The ship of state, per Tom Knapp

Eminently quotable:

One can only hope...

The sound of adding machines chattering away in the Oval Office is the sound of empire in decline. The ship of the imperial state lacks fuel for its boiler and powder for its cannon … but its captain and crew dare not take it into port for maintenance. They’ve convinced themselves — and they may very well be right — that the barnacles infesting its hull are the only thing holding it together, and that it (and their jobs with it) will disintegrate if the fouling organisms are removed. And so they limp it along toward its next target, nursing as much mischief out of it as they can and hoping it holds together until they’re retired and it becomes someone else’s problem.

Read the whole thing over at c4ss.org.