The Raymond Chandler Congress

Read­ing a post at Hot Air today which came with an enter­tain­ing video I was put in mind of the Ray­mond Chan­dler story Lit­tle Sis­ter. There is a great scene in it where the cops are going to grill Mar­lowe when the two detec­tives get in an argu­ment and one of them slugs the other one. The guy who got hit shakes it off and says

It’s a new kind of third degree. The cops beat hell out of each other and the sus­pect cracks up from the agony of watching.

That seems to be, to use a hard­boiled detec­tive story term, the M.O. this year.

Instead of the usual Elect me and this is what I’ll do for you kind of cam­paign rhetoric what we’re get­ting is more of a This is what we did to you and if you don’t like it it’s because you’re stu­pid and racist!

Then there’s the lit­tle mat­ter of the bud­get. Con­gress is spend­ing our tomor­rows like there’s no, well, tomor­row, and they think if they just don’t put what they’re actu­ally doing into the for­mal writ­ing of a bud­get that we won’t notice.

This is a lit­tle like junior tak­ing the fam­ily car to a party, get­ting blitzed, and plow­ing into a phone pole on the way home, then think­ing if he slips the car into the garage and shows up at break­fast all dressed, show­ered, and perky that every­thing will be OK and when dad gets in the car to go to work he won’t notice it’s miss­ing its right front side.

That’s kind of how it struck me, any­way. See what you think.

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2010

Tags: budget, congress, Little Sister, politics, wrecks