“These are the kind of people running the IMF, and we want to turn the world’s finances and the control of the money supply (over) to them?”
– Representative Ron Paul describes soon-to-be-former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn(HT: Takimag.com)
It is said that even the blind squirrel will occasionally get a nut. Under the right collection of screwed up and unusual conditions, The Mississippi River has been known to temporarily flow backwards in some places. Also, Congressman Ron Paul has his days when he is magnificently right. He is on the issue of DSK, but he doesn’t understand the extent to which he was right or even why?
Rape-man DSK should be exposed to condign public ignominy. Not over Ron Paul’s quixotic views on money supply or currency management, but rather because he typifies modern world leadership. The type of guy who thinks that he totally should get to bone the cleaning lady if he drops $3K for a hotel room is precisely the sort of person who is running much of the modern world. There is only one antidote to this sort of Son of a NSFW, and that cure is a vigilant public. The elevation of people like DSK to positions of high responsibility not only justifies, but demands the continued existence of organizations like America’s Tea Parties.
America is a society that once thrived as a result of checks and balances. Sir Isaac Newton would have loved the US Constitution. Every action seemed to have an equal and opposite reaction. For a long time, this frustrated the partisans and stymied the utopians. However, this also served the American People profoundly well.
Yet, even the best engineering designs fail. Walter Russell Mead describes how an elite American Establishment has sought to circumvent this Yin and Yang of American Society and exert dominance without restraint. Mead’s description of the problem follows below.
But the United States today — in both parties, in the corporate and business worlds, in academia and among the intelligentsia, in religion and in many other fields — does not have the strong and thoughtful leadership that we need.
That is not what the elite thinks, by and large. To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public.
(Ht: the American Interest.com)
The sentiments described in the second paragraph above lead the elite to justify self-interested behavior. Once they get the elite position, they don’t think highly of the poor peasants who have to clean and vacuum the $3K hotel rooms. Thus, this elite feels justified in using their positions to fulfill selfish desires in oblivious neglect to the commonweal that they were elected to better and preserve. Peggy Noonan described this detestable tendency as “The Separate Peace.” She defines what this means exactly below.
I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.
I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”
Only one antidote exists to such an elite “leadership.” They must be challenged. Ironically, it is Famous Black Nationalist, Malcolm X, who describes the role groups like The Tea Party must play in preventing this parlously corrupt, inbred and enstupidated elite from running amok. In his famous “Message to The Grass-Roots” Speech he described the level of dedication required to make Civil Rights for African Americans a national issue in the early 1960’s.
We’re going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt; don’t let the government proceed. They even said they was going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and don’t let no airplanes land.
Given the current failings of America’s air traffic control system, I wouldn’t recommend lying down on anybody’s runway. However, Malcolm X made a valid and intelligent intellectual point here. We get what we tolerate. Let the government jam Cap-and-Trade or the Individual Mandate down your throat, and you might as well add Tabasco Sauce, because you are going to eat it. The Tea Party checks our detestable leadership, since morality, like Elvis, has long since left the building.
Ron Paul got one right when he questioned letting people like DSK handle our nation’s monetary future. However, he missed a vital opportunity to expand the rEVOLution without any loss of generality. Why should a jerk like DSK get to run much of anything, and who’s to stop that sort of iniquitous Cloaca Maximus from becoming just as powerful in the Good ‘Ol US of A? The Tea Party, that’s who! It still remains time to party like 1773.
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