Deflated Balls

The big story on Monday was about deflated balls. We assumed it had something to do with with Secretary of State John Kerry and his folk-rocking hippie pal James Taylor apologizing to the French for snubbing their big march against Islamist terrorism, or perhaps the Republican Senators’ apparent capitulation to the president on the the illegal immigration issue, but it turned out to be just another of those annual allegations of cheating leveled against the New England Patriots professional football team.

Even so, the deflated balls theme seemed to recur throughout the news. There was much speculation about today’s State of The Union address, which will reportedly call for massive tax hikes and vast redistributive spending that the Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress will never pass, and the press was giddy with anticipation that at least they will once again be able to caricature the Grand Old Party as lapdogs of the top-hatted, mustache-twirling rich who are always tying the downtrodden middle class to the metaphorical railroad tracks. The Republicans have always endured this reputation, and it lately hasn’t stopped them from acquiring majorities in both chambers of Congress, but the renewed slander might yet force them into some sorry compromise on the ridiculous proposals.

Another popular topic was the opening of the annual confab in Davos, Switzerland, where the world’s most well-heeled wheelers and dealers gather to drink, dine, and discuss the world’s problems. The United Kingdom’s left-wing Guardian took the occasion to anxiously note that the world’s richest one percent now control half the world’s wealth, but they should find some solace in noting that the plutocrats hobnobbing in Davos seem every bit as socialistic and authoritarian as the most welfare-dependent Guardian reader. USA Today preferred the angle that Davos will confront a “World on verge of nervous breakdown,” citing everything from such real problems as increasing Islamist terrorism to such non-problems as anthropogenic global warming to such happy phenomena as falling oil prices, and seems to hold out hope that the super-rich socialists at the gathering mike come up with a solution for it all. We’ve not been invited to Davos, and couldn’t muster the airfare or lodging expenses even if we were, but we’ll keep a skeptical eye on the proceedings nonetheless.

The rest of the news seemed to be about “American Sniper,” a big Hollywood flick that has been setting box office records that the previous slew of anti-war flicks never approached and is sending the mainstream media’s last surviving movie clinics into rage. Apparently the movie regards Islamist terrorists as bad guys and the American soldiers who have been fighting them as good guys, albeit with the some of the requisite Hollywood moral ambivalence, so the outrage isn’t at all surprising. The protagonist is apparently a white guy, which is also controversial these days, so the criticism will likely mount leading up to the Academy Awards voting. We haven’t seen the picture yet, and probably won’t until it shows up on Netflix, what with movie and popcorn prices being akin to a trip to Davos these days, so we’re withholding out own our judgment on the film’s artistic merits, but we’ll keep an eye on these developments as well.

Perhaps the desultory nature of the news can be attributed to “Blue Monday,” that post-holiday point in the dead of the winter that is said to be the most depressing day of the year. Around here the weather was unusually tolerable, although not nearly to our warm-blooded liking, but it still seemed rather a glum slog through the news.

— Bud Norman

Inauguration Day

President Barack Obama took the oath of office for a second term on Sunday afternoon. According to the reports it was an uncharacteristically low-key affair, arranged solely to satisfy the requirements of that pesky constitution, but there is plenty of appropriately expensive hoopla planned for today.

At the risk of sounding insufficiently respectful of the office, we’ll be doing our best to ignore it all. Obama’s first term was marked by the sluggish economic growth, vigorous expansion of an ever more meddlesome government, and declining American power that we had expected at the time of his first inauguration, and we now expect that a nation which voted for four more years of the same will wind up getting far worse. This could have been the day America began putting its finances in order, returning government to its proper limited role, and resuming the country’s leadership role in the world, but an electoral majority of the people decided to put all that bother off in favor another 99 months of unemployment checks.

None of which puts us in a celebratory mood. At least the hype should be more easily avoided this time around, so in some ways this inauguration will be less troublesome than the first.

Four years ago the inaugural festivities were inescapable. After eight years of relentless Bush-bashing from all corners of the media Obama had been elected on vague promises of hope and change, and the inauguration was regarded with an unsettling worshipfulness by a public that had only the vaguest idea what sort of change it was hoping for. There was the added angle of America’s first black president, too, heaping an extra guilt-ridden helping of historical significance onto the occasion. Obama came in to office with the most adulatory press coverage any president had ever enjoyed, compliant majorities in both houses of Congress, and sky-high approval ratings, to the point that there simply weren’t enough stations on the radio to avoid the resulting giddiness.

This time around Obama comes in with a smaller percentage of the vote after a scorched-earth campaign of hysterical vitriol against his political opponents, with a Republican majority in the House that was elected on a promise to rein in his most ambitious legislative goals, and a mere 50 percent approval rating in the latest Gallup poll. What’s left of Newsweek is heralding the inauguration as a “Second Coming,” and similarly religious imagery pops up here and there, but for the most the part the press can’t seem to muster the same messianic enthusiasm it once had. The only person we’ve encountered lately who seemed unduly enthused about the second term was slightly drunk, and even he wound up admitting that the whole Benghazi thing was an utter fiasco and that the debt has been piling up too high and will probably continue to do so.

In other ways, though, this time around feels even worse. It was bad enough to see the country fall for all that hope and change nonsense of ’08 race, and embrace a creepy cult of personality that is entirely unsuited to a free nation, but even more dispiriting to see it re-elect Obama without even the pretense of such optimistic delusions. The only rationale for Obama’s re-election was an obstinate unwillingness to face up to the country’s harrowing fiscal reality, along with a resultant willingness to believe the worst about anyone who might make the hard choices that are still available, and it looks as though the second term will be marked by the same cynical attacks on anyone who dares try to slow the nation’s headlong rush toward to financial insolvency.

The president used the last press conference of his first term to charge that the Republicans wish to see old people starving in the streets, or at least that they are “suspicious” of his heroic efforts to prevent that calamity, and while most of the media have abandoned the implausible claim that Obama is the messiah they’re still willing to echo the message that his opposition is the devil. One can still hope the House will still restrain Obama’s spending, or merely limit its increases to a level that will allow the country to forestall catastrophe long enough to get a more responsible president, and the mass protests against his gun-grabbing proclivities have already begun, but at best it will be a bitter fight with the sort of divisiveness that the president seems to relish.

By strange coincidence this inauguration day falls on what we are told is the most depressing day of every day, the “Blue Monday” when the holiday cheerfulness has entirely dissipated and the reality of a cold and dark winter settles in on the human psyche. Perhaps it’s just this calendar and the climate, but this is a bluer Monday than most.

— Bud Norman