Who was it that said politics ceased to be interesting when everybody—that is, not just the politicians of both parties, but also the voters who were supposed to keep them honest and accountable—stopped caring about deficit spending? Those wise words, though I now forget where I read them a year or two ago, suddenly came back to me when I saw the following pathetic headline to an editorial in London’s Daily Telegraph in July: “The Government’s generosity on foreign aid ought to be linked to affordability.” Indeed it ought! But the insanity of borrowing money in order to give it away is now so much taken for granted, in the media as elsewhere, that even such a minor eruption of common sense as this strikes us as vaguely inappropriate, even offensive, like a profanity uttered in church. The author of the headline sounds apologetic about it. No more the thundering editorial “must” but instead a wistful “ought to be.” Anything more emphatic might, after all, be thought insensitive to the presumptive sufferings of those on whose ostensible behalf the virtue of the foreign-aiders is being signaled.

No more the thundering editorial “must” but instead a wistful “ought to be.”

I had a similar reaction to a headline that appeared in The New York Times the same day. “Lawmakers Grapple With Nagging Infrastructure Detail: How to Pay for It.” If the Times still had as much of a tether to reality as The