Frank McCloud [H. Bogart]: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco? ... He wants more. Don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco [E.G. Robinson]: That's it! More. That's right, I want more!
McCloud: Will you ever get enough? Will you, Rocco?
Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't.
Now, from the 2011 version of "Key Largo," I give you the Republican Study Committee, that thuggish, tea-party-inspired majority of the House GOP, whose latest proposal, "calling for [federal] outlays to be slashed by $2.5 trillion over the next decade," would rain catastrophe on an "entire array of government programs, among them education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research."
These highest of unrealistic, gutted-government expectations left even Speaker Boehner so politically panicked and thus emotionally crushed, he sent forth his only begotten, designated spin-spokesman to pat the Study Committee's head and essentially tell it to get lost:
"Our immediate goal is to cut spending to pre-bailout, pre-stimulus levels. That’s what we pledged, and that’s what we’ll fight for. But that will be the beginning, not the end."
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also declared the unmistakable end of discussion by invoking only the vaguest beginning:
"I applaud the Republican Study Committee. I look forward to the discussion on reducing spending that our country so desperately needs."
But, insisted South Carolina's freshman congressman, Johnny Rocco Mick Mulvaney, "We want more."
And more I genuinely hope they get from the cowering leadership, just as fast as their little tea-partying feet can trample those who brung 'em.
Ideally, the Republican Study Committee's preposterous recommendation to reset the national clock to 1786 will remain in the political forefront long enough to permit the minority to hang it out to twist and agonize in the electoral wind.
Federal spending on "education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research" -- gone. As would be, in time, the entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare, because in those memorable, tea-partying words of Johnny Rocco Mick Mulvaney: "We want more."
John Huston's 1948 metaphor of obscured, political malignancies was a cinematically stunning retort of simple human decency. The greedsters, the reactionaries, the demagogues wanted more then, and though they got it in spades, it wasn't enough.
It never is. So they're back.