Money-changers in the temple

... only this temple is the temple of democracy. Glenn Greenwald links to billmon's diary on Kos (how did I miss that billmon is baack!):

What I was really wondering is how the American elites could feel so confident in their own entrenched positions that they could so blatantly ignore or defy reality -- as illustrated by the two Washington Post stories juxtaposed above.

The answer, I suppose is either that they have lived so long in the bubble of power and privilege that they no longer realize that moments like July 1789 or October 1917 can happen, or that they are supremely confident that populist rage can always be channeled to the right, where it can be easily controlled.

Either way, it amounts to the same thing: A total unawareness that at the end of the day, the only thing standing between them and the guillotine is sheer social inertia.

The elites do think that they are in charge of our inertia, that their conscious efforts succeed at making most of us into sheeple.

Click image for Wikimedia Commons public domain claim.