Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture » Hard Right

Serbian Election

Thomas Fleming — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:08:57 +0000

Toma Nikolic's victory in the Serbian presidential election has panicked the boys of the press. The Washington Post has particularly hysterical account, typical of the Post's purely ideological coverage of foreign affairs. Both the headline and the lead sentence get in the key-word "ultra-nationalist," while Nikolic's moderate strategy is described as "claims to have transformed himself into a pro-EU populist." Don't ask me what the writers thought this means, though it does indicate that for the Post, anyone who loves his country has to hate the EU.

Look at how much propaganda can be packed into one sentence: "During the 1990s Balkan wars, Nikolic was the deputy leader of the extremist Serbian Radical Party, which was even more hardline than late strongman Slobodan Milosevic — who plunged the region into its ethnic conflagration." Note the words extremist, even more hardline, strongman (Slobo was, after all, elected!), and the allegation that Milosevic, coming to power in the middle of a civil war, alone is responsible for the "ethnic conflagration"--whatever that means. I wonder if these guys own a dictionary.

You the piece yourselves, but pay attention to this little beauty:

"He supported Serbia’s warmongering in the former Yugoslavia, and even fought briefly in Serbia’s notorious volunteer units during the war in Croatia."

See, it is warmongering if a federal government tries to prevent the violent secession of the members and a war-crime to defend the lives and homes of Serbs who were being slaughtered by the Neo-Nazi regime in Croatia. (No, I don' hate Croats, quite the contrary, but Tudjman was vile and so were his supporters.)

"People say believe half of what you see,
Son, and none of what you hear."

Sing it Marvin--or rather Barret Strong, who co-wrote the song, but with this addition--"and even less of what you read."

Maybe we can hear about the election from friend George who is over there!

Leaving America

Thomas Fleming — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:40:46 +0000

On the Daily Mail, I posted a piece under the title "The Decline of the American Empire," which I borrowed from a movie by Denys Arcand, the great Quebecois filmmaker. Since the the savage tone of piece appears to have precluded front-page treatment, I have revised it a bit for our website in the hope that it might spark a lively discussion. In the future, we'll have a Chronicles blog where such discussions can be held among writers, friends, and registered regular readers.

Record numbers of American citizens and legal residents are renouncing their citizenship or turning in their Green Cards. The figures are still small--1,800 in 2010, according to a Reuters story--but that is eight times the number that renounced in 2008.

For many aspiring ex-Americans, the main reason is taxes. Many of them live and earn money abroad, but they still must file complicated US tax returns, which some see as a symbolic expression of a metastasizing bureaucracy. While Americans once celebrated the ties that bound them to their country and their fellow-citizens, many now see those ties as a snarl of red tape.

By the way, there is no red tape more complicated than what ties up paperwork needed for giving up citizenship, and, if you are rich, there is a hefty exit fee. As my colleague Chris Check pointed out to me, it is the capitalist equivalent of the Berlin Wall.

There is, however, a larger issue than taxes, one that Reuters is unlikely to touch, and that is the disaffection that many Americans have been experiencing for some years. Our moral and social landscape has been swept by a series of ideological revoutions that have reinvented marriage and the family, rejected sexual morality, abjured Western civilization, and redefined the human species.

Leftist Democrats are the worst offenders, but within a few years of every leftist moral coup, moderate and even conservative Republicans have got on board. I can still remember when Republicans actually opposed feminism, children's rights, and same-sex marriage, and I have read of Republicans who, in the distant past of the 1950s and 1960s, even understood and endorsed the Congress's responsibility for declaring war.

Bill Clinton, when asked which 19th century President he most admired, responded that he thought little of anything that happened before the liberation of blacks, women, and children, and Obama and his people would now include the liberation of Gays and endangered species. But Mitt Romney, when he is not wooing Southern Baptists, is far more radical than Lyndon Johnson or Hubert Humphrey. The rhetoric of both political parties now sounds more like Mao's doctrine of perpetual revolution than anything that resonates with the American experience.

Very little that is wrong with these US of A is the fault of President Obama, but in his crude, bullying style and his utter lack of substance, the President has come to stand for all that has gone wrong. Ted Nugent, famous both as a gun-nut and as rock-and-roller, says with his usual restraint that if Obama is re-elected, he will either be dead or in jail. People who have been forced to hear Nugent's music are hoping that the jail will be sound-proofed, but even the paranoid Nature Boy can be right once in a while.

The country I was born into no longer exists. The country in which I grew up and went to school exists only in the mind of people over 60. Small wonder that so many people I meet talk about other countries they'd like to move to.

Yes, every place we can think of has its own problems. My wife and I have for years considered--in descending order of probability--Italy, Greece, France, Montenegro, and Britain. "What?" people ask. "Italy and Greece are economic basket cases, France is overrun with Muslims, Montenegro, under its current government, resembles more a den of thieves than a European country, and Britain combines the problems of the rest with a smarmy hypocrisy in the press that is even more stifling than the atmosphere in the states."

All this is true or, at least partly true, but there is a difference. There is more to England than economic decline and the two and a half party state, more to Montenegro than tobacco smuggling and rich Russian gangsters, and there is more going on in Italy than the struggle between an aging playboy and his communist adversaries.

I used visit my friend Peter Russell, an impoverished poet who lived in a ruined turbine shed near Figline Val d'Arno. He lived in squalor, chain-smoking, binge-drinking, and scrounging off the commune, but how I envied him. He had no TV, thought his own thoughts, wrote endless lines of verse that a few people (including Katheen Raine) admired. He spoke fluent Italian in that wretched English accent that so grates on the Italian ear, but he had something closer to a human life than Bill Gates or Warren Buffet will ever experience.

America, while it has legitimate (though fast-disappearing) traditions and a history of its own, has long prided itself on the liberties enjoyed by its citizens and by the sturdy independence of its frontier communities. Here and there the cultural Sahara of the States is dotted with a small oasis--ante-bellum Charleston, New England in the days of Hawthorne--but no one in his right mind would move here from Europe to enjoy the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or listen to endless repetitions of Rhapsody in Blue.

What we had was a pleasant way of life, marked by political liberty and economic independence. If you want to get a sense of it, you can read the novels and stories of Booth Tarkington, the optimist who chronicled its collapse but never gave up his faith in the ability of the American character to survive even the presidency-for-life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He trained a dog to put his paws up on a chair and go throw the motions of repentance, howling piteously as Booth asked him, "Do you repent? Do yo repent of the sin of voting for FDR?"

In Tarkington 's "Growth Trilogy," he depicts the transformation of the old WASP republic into a plutocracy whose values and traditions are undermined by commercialism, development, and uncontrolled immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In the Magnificent Ambersons, the best known of the three, spoiled WASP Georgie Minnafer is appalled by the riff-raff, but Tarkington sees in the immigrants a growing American spirit--they walk taller, look straighter, more independent.

To a great extent, the optimism was justified. America changed greatly between the two World Wars, but we were still recognizably American. Tarkington died when I was only a year old, and it is good that he did. Given another few decades, he might have had to go back on the bottle in order to retain his sanity, to say nothing of his optimism.

In a way, the melancholy of the conservatives is reminiscent of the hippies' melancholia in the late 1960s. It is true that a lot of counter-culturalists were either Marxists or deracinated hedonists, but there was anothe strain is closer to Chesterton or to the Southern Agrarians than to the dispiriting socialism of the schools and the parties. You see it a little in Jack Nicholson's character in Easy Rider, in his speech, "This used to be a good country." Yes, used to be.

Drugged up and living as remittance men, hippies felt lost or rather abandoned. I was always haunted by the Crosby, Stills, and Nash line, "We are leaving, you don't need us." It's easy to laugh. Who would miss the denizens of the Hog Farm? But, as ignorant and foolish as they were, they knew what they disliked, and that was the Rotarian paradise of their fathers and, now, of themselves as old men.

Remember the song "Going Up the Country?"

I'm going where the water tastes like wine,
We can jump in hte country, stay drunk all the time
I'm gonna leave this city got to get away
All this fussing and fighting, man you know I sure can't stay...
Just exactly where we're going I cannot say
But we might even leave the USA
Cause there's a brand new game that I want to play.

I looked up the lyrics only to be disappointed. I always remembered that last line as, "There's a brand new game, and I don't want to play," which expresses my sentiments to a T.

To Ted Nugent and to all his admirers who think they can fix what is wrong with our country by swapping out Barack Obama and replacing him with Mitt Romney, all I can say comes from another pop song: "Hold on tight to your dreams." Something may happen in the future, a serious depression or a dictatorship installed by a coup, but the America of Booth Tarkington is never coming back.

Perhaps some new variation on old American themes will be restored by an oligarchy or military coup or a religious restoration. I won't live to see it, nor will my children. And if it does happen, that new America will resemble Tarkington's world about as much as the world of Diocletian looked like the world of Cato the Elder or even Marcus Aurelius.

There is no need to despair, but even less to indulge in a fatuous optimism that would make one postpone making a decision until it is too late.

Anyone know of some bargain real estate in Herceg-Novi?

Johnny, They Hardly Knew Ye

Thomas Fleming — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:58:29 +0000

John Derbyshire, as probably everyone but me already knew, has been fired by National Review. The firing was in response to a calmly written but injudiciously frank piece on Takimag on what to tell American children about race relations. Rich Lowry, in slipping the knife into his colleague's back, was surprisingly polite, confining himself to words like "nasty and indefensible." Compared to the nasty and indefensible name-calling that has been the hallmark of NR, this is almost a compliment. Wanting to think as well of Lowry as I ought to, I can only assume that he deliberately avoided terms like "racist" and "bigot" in order to avoid harming Derbyshire's damaged reputation.

On the other hand, the worst thing that John Derbyshire has done to his reputation with serious people is to associate with NR. He is intelligent, reasonably well-read, possessed of a decent prose-style and the courage of his convictions. What in the world was such a man doing in such company?

I have been telling Mr. Derbyshire this, admittedly at long intervals, for over a decade. I have also advised him that he has been too candid on race matters. There is hardly a subject on which Americans can stand to know the truth or even hear it discussed, and race heads the list of taboo subjects, taking precedence even over sex and gender issues. Even Rich Lowry, as ill-informed as he appears to be on everything under the sun worth knowing, must know that Derbyshire's arguments are the result of statistical studies, not of racial prejudice. The fact that Lowry--or anyone else at NRO--does not even try to refute them seems pretty clear proof.

Long before Rich Lowry went to National Review, the founder of the magazine had excommunicated the Birchers, Murray Rothbard, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobran. Those were the good old days, when NR still had men on the staff who would commiserate, if only in private, with the victims. I had several reassuring conversations after Mr. Buckley threatened to "excrete" Chronicles and its editors from the wholesome body of conservatism. I supposed he picked up this charming diction from the father of John Podhoretz and his friends.

I searched for comments on NRO and found none. Of the tweets I looked at, most made no comment and of those that did it was 20 to one critical of Lowry for being too polite. A million such readers add up to exactly nothing. "I'm glad I'm a beta," I can almost hear them saying, "alphas have too much responsibility and gammas are stupid."

John Derbyshire is no doubt unhappy to be out of a job, but his friends and fans can only congratulate him on his good fortune in getting away from these awful, stupid people.

Lynching George Zimmerman

Thomas Fleming — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:33:20 +0000

"I only know what I read in the papers." Will Rogers was a master ironist, and when he made and repeated this assertion, he seemed to be saying several things. As a friend of the powerful and famous, he was frequently asked serious political questions, which this modest reply deflected. But also, by implication, anyone who relied on the press or-- as we would now say--the media for news really knew nothing. Only the people who write, edit, and publish the stories are in a position to know whether or not they are telling the truth, and even the press lords and their lackeys are remarkably indifferent to the facts.

People who only know what they read in the papers or see on television or learn by tweeting are, nonetheless, all too willing to make sweeping judgments. For weeks, nearly everyone in America knows that George Zimmerman, a paranoid white bigot who obsessively calls 911 to voice his suspicions, brutally murdered a harmless "little boy" named Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, whose claim to be a neighborhood watchman is suspect, was explicitly ordered by the police not to follow Martin. He persisted, and though the harmless child was armed only with a pack of skittles, Zimmerman attacked him and either shot him in cold blood or in the course of a struggle that he initiated.

At least one 911 call includes the sound of someone screaming in panic, and members of Trayvon's family claim that we are hearing the voice of a young man facing death.

The fact that Zimmerman was not arrested just goes to show how racist the Florida cops still are, and, since Zimmerman pursued the unarmed boy against police orders and accosted him, he cannot claim protection under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" statute. "He should have called 911 instead of going after Trayvon."

That is pretty much the story put out by Big Media, but in the mouth of the Revs Jackson and Sharpton and Farrakhan, the shooting of Trayvon Martin is metaphor for black/white relations in America. When Farrakhan came to Rockford to stir up anger and violence over a case in which police shot a fugitive, he declared that it is open season on black men in America.

Even the President of the United States could not resist sticking his oar in:

“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this,” Mr. Obama said. “All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen.

“Obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” Mr. Obama said, his face grim. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

“You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Mr. Obama said, pausing for a moment. “I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

If we unpack his flabby rhetoric, Mr. Obama is saying, first, that he knows the facts of the case enough to know that a brutal murder has been committed and that, second, his sympathies are engaged because the victim is black.

When on our Friday radio show Paul Youngblood and I tried to raise questions about the official media account of the case, caller after caller angrily demanded why we were defending a murderer. When we pointed out that nearly everything the callers were saying was incorrect, their response was to say, "You guys are sick."

The New Black Panthers say they are so convinced of the facts in the case that they are offering a $10,000 bounty for the "capture" of George Zimmerman.

Some white nationalists, it goes without saying, are happy the young man was shot. His skin color by itself is proof of guilt. How such people are any different from the Sharptons and Farrakhans, I simply do not know. They are, however, proof that skin color is not everything.

Let us start with a few basic facts in the case.

1. George Zimmerman is a member of his neighborhood watch association and regularly patrols the streets. For this reason he has frequently called 911 to report burglaries and suspicious persons. The mere fact that his group does not belong to this or that consortium of neighborhood associations. The neighborhood has, in fact, been plagued by burglaries, and the neighborhood association advised people to call the police first and then George Zimmerman:

"If you've been the victim of a crime within the community, after calling the police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman ... so we can be aware and help address the issue with other residents," the newsletter said. It added that the neighborhood watch group was looking for more participants at its monthly meetings."

That is what he did on February 26. When the 911 dispatcher learned that George was following the suspect, he advised him": "We don't need you to do that." In other words, it was a suggestion and it did not come from the police. If you listen to other calls made that night, you hear similar advice being given people who witnessed the fatal struggle. "We don't need you to go outside," advised one dispatcher. Obviously, the intent is to protect the person being spoken to--and to absolve 911 from any responsibility for what might happen.

2. Zimmerman is not a white bigot, but a half-Hispanic. His father says they have black relatives by marriage. George is praised by a neighbor, Samantha Leigh Hamilton, who told the local television news that "she once left her garage door up and Zimmerman noticed it while out walking his dog. He notified another neighbor, who let Hamilton know.

" 'The only impression I have of George Zimmerman is a good one,'" Hamilton said Wednesday.

"Hamilton said another neighbor, a black woman, would regularly inform Zimmerman when she was out of town so that he could keep an eye on her place. Hamilton said that when she moved into the middle-class, racially mixed community of about 250 identical townhouses, the black neighbor told her, "Hey, if you need anything, you picked a really good area, since George is part of our neighborhood watch."

Hamilton said there had been several break-ins in the past year, including one three doors away in which burglars took a TV and laptops.

"When I hear about him calling the police constantly, it kind of makes sense to me because we had so many break-ins recently," she said.

One of Zimmerman's friends, Joe Oliver, is a formed news anchorman. As a black man, he says, he never perceived any racism on Zimmerman's part. In fact, Zimmerman and his wife have "mentored" a black family whose members are very grateful for their help.

Much has been made of two criminal charges against Zimmerman. In one case, he touched a policeman who was arresting a friend; in the other, his girlfriend or wife made a domestic battery complaint that faded away into the mists of "he said/she said" marital squabbles. If, as is alleged, the woman in question is his current wife, it was obviously not very serious.

3. Trayvon Martin is 6'3" and a former football player. Nearly all the pictures being circulated show a smiling young kid, but they are several years out of date. More recent pictures show a sullen young man in a gangsta hoodie, definitely not good PR material. Family members described Trayvon as a good student; friends are more likely to use the word average. He had been suspended from school for 10 days, which is why he was staying with his father's girlfriend. According to the police in an Orlando Sentinel story, he was suspended for possession of an emptied marijuana baggie and a pipe.

If we can believe researchers who have gone over Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to Trayvon and his friends, he already had two tatoos, a gold tooth, and a reputation as someone to supply dope. His handle is interesting: @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA. For this and other possibly relevant details, see this unverified story. His friends, by the way, assume that he was giving George Zimmerman a beating when he was shot, and one refers to an alleged attack made by Trayvon on a busdriver.

All in all, the evidence of his social networking paints a picture of a budding thug. That by no means indicates any guilt on his part--we do not have a right to shoot young black males who have adopted a gangsta style--but it does begin to suggest a rather different possible scenario.

4. Let us look at the incident itself. When George calls the 911 number, he sounds calm and unaggressive though naturally concerned: "This guy looks like he is up to no good. He is on drugs or something." He added that the person had his hand in his waistband, was holding something in his other hand, and was walking around slowly in the rain looking at houses.

While he is giving directions for the police, George apparently thinks the guy has spotted him: "He's coming to check me out." He is probably correct, since Trayvon then heads into the backyard of a house.

What happens in the next minute or two is not entirely clear. George had left his SUV and was trying to discover the whereabouts of the suspicious person. He may have been following him or even accosted him, but we do not know. What Zimmerman told the police, though, is that as he was returning to his car, he was approached by the young man. Let me quote directly from the Orlando Sentinel:

"Zimmerman told them he lost sight of Trayvon and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from the left rear, and they exchanged words.

Trayvon asked Zimmerman if he had a problem. Zimmerman said no and reached for his cell phone, he told police. Trayvon then said, "Well, you do now" or something similar and punched Zimmerman in the nose, according to the account he gave police.

Zimmerman fell to the ground and Trayvon got on top of him and began slamming his head into the sidewalk, he told police.

Zimmerman began yelling for help.

Several witnesses heard those cries, and there has been a dispute about whether they came from Zimmerman or Trayvon.

Lawyers for Trayvon's family say it was Trayvon, but police say their evidence indicates it was Zimmerman.

One witness, who has since talked to local television news reporters, told police he saw Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon on top, pounding him — and was unequivocal that it was Zimmerman who was crying for help.

Zimmerman then shot Trayvon once in the chest at very close range, according to authorities.

When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head."

No witnesses have yet confirmed or disputed Zimmerman's account of the beginning of the encounter, but, as you have read, one witness has confirmed his description of being beaten by Trayvon. Another detail it would be good to clear up is whether Zimmerman drew his gun and shot or the gun went off in the course of the struggle, as the interview with Joe Oliver seems to indicate.

Much More to Come

Gaffes

Thomas Fleming — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:05:07 +0000

Mitt Romney now admits he "misspoke" in saying he was not concerned about the very poor. Ron Paul, one of Romney's few defenders, says that if we could look into Romney's heart we would not find that he cares nothing for poor people. This is among the more disturbing signs of Dr. Paul's weirdness I have come across. In the first place, we cannot look into a man's heart and probably should not wish to. In the second place, politicians do not have the metaphorical heart that is supposed to care about others. The very definition of a politician is an egomaniac who will tell any lie to get elected.

What Ron Paul should have said is that Mitt Romney never meant to reveal his indifference to the suffering of other people. I am sure this is true, and if we look closer at his language, we can see exactly what he meant to say. "Concern" is an ambiguous, if not a dodgy word. Its primary meaning meaning is something like "be related to to, involved in." As in "this book concerns the Franco-Prussian War." A derived meaning is to care about. All Romney meant to say was that in thinking about economic policies, he was not primarily addressing himself to welfare dependents who were taken care of by the government but to working class and middle class people who were slipping between the cracks, that is, to the class of people who have been badly hurt by the Bush and Obama administrations and their policies.

The fact that a scoundrel like Newt Gingrich could make hay out of this in the press tells us more, perhaps, than we need to know, both about Gingrich himself and about the literacy of the press. It also tells us something about Romney who, even in defense of his career and his ego, could not come up with a coherent explanation of his harmless gaffe.

Iraq: Countdown to the Coming War

Thomas Fleming — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:56:51 +0000

Day Six

December 23, 2011. Thousands of Sunni Muslims in Samarra, Ramadi, Baiji, and Qaim have taken to the streets. Many of them carry signs and banners protesting the Shi'ah-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki and expressing support for threatened Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi.

Day Five

December 22, 2011. Dozens of people were killed as bombs exploded in several Baghdad neighborhoods. While some of the attacks had the earmarks of Sunni militants linked with al-Quaeda, others were aimed at Sunni and mixed neighborhoods. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed the attacks on his political rivals, while Sunni leaders claimed that the bombs were part of a organized campaign to plunge Iraq back into the bad old days of violence, before the Americans had brought peace and stability to Iraq.

Day Three

December 20, 2011. US officials expressed concern that all the billions of dollars spent on building up Iraqi security, the judicial system, and the media are now being used to stage political show trials that will exacerbate sectarian tensions.

Day Two:

December 19, 2011. The Shi'ite dominated government of PM Nouri al-Maliki issues warrant for the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi. the al-Maliki government made the arrest order a prime time television special. The warrant cannot be executed because the vice president was in Kurdistan, which the Baghdad government does not control.

Day One:

December 18, 2011. Last US troops leave Iraq.

Watch this space

Worst Laid Plans

Thomas Fleming — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:23:06 +0000

When Herman Cain made his irrelevant 9-9-9 tax plan a focal point of the current political debate, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were quick to shout out their 'Me too!' Perry's 20% flat tax, pulled out of the magic hat by a deft right hand, would produce a very serious revenue short fall, but we are not to worry.

Read the entire column on the Daily Mail.

The Continuing Tory Revolution

Thomas Fleming — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:06:06 +0000

I know it is none of my business. If the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth wish to change the rules of succession to the crown, I have no right to an opinion, not only because as an American I have about as much interest in royal antics as I do in soap operas....

Read on in my blog on RightMinds at The Daily Mail.

The End of the American Empire

Thomas Fleming — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:07:13 +0000

Eight years ago when George Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq, the only moral or legal justification they could dream up was Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of "weapons of mass destruction." At the time, I derided this claim, in print and on radio and television....

Read more and comment on The Daily Mail.

PS Comments will now be approved very rapidly.

Getting Real Again

Thomas Fleming — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:35:45 +0000

Monday, September 19

The big noise is, again, President Obama's job's plan that will require a tax on the rich, the so-called "Buffet Plan." Now, I'd be ticked pink if all the Warren Buffets of America could be taxed out of their dirty business. What has Mr. Buffet ever manufactured, what has he ever done worth doing? He is a money-manipulator like George Soros, the sort of person our ancestors despised. Take all their money, I say, and leave real businessmen--who make, distribute, and sell things--alone.

That would not get us very far, as Rush Limbaugh has been saying. Successful people in general pay far more than their share of the taxes, and squeezing the porno-kings, Ponzi-schemers, and Warren Buffets who pay too little will not put us into the black. Mr. Limbaugh thinks we should tax the Democrats, but that is both short-sighted and unimaginative. If we started taxing Democrats, we'd quickly run out of them, and then who would be left for the Republicans to blame?

Rush is right about the basic point though, and this is a subject I have been meditating on for years. Justice demands that the guilty, not the innocent pay, and the guilty parties to the national debt are the congressmen and officials of both parties who took bribes and pandered to the lobbyists and ward heelers. When elected legislators and bureaucrats go into debt, it is their fault as much as it is the fault of the board of directors and managers of a business. Let the responsible parties be held accountable. If every member of Congress and White House flunkey who got us into this mess were held responsible, we'd have about 500 people to pay back the trillions of debt they--not we--owe.

Oh, yes, they'd whine, but they were happy enough to take credit for passing all these boondoggles. Now it is their turn to pay. But that is just a one-time deal. What we need is a system by which all elected officials are held responsible for the debts they run up. Naturally, we would then require them to put down a deposit, of some hundreds of thousands for local offices and some tens of millions for a state-wide office, some billions for the Presidency. Of course, if they went over the limit we had established, they would have to pay that, too, and no bankruptcy relief for politicians, nosiree!

"But then the only people who would get elected to high offices would be the rich and their flunkeys!" As if that were not the case now. Under my plan, at least they would have to buy their licenses to steal, and it would be fun watching them squirm. We should also have to make one minor adjustment in our system of jurisprudence. Politicians being politicians, the presumption would be guilt, and the dirty politicos would have to prove their innocence. Ron Paul and a few others would go Scot free; the rest would go where they belong.

Imagine Mitch McConnell joining Harry Reid, doing life at hard labor.

I turned 91 in prison

Doing life without parole.

"No one could steer me right,"

Obama cried, Obama cried,

"Ron Paul tried to learn me better,

But his pleading I denied.

And now I'm breaking rocks

Because I lied"