There are two types of hereditary aristocracy.  One has a sense of noblesse oblige (i.e., it maintains its privileges by serving the people), and the other is parasitical, superficial, and disgusting.  Our current federal politicians act like the second type.  Exhibit A for the fact our political class needs to be voted out is the writhingly bad performances from Biden and Pelosi at the annual St. Patrick's Day lunch, along with a celebratory spirit at odds with America's slow, seemingly inexorable collapse.

The event was the annual Friends of Ireland St. Patrick's Day luncheon in the Capitol.  According to Wikipedia, the original purpose of the bipartisan event, which Ted Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan, and Tip O'Neill inaugurated in 1981, was to support peace in Northern Ireland.  It's attended by the president, the vice president, the speaker, the Irish prime minister, and other officials.  I gather that, nowadays, it's just a nice party.

There's nothing wrong with a nice party, but this year's event had the feeling of a nice party in the closing days of Rome, when the political leaders were mad and bad, and their ostentation contrasted badly with the austerity the incompetent political class had imposed upon the beleaguered Roman people.

The two elements of the party that made for the most startling headlines were the performances from Biden and Pelosi.  Biden's remarks were offensive and impolitic at so many levels that it was, really...a typical Biden performance.  He opened by insulting both the Irish and Italian people, implying that the first are stupid and the second are dangerous:

I — well, I just want you to know, I may be Irish, but I'm not stupid.  I married Dominic Giacoppa's daughter.

The irony is that Joe has shown throughout his career that he is stupid.  As Robert Gates famously said, "I think [Biden has] been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."  True.

Image: Nancy Pelosi.  YouTube screen grab.

Where Gates erred was in saying Biden is "a man of integrity."  The Hunter Biden laptop — a laptop the New York Times has finally conceded is legitimate — revealed the one area in which Biden shows real talent: he is a criminal savant who has used his position in American politics to sell out American interests for his own financial enrichment.

But back to foreign policy, where Biden seems intent upon inciting a completely unnecessary war against a nuclear nation.  Thus, Biden used the occasion of the luncheon to lob the kind of immature insults at Putin that would be embarrassing in a high school cafeteria:

But my generic point is that, you know, now you have Ireland and Great Britain, and, you know, the Republic standing together against a murderous dictator, a pure thug, who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.

I'm not quarreling with Biden's description of Putin, who is a very bad man.  I am quarreling with this kind of locker-room insult from a president who, along with his party, is seemingly determined to pitch America into World War III.

The high school feeling was also apparent when Nancy Pelosi, her voice quavering uncontrollably, read aloud a poem from Bono (of U2) celebrating Ukraine president Zelensky as a new saint.  This is the type of poem that would have been a standout in the remedial 9th-grade English class of a failing public high school:

While all this was going on, as you can see if you continue with the video after Pelosi's recital, congresspeople not only dined in style in a beautiful, paneled chamber, but were entertained by the Riverdance crew.

In prosperous times brought about by wise hands at the helm, this display would have been unexceptional.  However, our political class has wrought havoc on America.  Our southern border is gone, so that unknown millions pour across it, bringing with them escalating crime, Mexican cartels, human-trafficking, disease, and poverty.

Our international prestige is gone, thanks to Biden's execrable decisions about the Afghanistan withdrawal and his embarrassing performances on the world stage, including groveling after our enemies (e.g., the Iran agreement) and alienating our friends.

At home, the inflation arising from Biden's decimating our energy sector and printing money like mad is destroying what little money people have left after two years of Fauci's COVID policies.  The Democrat party's criminal justice meddling has turned Democrat cities into hellholes of crime and poverty.  D.C.'s streets are walled off because our governing class is afraid of the people, and those who dared walk in Congress's halls rot in jail without trial or bail.

The American Rome is burning, and our Nero class is fiddling away madly. But we're still a democratic republic.  If you don't like what's happening, it is your responsibility to fight through the ballot box whenever you can.  Throw out the Democrats and the RINOs, and elect true constitutional conservatives who can end the moral and financial corruption that characterizes our capital city in 2022.