Cheap shots and expensive lifestyles

De Sacha Guitry à Diane Arnaud.

Please tell me David Petraeus with his visiting professor gig at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, isn't burnishing his academic credentials for that presidential run (perhaps it could be a bipartisan Joint ticket with Anthony Wiener). Washington Post:

Petraeus has a doctorate from Princeton University and has written widely on international relations, military strategy and tactics and national security issues.

He says in a statement released by Macaulay he’s pleased to teach at the college, where most students are children of immigrants. He says he looks forward to leading a seminar on the global economic slowdown.

It would be cool to have one of those certified Serious people out there recommending a fiscal Surge on the Sunday morning shows, though I guess around five years [jump]
too late. I fear he'll call instead for a classic counterinsurgency approach, clearing, holding, and building one too-big-to-fail bank at a time.

I wonder if he could moonlight over on the literary side in the hip, postmodern field of biography studies, like (this goes out to you, Thers) The Man Called Petraeus: Dis-solution of the Subject in the Flood of  Jouissance.

L'esprit viennois.

It was supposed to be the legislation so bad that even Congress wouldn't be able to live with it—the dread sequester, which was to lop a hunk off the budget of every federal department as with a deli slicer, deaf to the screams of civil servants being divided from their water coolers, teammates, or thumbs. Faced with the prospect, our fearless legislators were expected to be galvanized into bold action, hastening to cut that budget on a rational basis instead.

Then it turned out that Congress thought they could live with it after all. None of their campaign contributors lost food stamps, or had to drive an extra 50 miles to get their chemotherapy, or found their neighborhoods unprotected by police or their children's day care centers unstaffed. No crisis after all! Funny how that works, isn't it? How the people that don't suffer from the legislation are the same as the people who get to vote on it?

But not so fast! Campaign contributors do have to eat meat, right? And your ranchers (Western states, big right-wing donors) have to sell it too. So they managed to pass some legislation permitting the Agriculture Department to use a scalpel instead of a slicer allowing the inspection of meat to go on as scheduled. And then they came for the air traffic controllers, who are needed to OK the flights on which legislators and their contributors frequently fly...

“I am so happy that we were able to work together across the aisle in a bipartisan way to solve this problem,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who helped spearhead the last-minute negotiations. “It’s nice to know when we work together we really can solve problems.”

Yes indeed, everybody has to sacrifice, unless of course it's somebody you know or somebody who has written or may someday write you a check. Because why solve a problem if it's not Serious?

Un dernier clou dans le cercueil du général Petraeus.

All images from the blog of the Swiss novelist and critic Roland Jaccard, where I am sorry to say they are uncredited.