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Could it be the Muslim in the White House?

Well, yes, but it’s because he’s an idiot, not because he’s a Muslim. The idiot Texan before him in the White House ran up debt, trying to buy Ted Kennedy’s friendship with the Medicare perscription expansion, too. And the dress-smearing super-idiot in the White House before the Texan had a chance or two, what with the Cold War peace dividend, to reduce debt, but didn’t, and he woulda spent more than he did on buying stupid people’s votes if the “Gingrinch” Congress hadn’t dragged the brakes a little. But the Repubs in Congress didn’t hold their foot on the spending brake, and the Super Incredible Idiot Dems in Congress are flooring the spending accelerator. We are doomed.

Tytler didn’t say it, even though it’s often attributed to him, but, “A democracy (or a representative republic) cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

To put it another way,

“The America of my timeline is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of other citizens... which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes in his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses’.

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first, but once the state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and curcuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome. Mine was a lovely world - until the parasites took over.” -Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset