Busy Day -OR- Gnawing Through the Restraints and Fighting the Thorazine.

A serve and my volley taken from elsewhere:

[QUOTE=citizen] let's try 'government done right,' for a change. that, too, has never been done before.
of course, none of this would be possible w/out bush & cheney.
evolution works in mysterious ways, eh?[/QUOTE]

The Shrub and Darth Cheney were the logical choice to bring St. Ronnie's crusade across the finished line.

Prior to 1980 government was a mess, but it was a somewhat manageable mess. It didn't do much of anything particularly well or efficiently. It was partly the result of half-hearted implementation of well-intentioned ideas and partly deliberate opposition installed obstacles and booby-traps to insure failure; what James Madison might have termed "gradual and silent encroachments"

Reagan said he could fix it and people believed him. He failed to fix it, but managed to convince people that what he did was even BETTER! He slathered on a ton of lipstick and kicked the pig. He cranked it up to ELEVENTY! That's betterer ya know.

Reagan's abrupt change in course and trajectory achieved records in all categories, but quickly distanced us from the road we thought we were on. It was a hyper-stellar by-pass. It was a new destination. Completely uncharted.

At speed, there was no way to stop and ask directions. The vehicle wasn't designed or built to withstand heretofore unknown stresses and pressures. The Reagan Conestoga wagon was retrofitted as we went. All or nothing. Boom or Bust. Just like in the movies.

Voodoo economics gave rise to voodoo economists who made it up as they went along.

Successors didn't dare mess with the works. They could only augment, supplement and pray that anything that fell off wasn't vital to the propulsion system.

Like the classic Bill Cosby routine put it. "Have you ever had a Sneaker blow-out at 75 m.p.h.?"

From a different perspective it was patently insane. Right turn after right turn after right turn after right turn. The upward spiral was magnificent. Then it ran out of its primary fuel; Disbelief. Keep it going. Ever upwards...

SPLAT! Not enough escape pods, lifeboats or parachutes to go around. Sorry folks. The cost of this little excursion into the twilight zone?

Perhaps the future. Undoubtedly, the future we'd been told awaits. What comes now will be very different.

Unless Scotty can get together with McGuyver, Q and Jean Luc Piccard, design and build a worthy vessel to continue the journey, we're phooked. So unless you're a complete moron, you're rooting for the dream team.