[steel_resolve]

Peggy noonan needs some new meds. Not that I disagree with her gist of the article, it's her tone - seems like she's ready to committ suicide.

[visualops]

If government is a steamroller, and that is in good part how I see it, the individuals who work in it are the atoms in the steel. The force of forward motion carries them along. There is inevitably an unaccountability, and in time often an indifference about what the steamroller rolls over. All the busy little atoms are watching each other, competing with each other, winning one for their little cluster. And no one is looking out and being protective of what the steamroller is rolling over--traditions, shared beliefs, individual rights, old assumptions, whatever is being rolled over today.

Pretty good analogy.

[Zack Nguyen]

a new operating assumption: that the steamroller will always be with us. And that if it is destined to become always and every year bigger, heavier and more powerful, then you might as well relax and learn how to run it, how to drive it and direct it.

What a great way to put it. Bush's decision to embrace big government was the politically safe decision. Yet it will have severe consequences for our financial stability down the road.

The biggest problem is that conservatives have lost the argument with liberals on whether big government is desirable. The American people have decided that they want all the government they can get so long as they don't have to pay for it.

[Peach]

Peggy Noonan/Abramoff ping.

[Dems_R_Losers]

This may be the single greatest opinion piece ever written by an American. Noonan says exactly what many of us have been trying to say here for months and years. Republicans are not the party of government. We do not want our party to be the party of government. We will not love party leaders who love government.

[cgk]

Peggy ping.

[cgk]

Excellent advice in the last lines:

Is there a way for Republicans to go? Stop trying to fit in. Stop being another atom in the steel. It does no good trying to run a better steamroller. It won't work. Steamrollers are not your friend.

[Doctor Stochastic]

They are not virtue machines.

But are they virtual machines? Or are they virtually machines?

En passant: I saw a real steamroller (and a real steamshovel) a few days ago (in a museum in Argentina.) I had always heard the terms, but my referents were always diesel powered.

[mystery-ak]

[GSlob]

"We are all of us, even the best of us, vulnerable to the call of the low: to greed, conceit, insensitivity, ruthlessness..."
Greed is good. Insensitivity and ruthlessness are the sine qua non of all the great statesmen [check Machiavelli if you doubt my words]. Conceit is fun to watch from a safe distance. So it is not quite "call of the low".