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JasonC... what you may be failing to realize is that the United States is dying as a free market engine. The productive class is being forced to fund the non-productive class to the point where all of that lump in the throat, Fourth of July crap is dying... We are entering a period of economic decline that, like the British Empire, may well be unstoppable. We are fighting here and in other forums to try to preserve what we thought was the deal. The battle will not be easy, as Reagan Revolution types like us (the free market people who made the system work for us and for our communities) are now in the minority. The Losers are in the majority and they don't give one rip for anything we talk about or feel strongly about. To them, we are a path to high fashion lifestyle.

If we lose this battle, I'll buy you a beer in Singapore...

We are not entering a period of economic decline. You only wish that we were entering a period of economic decline - approximately because you don't like who won the last election, though I've no doubt you would hardly have been satisfied with the other fellow, either.

Instead it is an ordinary recession, one, and the ordinary political cycle, two. Democrats win some elections, Republicans win other elections. Some years the economy grows, some years it contracts.

You will say next that it isn't the momentary crisis that leads to your judgment but some longer sweep of history you see headed toward socialism or stagnation and regard in your philosophical pessimism as inevitable. But you are flat wrong. There is no such pattern in any longer sweep. The longer the sweep, the more clearly the pattern is relentlessly upward, and the more unstoppable the free market and the US in particular looks.

You are thus left predicting that this time it is different, that this time a non-entity ward heeler pol is the antichrist, that this time a contraction of the economy for a year or less is the end of capitalism. And I say it is rot and you have no evidence for it besides your wishing it were so, and that wish is prompted only by your pessimistic philosophy and your accumulated resentment that your ideas have not been accepted and embraced and made the dominant outlook for the American people.

Which is precisely what I have despised the Democrats for, rightly, for the last 5 years. They spent them treasonously screaming doom for the sole reason that they were not in power and other men were. It was transparent that they did not give a damn for the good of the country nor for any honest assessment of its policies or chances. They simply wanted the country to crash because it hadn't bowed down to worship them.

Do not make that mistake.

The American people have freed humanity and built the modern world, and are the source of all the justice you have ever known. Your rejecting them as hopeless is ridiculous on its face; they are vastly greater than you are. In power, in sustained achievement, in judgment, in justice. The US will be championing human freedom, successfully, when you and I are dust.

Why is the right now in the minority? Is it because everyone loves socialism and thinks it is the wave of the future? Hardly. It is much simpler than that.

You can't leave Rumsfeld at defense and "go slow" instead of surging to win rapidly - and expect no consequences. You can't spend your second term's political capital peddling immigration reform of all things - perfectly splitting your own base - and expect no consequences. And you can't moralize yourself into forcing a messy 90% creditor-loss bankruptcy on a systemically important financial firm like Lehman - and expect no consequences.

One of those was readily survived. Two was nearly mortal. Three means a term in the minority and probably two terms.

You don't get to screw up policies that critical, that royally, and retain the trust of the American people.

They are not rocket scientists, they are empirics. They will throw you out if you screw up things that big, that badly, that often. They will not care if you are running against Mickey Mouse. They will take their chances with a cartoon, just to be rid of your incompetence.

We need to earn back the reputation for economic professionalism and competence, that was blasted to hell last year, in the name of an idiot puritanism about "moral hazard". Instead, we have a thousand populists screaming that the problem is that we haven't boiled enough bankers in oil. Trust me, we never regain power on that line. If it is boiled bankers that are demanded, the Dems will get the nod every time...