The Other McCain

by Smitty

The Editors at the Puffington Host would be amusing with lesser stakes:

Members of President Obama’s deficit commission huddled behind closed doors today despite pleas from the left and right that they hold all their meetings in public.

The move only heightens suspicion that rather than forging a national consensus on future spending priorities, the commission’s work will consist of backroom dealings in which members of the Washington aristocracy find high-minded excuses for cutting the social safety net.

Bruce Reed, the commission’s executive director, assured the Huffington Post there is nothing sinister about holding working group meetings like today’s in private. But he had no good reason why they shouldn’t be held in public, either.

“The smaller working group meetings are not decision making meetings,” he said. “It’s not practical to have C-SPAN there anytime two or more fiscal commission members are gathered…. We’re going to have some boring meetings in public — and some boring meetings by ourselves.”

Reed said the “actual deliberations are going to be in public, at the full commission meetings.”

Listen, Editors: the political version of the Unreliable Narrator is what you supported in 2008. The only surprise here is that you have any surprise left in you. We’ll just coat that remaining surprise in BP oil Real Soon Now. But you can let go the naïveté. You can realize that your Progressive Overlords care not fig #1 for you, liberty in general, or the US Constitution in particular. There will be exactly zero (0) actual deliberations in public: all decisions will occur away from scrutiny, with occasional sideshow flourishes for the rubes.

But what’s the harm of letting the public into the other meetings as well? Reed struggled with the answer. “Look, I think that the, the goal of, of the working group meetings is to give members of the commission a chance to ask questions and learn things and not have to make formal statements and, and so we’re going to have plenty of opportunities for members of the commission to educate the public and be educated by the public. But sometimes members want to have a boring meeting just by themselves.”

Translation: the exact nature of the financial crisis is so bad that, if the general scope were to become public knowledge, the current Greek instability would seem a rosy alternative.

Perhaps, as a consolation prize, the good President could remind us all that words about sunlight are almost as good a disinfectant as actual sunlight. Because words matter.

The situation recalls an old poll from The Onion: “73 Percent Of Americans Unable To Believe This S**t”

Calling the American people’s enormous s**t-belief capacity “one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) stressed that it is the patriotic duty of all citizens to grant our leaders the benefit of the doubt with regard to their s**t.
“If the American people are no longer willing to believe this s**t, who will?” Kerry said. “Somebody’s got to take this s**t at face value. Otherwise, why are we even doing all this s**t in the first place? I am truly saddened by the lack of faith that the citizens of this country are willing to put in my s**t, as well as that of my esteemed colleagues. We must repair our society’s fraying trust in the s**t of our elected officials, or you would not believe the kind of hardcore, heavy-duty s**t that will come down.”