I try to avoid getting into the personalities involved because it’s not about personalities. It is really about the power of teachers unions (in league with all public employee unions), locally and in Albany, and even nationally. It is about a historical trend among Progressives to take control of citizens’ lives by first targeting them as children, beyond the immediate reach of their parents, and conditioning them to accept elites exercising power over them through government. It’s about a worn-out, moribund concept of public education, that if it isn’t already dead sure is startin’ to smell funny. And only lastly is it about the unwitting and useful slobs and factotums and placeholders who run the thing on-site at the public school penal colonies.

But all of this morass of expensive compulsory institutionalization has now been swept away conceptually by the internet, and by the vast resources for learning online from the best teachers available, without the current abject institutional confinement and the resulting formation among students of immature peer group cultures (and the now multiple-generation conspiracy against adult reality) that public school advocates attempt to call “socialization.”

This dysfunctional horror show is now six or seven generations deep in America. Parents who think fondly (often aided by the darkest rose-colored glasses) of their time going through it want to believe that they are giving their children something “even better” than what they had, usually unaware that public schools have continued to march on toward odder and odder goals, including the “diversity” fetish, which boils down to “we are replacing your values with ours.”

So it was with great wailing and gnashing of teeth, when the New Paltz school budget failed to pass on Tuesday with the required 60% vote (because the school district had proposed a budget that exceeded the property tax cap set in Albany), that the usual suspects, those who think that all good things come from government, and that there is never, ever enough of such good things, were very very very upset. Whining slob Lefties and blackguards that they are, any setback for the agenda is a deep offense against their moral vanity, which is immense and based in vapors so thin that they barely function intellectually, such that they are consumed in the offense they take that anyone would, or possibly could, disagree with them.

Despite my effort to resist taking the matter down to the personalities at the local level, every once in a while an individual will catch the light of the moment in just the wrong way and I’ll go there very quickly indeed, and I’m almost there with at least one of these people, someone I’m calling for now the “lovable fuzzball commie.”

Something I never noticed before, and this might have been part of what limited mystique George W. Bush had, is the resemblance between W. and Carson. It’s not pronounced, but it’s definitely there. Both apparently got the same results out of drinking as well.

One thing I did not know about Carson was that he was a philanderer. At least he had the decency not to flaunt it.

His schtick, the head whipping from side to side, the darting eyes, all the rapid moves were born in his youthful obsession with magic tricks, his early self-training at being an entertainer. He was trying to hold his mother’s attention, at first, and maybe for a lot of his life. She was apparently indifferent. But it worked on almost everyone else.

Most impressive was the part about how when the television writers went out on strike for several weeks, Carson wrote the entire show himself. He was also a generous man, who helped people in dire straits all the time and never took any credit for it. Was also a voracious reader and a loner, who could spend his time with everyone in the world or just himself. In the end, everyone knew Johnny Carson and no one knew him.

More: Michelle Malkin on the jobs lost to the drilling moratorium.

The new vanguardists of Communism are the Communist intellectuals who actually admit to being Communists. After decades of making up all sorts of new names (and retrieving old names) for themselves, they’ve finally come full circle and returned to the gold standard.

Conrad Black sees FDR as a great hero, to whom he compares our President Nosferatu unfavorably.

My comment from that thread:

It’s only because I admire Mr. Black that I hesitate to point out that Pharaoh Roosevelt had scrambled eggs for brains, had no experience at all with anything much at all, was resentful and envious of those who could create wealth (his intense animus directed at Andrew Mellon, for instance), was deceitful and arrogant beyond comprehension (his arbitrary manipulation of the price of gold), had totalitarian instincts whence the line can be drawn directly to our President Nosferatu, currently sitting, and believed in the state, not the people, but began in earnest the conflation of the two. He had no idea what he was doing, but he loved jamming it to people who did. As for Social Security, it was the great scheme by which Americans of a certain age would be assured that they could live in retirement in the manner they had grown accustomed to during that very Great Depression.