A teachable moment

All this kerfuffle about taxes! Geithner, Rangel, Killefer, Franken, Daschle....I'm losing track. Is there a pattern here? Limousine liberals who don't pay taxes even on their limos. I wouldn't be surprised if the Daschle nomination is withdrawn by the time I finish writing this post.....the gale of ridicule is shredding Obama's credibility with even a few of the credulous. This campaign ad is all over the internet and enough to finish him off:
But now there's a New York Times editorial against him and Nancy Killefer has withdrawn from her appointment as performance czarina because, uh, she didn't pay some tax.

The great Victor Davis Hanson derives a lesson:

This is all about as good an argument for a flat tax as one can imagine.

Flash: And lo! the deed is done. Daschle out. So how in tarnation can Geithner stay in charge of the IRS? How can Rangel run tax legislation? Answers on a postcard to: Office of Hope, Change and Expediency, West Wing.

Morning rant #3

I disliked reading Anne's 'This is the way a society dies'. As a Briton I find these things so shameful that I avert my eyes. I thought that America would stay self-reliant, then came Obama. Truth is stranger than fiction. The standard model of politics is that the pendulum will swing back, but this time liberals may engineer prolonged power. Let's face it, Obama's domestic agenda is mostly Bush's compassionate conservatism on steroids + disdain for unborn children.

'1984' hit the zeitgeist in 1948, still in the age of Hitler and Stalin, but the negative utopia of 'Brave New World' better describes present trends: hatcheries, conditioning, vaccination-workers, embryo-workers, psychotherapists, counsellors and so on. Were distopian Islamism prematurely to pursue total war before the West has hollowed itself out, then the West would be forced to a moral re-armament. Liberals realize that war breeds virility. Virility + American history = live free or die....soooo 18th century. The deep, sometimes subconscious motive for hating the Iraq war wasn't hatred of war, but fear of the politics of martial virtue. Hence both liberals and subtle Islamists will avoid all-out war, but rely on the ease with which a pacified, passified, dependent society can be switched from Brave New World to 1984 and Big Brother may be an Ayatollah. It's not a conspiracy, it's a co-incidence of interests.

So where's hope? Where's change? Well, events, dear boy, events.