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November 24, 2011 - November 17, 2011

Friday, March 04, 2011

TOLD YOU I'D BE BACK. One advantage of being older than most is that sometimes you can recognize a stretch of track you've had to run before. The question of who Obama is has finally been answered, and the news is not good. He's Jimmy Carter.

A small man with a big phony smile, textbook smarts, and not an ounce of common sense to ameliorate his arrogant presumption about being better than the nation he's supposed to lead. The result is depressingly the same. Economic stagflation, an entirely avoidable energy crisis, chaos in the middle east, catastrophic foreign policy weakness across the board, and a growing sense in the nation that America is both rudderless and in decline.

Those who are old enough to remember the bitter little cracker who occupied the White House from 1976 to 1980 also remember that the pundits started asking whether anyone could be a successful president, whether the job was just too big to be manageable. Of course, these kinds of doubts belong almost exclusively to liberals, progressives, Democrats. Because they think the president's job is to run everything. Carter certainly tried. He even personally micro-managed the schedule of the White House tennis court. Obama doesn't care about tennis, but I can't wait for his March Madness brackets...

The good news is that all this talk about American decline is tied pretty directly to what has transpired since Obama took office, which is to say that a weak, naive, self-absorbed president tends to sap the national spirit in a significant way. The antidote is simple: a good president. Which arrived promptly in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan.

The bad news is that so far, there's no Ronald Reagan on the horizon. Why conservatives are as depressed as everybody else this time around. We have a blizzard of candidates. But sadly they're all weak sisters in one way or another. It's the only issue of importance in the nation. Until November 2012, we're just taking our lumps, the inevitable fallout of a truly wretched president who is as indecisive and ignorant of his responsibilities as he is supremely confident of his superiority to the people, the democratic process, and the complexities of the globe.

So it's time to remember a few verities and engage in some rigorous analysis.

Verities. America is not in decline relative to the rest of the world. Yes, the world itself may be having to take a step back and re-assess its course, but Europe is in far worse shape than we are by every measure, China is dangerously over-extended (remember when Japan was going to own the world...?), Russia remains a gangster economy, the Middle East is a pitifully violent and incompetent disaster, and South America is lapsing into its old comedy shtick of banana republics and overdressed military dictators. America has a bad head cold. Everybody else is stricken with a life-threatening flu.

We still have the largest, most innovative and resilient economy in the world, the greatest military the world has ever seen, and a population that still -- despite all the malicious intentions of the progressives who would divide us into hostile, spiteful factions -- regards itself as American first and hyphenated second. No other country of such mixed racial, ethnic, and religious makeup can say that. Not one.

What distinguished Reagan was his optimism, even, especially, in the worst of times. That's the litmus test a conservative candidate must pass if we are to retire Obama and return to our national greatness. The mission is not to dream lesser dreams and make do with less. It's to remember the vision of a shining city on a hill and plot the most direct path to its attainment.

We have a lot of work to do.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

PNEUMONIA. I'll be posting again soon. Had a bad patch there. Couldn't breathe and couldn't sleep because I couldn't breathe.

So I've been sleeping a lot since. And breathing too. It puts things in perspective. I refuse to die before this assault on our country has been turned back. The thing that quelled my panic about not being able to draw a breath.

I thought, okay, you just get sick enough and then you die, but that's when Raebert crawled into my lap, lay on his back, and wrapped a paw gently around my neck. Not allowed to die.

So here I am. And thank all of you who expressed your concern. But Raebert weighs more than all the comments. A hundred pounds more.

I'll post tomorrow. Okay?

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