The truly fundamental problem of our politics is that a Congress that systematically refuses to do its duty and run what is supposed to be a republic, manages to get itself re-elected cycle after cycle with less turnover than the Politburo of the late unlamented Soviet Union. These two facts are not unrelated, in that avoidance of controversy is how they avoid both unpopularity and any responsibility. We need two things if we want to get a republic back, a form of government in which the people’s representatives conduct the people’s business in public. We need a massive, near-total, change in personnel, and we need to decisively remove from the remnant and the replacements for the deadwood any possibility of future job security from pushing off their duties onto future presidents.

About the only way this is going to happen is if some self-abnegating president were to use the powers unwisely ceded to the president, in the USA PATRIOT Act, etc., to declare every member of Congress who voted for either AUMF, the USA PATRIOT Act, etc., to be enemy combatants and send them all to Gitmo. He would then tell the rump Congress that they too would be declared enemy combatants should they fail to pass an omnibus bill that would both repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, etc., and also establish direct Congressional control of all the agencies of the federal govt. He should then fire, or send to Gitmo, every official in the line of presidential succession, and himself resign. We would have no way to get a president until 2013, and Congress would have to run things. Maybe by 2013 the habit will have grown on them. At any rate, the whole experience ought to leave them decisively less willing to leave their own fate in particular, as well as the government in general, to the vagaries of who managed to get himself elected president. The memory of George III kept us on the republican straight and narrow for a couple of centuries. The memory of this latter-day Caligula, coming so soon after Dubya, should do as well.

Pictures of Midnight at the Ohta Wafer Factory: “As long as it isn’t me in there screaming in the middle of the night, I’m OK. Why make trouble? They would get to me soon enough. And no one would care. In the meantime, I can breathe the air freely, safe in the knowledge that, for the moment at least, someone else was suffering. Tonight I heard a young woman screaming as I passed the ‘Wafer Factory.’ “
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Okay, I admit it isn’t a perfect analogy.

Difficult to comprehend how the same individual can spend his days planning needless wars inflicting unnecessary death and pain upon thousands, then go home and bounce his grandkids on his knee as they wait for dinner.

Revised forecast-After looking around and doing lots of reading of the MSM, I have come to the conclusion that the US as a republic has only about 10-20 years of life remaining. Sure the shell will be around for maybe 100 years more, but the heart and soul of what the dream of the founders was, is going fast. We are splintering into small groups and refuse to even listen to what someone of another group says. My group has the truth, the only truth and all others are false. The religious right are the first to abandon the united whole, believing that their world view should be followed by everyone. That their sect is the only correct one and all who do not march in lock step are going to hell.

Perhaps I am just very cynical, but I have finally come to believe that the dream that the US republic was founded on is dead, or is dying slowly.

When justice in the US depends on who you know or how many people you can buy rather than what the objective truth is, when the MSM-protected by the very constitution that they seek to destroy-lies about or ignores the news in favor of the trivial, when religion and ignorance trump science, when we the people are kept in ignorance and only used when election time rolls around and the people can be manipulated into thinking whatever those with the deepest pockets want, well then the dream is over. Only the shell remains and even the shell is fought over. Well.