Washington is a Monument with Feet of Clay

Below is the video from Lt. Colonel’s appearance at the South Florida Tea Party on April 15th.

When the Baron showed it to me I’d just finished reading the April 18th post at The Belmont Club. As many readers know I am a fan of Wretchard’s writing and mention his analyses on a regular basis. This one, “The Washington Monument”, may be one of his finest efforts. Interestingly, it repeats some of the same themes Col. West used in his speech, though from another perspective.

West heartens me; Wretchard leaves me pondering what he’s said. In other words, West is a leader and Wretchard is a prophet (though he might not agree with my estimate here that is how he functions from time to time).

First the video, which was sent to us by our German translator JLH. It’s fun watching the signer for the deaf who stands next to Col. West and repeats what he says:


Now, on to Belmont Club, where Wretchard begins with an analysis of the recent meeting between the White House Press Secretary and leaders of the White House Press Association, who asked for this get-together in order to air their grievances. They're feeling left out of the loop. Talk about high school…they’re upset at being treated the same way they treat the general public. Welcome to the club, Mr. & Ms. Media Person.

Wretchard moves on to describe how things work in Washington (in other words, why the White House Press pool feels so dissed by Obama, though he doesn’t say that directly):

Where one is on the totem is everything in Washington. The idea of hierarchy permeates every situation. Behavior is a question of knowing your place; when to say ‘thank you’ and never speaking out of turn. If you can’t understand the rules you’re a rube. Because of the default presumption that you are at Court; it follows that beneath every courteous speech ultimately you want something from the king or the duke or the duchess.

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There’s a bit of a jump here, with a discussion of Clinton’s remarks the other day about how the current public demeanor resembled what it was in 1994, during the period of the Oklahoma bombing:

…And this is where Bill Clinton has got it subtly wrong.

The former President argued that political discourse had gotten so strident that certain individuals on the right have crossed the line between criticizing government officials and “demonizing them.” Things now remind him of the days preceding the Oklahoma City bombing when Clinton’s unpopular actions were unappreciated by an America lucky to have him.

Ah yes, back when the press drooled on another empty suit. Little did we know back then that their craven behavior was mere foreplay compared to what they were prepared to do for/to Obama. At least Clinton pretended to like “journalists”. The Dauphin doesn’t have to do anything of the sort, so he doesn’t bother. Disdain is Obama’s strong suit.

After a report of Clinton’s interview regarding us restless natives, Wretchard analyzes how Monica’s boy gets it wrong:

The point Bill Clinton is missing is that the danger doesn’t come from right wing ‘anger.’ The anger is just a byproduct. The voices he hears from the Tea Party crowds aren’t threats; they’re warnings. The real peril is coming from somewhere else: the demographic decline in industrial world working populations, the increasing cost of energy and the international movement in the factors of production. A whole generation of failed policy from both parties is coming to a head and it probably means that the welfare state, the European Union and by consequence the Chinese economy are heading for a cliff.

What’s driving the Tea Parties isn’t amorphous hate. It is concrete fear: worry that pensions have been devalued; medical care will become unaffordable; taxes are too high and jobs are gone, never to return. And a look around the world shows there’s no place to hide. When the wave hits it will be global. [my emphasis —D]

In the many back-channel emails we get from readers, those are precisely the worries we hear, and the worries we have ourselves. Our pensions have lost much of their value. It is unlikely the Baron will find work in his field again. Computer programming is a young man’s bailiwick, unless you’re in a government job you’ve had forever.

The financial news talks about the government takeover of private pension monies in order to finance their grand giveaways. So now the question becomes not just “will Social Security be there” but also, “will your company pension be there” or will it have been cynically raided as the Social Security funds have been for generations?

Medical care “reform” is going to be an expensive, fraud-ridden and incompetent failure. Think of Social Security on steroids and heroin. In the form in which it passed, our national healthcare is a disaster waiting to descend. Socialized medical care may have worked in countries where socialism is regnant, but those economies are failing too, and they’re going to take their citizens’ medical care with them. But America, despite the overreach of government and the unions, is not and never has been a polity where socialism could function very well. Despite the valiant efforts of the Obamians and the Keynesians to groom us into becoming obedient recipients of government largesse, Americans are simply too ornery for such plans to work in the long run.

Even now, as evidence of the ‘grey’ market, of services paid for under the table (and thus out of the reaches of the tax man) continues to grow, I wonder how they handle that in Europe. Do government laborers work “side jobs” on their off-time to earn extra money? Is it a huge market and growing bigger as it is here? Or is the surveillance too rigorous for that to happen?

Wretchard comments on the current situation of world governments:

In the UK membership in political parties is at near historic lows. In America Congress’s popularity is lower than whales**t. The Eurozone is cracking up under its weight of debt. First Greece, now Portugal are being ripped off the cliff face like a zipper - and all the climbers are roped together. Japan is like a kamikaze sub heading for the depths and tapping out a sayonara. Russia was history long ago. And China, when it has used up its flowering moment, will face the consequences of its one-child policy. And Middle Eastern potentates, stuck in the same old, same old, are warning about a Summer War [the link to that War at his post is worth following].

Thus, as W. says, “the Tea Parties aren’t about putting some country club Republican in the White House…” And they never have been. The Tea Parties are a phenomenon of the rising of a movement toward individual state control, sometimes to the exclusion of the federal behemoth. Washington has every reason to be afraid of that desire that West expresses to shrink the bureaucracy.

Then Wretchard circles ‘round to the beginning of his essay with this passage, worth reading and re-reading:

The cheese-paring scene at the White House Press Corps is just as indicative of the coming storm as the Tea Parties. It is yet one more sign that the old institutions are making plans for a future that isn’t there; moving trillions of dollars in projected revenues around a five year plan like Hitler’s fictive armies were moved around a map in 1945. When you hear Gordon Brown describe the billions he’s going to spend to save the world and heal the planet; when you read news about the proposed legislation on “cap and trade”- the issue isn’t the “right wing hate” but where’s the money going to come from? The most telling fact about Bill Clinton’s speech is that 2010 reminds him of 1994. If he - or the political establishment - can’t tell the difference between the decades, that’s your problem right there.

Amen.

Bill Clinton, and the Democrats in general, are stuck in 2008, when they thought they had it nailed. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond anyone’s control have handed them a large mess. Their response, a kind of manic, drunken spree, has the electorate afraid of them. Our response has been to begin to work to get rid of those currently in power. They have become part of the problem in our very troubled future. Their solutions are bizarre, scandalous, and deeply cynical. In that sense, this is indeed a transparent administration.

I only hope the few decent folks in our current national legislature are not washed away in this tsunami of fear. I pray that citizens will look carefully at who it is that represents them in Washington and choose to retain those who are attempting to hold back the deluge of bad legislation in this shameful 111th session of the American Congress.

As Col. West said in several different ways during that speech, the most important thing facing federal, state, and local governments is re-establishing fiscal security. In order to do that, a lot of bulls are going to be gored. The next five years will not be pretty, not anywhere.

God help us all.