Nice false dichotomy at the the end. The two options are not capitalism and universal immiseration. Feudal states have winners, too, as did the U.S.S.R. The fact that some will come out ahead of others is undeniable. In fact, it’s clearly desirable, which is what your petty column is banking on. The problem isn’t whether some should get more, but WHO gets more, and HOW MUCH more they get. This translates at present to the question of whether the people who were responsible for the massive leveraging of mortgage debt, and therefor for the immensity of the current recession, should be rewarded twice for their reckless greed. Home owners are being hit hard, workers are being hit hard, even small banks are being hit hard, but the big investment banks that turned the bubble into a cancer are giving out the biggest bonuses ever.

As for Obama’s worship of equality, Obama himself seems like a sterling example of the rewards of human excellence in a relatively egalitarian system. You may not like Obama’s intelligence, or his eloquence, and you may criticize his numerous faults, but all of his speeches have advocated what was once the only valuable trait of modern American conservatism–that excellence is worth pursuing. If you hadn’t been plugging your ears and shouting NHYAAH-NHYAAH-NHYAAH, you would have known that even his speech to students on the first day of school encouraged personal responsibility and ambition.

Perhaps the conservatives have forgotten what it’s like to actually BE excellent, rather than just talk about how everyone else is not living up to their ideas of excellence. It’s time to stop complaining, start the painful process of reflecting honestly on the massive failures of the Bush administration. Unless you can admit where you were wrong, it’s going to be hard to improve. And if you don’t improve, you’ll stay a bunch of mediocre stooges forever, even if you can return to power. That’s not excellence. But then, I suppose that if you haven’t faced your ignorance after the recent, massive failure of your ideology, nothing that could ever happen will show you wrong. That’s some funny virtue.