Let’s see, the last time we went trotting in behind France to meddle in the internal affairs of an African Islamist country, providing (at first) only “support,” was . . . Libya.  How’d that work out, again?

If I were the U.S. ambassador to Mali, I reckon I’d tape my resignation letter to my office door and hop the next plane out.  The last guy in that position didn’t do too well, and we still don’t know the circumstances under which his mission ended.

You see, I thought bombing the wogs when “no compelling national interest was at stake” was something done only by Republicans, and was therefore (i) inherently racist (of course, that’s pretty much a 1:1 correlation for anything they do, isn’t it?), (ii) imperialistic, (iii) done solely to further the corporate interests of their donors (most of which donate disproportionately to the other party, but we’ll overlook that), (iv) the result of irredeemable bigotry and cultural myopia, (v) doomed to failure, (vi) unless done during times of continued budget surpluses a “war on the credit card” and therefore incontestably financially irresponsible, and/or (vii) did I mention racist?

And here we’ve got nice, enlightened, socialist France pasting bits and pieces of wogs all over the landscape.  In Mali, for example.  And now we find that, over three years after he was captured, France goes all general quarters on us and tries to free up some Secret Agent Man who’d been abducted in Somalia.  With about the same degree of success that the United States enjoyed at Desert One.  And now the French are pretty much admitting that they believe the victim has been slaughtered and his corpse and those of the soldiers killed in and after the rescue attempt are going to be paraded in public, much like happened when Clinton tried the same thing in Somalia. 

Once upon a time having two Western powers humiliated in such a fashion, by the same groups of filthy bastards in the same penny-ante place and under similar circumstances, would have resulted in exactly one and only one form of response.  The joint would be removed from the list of known inhabited locations on the planet.  The Western powers, including but not necessarily limited to those directly concerned, would have reduced the place to a howling desert and left the surviving locals to figure out what hit them.

Our ancestors understood many things we’ve apparently forgot.  The fact that all men are created equal does not mean that all societies and all states are created equal.  When our co-equals band together and behave poorly, they must be suppressed.  Means of suppression that are not violent do not function.  Peacefulness, respect for another’s culture, and so forth are post-suppression phases of the relationship.  Further, there are cultures and traditions which have no place in a modern world.  Gen’l Napier understood as much when his program of suppressing the burning of widows in India was greeted with whines of “but it’s our tradition . . . .”  His reply (according to his brother):

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Somalia has elected to follow the path of piracy, plunder, murder, and rapine.  Their people have tolerated and to a great degree welcomed into their midst the actual pirates.  Other than occasional bleats of how awfully unfair it all is, the West has done . . . well, not much.  Now mind you, in Somalia there actually are important national interests of the West at stake (contrast Mali; what, precisely, is fundamentally at stake for France or anyone else?).  These filthy bastards are interdicting one of the most important sea lanes in the world.  Countries have gone to war — declared war — for less.  Add to that the simple fact that pirates are enemies of the human race, and have been acknowledged to be such for centuries, and there is no longer any reason to permit the continued existence of a place called “Somalia” in any other than a purely geographic sense. 

Every one of their harbors should be mined.  Every watercraft — down to and including kiddies’ water-wings — must be destroyed.  Every building in every corner of the land must be destroyed.  Their fields must be rendered infertile for the foreseeable future.  Any dams, waterworks, sewage treatment plants, bridges, electrical generation capacity . . . anything capable of encouraging humans to remain in any particular location must be destroyed.  Their cattle must be driven off or slaughtered.  Every one of the people who offers the least resistance must be treated as being one with the pirates and dealt with as they are.  The survivors must be removed to other parts of the world, there to amalgamate themselves and gradually lose their identities as a nation of pirates and plunderers.

Our new Enlightened Leaders seem to have forgot that the world is a violent, vicious place, has always been such a place, and will forever remain such a place unless and until those peoples and societies eschewing that mode of existence decide no longer to tolerate the continued existence of those who embrace it.  Period.  The novel thing about the UN when Roosevelt and Churchill conceived of it was not the Great Big Council of Nations thing; that crap had already been tried with Wilson’s League, and everyone was cleaning up the wreckage of the peace-keeping job it had done so well against Germany, Japan, and Italy.  No, what made the UN’s organization unique was precisely the promise of violence against aggressors.  And by the way, the UN was not put in place to go ride herd over two ethnic groups merrily slitting each other’s throats in some godforsaken place around the corner from the back end of nowhere.  It was put in place specifically to curb violence between states, and to suppress aggressor states, rogue states, through the threat of collective, overwhelming, physical violence against them.  Sanctions had not worked against the Axis powers; what reasons existed then or exist now to suppose that sanctions will work against the Somalians?  It wasn’t sanctions that caused Khadaffi to drop his nuclear ambitions.  It was witnessing what happened to Saddam in Iraq that wrought his change of heart.

But all this is of a piece with Dear Leader’s (and Hollande’s) fundamental anti-Westernism.  Vigorous measures must be taken only when they will have minimal chances of success and only when their success will achieve little but failure will work great harm.

All of which is to say:  Expect to see more, rather than less, of this.  Also expect to see the NYT and the rest of the off-balance sheet Democrat party operatives play up the fearlessness with which Dear Leader sends up a recon plane for the French to guide themselves to their own destruction.  We will hear how intrepid Dear Leader was, how noble his intentions, and how morally refined he is.  And no one will publicly ask why it should be done this way, or what of lasting significance was to be accomplished.

[Update:  15 Jan 13:  And the dear Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung helps to figure out why France is in Mali.  Gold.  Copper.  Uranium.  Petroleum.  Natural gas.  Diamonds.  Other gemstones.  In recent years Mali’s been granting concessions to exploit its natural resources.  The jihadisti are of course interfering in that profitable little business.  When the U.S. went back in 2003 to finish the job it had funked in 1991, and turned out of power a thug who’d used chemical weapons on his own people, who was giving every impression of actively pursuing not just further chemical armament but nuclear weapons as well, and who had welcomed with open arms senior terrorists involved in the planning and execution of the deadliest attack on U.S. territory since 1941 . . . well, we were told that was just some War for Oil.  As if we couldn’t have got all the oil we wanted from Iraq simply by lifting all the sanctions and letting Saddam rock and roll.  Folks, France in Mali is what a war for pelf looks like.  Why is the UN officially blessing France’s war for resources in Mali, when its members roundly condemned the U.S. for getting rid of a viper?  Mali’s not in a position to go after Israel.  Iraq was, and is.]

In an earlier post I allowed that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.  The women of America overwhelmingly voted for this charlatan because . . . well, because someone who supported the other guy suggested you might take ownership of your genitals and what you do with them, instead of out-sourcing the costs to the rest of us.  In that post I mused over the likely geo-politico-military consequences of Dear Leader’s second term.  I specifically pondered the question of what avoidable disasters were going to befall us, and whether my three sons — who will be coming of age starting towards the end of Dear Leader’s successor’s term in office — were going to pay with their blood and limbs, if not their very lives, for this one man’s hatred of his country.  And I announced that, after thinking it over, I would vote for any person of any party, irrespective of what he or she promises to do to your uteruses and how it’s promised to be done, if that person could offer me reasonable hope that I would not one day be handed a neatly-folded triangle of a flag and thanked, on behalf of All Americans, for my precious boy’s service to his country.  You all voted single-issue based on what might possibly, maybe, if you believe MSNBC’s talking heads, could happen if the guy who suggested you ought to pay got a hearing from the other guy; I’m going to vote single issue based on what are the announced intentions of the bloodthirsty despots whose interests Dear Leader has promised to further.  To paraphrase Genl Napier, we will each vote our issues.

That was back before Dear Leader unmasked his batteries, and nominated confirmed anti-Americans, dedicated pro-Islamofascists, and explicit Jew-haters to three of the most important positions in the federal government.  Understand:  These guys aren’t going to be running the NHTSA or the Soil Conservation Administration.  If these three ass-hats bollocks-up the show (and by the way, what you and I will regard as a disaster these guys may well be viewing as a desired outcome . . . we actually are at that point that such questions are not self-evidently lunatic), the result is nuclear war in the Middle East, and we’ll be lucky to keep it confined there.  Recall, O Gentle Reader, that in May, 1914, there was no reason to suppose that the next scuffle in the Balkans would be anything other than just that — a scuffle among people who’d been slitting each other’s throats, poisoning each other’s wells, and stealing each other’s sheep for centuries.  Remind me how that worked out, again?

As hard as it is to put toothpaste back in the tube in domestic policy, it can be done.  Chile did it, and whatever Chile can do I refuse to accept that America cannot.  But in foreign policy events truly are immutable.  You simply cannot undo the results of Munich in September, 1938.  When the U.S. humiliated Britain over the Suez in 1956, that rang a bell that could never be stilled.  Eisenhower’s blowing off Ho Chi Minh when he tried to contact him (this was way back when Ho was just some local politician) and communicate about the constitutional structure of his country — Ho apparently greatly admired the U.S. Constitution, and was interested in discussing with the Americans how it might be adapted to his little homeland — set a course the results of which are still playing out.  For example, does anyone really think that John Kerry would be anything other than a sun-burned trust-fund baby were it not for his treasonous activities with the Winter Soldier outfit during the Vietnam War?  For that matter, where would anti-Americans like Dear Leader himself be without the intellectual and social heritage of the pro-Communist underground that suddenly went mainstream during that war?

We have yet to see the final results of the Islamic Brotherhood’s taking over the North African and Levantine littoral, a power-grab warmly greeted and actively encouraged by Dear Leader and the three men on whom he’s counting to knock America off its high horse once and for all.

So thank you, American women, for having voted this traitor into office.  I hope your guilt-free and publicly-subsidized whoopie is worth it to you.  Because it will be your sons too who die so that you didn’t have to pop for your birth control.  And by that time you’ll be too old to breed any more.  Maybe you and I will see each other at the cemetery on a Sunday afternoon, cleaning the bird shit off our boys’ headstones.  I’ll be the one looking at you like it’s your fault.

Thank you very little.

At first brush with this post by a formerly-famous writer (who also happens to be a lawyer now), I was strongly tempted to . . . well, certainly not to blog it.  But what the hell, it’s pulling massive traffic over at its site, and she’s a lawyer and according to her, a native New Yorker, and one can’t spend all one’s time exploding the myths of the gun-grabbers, the Fabergé lefties, and corrupt politicians.

The author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, wrote a book a number of years ago, Prozac Nation, which I never read and have no intention of reading, but the cover of which I vaguely recall.  Had something to do with growing up a depressive, and struggle against same.  I’m going to assume that she counts herself a survivor, for which she does deserve a large attaboy.  Who knows how I’d have dealt with that sort of thing.  Would I have swallowed a pistol? 

She was 26 when Her Big Book was published, and it did her phenomenally proud.  Made her a pile of cash and very highly sought after. I won’t say her success ruined her, because there may not have been much there to ruin, but she does seem not to have seized on the rungs of whatever personal ladders up which that book placed before her.  To the extent that her post is about anything, that seems to be as close to it as can be stated.  She’s gone from keeping away from rats on Manhattan playgrounds to the rarefied atmosphere of world-class lawyering, yet inside whoever is Elizabeth she’s still hunkered down on the fire step, afraid to go over the top and actually conquer some territory of inner adulthood. 

Mlle Wurtzel (can’t help it: her name appears to be a variation on Wurzel, the German for “root”; I could never think of Gen’l Schwarzkopf as anything other than that feller Blackhead) laments – or is it celebrates? – that she’s fetched up at age 44 unmarried, no children, no stable relationships, no assets, and no moorings.  Honestly, it’s hard to tell whether she’s bragging (O! the sacrifices of nobility: “In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.”) or whining (“Women who have it all should try having nothing,” after which she recites a litany of what she doesn’t have).  Her tone alters between daytime television-style confession porn (can’t keep her legs crossed; the very title of her piece describes her life as a one-night stand) and passive-aggressive demands that we pity her in her triumph (she recites all the eminent Harvard alumni in whose company she’s mentioned).  Both off-putting in their very own special ways. 

La Wurtzel works for David Boies, out of whose ass, if anyone’s, the sun of high-end litigation shines.  As Wurtzel notes, Boies was the guy who took down Bill Gates (probably did Gates a world of personal good, too, although Bill might not understand it yet).  He’s still able to come up with gems of advice to a woman, alone and unarmed, and who’s come up dry in trying to get the police to protect her from a violent lunatic: leave tonight.  Whew! that was a tough call; you’d have to go to David Boies – or to any hack refugee from the love docket with fraying cuffs and a gammy client trust account – for that kind of insight.  No; I do David an injustice.  He did precisely what any good and loyal boss would do for an employee.  From Wurtzel’s narration it sounds like he got on the horn, called in some favors, and got her out of a potentially dangerous situation.

[Aside:  The redneck in me can’t help but observe that having David Boies in one’s corner in such a situation is great.  Having David Boies and a .45 cal. Model 1911A1 on your nightstand is better by a quantum order of magnitude, and in fact with the latter you needn’t the former at all.  Wait. Oh, that’s right.  In New York City there are about nine people who have the former, and damned near none who are permitted to have the latter. Maybe . . . uh . . . maybe Liza might consider . . . not living in New York City?  Naaahhhhh.  By the way, the URL of the link says something along the lines of “wurtzel on self-help”; I’d have thought arming oneself for self-defense was Step A in any intelligent plan for self-help.] 

Whatever other hiring and retention practices Boies may indulge, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and suppose that they don’t include hiring or keeping around the actively daffy, the frivolous, the lazy, the poor planners, the unfocussed.  Which makes intriguing Wurtzel’s characterizing herself as enjoying – defiantly so, in fact – those attributes and others even less reassuring from an employer’s perspective.  I’ve had more experience than I care to in dealing with employees.  People with skeletons in their closets do not, after a certain age, make good employees.  They just don’t (in fact years ago I saw, in some advice-to-the-career-minded column by someone who certainly seemed to know what he was talking about, the injunction to get over whatever inner turmoil you have by age 35).  I’m not so sure, in other words, that Lizzie’s not drawing the long bow, as the English say, either with us or with her boss.  Given that her boss has made himself very wealthy indeed by rapidly divining the true natures of others and has kept her around four years now, I’m going to guess that it’s the Gentle Reader who’s the mark in this game.  What’s her game, then? 

Judging purely from her text, which is of course all I have to go on, she gives a very strong impression of someone who wants to be told how wonderful she really is.  But here’s the catch, sweety-pie: You’re trying to prove how wonderful you are, through all the wonderfully shallow and eventually irrelevant things we Americans are supposed to worship these days.  That, and by “confessing” to how superior her priorities and principles are than the sadly empty “untruths” told by the rest of us to ourselves.  The English would understand the nature of your error.  You’re trying too hard; you’re like Wilhelmine Germany – just not good form (around here we have another expression for it: “tacky”).  The essence of being wonderful is that others perceive it on their own.  Even if you in fact are (I’m also willing to assume that somewhere down there is an Elizabeth who is in fact as wonderful as she believes herself to be), when you call attention to it the shiny rainbow bubble bursts. 

(a) Libby is beautiful.  I’ll grant her that.  The picture she’s got pasted up on the post pretty well settles the point.  Assuming that picture was taken in the recent past, that still puts her at 40+ and damned hot.  She’s still in the same shape she’s always been; even fits into her old 501s.  But it’s not enough for her to be beautiful.  No: She must also be wanton, in a very controlled, purposeful, principled way . . . and of course only with the right sorts of people.  Understand, though, that she’s not balling her way to self-esteem, like the high school girl who’s on the cheerleading squad but isn’t the captain.  No, she’s going through life with a “pure heart,” “refusing to compromise.”  She lays up with whom she pleases and doesn’t even bother sufficiently with them to keep track of where they are.  Does she even remember them?  At least her competing queen of confession porn, Chelsea Handler, can be funny about it (for a few paragraphs, in any event).  Our Lizzie believes “in true love and artistic integrity . . . as absolutely” as she did in ninth grade.  Isn’t that just noble of her?  But she’s Big Enough to realize that “functional love includes a fair amount of falsity . . . and integrity is mostly a heroic excuse to avoid the negotiating table.” 

(b) Libby is successful.  See?  I wrote a Really Successful Book.  I get talked about on the same page as Eliot, Thoreau, and Emerson.  I could pop for a daily heroin habit.  I made a lot of money as a writer, doing what I loved, exactly as I pleased.  And I chose to shoot it up a wild hog’s ass.  I work for David Boies, and he thinks enough of me that I feel I can call him up and he’ll tell me to get the hell out of a place where I might be found strangled. 

(c) Libby is brilliant.  She decided at age 6 that she was going to Harvard and dammit, she went out and did it.  Again, props to her for that kind of detemination.  Her high school history teacher didn’t understand what he didn’t understand about Wurtzel (O! the poor rube; she must have been a peach to have in class).  She writes and had been writing professionally by the time she went to college.  In her late 30s she went – out of “curiosity,” no less – to law skool, just ‘cause, you know.  But not just any ol’ law skool was sufficient to set the right object for our Eliza’s quest; she’s for Yale, from which she graduates at age 40.  That’s important, you see, because at an age where all those distressingly conventional women are starting to fret about sags, spreads, and wrinkles, she’s launching her second, simultaneous, career with an e-mail.  No shooting out reams of résumés and sitting beneath a receptionist’s sneer and making propitiatory grimaces for her.  She just pops off an e-mail to David Boies and then magisterially so far forgets about it that she’s taken entirely by surprise when he – personally, no less – asks her if she’s still interested. 

(d) Libby can make her own way in the world.  True, she’s managed to squander almost everything she’s made, jumping at all manner of bright, shiny objects (including her friends and bedmates, from the sound of it). But she’s standing on her own, unlike the “prostitutes,” which includes every woman who is married and who doesn’t . . . well, I’m not sure what a married woman is supposed to do, or be, and not be a whore.  Seriously, growing up in New York City, a supposedly cosmopolitan, sophisticated place, she’s not able or willing to accept that every person’s life is his or hers to live, with its own stressors, opportunities, commitments, and compromises, and that for some women and their husbands, it’s very much a mutual choice.  And a sacrifice for each of them individually and both together, for that matter.  But the Noble Elizabeth is above compromises (she tells us so, so we can take that on faith).  Of course, she’s so brilliant that she can’t see that in fact she has compromised. She’s living illegally in someone’s cellar, terrified that some lunatic is after her.  That is apparently not a compromise; she must really want it.   As mentioned above, I have difficulty accepting that David Boies is going to keep someone on the payroll who can’t see any clearer than that. 

(e) Libby’s so famous that strangers – peons putting together public relations flyers and such riff-raff – still gossip about her.  In fact, she finds “so much I never knew about myself!” (isn’t that exclamation point just precious?) online, in what Other People write about Her. 

(f) Libby’s so sophisticated that she’s positively jaded.  “Happiness is the untruths we tell each other and ourselves . . . .”  Well.  The Awful Weight of the World an’ all that shit, I suppose.  “I am harsh and defeated, and I never thought I would describe myself in either way. The list of things I can’t be bothered with goes on forever. The list of things that bother me goes on forever.” 

[Aside: Just like Beach the butler Suffered From His Feet, and just as the Lining of His Stomach Was Not All that He Might Wish the Lining of His Stomach to Be, so Elizabeth’s pearls-before-swine prose seems to cry out of a thorough treatment of Wodehouse.] 

(g) Libby is concerned.  Used to be that cities were where “the professional class” could congregate and enjoy each other’s sophistication.  Now there’s all this awful money running the joint and no one respects the creativity of folks like Elizabeth because anyone sitting around in his pajamas can write Stuff just like she can without all this “infrastructure” to support “great talent.”  [N.b.  She omits an examination of to what extent the conscious policies pursued by NYC government might have contributed to the bipolarity of the city’s economic strata.]  By “infrastructure” she appears to mean doormen and folks to carry things from the taxi to the elevator.  Piracy and technology have sounded some sort of death knell for creativity (that must be news to the engineering guys working with design teams on four separate continents on the same systems and components, at the same time, and all without ever laying eyes on each other).  By “creative” she doesn’t seem to include the guy who figures out how to keep a small company afloat through a business downturn so fifteen families get to have Christmas that year after all.  But let that pass.  Most people who “think they are practicing law are actually making binders,” which go into storage, unread, produced purely as a device to bill the snot out of the client.  I don’t have the drive space fully to unpack and trash that statement, so I’ll just observe that this is yet one more example of someone who lives in Manhattan having a vision so narrow it can fit a stereoscopic view through a keyhole. 

(h) Libby is honest.  Pathologically so.  Nearly as much so as Kim Kardashian, one suspects.  And what a sacrifice it’s been for Her.  “Maybe I should have been wiser.  But the only way I could have was to have been a completely different person, along the way probably becoming a different writer, most likely a lousy one.  I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty, and the only way I am able to write that way is by being that way.  It has been worth it—of course it has been—because there is a higher price attached to rare attributes than common ones.  But there is a lot of good, workmanlike journalism that I could have, should have, and would have done if anyone ever thought of me.  I established myself as someone much too precious. And, honest, I don’t pretend to like people I don’t and I can’t pretend to respect people who don’t deserve it. Still, my financial life might look about the same no matter what, because I chose to write about an uncompromised life in New York City in these times, and the only way to be that person is to never have it all work out.”
Libby doesn’t seem to understand that she is, notwithstanding whatever talent and drive she might bring to the table, at bottom just another schmoe stumbling through life, uncomprehending.  For all of her learning she has yet to learn some really simple stuff.

Just by way of sample: No one has this thing figured out.  Not David Boies, not any or all the luminaries whose company in the brochure she finds to gratifyingly flattering.  When St. Paul allowed that we see though a glass darkly, he wasn’t correct in only a theological sense.  The rarity of human connectedness is so precious that you rejoice that it has been vouchsafed you, at all, even a little bit, with this other person, and you make a conscious decision that you are not going to allow the imperfections to rob you of even a little of your tiny bit of magic.  You will do this even if the vagaries of trying to keep a roof up and food on the table mean you can’t practice that intimacy other than with a text message in the middle of the night that I was out trying to find some place that sells Teflon tape at that hour and saw something that I knew would make you laugh.  The fact that there might not be a “correct” answer to any given life conundrum does not mean that there are not demonstrably wrong answers to those same dilemmas.  Not every one gets to be happy in life.  Even for the seriously wounded the experience of others’ beauty, innocence, and wonderment offers a glimpse of what might exist, what can exist, on the other side of the glass which shuts us off.  If you quit being so goddam full of yourself you might notice poetry, beauty, and philosophy all about you, and you can enjoy the little sparkles, glimmers, and flashes of it without losing your sense of the farcical, without “compromising” on your skepticism. Sometimes things and people really are as they seem.  There really do exist folks who’ll coach a bunch of tiny kids basketball for years in succession, and will buy a uniform and warm-ups for the kid who’s so excited that his daddy “just got out” and he’s going to come to the game today; and who’ll model how a grown-up man behaves when daddy blows it off after all.  Even if you are doomed to an existence shut in your own world, a world of your own making and the awfulness of which consists chiefly of the necessary consequences of your own stoopid decisions, others, even others closely around you, are not so doomed, are not obliged to be so doomed, are not lesser mortals for not being so doomed, and you are not entitled to resent them for it.  Making lemonade from lemons is one thing; pretending that having buggered up your existence through improvidence and flightiness is something to be proud of – in print, no less – is trying to polish a turd.  The former draws respect for never giving in; the latter gets you the kind of comments that Wurtzel’s post in fact has been getting.

Perhaps there is another Elizabeth Wurtzel out there, one who is not so tiresomely self-absorbed and so unobservant of the world around her.  I rather think there is, because I question whether anyone as inwardly non-functional as she portrays herself could have done what she has. The other day I was in a store, and I saw a cartoon posted behind the counter. It was one of those e-card thingies, with a picture of a mother comforting a distraught child.  “I’m so sorry you’ve discovered the world doesn’t revolve around you.  Here; have a nice tall glass of Get Over It.”  Whoever runs into Lizzie in some bar next week might stand her a couple of shots.  Do the ol’ gal some good.

Let’s see how this works.  Man, arrested six times since 2008, knocks on door to house.  Work-at-home wife, with nine year-old twins in home with her, fails to open door.  Man returns to car and fetches his crowbar, with which he proceeds to prize open the door.

 This chap is not looking for jewelry, a television, or even money.  When she heard him breaking into the door, she grabbed her kids, her phone . . . and her .38 cal. revolver (that last is important, Best Beloved), and headed not to a bedroom, or to a closet, or to a bathroom, but all the way up into the attic.  The perp follows them up.  He’s actually hunting them inside their own house.  He found what he was looking for and got it, good and hard.  He pops open the door and instead of staring down at a helpless victim he’s staring down the business end of a firearm.

The woman empties her revolver (and that’s important, Best Beloved) and hits him with five of the shots, all in places potentially deadly.  She punctures his lungs, his liver, and his stomach.

And this, Best Beloved, is where the revolver becomes important.  Her revolver had only six shots.  Six shots and she’s out of bullets.  Even if she had a speed loader it would take her several seconds to swing out the cylinder and re-load.  Several seconds in which a perp who’s still functional could overpower her, render her unconscious or otherwise unable to act in further protection of herself or her children.  Several seconds in which a perp who’s himself armed but hasn’t deployed yet could get to his gun and use it.

The woman was counting her shots.  The perp wasn’t.  He was on the floor, begging her to stop shooting.  He didn’t realize that she was done shooting for that day.  She ran from the house with her children to a neighbor’s.

What did this perp do, with five bullets in him?  He was able to rise from the floor, get all the way downstairs, out of the house and into his car, start the car, and drive off.  He lost it a short distance away and wrecked in some woods.  But what with adrenaline or whatever else he had in him he was still able to do all that . . . with five bullets in his body, any of which might have proven fatal.

 And all this played out before the police ever got to the scene.  The one mistake she made was to call her husband and have him call 911 rather than do it directly.  So she introduced maybe, what? 30 seconds’ delay into it.

If she’d had something with, say, a 13-round magazine, she could have pumped double the number of rounds into him, and would have had some room to put one or more through his head.  If she’d run out it would have taken two seconds, max, to drop one magazine and load another, and be back up and firing.  Or what if the perp had had company with him?  With her low-capacity weapon she’s got two moving targets and six shots to allocate between them.  With one of them awful “high-capacity” magazines she might have stood a chance.

So remember, when Congress sets out to ban “high-capacity magazines,” what they’re really saying is that people like this woman only get X chances to save their and their families’ lives, and if that turns out to be insufficient . . . well, they’re just the broken eggs we’ve got to accept in making our omelette of unarmed paradise.

This is how Washington works.  This is how those people actually behave who tirelessly, tiresomely lecture us here in flyover country about paying one’s fair share.

Look at all the green nonsense in there:  This is an industry that would not exist were it not for taxpayer hand-outs.  Little Bobby Kennedy’s firm even says as much in SEC filings.  Its business model is to keep the taxpayers’ money rolling in, in the form of grants, low- or zero-interest loans, and of course piles of tax breaks.

It’s not just the great big Cinderella’s pumpkin that is the Green Boondoggle that made out, however.  General Electric — you know, the cottage industry — gets an extension of a tax break that allowed it to offshore enough of its profits that, while it made $5.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2011, paid exactly $0 in U.S. income tax.  Don’t get me wrong:  I think the entire corporate tax scam should be repealed.  The U.S. has among the very highest corporate tax systems in the world, and in a global economy that hamstrings them.  They lose a good chunk of the comparative advantage they’d otherwise have from being U.S. based, solely because of the tax code.  So I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that G.E. managed to pay nothing in taxes on over five billion in profits.  What chaps me is that G.E. managed to get that break . . . and those tens of thousands of companies who can’t offshore their profits haven’t, didn’t, and won’t.  G.E. may lose some comparative advantage relative to its foreign competition, but it makes a bunch of it back up at the expense of other Americans, their owners and employees.

Isn’t that comforting?

Crony capitalism is not a tax code-specific disease, either.  If giving you a clandestine leg up through the tax law is one manifestation, another important one is simply to legislate your competition off the playing field.  Like hooking up the Wal-Marts of the world by prohibiting bogus “loopholes” that really aren’t loopholes in anything.  So Dear Leader is looking to enlist the biggest players to stump up spurious support for gun control by promising them to get rid of those pesky gun show sellers. 

I have a question, and I’m sure the data exist out there, somewhere, to answer it:  How many felons committing a crime with a gun (and not a crime in which the mere ownership or possession of the gun is itself the crime) used a gun which they bought at a gun show?  If you want to show how god-awful dangerous gun show sales are, then surely there would be piles of statistics showing that the guy who decides to shoot up the crack house, or the school playground, or his former employer’s front office, went to a gun show and bought that gun with some sort of criminal intent to use it.  It doesn’t count if he stole it from someone who bought it at a gun show; he could just as easily have stolen it from someone who bought it only after being waterboarded to disclose any criminal tendencies or other Wrong Thinking.  I also don’t think it would be very important if, say, this fellow bought the gun eight years ago at a gun show.  The whole objection to gun show sales is that they don’t allow for vetting of the purchaser.  If, however, there’s nothing in the purchaser’s background to flag the system, then no matter where he bought the gun you wouldn’t catch him.  So what I want to know is, for the last ten years or so, how many violent criminals who used a firearm in their crime had gone to a gun show and bought the weapon they used within, say, six months before the crime.  If that answer is zero or some very small number, then there just isn’t a “loophole” that needs closing.

And then of course you’ve got the final leg in the triad of crony capitalism, the direct hand-out.  Like Solyndra, in which $535 million of taxpayers’ money was “loaned” to Solyndra, but was subordinated to the equity position of the donors to Dear Leader who owned the bulk of the company.  If there is one single lodestar in the firmament of commercial lending, it is that debt trumps equity.  In fact, in the world of bankruptcy, it’s called the “absolute priority rule” (or at least it’s absolute unless you’re a labor union and Dear Leader decides he’s just going to hand the shop over to you).  I’m not saying that there are no exceptions, at all,ever, to that rule.  But there sure aren’t any when, according to the lender’s own evaluation of the borrower, the borrower is already going down the tubes and will not be going anywhere other than down the tubes even with your loan in his pocket.  As was the case with Solyndra.

And there you have the Holy Trinity of Dear Leader’s administration (note that it was at Dear Leader’s express demand that Baucus’s tax code give-away to his donors was pasted verbatim into the final “fiscal cliff” deal).