We all remember these lines spoken by the President who had come to rescue the nation, though most of us were not born then and our parents not yet even 10 years old.

the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Read it again and again, though. Keep in mind that President Roosevelt is no longer among us and that he said all of this almost eighty years ago. Then, tell us where the "leadership of frankness and vigor" is going to come from in this "dark hour of our national life"? Do you see any signs of anything such as that? Look around you---think about what we have have talking about in just the last week---and tell us what signs you see of leadership of "frankness and vigor."

A guy shows how easy it is to drive a old vehicle into Times Square loaded with explosives which fortunately are not constructed well enough to actually cause damage. He is caught shortly thereafter and is identified as a person born in Pakistan. Hysteria breaks out not as to how to protect us from similar attacks, but whether the person arrested is entitled to be advised of his constitutional rights and whether doing so endangers our country, or whether we could take those rights away by expeditiously stripping him of his citizenship. Leadership? No. And the former Attorney General of Connecticut knows better.

A massive oil spill, from a destroyed well which cannot be capped unless Superman can be found, threatens a coast which has been repeatedly battered by hurricanes in recent years. The best newspaper in the country tells us not to worry so much about it, based, at least in part, on the views of an organization which, it turns out

receives some money from the oil industry and other business interests in the gulf, and includes industry executives on its board.

Oh. And at least two Governors, and one United States Senator (from Louisiana, for crying out loud), see the whole episode as crying out for more deep sea oil drilling.

Not that we have much choice, of course. A one quarter of a loaf piece of legislation aimed at taking the tiniest of baby steps to ward finding another way to heat our houses, and fuel our cars, seems to have run aground in what passes for the United States Congress as leaderless as ever.

These rants from this scared blogger are written in the state of New York, a place which has shown the path to the governmental dysfunction as well as anywhere else in the world. What we do here almost always migrates to the national government a few years later so you might want to pay attention to this little gem in our local newspaper.

It's about our Lieutenant Governor who, once upon a long time ago, helped rescue our largest city from financial ruin and now by the stangest of circumstances, finds himself as "second banana" to a Governor who makes the last one we had who managed to complete his term, a clueless fellow who saw his job as mainly to direct patronage to the right places, seem almost brilliant. Said Lieutenant Governor has noted that the state is about to go broke, that what is causing it to do so is going to get worse next year and what is said to be a Legislature has one ungovernable house and another one which believes that if they deny reality long enough, reality will change.

And he says:

We're not going to go back to where we were...The economic paradigm has fundamentally changed in New York and the United States. Our economy, in my opinion, has been receding for some time -- it was kept alive by the credit bubble, and when that exploded, it exposed the fact that the competition, particularly in Asia for manufacturing, has devastated our economy.

There's the frank leadership but it is whistling into the dark. When the federal government tried to help with "stimulus" which was only a fraction of what was needed, they were barely able to even get that passed by a surly Congress which is fighting the ideological battles of the 1920s fed by television executives who have replaced news reporting with championship wrestling: Edwin Newman morphed into Joe Pyne.

A leadership of frankness and vigor?

There is President Obama, to be sure. He is a brilliant man, quite aware of what faces us and what needs to be done. But he is not a magician or a dictator and the fact that his father was from Africa and a black man, has caused almost a third of the country to refuse to accept him as the lawfully elected president, while part of that group even questions his citizenship.

His predecessor from 1933, the greatest president there has ever been, was not a magician, either, though that may not be conclusively established. Even he, though, questioned whether our system was up to this shortly after talking about fear:

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

We need to hear this again. We need to see this again. Where are the adults?