I'm the kind of a nerd that rewatches my dvds of 'I Claudius' on a regular basis. I'm a classic History Channel geek. I'm not allowed the have the Military Channel on the TV in the living room until my wife goes to bed. This armchair general retreats when confronted with an adversary that tough. Like a whole bunch of other people I've encountered in my life I've read hundreds of books, fiction and non-fiction about history. I can always tell when someone does the same. Its like an underground. We discover each other.

You see, people shun us. We like to talk about the first day of Gettysburg, the Flavian Emperors, the Coolidge Administration and the fighting in the Iron Triangle. The books by the Old Dead White Guys, long banned and forgotten by the educators who run our schools, lefties all, are some of our favorite books. I was being invited to a Civil War reenactment by one of my friends and noticed the look of absolute shock on the face of a thirty year old colleague who blundered in to the conversation. It was as if we were proposing a unicyle race down Wilshire Boulevard at rush hour clad in red satin clown suits with propeller beanies on our heads. This person, possessing a bachelor's degree from a leading university, when asked to guess when the Civil War occurred was fifty years off in her guess. Anything that happened before the Berlin Wall fell was a complete mystery to her. An Obama voter.

When we History Geeks get together we do engage in some odd practices. We whip out our 'context' and we compare the present with the past. We apply the knowledge that we didnt get a degree for, the stuff that we learned because we were curious and interested in more than the most immediate local things that affect us directly, to what is going on now. To the non-history person the past is just formless nostalgia, but to us the monetary crisis that preceded the French Revolution is relevant. Very relevant.

Just the other day I was working with 'I Claudius' playing on the dvd player on my desk and there came the scene where Tiberius has discovered that Sejanus, the commander of the gaurd, was plotting to murder him. His nephew Caligula presents him with a solution and he glows with joy.

Tiberius: Gaius Caligula I shall make you my successor! I shall set you on Rome's shoulder like a poisonous spider!
Caligula: Is that some kind of a joke, Uncle?
Tiberius: Not now, but it will be!"

Dont you kind of picture George W Bush saying something like that as he watched that poisonous spider of an Obama paralyze the opposition and creepy-crawl towards the fat fly of the Presidency? Because, whether you're a history geek or not George W Bush is looking better and better in the rear view mirror with his 4.5% unemployment and his $250 billion dollar deficit. Yeah, he started coming unglued when Nutsy Pelosi and Harry 'Uriah Heep' Reid took over the Congress but Bush at his absolute worse towers over that utopian pipsqueek who weaves his webs in his Shelob's Lair of an Oval Office.

Bush had more class. He was smarter. He was better read. He had better manners. I was always angry at him politically but there was one thing you could never fault Bush on; that giant monstrosity that is the Federal Government ran like a top. The proof of that is the phony Katrina-mania. Somehow the cowardly Mayor weeping and having a nervous breakdown and the confused and panicked incompetent Governor in a state of paralysis as the mighty storm approached was turned into a crusade against Bush, the head of the only sector of the government that functioned as it was supposed to. They needed that propaganda 'scandal' because they couldnt find any real ones in the Bush Administration. The boring drabs in the W Administration did their jobs without incurring a raft of investigations and felony charges. The Clinton and now Obama Administrations are a different story.

The incompetence and malfeasance of this bunch of greedy, shameless amoral leftists is sickening. Their open support of ACORN, a criminal organization devoted to subverting our electoral and economic systems says it all. They even pretended to defund it and then reinserted the refunding into an unrelated bill. The pious Green Obamunists oppose offshore oil drilling...unless its a subsidy for a Soros-dominated group to drill off the coast of Brazil. That doesnt wreck the climate.

If you look back on my blog you will see that my early criticisms of Obama were based on the fact that he was an empty suit. His answers in the first debates were laughable. Even surrounded by ignoramuses of the first water (Biden, Clinton, Dodd) his answers were startling in their vacuity. The Empty Suit. He has no skills or talents of any kind. His overrated speaking skills have shown to be completely ineffective as the HealthScare legislation stalls and dissolves into chaos. His leadership skills are so lacking that he has bet all his political capital on one issue and then turned the execution of that issue completely over to Nutsy Pelosi and Harry 'Uriah Heep' Reid. He's a Nobel Prize winning joke all over the world. He wasnt a joke during the campaign but he is now.

Imagine the happiness of W! His predecessor was a gushing redneck speed liar responsible for the Fannie-Freddie disaster who had a well-publicized case of Satyriasis and his successor is so completely inept that even his attempts to destroy the country are failing in a political trainwreck that looks like it might take the entire Democratic Party down with him. The Dems can use all the doubletalk they like to explain away yesterday's electoral meltdown but it was a strong, angry vote of no confidence in the current course.

The incredibly disappointing loss in NY23 should make the rebels against Obamunism stop and consider whether their approach was too strident to have any appeal in fervently blue states. The Obamunist juggernaut has not been derailed. It has been stalled on the tracks. If Obama had any leadership skills he would be out, as Bill Clinton would have been, proclaiming total victory with a smile and a knowing wink. But that crowd-pleasing chicanery is far from the soul of Mr. Teleprompter; it came natural to BJ Clinton. The spokesholes are out spinning that 'the voters still want change' but a line like that only works when El Presidente says it right into the camera with a devilish smile that lets us know he doesnt think we're that stupid, that lets us all in on the joke.

Thats good damage control but thats all BJ boiled down to, damage control. Damage control is easy when you have a Congress that is cutting capital gains taxes and balancing the budget, when unemployment is low and inflation is 2%. Barry has a tougher job of spinning. His line blaming Bush has worn thin. Its a sign of how clueless the Obamunist Radicals are that they dont get that people want to know what the hell they are doing that will reingnite the economy. Or why they keep hearing that the Obamunists dont want to reignite the economy. The reality of the anti-business, anti-consumer, anti-capitalist rhetoric emerging from the elitists in the administration and Congress is starting to sink in.

So W can sit back on his ranch and watch with glee. The annoying, unwashed protesters have all gone away, to camp out in front of Nutsy Pelosi's office because she's not far enough to the left. W wont have to worry about his legacy. We havent seen the worst of Obama by any means. This could even be the end of a Golden Age and the beginning of an age of sloth and decline. Historians will point to the misguided direction taken by Obama, not Bush. The joke is on us.

Sometimes, when the cares of the world weigh down on us as a nation, it's nice to take a little breather from the alarming present and ease our troubled minds by wandering back into the past. You know, get out the old history books and just do a little escapist reading. Now, I'm not talking about the important facts of US History as our schools teach it; we all know that stuff about Indian Genocide, the KKK, the McCarthy Years, how we're all responsible for slavery and JFK being shot, the stolen election of 2000, the growth of that vile monopoly capitalism that's killing the planet-- our malignant nation's "Tragic Past" as one presidential candidate calls it. No, I want to get away from all that and lose myself in a far distant past, one with nothing to do with our frightening present. Oh sure, people used to think that many of our traditions and most of our laws originated in the Roman Empire until we discovered that the US Constitution is really based on a mixture of Iroquois Law and the Ujamaa traditions of the African Slaves which were ripped off by the fiendish 'Founding Fathers' and credited to the Romans by the White Chauvinist Pigs who conspired to create a capitalist hell on Earth right here in our tragic nation.
Around the same time as those Founding Fathers there lived in England a historian named Edward Gibbon. He was considered, until the publication of Barak Obama's first book, the finest prose writer in the English language. Sometimes, just to take my mind off my troubles, I'll leaf through 'Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire' and muse over some random quotes.
Let's do it together, shall we?
Those were troubled times, the old Fifth Century. Here's how Gibbon describes the scene (all Gibbon quotes will be in Italics):

...every species of corruption polluted the course of public and private life; and that the feeble restraints of order and decency were insufficient to resist the progress of that degenerate spirit which sacrifices, without a blush, the consideration of duty and interest to the base indulgence of sloth and appetite.

Just imagine living in a place like that! There's more:

...and the mad prodigality which prevails in the confusion of a shipwreck or a siege may serve to explain the progress of luxury amidst the misfortunes and terrors of a sinking nation.

Phew, what a bunch of morons! But the regular people were pretty down to earth it seems:

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the insubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

One warmonger actually tried to get the Romans to abandon paying off their enemies and to encourage the people to defend themselves against the rising menace:

He exhorts the Emperor to revive the courage of his subjects by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute in place of the barbarian mercenaries an army of men interested in the defense of their laws and of their property; to force, in such a moment of public danger, the mechanic from his shop and the philosopher from his school; to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure; and to arm, for the protection of agriculture, the hands of the laborious husbandman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll bet this loser wants me to miss my favorite TV shows, too! At least we have that dunce W to blame our problems on. I guess the ancients did too:

...and the people imputed to the mischievous policy of the minister the public misfortunes, which were the natural consequence of their own degeneracy.

Well, we can see how out-to-lunch this Gibbon dude really is. But it gets worse. You see they didn't understand 'soft diplomacy' or cultural sensitivity in Gibbon's day so his chauvinistic mind allowed him to make the following statement:

The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the Council Of Ravenna he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.

Geeesh! Picky, picky, picky! Why can't we just Give Peace A Chance? but no, Gibbon continues with the insults:

They disdained either to negotiate a treaty or to assemble an army; and with a rash confidence, derived only from their ignorance of the extreme danger, irretrievably wasted the decisive moments of peace and war.

But, in the end, the Romans sat down at the table for a respectful round of negotiations that only can be achieved by good-hearted people getting together to resolve their problems in a civilized manner:

...the Romans were resolved to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric refused them a fair and honorable capitulation, he might sound his trumpets and prepare to give battle to an innumerable people, exercised in arms and animated by despair. "The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed," was the concise reply of the barbarian; and this rustic metaphor was accompanied by a loud and insulting laugh, expressive of his contempt for the menaces of an unwarlike populace, enervated by luxury...

But, what the heck. Dale Carnegie once said that 'No' is the first step toward 'Yes'. They just should have explained everything to him more clearly. I think that 'rustic metaphor' shows that they weren't dealing with a guy with any higher education or knowledge of the Rules Of Diplomacy. But Gibbon lets us off the hook a little:

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to deprecate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

So don't sweat it, baby! Its just these Evil Times. And if a tiny ally is overrun by a swarm of bloodthirsty barbarians just relax. These are local problems as Gibbon so correctly notes:

The Britons, reduced to this extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining monarchy.

So chill out, relax. Catch the Olympics on TV or go down to the health club and get a massage. You deserve it! All this worrying that the people who, by their superior merit, have managed to obtain positions of leadership are blindly leading us to destruction is just idle paranoia. After all, Rome's still there, isn't it?