The Ship of State is foundering on it's Summertime Cruise. I fear that once again we'll be the ones to have to walk the gangplank to lighten the craft. Lots of privileged folks are on board, of course, but they'll be busy with their tales of aggrandizement and power sharing, scratching backs and kneeling to get a better angle on it.
It's time for us to deal with the slimy mess which has prevailed in D.C. since the liberal orgasm of a year ago or so. Do we just paddle harder and hope and pray for "change"? I'd like to see some authentic patriots do something real for a change.
Angelo M. Codevilla gets its correct when he writes,
"Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it."
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print
