I think it's time to put this blog to bed again. Indeed, I drafted this ten days ago, before a recent trip, and have left it sitting unpublished for that long, so this is really just a case of waking up only to go to sleep again. As the old hospital joke goes: wake up, it's time to take your sleeping pill.

As I remarked in a little colloquy on a previous post with Tony Williams, commentator extraordinaire, this is a tougher crisis to deal with. Last time around we had targets ready to hand. I'm reminded, perhaps unjustifiably, of the poem by Cavafy which ends

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

This isn't to deny that Cheng was a horrible Chancellor, nor is it to say that Rauner and Madigan aren't barbarous in their way, only that the larger context that's made it possible for folks like them to do this much damage strikes me as the real problem.