The rhyme of history is ringing in my ears. An obscure, slender figure (sans stove pipe hat) has arrived from Illinois amidst the shattered remains of the Whig party. Alright, that’s an exaggeration.
Our do-nothing, know-nothing warrier prince is nowhere to be seen. The Republican Paradigm, under the leadership of its very own cartoon character- Dubya- has had the misfortune of leaving its greasy fingerprints all over the collapsing financial system. And it’s not just politicians who have left their grubby smudges all over the shards of Grandma’s bone china. It includes the rank & file junior plutocrat-wannabe’s and MBA greedheads under the cloak of the GOP who have gamed the system with zero regard for its stability.
The great benefit of Laissez Faire as a moral philosophy is that one is excused from moral culpability. Nobody expects you to behave honorably because morality is orthogonal to the market. There is no overlap. You are expected to be self-centered and greed is just the normal operating condition. It’s all good, baby.
Mr Bush has not stepped forward to offer advice or reassurance to the citizenry. Bush is brave when he can order the Army to march in somewhere. But if the problem involves math, lookout. And where is Mr Rove, Bush’s brain? I suppose he is absent because he is a specialist in election, not governance. He just delivers these disasters to the Whitehouse. He evidently holds little or no indemnity for his work.
Instead, this ideological weasel, this scoundrel-in-chief, is hunkered down out of sight during the election so as to avoid contaminating McCain/Palin with the foetid stink of GOP incompetence.
The framers of the constitution apparently never anticipated that the republic could be run aground by a frat-boy imbecile egged on by a pack of greedy, morally vacuous, shady characters from the military-industrial-finance-fundamentalist “sector”.
The US constitution needs a provision for mid-term ejection of incompetent fools.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
We could have impeached him – but Congress didn’t have either the gumption or the votes to do so. Ultimately, they couldn’t have rid us of W because a large fraction of the population still believes in his (and in the GOP’s) superiority. No Constitutional provision can protect us from ourselves.
OT, I think it’s sort of amusing to see Gov. Palin running on integrity as her qualification. I guess you don’t actually have to have any to trumpet that you have more than the other guy – well, maybe you do, but apparently her target audience either doesn’t realize that or doesn’t care.
You can lead a voter to reality, but you can’t make one think, let alone accept it or act rationaly to change it.
“It includes the rank & file junior plutocrat-wannabe’s and MBA greedheads under the cloak of the GOP who have gamed the system with zero regard for its stability.”
Recall mr. Bush is the first president with an MBA (A Harvard MBA). But most grad programs have no filtering once you gain entry. Nearly 100% graduate (I never understood this).
PS – you’re sounding more and more like Hunter S. I think you may be channeling him.
What happened to sovereignty slut Nancy Pelosi and the Democraps’ 100 Days? She was taken into a back room and educated. There are no Democraps and Republicants. There is the Party. All grow wealthy for the meager personal investment of compliance.
AIG held a $500K retreat for its chosen after its first $89 billion Federal bailout arrived. A second huge chunk rolled down the conveyor belt and AIG did it again.
Stupidity and corruption practiced upon a sufficiently large scale earn reply in kind. Ancient Rome reserved crucifixion for those whose crimes endangered Senātus Populusque Rōmānus. Spartacus’ revolt lined the 71 BC Appian Way from Rome to Capua, 212 km, with 6000+ rotting corpses at 116 foot intervals. The Beltway is a circular freeway 103 km in circumference enclosing Washington, DC’s alphabet soup of incompetence and cupidity. Halve the spacing.
Of course the SPQR was a slave society that supported an oligarchy till its end, so yeah Al, I guess there are innumerable similarities to today.
The difference is that the slaves think they’re already free.