Rant

What follows is a comment I left on this thread at Althouse:

(No edits. Some additional thoughts in the parentheses, is all. It's a rant.)


I predict that the political class of 2012 won't contain any of the people we are talking about here in 2008, with the exception of Jindal and Palin.

We are already well into fantasy land with the two offerings (assuming Hillary doesn't take out O! on Wednesday) currently before the electorate.

Obama and McCain. Imagine that as a little thought sketch. Combine that one with Reid and Pelosi, and then imagine that as a painting.

Now hang that painting up in the ruins of Pompeii. It looks... out of place (should have written "Looks right at home" - ed) , doesn't it?

Our economy is as far away from collapse as the number of wage earners who believe that their retirements and investments are still liquid.

Our national security is being challenged at home by a flood of illegal aliens threatening to overwhelm our social and emergency services while the national government looks the other way because the parties perceive different, but equally damaging and cynical temporary advantage from the current situation. Abroad, Islamism remains to be confronted while the Bear has begun a program of limited empire.

And as soon as China sweeps up the last of the confetti, they are going to be back on the road in pursuit of becoming THE controlling power on the Rim. (And Africa. And looking hard at Central and South America as buffers.)

Energy policy - all of it, from domestic exploration to refinery capacity to clean coal to drastically overburdened generation and transmission structures to nuc - can't be ignored or yammerheaded any longer. Fuel costs NOW are not sustainable for a slim majority of businesses, and by extension the employees of those businesses. Fuel Oil and Ngas are both going to spike with the first frost (BEFORE the election - and that's a bomb waiting to go off) and on top of that increases of forty to sixty percent for food, transportation, and credit (if the last can be had at any price come winter).

Almost all of our coming pain can be attributed directly and unambiguously to government interference in pursuit of interest group support, failure of government to enforce its own laws and regulations, and a decades long "arrangement" that evolved between congress, the courts, and the executive that some time in the past morphed into a full blown conspiracy to contravene the Constitutional limits of government power.

One push will put us into the abyss.

And we've got Obama and McCain to choose between.

2008 is important, make no mistake. But 2010 is when the hard work of recovery will probably really begin.

Neither one of the candidates (okay, the three, until Wednesday) is inclined, but more importantly is not equipped to deal with what is about to happen.

And they could not give a rat's ass. Honestly. The media that camps their every move - that prides themselves on their connectedness and smarts and conventional wisdom - that media is covering the house kerfluffle then the experience kefluffle then the angry white biddy kerfluffle...(The political establishment long ago ceased operating like the real world meant crap where their ambition was concerned.)

Russia has announced that their borders end where their armor stops rolling.

Iraq, with good reason, wants assurances that we'll be gone by 2011. That's to impart to their population, not ours, that the Americans are soon not to be trusted, and there isn't any time to sugar coat the situation. Media is covering that incorrectly, too.

And last, nobody is reading the financial pages, nobody is watching Bernanke daring the bank guys to blink.

We dance on an event horizon and look to cartoons to save us.

Oy. A knowledge of history can bring the sting, baby, and that's no lie."