happens in the sausage factory that lies within the Beltway, where principles go the way of wind-swept dandelion seeds faster than Ted Kennedy used to down his first shot of scotch in the morning. We need to see what resolve actually coalesces in light of the Simpson-Bowles enshrinement of Big Government in the guise of restraint -- not to mention the creeping fiscal gangrene that led to Simpson-Bowles: The health care debacle, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, subsidies, crony capitalism, the debasement of our currency, the dismantling of our sovereignty, and, beyond that, our increasing obeisance to the UN, and on and on and on. Forget for a moment the simple matter of inertia: That Big Government is now a runaway juggernaut that cannot be stopped. My true skepticism lies in the cultural weather: The winds of the zeitgeist blow ever more insistently leftward - and our feckless political class invariably follows. It is our culture that is diseased; the political rot is merely a symptom. Every level of our educational system, from preschool through PhD, along with virtually every permutation of our mass media, local, state and federal government in general, along with the long-since corrupted scientific "community," remain firmly committed to indoctrination, ensconced as they are in the gossamer cocoon of "wouldn't it be pretty to think so," the liberal's raison d'tre. Our culture is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a false collective consciousness. Overused totemic words like "sustainable" and "diversity" and "tolerance" and "justice" (be it social,