How To Create Illegitimacy

The START Treaty vote and the omnibus spending bill (hell, to a lesser extent even the tax cut bill, which I favor) currently progressing in the Senate are, frankly, the stuff that revoultions are made of. Or at the very least the stuff of endemic disobedience. Many citizens of certain South American countries don't pay their taxes because they don't view their governments as legitimate. After assessing the circumstances - a vote by a repudiated Congress on a massively inapproriate and profligate bill - how legitimate do you feel our government is? Given the polling results, not very. So let me ask you, do you want to send a few extra thousand dollars to Washington DC on the instructions of the 111th Congress? No you don't and pretty soon, if this doesn't change very soon, many of you won't comply with the dictates coming out of DC. And that is when it all falls apart - when the rot is too far along. If some time in the future, the United States of America as we know it looks significantly changed for the worse - lawless, bankrupt, and/or fraying - we'll look back on the 111th Congress as a visible marker along the way.