No, really:

Somebody wants/needs something (they’re both the same), give it to him. Americans, goobers that they’re taken for, are supposed to buy into this idea if they want to be among the select — the smart elites hunkered down inWashington, D.C., Manhattan and other learned enclaves.

Are we seriously still on the decadent enclaves on the coast? Seriously? It’s been 10 years, we’re still on this? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, I mean, parts of this country we’re still on the Civil War and before anybody accuses me of South-bashing I’m talking about a neighborhood I could hit with a rock from here. But … how long is this going to go on? I’m asking so that I can take a nice long nap. I got up at 5 this morning. I’d rather come back when the meeting’s actually getting started.

Also, “learned enclaves?” I went to state school in the Midwest and was a flaming liberal long before I got there, so kiss my hick ass, you blowhole. New York ain’t the only place folks go to college.

Instead of focusing on the reality of what’s happening across America, they divert themselves by trying to rip apart the tea party. Let them. What’s happening is bigger than the tea party or anyone who is putting it to use for his own ends. The tea party is but one manifestation of a larger phenomenon, and I don’t have a name for it.

Perhaps it’s a belief that even if the party in power claims to have a voter mandate, it still should not and cannot govern outside the boundaries of common sense. (It’s a lessonRepublicans should heed if they win big in November.) Americans have seen their own lives diminished, even crippled. But while they’ve suffered or lost jobs, they’ve witnessed government bureaucracy and jobs grow. While they can’t get a home, car or business loan, government — federal, state and local — borrows unfathomable amounts that can’t be covered in 100 years. While they see their own retirement prospects dry up, they witness public “servants” reaping pensions of bank-robbery proportions.

Don’t bother continuing to read the column for any evidence, whatsoever, of this increase in government bureaucracy. I’m not saying you couldn’t find some if YOU went out and looked, but clearly Byrne didn’t. This is what happens when you freebase after reading Dennis MIller’s later work.

Or his early work, come to think of it.

I am about done with comfortably situated loudmouths like this talking smack about the few people in America who’ve managed to hang on to the pension that used to be considered the due of hardworking men and women. Teachers, bus drivers, janitorial staff, all these people get ridiculed for still belonging to unions that have some power and are willing to fight to keep it. We say, “I don’t get a pension, so why should you have one?” instead of, “You get a pension, so why don’t I have one?” A pension used to be a middle-class reward for having destroyed your knees on a dock, your eardrums and hands on a factory line, your health in the classroom teaching the feral dingos spawned by your neighbors. It used to be an expectation.

Now it’s an unconscionable intrusion on Byrne’s right to be rich, and it’s bumming him out.

Democrats have coined what they believe is a nifty campaign slogan to describe the opposition: “the party of no.”

No ideas, no platform, no positive affirmations, no help for the tired, poor and huddled masses. No agenda for what they would do when they take over Congress (if they should be so lucky). Witless rabble, far outside the mainstream, who have no solutions, only “no-we-can’ts.”

And every time Democrats take that attitude, the company of angry Americans grows larger.

So what Democrats ought to do is … stop pointing out that Republicans suck? I don’t understand the course of action being recommended here. They ought to pay attention to the fact that people are pissed about stuff? Erm, okay. But if they’re supposed to be paying attention to how Democrats don’t respect anger over raising taxes that haven’t gone up and expanding government that hasn’t expanded and the growth of a deficit that isn’t going to bother them one bit in a million years, I gotta say, I think discussing whither the Tea Party is a much more productive use of their waking hours.

By which I mean about as productive as screwing a porcupine senseless. Which would be a step and a half over how most Democrats today spend their time.

A.