Mark Steyn on the pitiful state of America’s Ruling Class in 2011:
If you recall the smile on the face of the “automatic pilot” in the movie “Airplane!” as he’s being inflated, that’s pretty much the Democrats’ attitude to binge-spending as a permanent fact of life.For a sense of Democrat insouciance to American decline, let us turn to the president himself. The other day Barack Obama was in the oddly apt town of Fairless Hills, Pa., at what the White House billed as one of those ersatz “town hall” discussions into which republican government has degenerated. He was asked a question by a citizen of the United States. The cost of a gallon of gas has doubled on Obama’s watch, and this gentleman asked, “Is there a chance of the price being lowered again?”
As the Associated Press reported it, the president responded “laughingly”: “I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. … If you’re complaining about the price of gas, and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon – (laughter)…”
AdvertisementThat’s how the official White House transcript reported it: Laughter. Big yuks. “So, like I said, if you’re getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. You can get a great deal.”
Hey, thanks! You’ve been a great audience. I’ll be here all year. Don’t forget to tip your Democrat hat-check girl on the way out: At four bucks a gallon, it’s getting harder for volunteers to drive elderly voters from the cemetery to the polling station. Relax, I’m just jerking your crank, buddy! And it’s not four bucks per, it’s only three-ninety-eight. That’s change you can believe in!
Message: It’s your fault. The same day as the president was doing his moribund-economy shtick, my hairdresser told me that she’d bought her midsize sedan second-hand in 2004. She’d also like to ask the president if there’s a chance of gas prices being lowered again. But he’d have the same answer: Buy a hybrid. Wait till the high-speed rail-link is built between Dead Skunk Junction and Hickburg Falls. Climb into the fishnets and the come-hither smile and hitch.
America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there, beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders, are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.
“Paul Ryan’s plan would ‘end Medicare as we know it,’ Steyn writes. “The Democrats’ ‘plan’ — business as usual — will end America as we know it.”
But do they consider that a bug or a feature?
What the “ruling class” doesn’t seem to get is that they are all sitting on the limb they are sawing off. They are sailing on the same boat in whose hull they are drilling the holes. They may be at the “commanding heights” of the economy but the downside of this is they are now so far removed from the basic processes which make everyday living possible, they no longer comprehend that said processes can break, or that they themselves are helping to break them.
I remember reading years ago about the German aristocrats who lived in the countryside in the years prior to WWII. The author noted that the world of the old-money elites had been the same for decades, even centuries, and that none could imagine it even changing. That delusion was swept away by the violence that engulfed Europe in what must’ve seemed like an instant. Nothing is permanent, not even ruling classes.