Author Topic: A Separate Peace  (Read 900 times)

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Offline BlueStateSaint

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A Separate Peace
« on: May 19, 2011, 11:43:04 AM »
That's the title of a Peggy Noonan column from her website, referenced at RedState ("The Two Amerikas of Obamacare").  Although it may have been written six years ago, it's pretty descriptive of the Democratics today.

Quote
A Separate Peace

America is in trouble—and our elites are merely resigned.
The Wall Street Journal: October 27, 2005

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It’s harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can’t prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

I’m not talking about “Plamegate.” As I write no indictments have come up. I’m not talking about “Miers.” I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.

But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.


The rest is at:

http://peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=289

Sobering stuff.  There's a little phrase that comes to mind:

Be very careful of what you ask for--sometimes, you get it.
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." - Thomas Jefferson

"All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk!" -Ayn Rand
 
"Those that trust God with their safety must yet use proper means for their safety, otherwise they tempt Him, and do not trust Him.  God will provide, but so must we also." - Matthew Henry, Commentary on 2 Chronicles 32, from Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible

"These anti-gun fools are more dangerous to liberty than street criminals or foreign spies."--Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor

Chase her.
Chase her even when she's yours.
That's the only way you'll be assured to never lose her.

Offline DumbAss Tanker

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Re: A Separate Peace
« Reply #1 on: May 19, 2011, 01:10:49 PM »
Strangely, that excerpt struck me as a literate rewrite of a Nadin Brozlovski post.

 :rotf:
Go and tell the Spartans, O traveler passing by
That here, obedient to their law, we lie.

Anything worth shooting once is worth shooting at least twice.