Since the very first tax-day Tea Parties popped up in April 2009, a raging sense of puffed-up indignation has possessed our ruling class.  Emerging as the single truly bipartisan issue of our day, this how-dare-they-question-us obsession has grown from spurts of shocked angst among media talking heads to hands-on-the-hips Capitol Hill lectures to full-blown rhetorical assaults on populist candidates.  

Just as all human beings from time immemorial have, our own ruling class of elites crave the one thing which must still be earned -- R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Unfortunately, our elites just can't get no respect from the people.  This irks them down to the marrow of their souls.  From sunup to sundown, day after day, they squirm and fret and bellow for the respect they've lost among the governed. 

Yet, respect lost is neither easily nor painlessly regained. 

Alas, the higher one climbs upon his own high horse, the more ignominious his fall from grace, when his claims are revealed as unworkable-in-the-real-world flimflam. 

Our ruling class finds itself now in the crosshairs of public scrutiny and the hardworking public is purely disgusted by what it sees. 

Policies long heralded as the cure for all that ails now have become the oozing boils on a diseased economy and every American middle-class family bears the pain.   

The home-ownership-for-everyone push, backed by both parties for decades, has brought us a devastating bubble-burst, with worse housing-price declines than the Great Depression.  Our government-run "education" system, operated by unions dedicated to feathering their own nests, under discipline constraints that ensure chaos, has produced whole generations of illiterate "graduates," who are unfit for any workplace.  Government bureaucrats, in a shoddy, self-justifying system designed by our elites, choke our entrepreneurial engines of success with ever-growing ropes of regulation.  

Social policies, ubiquitously heralded by our elites as "kind" and "humane," have reduced large swaths of our population to greedy, screaming, lawless welfare-state dependents, wholly unable to create a single thing of value to others.  Real human beings, reduced in the minds of our elites to nothing more than "social experiments," now bear the pain of wrecked lives due to elite folderol of a magnitude which truly deserves the label "crimes against humanity."      

The wholesale adoption of single-motherhood as a "liberating" force for society has brought us roving gangs of fatherless youth, hell-bent on venting their rage at public events.  The "Pride" movement has made whole American cities unfit for healthy children.  Our elites, utterly divorced from sexual reality, are now daily -- daily! -- revealed as moral reprobates of the lowest order, unable to rule even their own lives, much less ours.        

While industrious, hardworking Americans have gone about the business of building solid families and businesses and creating the goods, services, and jobs that fuel the government engine, the ruling class has squandered our surpluses and reduced us to beggars just hoping to spare our children and grandchildren from the serfdom of public debt.  While America's finest young people have willingly offered their lives to protect and defend our U.S. Constitution, these reprobate rulers have spent their lives stretching Constitutional boundaries in disdainful mockery of its defenders.

Yet, they collectively beam and strut in public with "patriotic" zeal.  

Shame?  These vile varmints wouldn't know shame if it came up and introduced itself at a beltway cocktail affair.

Humility?  Oh, please.  Humility has become an archaic virtue, something only those bourgeois "bitter clingers" still revere.              

For decades now, the political class has quietly spurned true public service in favor of shady get-rich-powerful-and-famous off the public purse schemes. Our once-intrepid defenders-of-democracy fourth estate -- the media -- have stooped to gutter-level collusion with the politicians they are tasked with keeping honest, so that media elites, too, are now nothing but a pack of Pavlovian puppies, who gather 'round their favorite political masters seeking pats and praise.  

Yet, among these denizens of counterfeit virtue -- our elite institutions -- the real enemies of society are imagined to be the "religious-right," the social conservatives, the God-clingers, and the natural family.  The enemies of the elites' mythical "utopian" state are the Constitution-revering, small-government Tea Partiers.  

In the minds of our elites, we the people cause all the problems.  In their own self-righteously addled brains, our elites consider themselves blameless.  With their hands caught bloody-red in our cookie jar, they stand around pointing fingers across an imaginary aisle, as though their parents -- the citizenry -- are too blind and stupid to see through their adolescent ruse.

What's to be done?  

Personally, I like what Sarah Palin is doing.  In this summer of failed hope in government, Sarah Palin goes about the country actually inspiring hope in God and ourselves.  She reconnects us with our better selves through our founding principles.  She reminds us that in America -- still, to this very day -- one citizen can indeed make all the difference. 

In the midst of falling, failing, flailing institutions, Sarah Palin stands as a commoner -- one woman of the people -- despised by the elites of all stripes  from the moment her dainty little foot hit the national stage.  She is purely a beacon of all-American spunk, flinging common sense at ivory towers from coast to coast and in every hamlet in between.  And she does it all with such pure aplomb that she puts elites in "all wee-weed up" disgrace -- without herself so much as breaking a nail.    

Can this Republic be saved?  At the moment, the odds would seem not to be in our favor.

But one thing is certain.  If we do not try, then we are a disgraceful generation, unfit for the name we all bear gratuitously -- Americans. 

And as any good mother would, Sarah Palin inspires us each to try our best and give it all we've got.  We are Americans!  This is Palin's message. 

Now that all that misplaced hope in government is deader than a doornail, righteous hope in God and ourselves can bloom.  This was the hope of our Founders.  It's the only genuine hope we have left.    

No man, nor any force, even comes close in value or strength to an army of genuine Americans.

Our elites want our respect?  Then, let them lay down their vainglorious self-interest and put their fortunes with us patriots.  They've led us to near-ruin.  Now let them either follow or get the hell out of our way. 

Whether Palin runs for president now matters not at this juncture.  She is Lady Liberty personified in this our moment of American restoration.

And only ninnies of the lowest oh-so-elite order would fail to see that. 

Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent citizen journalist and a frequent contributor to American Thinker and Pajamas Media.  She welcomes your comments at www.commonsenseregained.com.