This is Where We Are…

I am not certain that there is much future in assessing blame between “D” and “R” — there is plenty to go around. It is about as useful as debating Hoover and FDR, useful in gross terms for not making the same mistake again, but we seem to make the old ones again anyway and add new twists to them.

We know what doesn’t work — Europe was our supposed model — or at least the liberal model several years ago, and it is imploding before our eyes, daily. Greece, Ireland, France, Spain, Britain — “austerity” everywhere as they led the way into excess they now must riot their way back out as the moochers got accustomed to the free lunch.

I don’t know if the US voters understood the impact of the European problem, or if it was just an intuitive reaction of basic common sense that mid-Westerners and Southerners have in abundance and that apparently is dulled by the association with cooler sea water — but the reaction on Nov. 2 was startling to the European-oriented elites.

It is not as if their liberal media has not informed them in graphic terms that the Social-Democrat model was failing and about to topple. The difference between Social-Democrat and pure Socialist models is that the pure model runs out of other people’s money faster, and that social-democrats have an easier time to turn it around before finding themselves searching for restored and re-welded parts for a 1955 Chevy Bel-Aire.

In order to work properly, Socialism requires that those who manage it be as moral as those who design it, but in any society those who seek power are not by nature moral beings. Social democracies suffer the same fate, just more slowly.

World leaders can see what economic models work, and first-hand they are discovering which do not. That is why President Obama was rejected both at home, and more recently abroad. He has returned home for a change of clothes and will leave soon for the failing capitols of Europe, where he will be further lectured on how not to make the same mistakes that Europe is reeling from.

Steeped in liberalism, he is unlikely to learn. He was a high-minded social democrat who accepted the hammers of Chicago politics in the White House to get his high-minded policies to fruition, and in doing so became a politician using whatever means were necessary to get to what he perceived as a moral end — and became a Chicago Pol.

The people know.

Come to Think of It — We did Lose the Election…

P.J. O’Rourk is not H.L. Mencken, or Will Rogers, and certainly no combination of the two — but he is all we have.

He writes in the Weekly Standard, “I think we lost the last election on November 2. Every race was won by a politician…we will have won an election when every seat in the House and Senate…are filled with people who wish they were not there.”

I particularly liked, “We also elected a lot of amateur politicians. However, Politics is like vivisection — disturbing as a career, alarming as a hobby. And we may have elected a few reluctant politicians. But not reluctant enough.”

All in all, not bad writing, and certainly expresses my view, but he was a lot better writer when he was closer to his LSD days…