God Save The Queen (and God Help America)

The Queen of England . . . there's a future for her, and the royal family and the nation that she leads. 

We Americans and our British cousins can't get enough of the newborn prince, name to be determined.  He's a real bundle of joy, all right, and his parents, Prince William and his lovely wife Kate do make a charming couple.  Why, the future King William V was making fun of himself by joking how much more hair his son had than he did. Madness!  This is a couple who will one day represent the United Kingdom to the world, and Queen Elizabeth II, who has done a wonderful job of leading Britain through years of boom and bust, has reigned over every cultural shift from Beatlemania to punk, and has survived currency decimalization and a common European market, continues to set an example for the nation and makes the British people proud to be British.

And then, there's America.  Oh, no.  As the head of state as well as the head of the government, President Obama  is called upon to lead us silly Americans and represent us all over the world, but he's had trouble doing that, what with all of the right-wing Tea Party types calling his legitimacy and even his existence into question.  But even if none of that were an issue, he still has to run the government as much as lead the country, and that's a problem.  Our government sucks.  Just recently, the Republicans' Tea Party wing has called for getting rid of the health care law as a price to pay to avoid defaulting on the national debt.  They also want to stop spending money on all the other amenities that make a country worth living in.  In constitutional monarchies, where a prime minister serves with the king, queen or emperor, and in other republics, where a prime minster or chancellor serves with the president, the monarch or president leads the people while the prime minister or chancellor takes care of the nitty-gritty stuff.  But here, Obama, in addition to being the head of state, has to run the show on a quotidian basis and get his hands dirty in dealing with a Congress teeming with bad ideas.

Again, our government sucks. Britain's government also sucks.  But when David Cameron or a nutty member of Parliament screws up, it's no big deal, because the Brits still have the Queen.

All we have is the government.

This is so embarrassing . . ..