Yep, still here

Just had to share this from commenter Thomas Cussons at CoffeeHouse, because it sums up my view of the Brown Ruiner more succinctly than I ever could, what with rage diluting my attempts at concision. (My emphasis.)

Brown as Shadow Chancellor was relentless in highlighting the Tories' economic failings. He managed, quite falsely of course but that was the mark of his then political effectiveness, to present the recession of the early 90s, in retrospect a mere blip, as an economic Hiroshima, a calamitous failure. In much the same way, from May 1997 he succeeded in making a supine press believe that he had inherited an economy on the point of meltdown.

In reality, the precise opposite was the case. Nonetheless, the myth of 'Britain's greatest-ever chancellor' was being assiduously spun.

Twelve years later, his true legacy is revealed: an economy castrated by a man in thrall to his own mysterious shortcomings, a man consumed by bitterness, eaten alive by a barely contained belief that the world has always conspired against his self-evident genius.

The question now is less how have we been reduced to this pitiful state, more why are Dave and his boys not making clear that we are ruled by a kind of psychopath.

Brown's legacy – economic meltdown, debt of unimaginable proportions, a vast underclass of benefit-dependent numbskulls, a grotesque expansion of government on all levels – is properly terrifying.

Why is this not being screamed about? Why have we not already taken to the streets?

Is despair the only rational reaction?

It increasingly feels like it.