On Christmas Day, you can't get soreIn an hour's time I will have to beam at all mankind a shining grin of blessed munificence. Before that hour strikes, however, I would like to wish a few lumps of coal upon those deserving them in their stockings.
Your fellow man you must adore
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four..."
- Tom Lehrer, "A Christmas Carol"
To Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko: Shame on you for this week, where you proved through the F-35 decision, the decision to restart the Yamba Dam project and the budget proposal you delivered today, with its staggering 49% of intake from borrowing (this in order to deliver everything on every ministry's wish list, it seems - E) that you are not a flexible dealmaker, but a shambling, dissembling sea slug. Maybe it was a bad week for you -- but yowza, what a week it was!
To Ozawa Ichiro - for batting your eyelashes at Osaka City Mayor Hashimoto Toru when the latter came slouching up the capital to beg from everyone whose office door he found open to please, please, please let him turn Osaka from a "fu" to a "to" --although no sane person can explain what good that bit of bureaucratic paper shuffling will do: Osaka will still be Osaka, with nearly nothing to recommend it save the bunraku puppet theater and Janne Morén. Thanks Ozawa-san for tossing the DPJ into yet another round of self-doubt and suspicion as to you and your acolytes' intentions.
To Defense Minister Ichikawa Yasuo - for having accepted the offer to head a ministry about whose issues and history you knews zilch...and having the gall to remain in office after admitting you had no qualifications for the post, other than that you were a breathing human being with the proper citizenship.
To Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu - for never having a proper explanation of what it is the government thinks it is doing. Is there anyone senior to you in the party hierarchy to explain to you simply, so that you might understand, how important it is for you to know the answers to the questions being put to you, as you are supposedly the government's COO?
To Watanabe Yoshimi - for quitting a dying party out of principle, then wasting years not articulating what your new party stands for, other than for adolescent slacker narcissistic snark.
O.K., O.K., I think I hear sleigh bells on the veranda, so I had better stop here.
Merry Christmas, メリー・クリスマス, Joyeux Noël, Vesel Bozic!
Many thanks for your terrific analyses and great style (even tone; easy, wry humor; depth of insight) - much appreciated as we continue to witness, as generations before us, the irrational "march of folly" at the national government level worldwide.
ReplyDeleteWishing you a good holiday and all the best in 2012!
Agree with all of it, but would like to express in particular my shared disgust with Watanabe Yoshimi for his utter uselessness. At one time I thought he and Kan Naoto could actually make a difference.
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