The world will end August 2^nd.

Or something like that.

Preacher Harold Camping picked 6:00pm May 21^st, the Democrats in the Treasury have picked August 2^nd.

Thus, the parrots in the activist old media have joined in and said that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling to a bazillion, gazillion dollars by that date the financial markets will collapse, the NFL season will not happen, and unemployment will skyrocket to 8%. Who knows, gas prices might even go up.

“Do you want to have a situation where August 2^nd comes and they fail to pass it … and the world laughs at us?” says Chris Matthews. “Does anyone win if we have a catastrophe?”

“I don’t think anyone wins because the catastrophe is so apocalyptic.”

That last quote was NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, not Preacher Camping.

Also, remember Chris, we elected a Citizen of the World as President, why would they ever laugh at us?

Timmy Geithner said not raising the debt ceiling would cause “catastrophic damage.”

The new IMF Chief declared “nasty consequences for the entire global economy.”

Barack Obama says we need to get a deal done to “avert Armageddon.”  Hey, I thought Steve Buscemi took care of that in 1998 with Bruce Willis.

And Chicken Little said … well, you know what Chicken Little said.

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What was once just a worry, then a fear, is now beginning to speak its name. Here’s Bill Kristol in the pages of the Weekly Standard on the pretty pass at which we find ourselves:

We are not now quite at a founding moment, or even a re-founding moment. But we have arrived at a genuine crisis, or a set of crises, and we may well be at a decisive moment for the country…

Of course, the leaders of the Democratic party don’t want to come to grips with the present moment. Committed to stale progressive policies, they’re doing their very best to push more of them through, even as the failure of those policies becomes ever more evident. Serious reflection on the failure of their favored policies, both at home and abroad, would be too painful. It would require a rethinking too consequential and too disruptive to be willingly undertaken. After all, experience has shown that liberals are more disposed to have the rest of us suffer, than to right themselves by rethinking the dogmas by which they are enthralled.

But it’s increasingly clear that “the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government,” in our case welfare state liberalism, is no longer sufferable. Out-of-control spending and debt really do threaten our economic future. Weakness and timidity abroad really do threaten a world in which terrorists and fanatics possess, and use, nuclear weapons. The nanny state, at once all-intrusive and all thumbs, really does threaten the future of self-government. The dogmas of multiculturalism really do threaten the strength of a free society.

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Credit where credit is due: in this case, this story by Steven Erlanger of the New York Times:

PARIS — Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.

Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.

Heartbreaking, I know. But then, social-welfare systems were actually affordable for a while when the U.S. a) was reconstructing their countries with the Marshall Plan and b) providing American troops and U.S. nukes to shield Europe from the hungry Soviet bear throughout the eighties and nineties. Hey — it’s easy to be a “lifestyle superpower” when you don’t have anything better to do:

Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.

But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead.

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Now that the MSM has done its best to ignore the Amy Bishop Obama obsession and is going all out to pin the right-wing-nut-job tail on Joseph Stack, it would seem that leftist-radical myopia is once again controlling the establishment media narrative.

It is, after all, difficult to see clearly when your legs are tingling and your passions are in willing-thrall mode.

So, here’s the pertinent question, the question our drowning Obama groupies in the MSM do not dare to ask:  Is disillusionment with Obama causing people to snap and commit acts of violence?

It’s a good question, born of common sense.

If there was a single characteristic that defined the Obama campaign followers in 2008, it was an adolescent fawning the likes this country has never seen.  There were the creepy fainting women in teenybopper crush mode wherever Obama went.  There were the so-called intelligentsia speaking of a man who, to them, seemed more like a god, a savior, an uber-competent of downright immortal stature, purely obsequious observations based on Obama’s postage-stamp-sized resume, his fondness for arugula and GQ looks. (more…)