Couple of points, David. First, McCain did not appear to me to have the ability to grasp the issue, explain the issue, define the issue or articulate the issue. He wasn’t as much in passive acquiescence as he was in utter befuddlement.

Republicans, of course…can’t get any traction on any principled dissent, precisely because the entrenched media will conspire to strangle off that dissent in a chokehold and smear campaign designed to prop up leftist misdeeds, misteps, mistakes and misinformation.

Top that off with an array of some of the worst public speakers in the history of mankind…and Republicans are essentially useless in countering a superior enemy’s tactics and strategies. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but Republicans are Little Leaguers playing hardball against an all star team of propagandists.

Our entire information stream …the places we have traditionally gone to get our opinions formed, honed and replenished…are owned…lock, stock and barrel…by leftists intent on not allowing ANY other voice into the conversation.

McCain is simply a grain of sand in an ocean of disinformation. He had a platform to make a point or two, but his opportunity was not “golden”…it was cubit zirconium…made even cheaper by his tin ear on the issues.

A lot of the blame belongs to John McCain. He had a golden opportunity during the debates and on the campaign trail to inform the voters that the Clinton administration forced lending institutions to provide mortgages to minorities possessing poor credit histories. The feckless GOP candidate, for all practical purposes, approved of the tacit conspiracy to ignore the issue.

“Perhaps the percipitous decline in balances will start people to their sheds for the torches and pitchforks.”

The odds are that most employees of AIG voted for Barack Obama. They thought he was one of them. After all, didn’t he attend Harvard University? Money talks and bovine excrement walks. At the end of the day, economic issues are very important. I’m sure that many of these people would vote differently if it were possible.

Anyone who is not terrified at the prospect of us puffing in a trillion dollars to try to inflate a popped balloon, isn’t grasping the thin ledge we are on, or is excited about the leap for some sadistic reason.

Joe Biden’s words rarely get lodged in me, like a bad piece of cheese…stuck in between my molars…but “You’re gonna think we’re wrong” is still wafting a serious stench past my olfactory senses. I smelled something bad then and it’s only getting worse.

When I get consumed by the wave of melancholy (as beautifully outlined by VDH) for the way things used to be (or ought to be)in the Dreams of our Fathers…I go back to brass tacks and try to figure out what caused us to not have all four wheels on the rails.

Some things that I believe we MUST investigate:

1)Joe Biden KNEW we were going to believe they were wrong…did Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson as well?

What did they know, when did they know it?

2)The “toxic asset” problem was discoverable from the minute the housing bubble crash hit. YEARS ago. Yet, someone (Frank) was protecting someone else (Raines, Moses, Johnson?)and throwing up obstacles against finding out if the books were cooked, if there was a way to fix it, to even ADDRESS it…during the time when it was merely a wave…not a tsunami.

Who is going to cross-examine those people…and when?

Why are they being provided cover and safe harbor?

3)AIG “bonus” money…is a distraction. It’s a sleight of hand move that, in some ways is working, in some ways is backfiring. Make the sheep believe that the wolf is in front of them…when the pack is looking to pick off the slowest at the rear of the herd. $165 million dollars given back today, with interest …is enough to let Chinese economists pick their teeth, removing the crumbs of their feasting on our debt.

Why did Geithner’s Treasury Dept. go to Dodd and ask him to put the clause back in. Who is going to cross-examine both of them? Our entrenched media? Don’t make me laugh. How can you provide cover and take aim at the same time?

4)Is there a citizen’s court, whereby a real examination of the potentially destruction of a nation can at least obtain justice from an information stream that lies to us, a party apparatus steals our economic system and implants their own without permission?

5)In the “We are the change WE have been waiting for”… who are the two “we’s” exactly?

What is the “change” we (the receiving “we”, as opposed to the quarterback “we”)are about to get? From my seat in the cfbleachers…a fiscal enema is “change”…but not something I had particularly been waiting for or anticipating with any fervor.

Why are these particular moves being made…which, again, from my seat in the cfbleachers sure look like they are being layered, one upon the other, to create a national fiscal crisis…rather than to cure one. We spend a trillion to “solve” a problem, then another trillion to address a “problem” that isn’t proven, then another trillion to prop up our confidence that the first two trillion has eviscerated.

If one wanted to blow up capitalism…and replace it with something else…but didn’t want to SAY that’s what they were doing, I would be hard pressed to invent moves that did the job any better than this. Barney, Chris, and Franklin all set up the pins,…and even the worst bowler could knock them down.

Give me a compliant, arrogant, elitist and VERY conspiratorial press and before you know it… the “change” that “we” have been waiting for…has flushed our systems of all the capitalism dollars and is replaced by another economic system entirely. And here you thought “we” were going to be wrong. Feel better?

The Lefty-in -Chief abuses the bully pulpit to focus public anger on bankers and financiers. This is no more than self-serving slander by a pugnacious Chicago pol better at campaigning than governing.

I would suggest a less politically correct but far more honest target for public anger: The perverse and unnatural relationship between banks and the government in which liberal politicians enticed, induced and pressured conservative bankers to make bad loans. The highminded goal was to give the restive poor (read that African-Americans) a stake in America.

The perfect paradigm for this perverse and unnatural union of bankers and politicians is the personal and professional relationship between Barney Frank and Franklin Raines.

It was in the coupling of these two—a fat cat liberal Jewish-American pol and his affirmative action African American banker/bureaucrat lover –that Americas current crisis was conceived. The bed Barney and Franklin made for themselves is the bed America sleeps in today. In their obscene thrashings under the covers the entire nation was buggered.

“He is close to being an unmitigated disaster..I still suspect that Obama will resign before the end of his term. He will claim to be suffering from serious medical problems.”

..close? “Nay seems sir, is..” an unmitigated disaster. His track record of a mere 60 days is enough to convince me that we should be rid of him.

David, I regard your commentary on this site as among the best (with the likes of Marc Malone, cfbleachers, etc.) and I put great stock in what is written here. You folks are, I believe, the resonators of the “new” silent majority. (I mean, of course, to divorce that phrase from any former associations with the tragic Nixon administration.)

But we have to foment a movement to make this early departure of this sad sack eventuate. So far, tea parties are growing in strength and we face a landmark checkpoint of sorts — as someone observed — when the first quarter 401K and IRA statements arrive in the mail. Perhaps the percipitous decline in balances will start people to their sheds for the torches and pitchforks.

One can only hope that the drumbeat intensifies.

The Coming Great Combine Stone-crushing Harvester Paver

First, let’s make a stop where our American sense of rights first took shape centuries ago, in merry old Britain, where today’s Prime Minister has just had to say he’s sorry:

“Gordon Brown has apologized after an investigation showed that the British National Health Service-run Stafford Hospital was so abyssmally bad that patients drank water out of flowerpots and that too many died in squalor or agony as untrained and undermanned staff were forced to meet “targets” instead of providing the care they advertised. Brown claimed these were “isolated” incidents.”

Hold that thought, right alongside the one about how the Brits routinely say they love their National Health Service.

Now, I’ve had this image building the past few days, an image that is a metaphor, but it’s coming along somewhat on an industrial science-fictionish track.

It is about Obama and what I think he really represents. This is the signal that I get out of the Obama noise, not from the side, not half-formed, certainly no longer dismissive. It is a straight-on take, not of the scattered parts of this strangely unfolding presidency, but of the whole of it.

I’ll start by saying that I now understand Obama as what I’m going to call a “movement socialist,” which I’ll define as someone objectively attached to the web of concepts that constitute and fortify socialism.

I’ll define socialism both as (1) the state’s involvement in the economy, including the economic livelihood of every citizen, to the detriment of all, as well as (2) state involvement in culture and the characterological formation of every individual, to the increasing exclusion of the vital social institutions of family, church, and the natural community.

I’ll further define a “movement socialist” as someone who is so deeply ingrained with the beliefs and habits of mind of this movement socialism that the person and the movement are not separable. The person of Barack Obama is of, and in service to, the movement (and, no, not to the country when and where he might perceive its interests diverging from those of the movement) and, as anyone with eyes and ears has seen and heard, the movement is in service to Obama.

This commitment, total commitment, to the movement by Obama, and the movement’s return of that commitment, is both a general and totalizing commitment. It is not even by necessity a commitment to any given policy or program, or any selection of policies or programs, with the possible exception of the very ground of the movement’s deathworks, which is industrial abortion. It is only a commitment to advance the movement when and where it can be advanced.

This form of movement socialism merging in with the massive political and social power of the federal bureaucracies will create the synergistic machine I describe in the title of this post: a monumental, bureaucratic system of compulsion and social digestion that I’m naming the great combine stone-crushing harvester paver.

One can refer to the European social democracy models if one wants, to get a pale sense of what’s coming, but this is America, and crushing these stones and harvesting these people and paving over these traditions requires very big industrial equipment.

And that’s what this merger of the movement socialist and his movement socialism with the unprecedented power of the federal bureaucracies will bring.

This industrial crusher-harvester-paver is not about protecting prosperity or “providing opportunity,” and certainly has nothing to do with freedom. This thing is about itself, about establishing itself, about feeding itself, and above all about protecting itself.

It will no longer simply be government in business for itself, but rather utopian movement socialism in business for itself, and its business will be power.

It is going to be very American, and it’s going to work like the very worst of the public schools, with all the panache of the postal service, amidst the strident idioms of a child welfare bureaucracy, because childhood will need to become even more of a permanent condition.

Barack Obama’s face will be on the front door of the main and every local directorate, but the man you meet inside will look and act very much like Harry Reid. The main lady in the back office will laugh like Nancy Pelosi, until she sees your face and gets up and closes the office door in it, your face.

If you don’t like the way you are treated, you will be shown out the rear exit, in reality or metaphorically, and who you meet back there will be the middle managers of the carting industry. They will see to all your further complaints.

If this sounds grey, dismal, and sour, I’m only going to say that I didn’t even get to the really bad stuff. What I’m describing has of course happened before, in other places, with horrible and predictable results. The strange part, of course, is that none of this commitment on Obama’s part was hidden, at least not hidden anywhere that wasn’t in plain sight. But the public schools and the putrefactive culture and the media have all done their jobs. To say that the concepts are not there by which to understand all this is to miss the point that the perceptions are not there either. You cannot understand what you cannot see even when it’s right there in front of you.