Playing With Fire

For a bunch of not terribly popular blokes with not terribly popular policies, Liberal Democratic Party leaders are acting with extraordinary self-assuredness.

I had thought Ōshima Tadamori's dismissal last night of a threat to the leadership's ability to shepherd the second supplementary budget through via an Article 59 two-thirds majority override should Koizumi Jun'ichirō go through with a pledged walkout was...on target...but still insufficiently open-minded to the possibility of a non-LDP centric reality.

Now members of the leadership are telling the press they are laughing at Koizumi's warning, digging the knife in deep by parroting Koizumi's now famous line about being so astonished and disgusted at Prime Minister Asō Tarō's perfidity that he could not longer get angry, only laugh. The head of the LDP General Council is even contemplating how the leadership could punish Koizumi, should he go forward with his threat to absent himself from the Diet chamber during the revote.

Damn, is this ever getting interesting.