With a bang and a whimper?

"What we are witnessing today is how empires end..." 

--- Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan has the guts (and the economic understanding) to say what needs to be said. Wall Street, the Democrats, and the Republicans are clueless.  Congress is going on vacation.  The Fed is pledging money not appropriated by Congress - in fact, the money doesn't exist.  It's printed out of thin air!

The sad part is this was all completely avoidable - if we had had a conservative party in Washington.  There was a period of six years in which the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency - but of course, government grew and grew, spending went up and up, the borrowed-money joyride rolled on, and if that weren't enough, Roe vs. Wade needlessly continued to be the "law" of the land, and now the GOP has the unmitigated gall to point the finger at anyone other than itself for its failures.

Meanwhile, real conservatism is going to take the blame because of what the counterfeit conservatives have been doing and calling it conservatism.

I think Buchanan called it.  Real conservatives are frugal, they pay their bills, they obey the law, and they mind their own business.  But what do the folks who have co-opted the term do?  They spend like there's no tomorrow, they borrow from what amounts to a printing press, they run roughshod over the Constitution, and they involve the United States in conflicts all over the world that we have no business being involved with (let alone the obvious fact that we can't pay for it).

The real beneficiaries of the current Republican joyride and economic crash (not counting the politically well-connected, those who have already become rich at our expense, and the massive network of lobbyists) will be the Democrats.  And the Republicans have no-one to blame but themselves.  Meanwhile, we, the American people are going to have to pay, and pay, and pay - in blood, in taxes, in a devalued dollar, and in the inevitable international blowback that we, our children, and grandchildren will have to suffer for the hubris of these politicians who think "conservative" means making the government bigger, spending more money, borrowing more - while criticizing the Democrats for doing the very same thing.  And of course, neither major party will move in a conservative direction.  Both are proposing more government tinkering and more "bailing out."

We think these people in Washington are smart.  We think they're well-read and highly educated.  We think they understand economics and history and the Constitution.  I should have figured it out when I lived in Philadelphia and was set-up at a booth at a community fair with a bust of Thomas Jefferson.  I asked Representative Jon Fox, a highly touted "conservative" Republican U.S. Congressman, what he thought of my "friend" on the table.  Before he could draw a breath, his lackey, latched to his side like Smithers to Burns in the Simpsons, almost in a panic, whispered in the Congressman's ear: "It's Thomas Jefferson!"

I really do believe most of our politicians in Washington would fail miserably at "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"  

Also in Pennsylvania, I remember a visit to my State Rep's office (she was a Democrat, but I don't remember her name).  I asked her if she could sponsor a piece of legislation on the floor of the Statehouse in Harrisburg.  I read the short proposal to her and asked her to read it over for herself.  She said she could not.  She was opposed to it.  You should have seen the look on her face when I told her she had already agreed to it - it was a verbatim quote from the State Constitution.  She feebly offered that maybe it should be changed - but as I pointed out to her, that passage was from a part of the Constitution that was not permitted to ever be amended (it was from the State's version of the Bill of Rights).  Why didn't she know this?  What the heck to we pay these people to know - if not the bloody Constitution?

These folks are simply not very bright.  Some probably are.  But I believe the vast majority of them are hucksters and Bull Artists, people who would fail in the private sector.  They demand junkets, per diems, lucrative retirement packages, special privileges, and deference from the rest of us - when they are more fit for picking up litter off the side of the road.  And now we are approaching an economic meltdown, and there they are, like deer in the headlights.  Clueless, pointing fingers, and scurrying like roaches for cover.  I shouldn't be surprised, but I still can't help being appalled.  

Thanks a lot, Washington.  Thanks Democrats, and thanks Republicans.  I'm beginning to think Thomas Woods' definition of bipartisanship makes a lot of sense: "the Stupid Party getting together with the Evil Party to do something both stupid and evil."

But I suppose the old saying is true: we get the government we deserve.  Man, have we scraped the bottom of the garbage dumpster, or what?