An interesting twist on an old meme.

A woman crashes her car into the White House barricades and then careers off toward the Capitol, where she is shot and killed–in an unnecessary fusillade–by Capitol police, who are working without pay because of the government shutdown. The next day, a man incinerates himself on the Mall. Is it just me, or is there a whiff of the apocalypse in the air?
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The real similarity between the Tea Party and the New Left is a matter of style: a politics of confrontation rather than of compromise. Indeed, our generational tendency toward public melodrama provided the script for the inevitable backlash.
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It was all about street theater, bombast, showtime. “Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic,” William Galston wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, “but rather of an empire entering moral senescence.”