Upset? Maybe Not

It dont look good. For McCain to win every poll has to be extremely wrong. Not just some of them, not just one or two of them but all of them. No matter how you slice it this looks like the end. Its depressing.

George Will today has a column pointing out that LBJ won and had vast majorities in Congress and that after Watergate in 1974 the Congress was swept clean of Republicans, setting the stage for what was effectively six years of Congressional rule. He forgot to mention 1992 when Clinton and the Democrats dominated both branches. According to Will the country survived all these Democratic victories quite nicely.

Or did it? Wasn't LBJ's victory in 1964 the beginning of the nation's unchecked slide into welfare-state socialism? Didn't the 1974 Democratic majority take the viable South Vietnamese nation, which had defeated the Viet Cong completely in the countryside and was holding off the North Vietnamese Army, and defund all military aid to the South? This set the stage for an NVA invasion and the throwing away of two decades of valiant efforts to keep the people in the south from the most brutal form of slavery ever known in human history. It also set in course a falling of dominoes in the Third World which came very close to losing the Cold War for the West. The Clinton victory ushered in an age where lies and corruption permeated the government. The rules and the truth were thrown out and a permanent state of war was declared on anyone who disagreed. Republicans or whistle blowers were destroyed as confidential government records, sealed divorce transcripts and supposedly sancrosanct medical records were combed and any juicy bits were handed to the increasingly partisan and compliant liberal media.

The public rewarded the Democrats for their misbehavior. The lies worked. Little by little the integrity of the system was eroded. Republicans were eager to 'cross the aisle' to accommodate this trend. Only a handful of stalwarts from states inhabited by the remaining few Americans who still believed in the old verities remained on the scene yelling unheard into the ether. After Clinton crushed Newt Gingrich and then torpedoed Livingston as his replacement a gigantic but feeble-minded creature named Dummy Hastert emerged to 'lead' the House Republicans away from the policies of the defeated Gingrich and Livingstone and into the boundless pasture of legislative corruption where they and their Democratic buddies were able to feed in groovy bi-partisan harmony on the dense fodder that an ever-expanding government could offer.

But now we are at the end game. The erosion of the integrity of the democratic system is at one with the erosion of the integrity of our social system. Mass media has so destroyed people's political consciousness that the whole concept of democracy and freedom has become meaningless. American's are so inured to debt that the swelling national debt and the geometric expansion of its unfunded obligations just reminds them of their own financial dilemma. They don't see that the system that they live in, that they have known since birth and which has been consistently raising their standard of living for the last 63 years, can fail.

But this last Democratic Party victory is indeed 'America's Chickens Coming Home To Roost'. The economic system which created the last burst of wealth will be stressed into a permanent decline, its innovative wealth creation strangled by a death-grip from intrusive regulators, confiscatory taxes, and predatory unions. This will drag the public sector into bankruptcy. It already has in New York, New Jersey and California. Without a trillion-dollar bailout these three states' governments will implode. Their bonds are probably as worthless as a pack of sub-prime mortgages. And who are the main holders of California Government Bonds? CALPERS, the pension fund that pays out outrageous retirement pensions to state employees who retire to live in luxury in their mid-fifties. That fund also was big in the bundled mortgage market. What would a California bond default do to those pensions?

But the voters of this state are fearless and believe in the future! When the hated Bush wouldn't fund embryonic stem-cell research the good citizens of this state passed a three-billion dollar bond measure to fund embryonic stem-cell research. Dozens of breakthroughs have resulted from this. I'm sure of it. Really. This year the buzz-word is 'alternative energy' and the bond issues infest the ballot to the tune of tens of billions. Throw in a few bill more for mass transit, children's hospitals, and veterans and add that to the ten billion dollars the state has to borrow just to pay its bills and you have the entire problem in a nutshell. There is no opposition party standing up and pointing out that all children in California are automatically insured by the state already and that the incoming Obama Administration is promising additional federal largesse to these already pampered prepubescents who might not really need an extra 3 billion dollars at this point. There is no opposition party pointing to the head-on collision with insolvency that our nation is facing from all these 'socially conscious' policies. So the happy morons of Cali will tromp happily to the polls and vote to hand a couple of billion borrowed dollars over to T. Boone Pickens.

The real estate bubble bursting was like the little chest pain and fluctuation from a mild heart attack. Now Obama is going to take power, put his big feet up on the desk and fire up a giant-sized Marlboro of taxes and spending to the applause of a befuddled electorate who has installed him to make their lives OK after the Evil Bush wrecked everything. He'll be chain-smoking these compassion ciggies and also laboring hard to make sure that the boys are all getting their cut, that's only fair. Lets hope that the national ticker can take it.