Pot callng the kettle black...

The Wall Street Journal opines that Barack Obama's been stealing the Underpants Gnomes' business plan:

Sometimes it takes "South Park" to explain life's deeper mysteries. Like the logic of the Obama administration's policy proposals.

Consider the 1998 "Gnomes" episode -- possibly surpassing Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" as the classic defense of capitalism -- in which the children of South Park, Colo., get a lesson in how not to run an enterprise from mysterious little men who go about stealing undergarments from the unsuspecting and collecting them in a huge underground storehouse.

What's the big idea? The gnomes explain:

"Phase One: Collect underpants.

"Phase Two: ?

"Phase Three: Profit."

Lest you think there's a step missing here, that's the whole point. ("What about Phase Two?" asks one of the kids. "Well," answers a gnome, "Phase Three is profits!") This more or less sums up Mr. Obama's speech last week on Guantanamo, in which the president explained how he intended to dispose of the remaining detainees after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly against bringing them to the U.S.

They're hardly ones to talk: Republican political theory is largely build on this business model. See, e.g., the Iraq misadventure, "supply-side" economics and "reducing taxes gets more revenue", "just let the markets work", etc. Republican political theory is just surfeit in one-liners, "sound bites", and simplistic ideas that ignore potential complications and externalities (and realities) that might be problematic ... and that are remarkably short on substance (see, e.g., the Republican "budget").

Cows and barn doors....

In the N.Y. Times article linked in my last post, we have this interesting tidbit:

The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said Wednesday that moving detainees to American prisons would bring with it risks including “the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States.”

Like wow.... You know, part of that sentence sounds vaguely familiar for some reason. Do we really have people that can utter this kind of stuff in high positions of gummint?

Certain words just jump right off the page at you....

Dan Froomkin's White House Watch column today has this little tidbit:

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times:

President Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a "preventive detention" system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in the private session said....

[emphasis added]

And Obama's supposedly a Constitutional law expert. Count me in the "whomp-jawed" column.