Dear Mr. Inglis,

I am so enraged by your first vote on the bailout, Congressman, that you've managed to flip me from a supporter to someone who will actively speak out AGAINST you in the next election to prevent you from screwing me and my fellow constituents even further.

You've voted to destroy this country and every one of its founding principles. You've put your political self-interest ahead of the need of the people. You've managed to allow liberalism, dare I say socialism, to substitute its odious philosophy for market capitalism.

You should be ashamed.

You should be alarmed at the pork that this new bill is full of. You should be scrambling to prevent the outright embarrassment you will incur if you vote for this earmarked boondoggle that we cannot afford. It will saddle my children with debt to the Chinese for the rest of their lives and I won't ever let you or my fellow constituents forget it.

And tell the House to get new IT staff to fix that piece of shit website you have.

She's a liar, a fraud and she has terrible hair. She clearly fits in with her district. But more importantly, this is just one more piece of evidence that she's off her rocker. See this gem from over the summer.

http://news.ionlinephilippines.com/2008/10/singing-obama-kids-video/

How can a man spend his entire career fighting lobbyists, special interest groups and pork barrel spending and vote for this bailout bill? How can he rail against earmarks and express such passion about cutting wasteful spending only to go ahead and accept this Christmas tree festooned with waste, earmarks and special interest goodies to the tune of over a trillion dollars?

How can he accept this? How? I was thrilled last week when he suspended his campaign. I thought here is the man of action I'd like to see running the show. He flew to Washington and instead of standing up for what was right, he stood up and was counted for what was easiest. After he flew into town and got the read on the situation, he should have come out in front of the public and denounced this horrific attempt to manipulate the markets and extend bureaucratic control over capitalism as the pile of socialist shit it is. Furthermore, he should have said, there is nothing that could make me vote for this bill in its current form. No goodies, no trinkets, no added features, no extra earmarks, no nothing that would make me, John McCain, vote for something that is so at odds with my political philosophy, my record and my core beliefs.

What would Mr. Reagan think of you now John? You've become a big government stooge supporting a bill that gives away the future of my children and entrusts it to Chinese financiers and Islamic oil producers.

In the end, you've surrendered your principles when the time came to stand up for them. You've sold us down the river John. And what saddens me the most about it is that, while 73 of your colleagues (and it looks now like a majority of the House) also sold us down the river, you were the one guy that I thought could turn us around. So this black mark counts doubly, triply against you. You've ceded the moral high ground and condemned this country to 8 years of liberalism run amok. You've hastened the end of the American era by allowing the Democrats to ride their way to power in all branches of government. Their insidious policies will bring about the final death knell of this once great country.

This is on you, John. You and every other alleged fiscal conservative in the GOP. You and your buddy Lindsay have brought on catastrophe.

Are there really only 25 market believers in the US Senate? God help us all if this is true. I'd almost rather believe that the 74 voted Yay in order to devour the billions worth of pork crapola that they've stuffed in this donkey.

I'm sorry to say that my own state apparently has only 1 Senator who places his faith in Adam Smith and not in the greedy, grubby, grabby hand of the United States Government. Well, you say, it must be Mr. McCain's good friend and fellow pork buster Lindsay Graham. Well, says I, you'd be dead wrong. Senator Graham has voted in favor of this steaming pile of shit. It was the junior Senator of the great State of South Carolina, Jim DeMint, who courageously stood up and threw down the bullshit card. I know Jim DeMint. I don't think the man voted against this because his office was inundated with outraged constituents. I honestly think he voted his principles. What a strange, absent concept in today's Congress!

So as this vote represents a victory for Marx, so too it reveals those in our nation's government who firmly believe in the foundational principles of this country as laid down by the founders and will stand up to prove it. Crises have a funny way of bringing forth those principled few and sending the unscrupulous masses scurrying for cover. It's like turning a light on in a grimy kitchen and watching the bugs run.

Weasled out. Beware, Mr. McCain

Stood up and was counted

Nod to Michele for the craptastic references.

We've done this type of thing before, of course: the Savings & Loan collapse of the late 80s, the collapse of Chrysler in the late 70s, the Home Owner's Loan Corp of the 30s and 40s, the JP Morgan rescue of the 1907, the panics in the 1870s, 1841, 1819 and 1809. Of course, the granddaddy of all rescues was the original one in 1792 engineered by arguably my favorite founder, Mr. Hamilton. You can go read about it if you like.

But would Mr. Hamilton be happy by the current approach? Having studied the man in some detail, I suspect not. Hamilton supported public debt and strong central government in the furtherance of American economic power. He wanted to supplement and complement the principles of Adam Smith, not restrain them or legislate them. He would not have recognized the concept of restrained, third-way market capitalism that seems to be creeping around the globe.

The notion that the Federal government should be involved in the economy was a given to him, as it is to us today. But that involvement was not to function as an economic entity somehow superior to the invisible hand, regulating, restricting, governing it. The role of the Federal government, he would say, is to enable the American worker to start a business, sell his wares, sell his services, produce his product. To the extent that a bailout enables positive economic activities and doesn't restrict the economy through microscopic regulatory control, then it is a good thing. If the Fed presumes to know better how to govern the economy than Capitalism itself, then a bailout is a bad thing.

So where do we sit? To be honest, I don't know. Injecting liquidity into the system in order to prop up otherwise failing institutions seems to be a bad use of taxpayer money. It substitutes the judgment of bureaucrats and legislators (campaigning for re-election) for the judgment of the market. That should scare anyone who has ever seen government judgment in action (i.e. the DMV, FEMA, the IRS). Should we trust the people with a 10% approval rating to legislate a $14 trillion economy? I suspect not. Alexander Hamilton, I can assure you, would be aghast.

At the end of the day, what would Hamilton do? I believe he would look at companies that are failing because of the risk they incurred and suggest that they be allowed to fail and not nationalized or otherwise artificially propped up. He would view Government Sponsored Entities such as Fannie and Freddie with disdain and recoil at the notion that trillions of dollars worth of housing was being exposed to high risk because everyone was overconfident in the unlimited support and blank check guarantee from the Federal Government (aka the American Taxpayer). The government should not be loaning money to credit risks and acting as a mortgage lender and backer, he would say. The government should act as an enabler to allow people to own houses they can afford and not guarantee mortgages to those who cannot.

The very concept of risk-reward, the foundation of capitalism, is threatened with the bill currently being tossed about on Capitol Hill. Restricting market capitalism at this juncture would not be something Mr. Hamilton would favor. It didn't work in 1932 and it won't work now. The solution is to unleash the market forces, not further legislate them.

1777 wasn't a good year for America. Washington was in full-blown retreat, lurching his way across New Jersey and Pennsylvania desperately trying to find food for his army. Things were so bad that the soldiers, mostly naked (literally naked), were roasting their dead comrades' boots and eating the leather soles. Inflation at that time makes today's Zimbabwe look like a model of economic success. Yet the country pulled through. Things weren't terribly good, but perseverance and an indomitable spirit got those hardy people through some very dark times.

1861 was another year that wasn't great for America. My own state of South Carolina had rebelled, declared independence, bombarded Fort Sumter and the rest of the south followed it into war. Let me, for a moment, attest to the character of the southerners (of which I will likely never truly be a part). They are a tough bunch full of stubbornness, determination and grit. If anyone could defeat Lincoln's North, it was the people who gave birth to Lee, Bragg, Polk, Johnston, Hood, Beauregard and Forrest. But by cleaving a great people in two over an issue that should have (and could have) been resolved in 1783, the conflict that would ensue was an ordeal that America recovered from only after a century, appropriate legislation and anyone alive at the time had passed. It was the bravery and determination of people like Andrew Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson that put to rest the schism and finally healed the nation.

1941 was a year that came to be infamous. It was not a good year for America. The Japanese had destroyed US Naval power in the Pacific and the British alone held the line against a terrible darkness. Western Civilization itself, and all of its 2500 year history, was at risk of slipping into a deep abyss. Let there be no mistake about how bleak things looked in 1941. There was a resignation in these States to Germany ruling Europe. There was a real, powerful (magnitudes more powerful than today) anti-war lobby that sought to keep America isolated and insulated from the world. The Japanese changed that on December 7th at 7:48 am. The result was a rallied America that had never been as unified and an awakened giant the likes of which the world had never before seen in the history of mankind. In a improbable turnabout, just 4 years later the United States was more engaged and involved in the world and more relatively powerful than any nation in history.

2001 was not a good year for America. Politics had torn the people asunder the previous year. Charges of a poisonous and ridiculous nature were hurled about between countrymen. There was nothing short of internal war. Had the politicians and ideologies been represented by individual States as they had been in the 19th Century, civil war might have resulted. The economy had had a bubble burst in the first months of 2000 and had yet to bottom out. Jobs were being lost left and right and GDP was threatening to enter negative territory for the first time in a generation. And yet things only got worse. In a short, brutish and nasty flash, an act of terrorism took more American lives in a single day than at any point in the nation's history save for the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and the Battle of Antietam. It was a stunning attack on the world's only indispensable nation, the only MegaPower, a nation that had never been attacked on its own soil in such a brutal and cowardly manner. Yet the nation and its people circled the wagons and pulled together. The people's leader, a man who came to power promising to keep America out of foreign adventures, summoned an improbable inner strength and vowed to focus on nothing but her defense. And to that end, he succeeded for the duration of his tenure.

I know I'll never forget that day. I doubt anyone alive in this country at that time will forget. It is etched in our collective memory in a way that few events are. It is a sad anniversary when it comes around. It reminds me of our mortality and the vulnerability of our people and our nation. I can only hope that my soon-to-be three children will never have to face a day like that. My oldest was 5 at the time and I doubt he recalls it. I envy him. If there was ever a harbinger of the new world order, it was al Qaeda. George Bush the Father spoke in 1991 of a new world order with a thousand points of light coming into being following the defeat of communism. It was not to be, sadly. The real indication that we lived in a new era was when cowards murdered 3000 Americans on a clear, crisp fall day in September 2001.

It makes me tear up to this very moment.

However, I have every faith in the spirit of my adopted country that we will pull through. And as we pull through, we bring with us the beacon of light that represents the sum history of the Greeks, Romans, Franks and Britons. If Western Civilization is doomed to fall prey to the darkness of radical ideologies (be it tyranny, racism, sexism, totalitarianism or religious extremism), it won't be on America's watch.

Tomorrow morning at 9am, I will board a plane with my eldest son and travel to New York. Ostensibly the trip is about experiencing Yankee Stadium before it is torn down. But it is also, and more importantly, about experiencing Ground Zero and the 9/11 Tributes at the Yankees game that I hope will leave an indelible mark on him. The greatest gift I feel I can give my children is knowledge and experience of the history I have witnessed.

And so I celebrate another year of writing and another child while I also remember the events of 7 years ago today.

Never Forget.