The wheels are coming off the trolley?

Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal's answer to the New York Time's elderly schoolgirl columnist (props to Mark Steyn) Maureen Dowd, has officially flipped out. Perhaps it was the latest scandal in the Catholic Church that pushed her "into bad territory with the trolley", but she seems to think the world is out of control and the President - any President - can't handle it, manage it, control it anymore (as if they ever could). She also offers this beauty taken from Christopher Lawford's autobiography:

"I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age." I asked him (Uncle Teddy) why, and he said, "Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart."

Well, please kick the bucket ASAP Ted - few have done more to send "the trolley off the tracks" than you have. In death you might even have to give up your seat in the US Senate - though I don't know why because your constituency would still elect you every 6 years and your staff could cast all of your votes on all issues before "the worlds greatest deliberative body" - they already do!

In the quote above Ted K sounds like a grumpy 73 year old man, which he is, but he is also one of "our Elites" who has made a "separate peace" with the struggling masses of "the Other America" as John Edwards (who?) used to say before he joined Fortress Investment Group LLC. As an aside, doesn't Fortress Investment Group sound like an financial company who's ownership has resigned itself to an "I got mine, you get yours" world view. To quote school marm Noonan:

"You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to."

Is Noonan proposing that it was ever any different? If so, then someone should tell her that there have always been the Ted Kennedy's of the world who live in an elite bubble making a separate peace with the great unwashed. The wheels are always coming off the The United States of America and the wheels are always being put back on - that's what makes the USA such a dynamic and powerful force in the world. There is a mysterious "it" or "things" in Noonan's commentary as in:

1. "things have broken down and can't be fixed"
2. "I'm not talking about 'Plamegate.' As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about 'Miers.' I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything."
3. "I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming."
4. "I have wondered if it hasn't all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible."
5. "Not all of course. There are a lot of people--I know them and so do you--trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives."

What is this "it"? What are these "things"? Well, they're everything and so I guess she's correct (in an unconscious way) - the world doesn't stand still and some things fall away while other things rise. But what's the problem with that? "Our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us." says Peggy Noonan.
She means people like herself, I suppose, or, God help us, Ted Kennedy should fix our many problems. Let me say a loud, no thanks - I would rather "go down with the ship" that live in Ted K's socialist lifeboat.