They Mostly Come with Fright ... Mostly

Every four years, like clockwork:

This the most important election in history.

It's a turning point.

The current occupant of the White House is TEH MOST [right-wing, left-wing, arrogant, incompetent, warmongering, appeasing -- take your pick] EVAH!!!

Over at WaPo, EJ Dionne as much as admits that that whole line of thinking is mostly horseapples -- but pours a bucket of it on us anyway.

For the first time since Barry Goldwater made the effort in 1964, the Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era.

Yawn ... no, EJ, not really.

Since the end of World War II, the federal government has regularly seized somewhere in the neighborhood of one in every five dollars of GDP -- sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less -- from the productive class for redistribution to the political class (directly seized, that is; factor in the costs of federal regulation, currency manipulation, and similar state and local ministrations, and it's more like half your money disappearing down the rathole).

With the exception of Ron Paul, none of the major candidates have believably proposed any changes to that formula.

Yes, there's continuous bickering over how much of the loot goes to which sector of the welfare-warfare state (guns vs. butter), but it's just a rhetorical game of manipulating small percentages and scaring the bejabbers out of the rubes with body counts.

One side says it will get Osama bin Laden out from under your bed, the other side says it will keep cyanide out of your blood pressure medication. Which you should read to mean that one side will give your money to Lockheed-Martin and send your son off to die in some foreign shithole, and the other side will give your money to Pfizer and let grandpa die while awaiting FDA approval of its competitors' medications.

The candidate who wins will be the one who most convincingly promises to do both, more efficiently.

The managerial state is indeed on its last legs, but not because the Republicans are kicking it in the shins. They're holding it up by one arm just like the Democrats are holding it up by the other. When it finally goes down, they'll go with it ... and it won't be an election that brings that about.