This NRO post is being linked in a bunch of places, so let me add to the chorus: it’s depressing, but frightening in its possible prescience. Steyn’s point really does boil down to this: we don’t have the money, we’re not going to get the money any time soon, and our political class is running out of road on which they can kick this particular can.
Steyn does have the luxury of not having to operate inside the American political system, though. And while I know that it sucks to have to choose between ‘bad’ and ‘worse,’ history since January 2007 should show even the most rigorous partisan purist what happens when you let the American people get conned into choosing ‘worse.’ That we let them get conned is, of course, a personal failure on many people’s part, including mine: clearly those of us fighting in 2006 or 2008 were not influential enough or articulate enough or energetic enough back then to stop the avalanche.
Or perhaps we were just not numerous enough. One hopes that’s the answer, at least…
Moe Lane
Reading Steyn ruins my weekends. I do all that I can (whie still maintaining a job and raising my kids). I hope that there are more of us and that it does make a difference. I don’t know how else to handle Steyn without throwing up my hands and sitting on the couch. . .very tempting.
Yeah, unfortunately, Moe, Steyn nails exactly how I’ve felt about this election. Nobody has the will to actually turn the car around, or even hit the brakes a little.
Conservative attempts to trim spending are labeled “extreme”, but the real extremes will be the depths the people of this country sink to when everything collapses.
“A republic…if you can keep it.” Sorry, Ben, looks like this generation can’t.
Sometimes I find myself fantasizing about an Obama victory in 2012 just so I can hear him twist himself into knots trying *not* to blame his predecessor. Of course, the broadcast would be on emergency shortwave radio, but hey. Bad stuff happens.
I sometimes wonder if the GOP is trying to kill the cancer by almost letting it kill the host, then praying that the sleeping immune system finally awakes.