The need for leadership with class and honor to match their hubris has been in existence for a long time. At the current moment, as has happened many times in the past, the quality of leadership- from Wilson to Grayson, and Beck to Olbermann, vapid partisan noisemaking appears as virulent and infectious as the Swine Flu.

It is always difficult to not panic and declare the end of journalism, the fall of American Democracy, the coming apocalypse in 2012, or what have you. There have been questions about the virility of the American Dollar before. Similarly, as President Obama has pointed out, FDR faced much of the same rhetoric 70 years ago about health care in America.

What is needed is more leadership like that of President Obama, of Senator John McCain. And Ms Noonan is right, elders are needed to set the standards and hand down the lore.

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
-Shakespeare, Ceasar III, II