Well, As A Matter of Fact, We Are...

Himself, The One, The Prez has admitted the obvious:

The US is broke. Do you notice how politicians of both parties choose holiday weekends to drop bombs on the culture? Two years ago, it was the Bush/McCain/Kennedy immigration bill, scheduled to be passed in the dead of night on Memorial Day weekend, before it could be read. Word leaked out, and the Republican party was nearly destroyed in the fallout. This is the true Bush 'legacy'.

The US is broke, mainly due to the entitlement programs His party insisted be put in place, and expanded year by year. Anyone who suggested even a freeze on spending to allow revenues to begin catching up with expenditures was vilified as a heartless beast. Speaker Gingrich was cut by a thousand knives for his efforts during the early 1990's.

California is some $25 billion in the hole, and cities such as Cincinnati have been caught in the general undertow created by years of pledging to spend more than could ever possibly be generated by the economic base of the city. Barney Frank wants the Treasury to guarantee municipal bonds--but with what?

I first realized some tipping point had occurred in October 2007, one chilly evening in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. My bride and I were there for two events: The semi-annual Lawrenceburg Antique Auction(an experience unto itself, highly recommended), and the kick-off rally for Fred Thompson's presidential bid.

The auction, usually too rich for our blood, was very poorly attended, with anemic bidding. We made out like bandits, to the point I felt embarrassed as I wrote out a paltry check for a magnificent haul of furniture. We could have bought more, but there was no room in the house! We kept asking one another, 'Where are the bidders? So many of the high-rollers aren't even in the room this time!' It's as if they had dropped off the edge of the earth. It was eerie.

We wandered down to the rally, to a square full of enthusiastic, but worried people. The older ones among us were delighted by a speech by Sen. Howard Baker, who had hired Fred in 1973 to help the Watergate Senatorial Committee navigate the crisis visited upon the nation by Nixon.

It was not Fred's best night, sadly. But as he gathered steam, and talked about a government that controlled neither its borders or its spending, he began to connect with his audience, mainly families with kids, dressed in jeans and flannel shirts. They knew things were terribly amiss, that they had been betrayed by the leadership of the party they had sacrificially supported since 1980.

It was not to be for Fred's bid, but he was (and is) one of the few voices willing to say the hard things about the hard choices that must be made.

Not even he predicted how quickly we were to approach the bigger tipping point, less than a year later.