“ Mr. Obama looked to be the man-on-a-white-horse — on the exhaustion of Reagan-Bush Jesus-Republicanism — but he’s coming off more like Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe Joseph d’Orléans, duc d’Orléans) in 1793, with perhaps Newt Gingrich waiting offstage to become Robespierre in 2012 — and some obscure US Army captain now toiling in Kirkuk slated to become the American Napoleon of 2015. As you’ve surely heard a thousand times now, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. The enormities of Wall Street today are a little like those of the French Ancien Régime at Versailles.
