Have you read this? Charles Pierce is a genius at grabbing the god-awful truth and shining bright lights on it. His latest Esquire piece,
"The Reign of Morons is Here", is pure Charlie--raging, brilliant, and, of course, spot on:
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers,
Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so
ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have
elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
And this:
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government
of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing
it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar
daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their
party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may
be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three
words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people
have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you
could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald
Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem,
through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big
government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like
Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a
budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common
ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in
good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher
functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat
right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now
seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion
disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the
monkey brains.
But you really need to read the whole thing. In a nutshell, it is what we've done to ourselves. It did, in fact, start with Ronald Reagan. and many of us could see the handwriting on the wall even then. He wasn't called "the Teflon president" for nothing. The press saw a sunny personality and a gift of gab, loved reporting on this former-actor-turned-President of the United States, and ignored what was really coming out of his mouth. His mission was to decentralize and eventually decapitate a government that, on looking back fondly now, was working just fine for most of us.
Bill Clinton, instead of working to fix the path to destruction, followed the yellow brick road. Outsourcing and off-shoring gained a friend, much to our dismay.
George W. Bush proved to the crazies that they could win as long as they kept their leaders mediocre and clueless and talkin' like good-ol-boys.
And Barack Obama, given the gift of an entire progressive movement standing by his side and ready to go to work, blew it almost from the start by bringing in Wall Street cronies and by thinking beyond any reason that he could compromise with people who made it crystal clear their main goal was to destroy him.
So here we are. They're doing what they've promised to do: they've already shut down the government, if even just temporarily, and if we've got it right--got their message--this is only the beginning.
If the people who voted those crazies in, and are still cheering them on, can't be persuaded to do the right thing and get them out of there, we either have to do a better job of convincing them, or we have to give in and enjoy the ride.
I don't know about you, but I'm with Charlie. No way in hell are we going to do that.
