Obama Missed Chances to Degas McCain

Barack Obama missed two great opportunities last night to pitchfork John McCain:

When McCain gimped around the debate stage warning “My Friends” that because of Wall Street’s  financial constipation and panic “we’re gonna hafta cut back on entitlements,” Obama failed to point out that McCain means cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare–the two biggest entitlement programs after those dosing bankers and generals with hundreds of billions of borrowed bucks.

McCain certainly does not mean putting the rich and military on dollar diets.  He is rich and he has been military.  He would not spit in the fountains from which both classes suck their elixirs of life.

No, he means putting fogies like me on food stamps by cutting back Social Security and into pine boxes early by cutting back on our medical care.

Obama let these pass.  Too bad. Many of McCain’s supporter are geezers living at or near poverty (one of the great American towns) and depending on government-paid docs to keep them walking and talking.

(McCain is still talking but his shuffling and the growing hump on his back makes one wonder about his arthritis.)

Obama missed another chance to pish McCain’s balloon when in the heat of Wall Street’s self-immolations McCain avoided intoning what has been Republican mantra until just the past couple of weeks: Change Social Security to cause each sweating for wages to plop her payments for Social Security into the dry palms of Wall Street stock jockeys.  These would have, for a fee, invested her financial future in such sure things as Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, AIG and other outfits that since Labor Day have gone bellybutton up.

Had McCain and Bush had their way on Social Security last year or the year before, most working Americans would have thrilled in the past week to see their Social Security deposits evaporate.

Obama missede these opportunities.  Like McCain he instead dropped worm-size tidbits from stump speeches into the maws of onlookers. Neither candidate had anything new to say.

Fortunately for Obama, McCain shambled around the stage, looking the old man he is, while Obama, still lithe and fit, appeared upright, calm and assured.

Presidential elections to date (all between white men) have shown that the candidate who appears taller will win.  If the candidates appear the same height, then the candidate who seems to have the most hair will win.

(A smart candidate, from the start of campaigning, will stand upright, wear elevator shoes, be trim and hide his pate under an excellent toupee.)

Obama seems taller, trimmer and more hirsute and upright than McCain.  But in this election there enters Obama’s skin.  In America, black trumps white.  If like Obama you’re half white and half black, you’re black–and subject to the white citizenry’s prejudices.

Prejudice against black as opposed to prejudice for height and hair may put McCain and his intellectual mentor, Sarah Palin–one in dotage and the other a dolt– in charge of the nation and the health of the world.  We would have the depressing in charge of  the depression.  That truly would be the holistic pits.

Obama-McClain Do the Gonna, Gotta, Hafta Cha-Cha-Cha

When last night the debate between Barack Obama and John McCain piddled to its soporific end, I shuddered with dread–dread for pronunciation of English among the ruling classes in the United States.

“Gonna.”  “Gotta.” “Hafta.”  “Tuh.”

Two U.S. senators, one with a law degree from Harvard and the other with a degree from Annapolis, speaking with the commonplace accents of high-school sophomores after a few drags on a joint.

“Tuh” for “to” of course now slogs the tongues of those who don’t wish their speech to stand out from those changing tires or tossing hotdogs at stock-car races.  “Tuh” hallmarks the speech of the present grease monkey in the White House, who despite his East Coast private-school and Yale educations now drools a quaky hick-Texas accent for the rest of us to try to translate.

“Tuh” also flops from the lips on TV of the richly suited former sports jocks gabbling forth endless details on the differences between crotch pieces for hockey and for volleyball and professional badminton.

How long will it take before American dictionaries offer “tuh” as an alternative for “to?” Just as long as it takes for lexicographers to recognize that most of the population cannot look up that preposition without first hunting for “tuh,” the only pronunciation they know.

“Gonna” for “going to” has even passed into newspaper writing and headlines.  It won’t be long before “going” in the conjugation charts and dictionaries simply will show as “gon’.”

“Gotta” for “got to” (whatever happened to “must” and “should?”) peppered last night’s first head-to-head between Obama and McCain.

So did, lord help us, “hafta” for “have to.”  None of these pronunciations will show spelled out in the transcripts, of course.  Transcribers have a way of cleaning up sloppiness.

Is that all horrified ears could mark in what was supposed to a universe-shaking event, the clash of two political gladiators in the great arena of the American mind as conveyed by TV?

No, one could also hear no original ideas, no witty utterances, no humor, no epigrams, no semblances to oratory or formal rhetoric.  The two senators to me sounded like two TV sports jocks hustling each other over luge statistics without the benefit of beers.

Yes, I know supporters on both sides swooned as one or the other senators dribbled forth bits cut, steamed and canned for and from former speeches.

I didn’t.  I found both boring, commonplace and neither showing the slightest signs of rising out of the treacly trench of presidential campaigning.

Did last night show me one is more equipped than the other to preside over the government of the U.S.?  No.  Alas.  I will vote for Obama because I cannot abide McCain and other Republicans, but I will vote without much hope for inspired leadership or good pronunciation.

Witches Banned From Palin’s Ascent

This morning, after watching  Sarah Palin being protected against witchcraft as she stood before a Wasilla preacher from Kenya, her back turned, holy texts in her hands, with two adept gents laying their hands upon her gently, I felt mightily relieved:

One more problem of American government solved, this time two years ago before she ran for the governorship of Alaska and won–not just because the witches bounced off her but because the incumbent governor then, Frank Murkowski, a fellow Republican and supremely stupid and arrogant, was despised most Alaskans, including those still wanting to secede from the Union.

As I savored feeling narcotized by this Pentecostal Church spectacle of getting anti-witch insurance in advance, imagine my delight when I chanced on an Associated Press piece–http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008201741_apabsentpalin.html– detailing how the governorship of Alaska is now being run by John McCain campaign staffers.

Even Alaska’s lieutenant-governor, in theory in charge of the state while Palin gallivants about the U.N. inhaling  foreign policy, has to vet with McCain staffers whether he can turn off the office lights at 5 p.m. and trot down the street in Juneau for a quick shot with other politicos in the Baranof Hotel’s saloon.

Only in America can one gaze on such a spectacle of what a free people can do when they undergo cultural lobotomies.

Palin, in case you missed her latest, opines that the nation will dive into Depression if Congress does not give George Bush his way in wanting to rescue his Republican owners by handing them $700 billion that our descendants yet unborn have still to earn.

Imagine a Depression, during which all those Wall Street high rollers would have to stand on street corners peddling Red Delicious apples at five bucks each while on the radio rappers yapped  “Brother, Can You Spare A Ten Spot?”

Palin, of course, knows as much about economics as a poodle peeing on a fire plug. Even so that over qualifies her to serve in Congress and makes her more than equal to that guy running with her, McCain, who admits he knows nothing at all about economics and that’s why he should be president.

McCain hastens with his ignorance back to the Senate to solve the upcoming Depression problem, and Barack Obama plans to join him there for the same thing, the usual American political solution: If you don’t know what you’re doing, smother it in money–other people’s money, your money and mine.

The best investment one can make right now is in green ink, the green ink the government printing presses will be sucking as they run day and night rolling out more and more $1,000 bills worth less and less for the Wall Street bravos to pocket.

Maybe a decent contribution will bring that godly Pentecostal chap back from Kenya to preach by the presses, to beg God to save them from breakdown while outside in the newspapers and on TV witches gibber and in Iceland Palin compares snow machines and bones up on energy policy.

John McBush Genuflects to Monarchists

Sen. John (McBush) McCain spent May 13 near Seattle meeting with a group of superannuated local Republicans who still mumble lip service to the environment, though in practice for the past 20 years their efforts for the environment have chiefly been silence and sometimes error and even deliberate attack.
The session was closed to the public, for reasons neither major Seattle paper nor Associated Press made clear.
When reporters did question McCain none apparently managed to ask him why environmental organizations rank McCain’s efforts for the environment well below 40 percent.
Nor apparently did anyone weasel in a query about McCain’s recent harangue about “activist judges,” a Republican and otherwise reactionary cliche about judges who render opinions based on law that run afoul of conservative dogmas–such as, for instance, saying prisoners held by the U.S. must be afforded the Constitutional privilege of being able to have lawyers and be able to question witnesses.  Oh, the horror of it!  Especially since 60 percent of federal judges now sitting are Republicans, appointed by such Marxists as Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and George Bush II.
McBush made his pro-forma howl about federal judges to ear-suck votes from  the many monarchists of the right who slaver to give the President, provided he’s Republican, the powers of Roman emperor.  (What they will do when a Democratic president claims the same powers I dare not think: Fall on their martini glasses probably.)
Even when McBush made his announcement, no reporters then bothered to ask McBush whether he would appoint another Catholic to the Supreme Court, where five Catholics–Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas– now make up the conservative majority and usually strain the law through eyes of good Catholic boys who memorized their catechisms and think the present mob of self-annoited eunuchs in the Vatican can have nothing but the purest thoughts.
McBush so far has enjoyed a pleasant life with the pressies who follow him around, chiefly, by all accounts, because he likes to sit down with reporters to B.S. and have a snort, two things reporters love because it (A) makes them feel important, (B) may provide a news story with a new lead and (C) because in good conscience they may put the booze on their expense accounts.
Unfortunately, all that denies the rest of us a chance to see what McBush says when he has to answer an intelligent, hard-ass question and so reveal the qualities of mind and character he wants to elevate into the Oval Office, where he can snooze away his latter years, interrupted only when the Vice President comes by daily to take his pulse and blood pressure.

Is the Rev. Wright Wrong? Only Sometimes

Over half of the U.S. voting-age population never lived when the federal government and states, counties and localities enforced racial discrimination against blacks, asiatics, native Americans and others not so lucky as to be born white, and against Jews, so dumb as not to be born Christian, preferably Protestant.
They did not see citizens of Japanese descent herded, at bayonet point if need be, into dismal concentration camps in western deserts, put there during the Second World War by members of the stupidly and incorrectly labeled “Greatest Generation.”
They never saw signs in restaurants saying “No Colored Served” and sometime “No Niggers Served.”  They never examined the tawdry furnishings, broken blackboards and tattered books (if any) nor inferior beans and other grub ladled up in the cafeterias of segregated schools for blacks in rich Southern and Northern towns.
The whites among them never went forth with children and cameras in hand to look at the body of the latest lynched black swinging in the wind.
They never read the articles in Time, Newsweek and other national magazines mocking the physical and intellectual attainments of people different from the owners and editors, never listened to radio programs mocking nonwhites and Jews or watched films in which all blacks, often portrayed by white actors, were clowns or crooks, and all Indians, usually played by white actors, were meant to be shot or sworded by some noble white guy, like John Wayne, who never served in the military.
During the war of the Greatest Generation, the American military was segregated and remained so until Harry Truman, as commander in chief, ordered integration–an order detested and often disobeyed by the generals and admirals of the Greatest Generation, especially the admirals.
What changed all that, somewhat?  Chiefly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of Lyndon Johnson’s many great legislative achievements, which couldn’t have come about had television not shown on the evening news police whipping, gassing, clubbing and whipping black men, women and children marching for their rights.
Many of us, however, still remember all of those injustices and have seen many injustices continue since 1964, not least of which remains the segregation of schools, now blessed by the Five Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Is it any wonder someone like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who did see and who did experience the racial prejudices and cruelties that exist to this day in America the Beautiful (for White Folks), might sail over the edge in his late years?
Is Wright wrong to say that America gets attacked because of injustices it has inflicted on dark-skinned people around the world?  Hardly.  All one has to do is read a good history of the CIA–Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes,” for example–to know that  noble agency spends most of its time and wads of our money supporting tyrants and dictators ruling over and terrorizing people of dusky hue.
Is Wright wrong to say “God, damn America?”  Note the comma.  Does God in theory support all our wars?  Note we’ve fought all of our recent wars against people of color other than white.  Such people around the world and in the U.S. appreciate keenly that the country that preens itself as being the home of the brave and the land of the free spends its treasure and blood trying to make sure, in the name of oil and bananas,  that many people never become free of kings and other tyrants.
Yes, Wright is wrong, very wrong, about AIDS.  But note that many evangelical white preachers still yawp on the TV and radio that God created AIDS to give homosexuals hell on earth.
And, yes, Wright is a foolish old man–foolish to pull his pants down in public for the press to hawhaw and for the many racists still among us to holler as a good reason for not voting for Barrack Obama.
Obama is trying to make the best of bad things–his former preacher slipping over the edge and the obvious message that deep in their hearts many whites fear and detest blacks and will not vote one.
Hilary Clinton is making the best of a bad thing–this racist backlash that may cause many blacks, main supporters of the Democratic Party, to refuse to vote for her if she beats Obama for the Democrats’ presidential nomination.
And can we expect the Republicans, who have deliberately practiced racist politics for the past 30 years, not to poke up racist fears if Obama does get the nomination?  Hardly.  They will try to liquidate him by parading Wright and any other black they can mock or make fearsome.  That’s part of the standard Republican playbook.   And merely a reflection of the American way, after all.

Statuatory Rape or Real Rape in Texas?

When it comes to what’s the legal age of consent for having sex, whether you’re committing a local felony or just enjoying legal lubricious fun depends on what state or country you’re in.
Texas now puts the age of consent for sex and for marriage at 17.  Just a few years back Texans lived with 16 for consent.  But the Texas Legislature raised it to 17, it’s said, because Texas authorities wanted to snare themselves a passel of adult members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whose polygamous presence upset nearby boondocks Baptists.
Next door in Arkansas you can consent to canoodle at 14, for getting hitched,  at 16.
(See http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm for a worldwide and U.S. rundown of legal consent ages in hither and yon.)
The Fundamentalist Church guys, who apparently screw every young thing that comes along, plainly aren’t too smart.  If they’d set up in Arkansas they’d have given themselves three extra years of legal joy–assuming they delayed the pretense of marriage.
However, they didn’t.  Now Texas has 462 of their kids in custody while Child Protective Services there (as in most states, fumble but not humble prone) tries to figure out which kid is whose and when did the birth mothers actually conceive and undergo a marriage, probably polygamous and therefore also illegal.  All this after an armed raid obviously aimed to jug the males involved eventually and so bust up the community disturbing to the orthodox.
No one should tolerate sex forced on anyone, and if Texas can prove that many of the girls had no choice but to “marry” their uncles or the lecher next door a few minutes before being thrown down on a nearby bed, then Texas should apply its rape laws to those who did the dirty deeds.  In prison they will learn what rape is like.
Equally, no one should tolerate that anyone is forced to marry once, much less 10 or 15 times, as may be the case with this particular specimen of the insanity of religion.  That’s involuntary servitude no matter how you dice it–slavery.
Finally, there has to be a cutoff age enforced by law for consensual sex, with sex with any person under that age being statutory rape–a term much more precise that the current “child abuse.”
It escapes me, however, why willing polygamous  marriages among consenting adults are illegal.
It’s quite legal now for 15 women above the age of consent to wive without benefit of marriage with a likewise consenting man and, though unknown, for 15 men to husband one woman.   It’s exhausting but not felonious.
The only argument I can reckon against the civil issuance of multiple marriage licenses is clerical convenience.  But now with computers surely the state can keep track of one man with his 15 wives.
The religious aspect is plain.  If a church says we allow only one marriage at a time, then that’s that for that church’s blessing.  But if as with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a theology says as many marriages as you can service, then why should that be outlawed so long as the brides and grooms are adults who volunteer for that miraculous state?  Why is that view less upright than that of the Holly Rollers next door who say that you can have only one marriage at a time but as many as you want so long as you divorce in between, that is, practice serial polygamy?
If Texas can prove females of any age were forced to marry and forced to have sex, then the state should hoosegow  everyone involved for such rapes and slavery.
But I fear that’s only a secondary aim, that the first aim is rub out a deviant religion that upsets other godly folk.  And that’s wrong.

Military Whores Analyze the War News

On Sunday, April 20, David Barstow of The New York Times unleashed his lengthy investigative piece showing that most of the “military analysts” on national TV and radio–retired generals and admirals, with a sprinkling of colonels and captains– are whores for the Pentagon and the Bush administration.

Instead of giving viewers and listeners and their sometime employers on the networks unvarnished opinions about what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they dish out propaganda prepped for them or prodded for them by Pentagon and White House flacks and political ops.

Many of these gents–no women among them yet–earn $1,000 a pop for appearing on “Meet the Press” and like thumbsucking and news programs.
Beyond that, many turn out to be top officials, often recently hired, of such companies as Blackwater which supply goods and services –often shoddy–to the military at high prices. Some even earn a few hundred thousand now and then as consultants to other companies also pushing and shoving to peddle their skills and manufactures to the Pentagon at inflated prices.

Few of these “analysts” wish to offend former colleagues in the high-ranking officers’ corps or to offend the Secretary of Defense and his lackeys, for fear they will find themselves cut off from the sweet, inside talk that gilds their expertise or, worse, find their companies cut off from sucking on one of Uncle Sam’s sweet money tits.

None of this should surprise, especially not surprise anyone with experience with the military. Used to giving orders, these hookers are also used to taking them. To get to where they had been with eagles and stars on their shoulders, they also had to be political. It is, after all, the current president who makes one a general or admiral in the first place (with the OK of Congress of course, something rarely withheld). And it is a secretary of defense who convinces a president to make your nomination in the first place. You don’t get to be a general or admiral by making waves against the establishment.

The saddest thing Barstow reports is the lack of interest and investigation on the part of the national news machines about whether their hired experts in fact are delivering the straight skinny instead of warmed-over pap from the military propaganda kitchens.

Indeed, one fierce news outfit, CNN, refused to even talk to Barstow about their military toy boys. That tells me more about CNN that I wished to know. So much for that channel’s pretense to cover news. It does better trying to cover up its own stained pants.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his valedictory speech to the nation, warned about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.

Now we should worry about the parasitical power of the military-TVNews complex, complete with house doxies pretending to be men of virtue.

We Winning the War–All Over Again

I have lived long enough to experience as an adult commanding generals of U.S. foreign wars yammering about how, despite all evidence to the contrary, the war is going well and we will win it if the nation just pours more men and money and blood into the battle.

The first such commander was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a vainglorious strut in command of U.N. (read mainly U.S. and South Korean) forces during the Korean War that President Harry Truman, a Democrat, committed American forces to out of military and diplomatic necessity.

When those forces under MacArthur finally staved off the invasion by Communist North Koreans, the Chinese joined in, fell upon the Americans and other forces and damn near wiped them out until MacArthur’s generals held them to stalemate.

Alas, that wasn’t good enough for MacArthur, who wanted to take the war into China (a few nuclear bombs here and there to pep the Chinese up) and couldn’t shut up about it, despite Truman’s orders for MacArthur to sew his tongue to his lips. Truman fired him, creating a great political stew while the stalemate went on.

It took a better and smarter general, Dwight Eisenhower, once MacArthur’s aide, to get himself elected president on a Republican platform that promised among other things to shut down the Korean War–it was achieving little and costing too much in money and blood.

The generals running the Vietnam War assured all of us over and over and over that more troops, more planes, more killing and bombing and, of course, more casualties, would let us follow that cliche’–the light at the end of the tunnel–right out into the sunlight of victory.

President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, believed them, until the View Cong and North Vietnamese started whipping us fair and square and angry Americans took to the streets to protest and riot. Johnson decided not to run for re-election and a petty Republican crook, Richard Nixon, whipped the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for the presidency because Humphrey couldn’t get his lips and tongue to say: I’m going to bring all our 500,000 troops home.

Nixon said that, lied about it, and made the war go on until with Saigon in flames, our ambassador and other staff had to flee town by helicopter as North Vietnamese troops took over the streets.

Now we have Gen. David Petraeus, American commander in Iraq, and Ambassador David Crocker telling senators and the rest of us that George Bush’s war in Iraq is winnable if–guess what–we just continue to blow up dollars and American soldiers there.

All the evidence is to the contrary, with Shiites of the government fighting Shiites of the streets, Sunnis blowing up and shooting us and Shiites when they can, the country’s civilians, including kids, daily dying violently from the war and suicide bombs.

As for Bush himself, he fiddles while Baghdad explodes. No American can leave the so-called Green Zone, our fortress under mortar siege there, to walk the streets of Baghdad one inch without getting shot or bombed.

Worse, Sen. John McCain finds that all jolly; and if he’s elected president, by God, he’ll keep us there fighting for another 100 years; no pansy he. In effect, he already pledges himself to be Bushette and a worse fool (something I never thought possible), because McCain should know better.

As for the Democrats, neither Sens. Hilary Clinton nor Barack Obama can bring themselves to say if I’m elected president I’m withdrawing our Army immediately–no, both maunder about phased withdrawals, supportive presences and other garble as they try to avoid the obvious: We’ve been whipped fair and square in a place we should not have come to in the first place and we’d better get our buns out of there before we ruin our Army and bankrupt our nation.

I expect someday, if I live long enough, to read that Iraqis have swarmed and overwhelmed the Green Zone, that Ambassador Crocker fled by helicopter and that General Petraeus has managed a withdrawal of our forces into Kuwait, a maneuver so brilliant and so bloody that he soon will announce he’s running for president on the peace ticket.

Robbing Banks or What the Banks Do

Ever since big Republican bankers began writhing and howling because of all the house mortgages going belly up across the land, the great minds of the world of finance have been trying to figure how to save their asses from being fried for all the bad loans they enticed the ignorant into signing in order to finance four walls and a roof.
Their answer–or least a main one of them–is loot the U.S. Treasury, itself a vault that if it didn’t have the power to print money and government bonds would be bankrupt, thanks to the drunken spending of the Bush Administration on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How do bankers loot?  First they have to convince fellow bankers sitting on the board of the Federal Reserve that if the Fed doesn’t make money cheaper for the banks to borrow from the Treasury, then the whole economy will collapse.  It’s not as if such convincing takes place in public meetings.  Nay, it occurs over lunches, cocktails and dinners, where the rich among us whisper of those terrible dangers that might happen if a new Depressions starts: Reform!  Revolution! And worse, or maybe the same thing, Democrats owning the White House and Congress.
Given such fears voiced by old school chums and business buddies, the Fed governors then lower the interest rates that banks can borrow at, now down about 3 percent.  In the next day or two that may go lower.
Can an ordinary citizen or even a business or General Motors borrow at the Fed prime rate?  No.
So the big banks borrow the money low and lend it high, usually 100 percent or more higher, for mortgages, business loans, automobiles.
But better yet these days, there are credit cards.  Yes, Bank of America may borrow at 3 percent and lend it to you in a risky fashion, via credit card, for upwards of 30 percent.
Granting the spread in interest rates between what a big bank can borrow at and what it can loan at, one might think the riches pouring in the door might make major banks what they are supposed to be, conservative.  Yes, their officers are conservative, but only in politics.  The easy greed fostered by the Bush Administration has washed away until lately all their concerns about bad loans.
It’s been come in suckers, sign here on this dandy mortgage that will double your monthly payments in three years.  And then we’ll bundle this risky paper under some fancy name and sells of it to your betters.
Read the upcoming news stories.  Read about how the Fed will tell the bankers to back semis up to the Treasury doors to load up with $1,000 bills.  Read a few days later how the bankers will cry, it’s not enough!  Lower interest rates again!  Sell more federal bonds to the stupid Chinese and give us the dough!  We’ll love you for it!  And so will the children yet unborn who will be paying off those bonds 50 years hence.  What do you care?   You’ll be dead!

The American Way: When You Can’t Swindle, Bitch

When Boeing discovered that it couldn’t swindle its way into receiving the Air Force’s $100 billion contract to build the Air Force a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers, Boeing then offered a plane clearly deficient in size and capacity (but not price) to the Airbus-based plane that Northrop-Grumman-EADS tendered in bidding that became open to that company only after Boeing’s efforts to suborn Air Force officials withered under public scrutiny and punishment.

Now Boeing, its unions and Washington State members of Congress squawk with surprise that Air Force generals could see that the Airbus ship offers a better deal to the service and to U.S. taxpayers.

Though Northrop-Grumman-EADS will assemble the tankers in a plant yet to be built in Mobile, AL, the howls of surprise come wrapped in Old Glory, with plaints that a U.S. military plane should be built in the U.S. and not in perfidious France.

Boeing never has voiced such qualms about civilian airliners. Big chunks of Boeing’s airliners are built overseas by foreign companies, then airlifted to the U.S. for assembly here.

Northrop-Grumman-EADS is only flying the same construction route Boeing pioneered. No wonder Boeing feels euchred.

Worst of all are the hero speeches still echoing in Congress about the need to investigate the Air Force’s decision–speeches that ignore that the contract, finally, was up for bid, that there were two bidders and one of them won. What’s the surprise here, except to raise false clamor?

Boeing yelps that Airbus is subsidized. Well, Boeing is subsidized. It hardly pays any taxes in Washington and Kansas, where it assembles planes, it hardly pays any federal taxes, it gets exceedingly cheap loans, pollutes hell out of the land and streams with hard an official soul offering a mew, and until lately was subsidized by getting favorable treatment on winning contracts.

For me it would be pleasant if someday the manufacturers who hymn most loudly about the virtues of capitalism and free trade might get brave enough to practice same.