Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and everywhere.

Looking back on the decade past is a common activity 'round about New Year's Day. I was marshaling my thoughts and thinking about how to best characterize my feelings when I found the always-enchanting Devilstower over at The Daily Kos posted precisely the political retrospective I wish I could have written.

It's really worth reading from the top, and you should do so now. But if you don't, here's the nut:

They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again." They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

Because they will. Given half a chance — less than half — they'll do it again, only worse. "

I remember well the media's interest in Bush II as our "MBA President." No dithering meaning-of-"is"-is lawyer like Clinton, but rather someone who will run American government like a business. Imagine that!

Except the goal of business — especially those shady shell games like Arbusto — is to create profits. The explicit charge of American governance is to protect the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of each and every citizen. Two wholly different aims, which should be targeted in significantly different ways.

In business, when you appoint your unqualified cronies to high-level positions, you get their loyalty and support in inter-office politics. And if they don't follow through on their responsibilities, the reduced departmental expenditures can translate to greater corporate profits.

Do the same in government and what do you get? Americans drowning in their own attics.

(But, hey, at least the government could listen in on their phone calls and read their e-mails. You know, before they died.)

Representational democracy is not a for-profit enterprise, and its primary purpose is to protect and engender the citizenry, not to foster unregulated capitalism. To forget this is to say you'd like to relive recent American history, circa 1999 - 2009.

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"Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and everywhere."	Lyrics from the holiday classic Go Tell It on the Mountain, performed by Frank Sinatra (and many, many, many others)