I’d been getting depressed about the Wizards’ prospects for next season. The center of the team is Agent Zero, Professor of Gilbertology who, by all accounts, requires a steady diet of perceived slights in order to motivate himself. Recently, though, the slights hadn’t been coming. After being snubbed for the All-Star Game, he wound up as David Stern’s replacement for the injured Jermaine O’Neal. Then came the playoffs where I kept hearing national television commentators describing him as “underrated” and explaining to the fans that he, like LeBron James, is one of the best young players in the league. Then he’s named to the Third Team All-NBA and selected for the Team USA roster where he wound up not making the final cut allegedly due to injury. All-in-all, Arenas was at risk of getting too fat, happy, and satisfied. But now he’s bringing the bitterness:

“No joke, I felt like I was the 16th man on a 15-man roster,” Arenas said. “You are there to support your team and support your country and be happy to play but you know, I did everything they wanted me to do; but if I did everything they wanted me to do, why am I on the bubble of getting cut? I sacrificed. You’ve got LeBron being LeBron. You’ve got Carmelo being Carmelo. You’ve got D-Wade being D-Wade. Why can’t I be me? Why do I have to transform? I did that and now you are going to cut me?”

Right on! Fuck those guys. Let Gilbert be Gilbert! Yes, of course, it’s true that there was nothing actually unfair about this, but as long as Gilbert feels it was unfair we’re on solid ground. His apparent good attitude about being asked to transform himself into either a traditional point guard or a spot-up shooter (again, the right things to ask of him as a member of Team USA) was indicative of a distressing lack of egomania. Now we’re in good shape. Indeed, if I believed for a minute that Darius Songaila was going to add “toughness” to the team (that’s what the front office wants us to believe), I’d be downright optimistic.

The very kind Tyler Cowen writes that this new site “will continue to offer my favorite TV and NBA reviews on the web, along with his regular incisive-but-I-wish-he-were-more-cynical-about-government-and-more-sanguine-about-the-transformational-power-of-economic-growth Democratic political analysis.” Cowen’s a libertarian, so I expect we won’t see eye-to-eye on this, but I actually think I am pretty cynical about government. I’ve learned a lot from my various libertarian friends, from my seminar with Robert Nozick, from libertarian blogs, etc. and I think public choice economics is a very important perspective. The upshot of this is that, as a general matter, I’m considerably less enthusiastic about regulatory solutions to policy problems than are most liberals.

Sadly, though, the upshot of my libertarian-infused cynicism has mostly been to push me left of where I used to be on domestic policy issues. It’s cynicism about government and the political process that, for example, has made me much more enthusiastic about labor unions and much more hostile to means-testing entitlements than I used to be. If I believed that the deliberative democracy people weren’t naive fools, I’d be much more sanguine about various “third way” approaches to things.

Huh. Apparently there’s a Baltimore City Paper. Who knew? Said paper contains an article about The Wire, thus indicating that it’s a superior publication to the tawdry Washington City Paper. I’ve been avoiding the temptation to watch the review copy of the entire season that the producers sent to the Prospect offices since I’d like to take it all in at the proper pace, but the City Paper guy watched ‘em all and says “it’s the most gripping, ambitious season the show has produced to date.”