Disaster

Another kick in the gut from Mark Steyn:

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...Bush has declared Washington, D.C., a federal disaster area.

No, seriously. ...what was it? An ice storm? A hurricane?

No, it's the inauguration of his successor. ...

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"I don't know if anybody's ever done that," said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary.

Indeed. One reason why nobody's ever done that before is because a presidential inauguration is not (to be boringly technical about it) an "emergency." ...

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I'm not worried about "change" so much as creep. The Obama administration doesn't have to do anything terribly transformative – overnight socialization of health care, etc. In fact, it doesn't have to do anything at all. It could just sit there, and America would still drift remorselessly, incrementally left, inch by inch. Eventually, you reach a tipping point: At some point in the next four years, we will reach a situation where the majority of Americans pay no federal income tax but are able to vote themselves more goodies from those who do. The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it. We now have a government offering trillion-dollar rewards for bad behavior to the financial system, to the housing market, to the auto unions and to individual voters.