vice president

Chris Knight's avatar

One of the classic signs of imminent collapse of a culture is the brazen decadence that its leaders and elites start to exhibit.  Nero and Commodus magnified lavishness to scales unprecedented even as the Roman Empire was rotting from the inside and slowly collapsing.  The nigh-invincible Babylonians were in a drunken stupor of self-edification until Cyrus invaded and Alexander after him.  Louis XVI wasn’t a “bad” man per se but he was too busy partying and having fun while being horribly negligent about the affairs of the French people… and then he lost his head as bad as anyone could.

There are too many other examples that could be cited from the tale of years.  And you would think that we might have learned something from six millenia’s worth of them…

But here was the scene last night at the White House.  In spite of the “sequester” that is halting ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Longtime readers of this blog know that I’m for fiscal conservatism and letting the free market be responsible for itself, without government interference. Meaning that among other things that I’ve never thought anything favorable about government bailout programs.

A few days ago Mitt Romney, the assumed Republican candidate for President, announced that Paul Ryan would be his running mate in this fall’s election.

Paul Ryan is being touted as a “Tea Party conservative”.

Okay, well then…

Why should this blogger, or anyone else for that matter, vote for a Romney/Ryan ticket when Ryan:

– voted for the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)

– voted for bailouts of $14 billion for General Motors and Chrysler

– voted for bailouts of Bank of America, BB&T, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and other banks

– voted for bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

– voted for the insanely expensive Medicare

...
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Chris Knight's avatar

And there is no way, no how, that I would now feel comfortable voting for her as part of any ticket.

Palin’s address at the Republican National Convention was, in my opinion, whiny and shallow. There was nothing of substance or vision that I found in her words. All I really got was that she’s a mom, her kids play hockey, and she doesn’t like her “opponents”.

And that’s it.

I’ve heard speeches with more passion at the… nah, nevermind. Don’t want to go too far this morning (and I might be already anyway).

What happened to the great political speeches that we’ve come up reading about in the history books? The two last truly great ones that I can remember being given by a leader of this country were from the day of the Challenger disaster and then the 1987 “Tear down this wall!” speech in Berlin, both ...

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