PrintOctober 25, 2010
A Tide in the Affairs of America
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.- The Life and Death of Julies Caesar, Scene III, William Shakespeare
As the once-heralded Summer of Recovery yields to a Fall of Failure, there is a tide in the affairs of America which, if taken at the flood, could lead to a reversal of misfortune brought to us by a socialist-ideologue president, a tragic-comedian vice president, and a majority leadership team in Congress who are master and mistress of the martial arts of legislative cram-down.
Two years into this regime, their persistent blaming of Bush reflects an adolescent unwillingness to accept responsibility. With each advance in the calendar, their whining rings yet hollower.
Their chosen metaphor is that of a responsible adult, the Democrats, taking the car keys away from an irresponsible child, the Republicans, after the youth drove the country into a ditch. It's an elitist's analogy that negates the principle of this democracy. The car is a government that belongs to neither party, just as it was once owned by neither the Federalists nor the Whigs. Government here has always belonged to We The People. We decide who drives it, and to where.
And many of us are alarmed with the direction in which we're headed today. In one week, we'll find out just how many.
If the referendum on the last two years goes badly for the current regime, we know what to expect from the mainstream media. Their commentary template is already cast. It awaits only the intensity of the election results.
If the rejection of Democrats is decisive, the luminaries of the legacy media will lament mightily. Mainstream progressives, like Christine Amanpour, Chris Matthews, and Matt Lauer, will solemnly ask, "What becomes of our government now that the 'extremists' within the GOP have taken control of their party? Will America lose to gridlock because the Republicans won?" Media hand-wringing will abound.
The Clintonistas, like Paul Begala, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, will highlight the failure of Obama to persuasively communicate his plan for America. Their allegiance is to Bill and Hillary. As Obama's stock declines, the Clintons' shares go up for 2012. Clintonistas will cry crocodile tears over a GOP victory.
Both camps are nothing if not predictable.
What we won't hear from the three-letter acronym networks is the acknowledgment that they aggressively promoted the candidacy of Barack Obama, as well as the Democrats' agenda during the last two years.
Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, and the rest will allege that anger, racism, and intransigence drove conservative voters to the polls. They'll rhetorically ask, "Does America now face violence in the streets because of Tea Party anger?" Ed Schultz will vent his substantial anger at the people he calls angry.
A substantial loss by the Democrats in a week won't just drive another nail in the coffin of the legacy media. It'll nail-gun in a whole pallet of tenpennies.
As for the GOP, the greater the victory it achieves, the greater will be the potential danger it will face going forward. If Republicans win big, millions of us will watch closely to see if we've merely passed the car keys from Thelma and Louise to Evil Knievel, may he rest in peace.
For its part, the Tea Party, which began as a movement named after a historical American event, has the potential to morph into a political organization that eclipses the Republican Party. A GOP that aims to mollify Tea Party supporters with the ol' Beltway shuffle, followed by cocktails with political adversaries at the Club, may eventually find itself walking amidst the ghosts of the Whigs.
All this and more comes against the backdrop of the abject failure of socialism in Europe.
Europe is entering the throes of a societal trauma born from decades of the socialistic governing that our current national leadership covets. Europe has invested great power in government under the guise of giving power to the people. As always, socialism is being revealed as a fraud.
We watch the French riot against a retirement age elevated to our standard minimum, unless the union contract or civil service rules override the market.
We see the Brits make dramatic cuts in their government workforce, except among the government's health care workforce -- the third-largest body of government employees on the planet, behind China's Red Army and India's railway workers.
We hear the German leadership speak frankly to its people about the failure of unassimilated, self-segregated immigrants who threaten Germany's national culture.
All these things portend ill wind in American's future, for on a full sea of political solemnity, we, too, are now afloat.
So in one week, remembering the president's fierce urgency of now, we face our own urgency of now, and we will choose whether to take the current when it serves or lose our way as a free people.
