One of my left-wing classmates this morning was blaming the federal credit downgrade on the Tea Party, describing Tea Party-ers as worse than 19th century Know Nothings and referring to them as “Talibanic zealots.” He attacked the patriotism of the Tea Party movement, and predicted that the American masses would wake up when the New Deal safety net began to unravel. All this, he said, made his stomach churn.

I replied:

It is grotesque in the extreme to find political Philistines, oblivious to the philosophic foundations and the Constitutional intent of the founders of their own country, a group of reactionary ideologues clinging to outdated, historically-refuted late-19th-century Utopian visions of heaven on earth and equality of economic results between the provident and the reckless, the educated and the uneducable, the law-abiding and the criminal, the industrious and the idle achieved by the rule of scientism through the medium of socialism and collectivist statism, referring to people with a far more sophisticated and accurate understanding of economics, political philosophy, and America history as primitive zealots.

With a very special kind of irony, we find today all the patriots who stabbed their own contemporaries fighting for freedom overseas in the back, the same people who waved North Vietnamese flags and chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh…,” the patriots who are always telling us how disgraceful American history was until they came along, now waving the flag and demanding that we support their fiscal excesses out of patriotism.

The safety net constructed since collectivism’s heyday in America is already unraveling. It was always a Ponzi scheme and it has arrived at the inevitable endpoint of all such schemes. Demographics is no longer working on its side. It was only in the imaginations of ideologues that all this was ever permanently sustainable. Reality has refuted the left’s theories again.

You can pray aloud and whistle in the dark and spout this kind of nonsense about the masses “awakening” to agree with your own insanity, but the reality is that the apolitical, pragmatic mass portion of the country has already had its rude awakening. They elected the second leftist president in our adult lifetimes, and his regime has succeeded in surpassing the debacle of his predecessor. What you are going to get is a landslide election that will consign Obama, the democrat party, and the welfare entitlement state to the rubbish-heap of history to repose discarded beside the rest of the entire collection of intellectual dead ends and political mistakes. Well might your stomach churn.

Cartoon via Theo.

Santelli comes in around 3:06 and puts matters into perspective.

“You guys ever play sports been on an organized team? Ooh yeah. Okay. You know sometimes you get a couple of bad calls or the game didn’t go your way but should have. A good coach isn’t going to come up to you and say, The other team stinks I’m mad. We’re going fight, we’re going to appeal. The coach says, Doesn’t matter. Okay. we’re a better team than this. Just take this to motivate the team to move on to greater things. You know, the treasury secretary, the 8% excuses, the blame Bush, blame the sun, blame this. You know what leadership means? It means that it doesn’t really matter what S&P says. We all know deep inside that no country is the same as it was five years ago. And the market seems to be okay with it. As for stocks going down, we’re already Ralph Kramden on thin ice. Now an infant jumped on our shoulders that’s even more weight. In the end, in the end we need to address problems we know exist. The treasury secretary or president should be out here not fighting S&P, not grabbing the other coach and slapping him around, taking the umpire behind the barn. He should be getting the team psyched to overcome. I had a professor in college. I wrote a great paper. Could never please this guy, but it made me better. We’re better than this. Don’t get caught up in the minutia. All this b.s.. We’re better than this. We need to prove it. We’re off track. Whether we’re better than some other country or not, the real circumstances we’re on the wrong path.

Blame the Tea Party? Geez, no wonder Kerry did so well in an election. If it wasn’t for the Tea Party, they would have passed the debt ceiling thumbs up, we would have been rated BBB.”

Don’t You Realize Paul Krugman on the Nobel Prize?

Posted at the Conservatory. link

A female CEO speaks critically of another leader’s job performance.