia’s incoming White House pet, setting a good example by taking on a second job to help support the family.

Isadore the Infrastructure Improvement Iguana

Arnie the Ant and Ginny the Grasshopper — Both wearing overalls and carrying shovels, symbols that troubled times fall equally hard on the party animals and the serious guys who saved their money and invested it with Bernie Madoff.

Petey the Penguin — Don’t want to go with another eagle. But everybody likes penguins. They march; they don’t fly into airplane engines ...

Joe Biden — Dressed like a penguin.

Or, if all else fails, they could just get Bobby Jindal a prime-time program.