horse of george

How appropriate that a rant about pop tarts so perfectly captures the sad state of America right now - Mark Steyn brilliantly holds forth on the noxious absurdities strangling life from the republic bit by miserable bit. And conveniently his invective hits upon a point I've made often: great powers will not survive governance from the left - it's like inviting a cancer into the body politik that will assuredly consume it. Finland wants to elect a bunch of lefties - fine, go ahead, have at it 'cause who really gives a shit - but a great power will be ruined by a political shift of that sort that persists. Indeed, Europe is a good example of this dynamic - Greece for years elected socialist governments - but who cared, it was Greece - then along comes the Euro, a thing with pretentions to great power and real significance, and suddenly it matters a great deal that Greece is a horribly run socialist dumpster fire, and Spain, and Portugal, and Italy... in short, the forces that make a great power possible and then sustainable are often, if not always at odds with the effete sentiments of the enlightened who've convinced themselves into thinking they know better. The left wing elites who dreamt up the EU, assembled it out of golden fancy, either lacked the hard wisdom to understand these hard facts or arrogantly assumed such dark things lay forever in the past and the future would therefore obediently align with their fond wishes.