Funny how George W. Bush is now a liberal. John McCain too. Republican Senators Lamar Alexander, Bob Bennett, Tom Coburn, and Saxby Chambliss and many of their supply side brethren. William Buckley's son is voting for a progressive. The Republican Treasury Secretary's more of a socialist, of course. He's really out there. Hell, even the Democrats are moving left.
Yes, good old big government is back. Funny how "conservative" capitalists scurry to the collective when their survival's on the line. Now, they say, we should all hang together. Now, they say, Americans should bail them out. Now, they say, we should all rally to the exchange and the ledger book and the bond rating. Regulation is back in vogue. Centralized economy is the big hit of the fall season.
Supply side manque Ronald Reagan is now a dusty discredited ghost of a failed economic jester, a gimmick-embracing old fool with no understanding of true American values. Sure, Sarah Palin still uses the old reprobate's name - but hell, that tells you something right there, doesn't it. Wink.
No, on the Dow of dead presidents only one stock is rising - that of the true blue chip liberal of the last Great Depression, the political stud named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And let's hope there's a little FDR in the skinny Senator from Illinois, who has his work cut out for him starting in January. The markets are eating their young, destroying their own super-leveraged brand of unregulated capitalism - but the effects will go far beyond the exchanges. Are we ready for double-digit unemployment, shortages, bread lines, Reagan Towns and Bushvilles, and lots of grass growing through highways and parking lots and strip malls filled with empty stores and abandoned automobiles?
On television - which, saints preserve us, might survive to entertain us all in our poverty - the endless pimping of the good life hasn't quite caught up with the economic storm front. Ads for luxury cars, retirement schemes (what a crock "retirement" turned out to be), high-end travel, glorious clothing and beauty products, and - I swear I'm not making this up - financial advisers who counsel a buy-and-hold strategy for "long-term security."
It hasn't sunk in yet, but it's all headed down - the world we knew for the past thirty years is fading away. "Supply side" is the synonym of anti-Americanism. To espouse that failed economic theory is to hate your country; to act on it is treason, soon to be against Federal law. The great deleveraging is here. And we're all liberals now.
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