The "tragic decadence of American liberty."

Our title is from Mr. J.R. Nyquist who writes about some unpleasant truths about the U.S. We've quoted briefly from his article and expand on it now.

We have remarked on this blog about America's penchant for combating fleas instead of doing something about the dogs they come from. Mr. Nyquist focuses even higher than we have. We've advocated going after Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Mr. Nyquist says the real sources of our difficulties are much, much more dangerous and that as a society we are operating without basic knowledge of this fact.

Addicted to a devil theory, the totalitarian regime always demonizes and dehumanizes its intended victims (directly or subtly). Hitler did this to the Jews, blaming them for World War II. The communist bloc demonized American capitalism for wrecking and undermining the workers’ paradise. The totalitarian regimes of the Muslim world, taking Hitler and the communist bloc as models to be emulated, currently blame both the Jews and American capitalism for their problems. Every totalitarian system justifies its crimes and denounces its victims according to a delusional system of thought. Every totalitarian regime is determined to spread its delusional system as if it were a contagious disease – easily caught and transmitted by the stupid, the ignorant and the thoughtless.

In the West, the party of appeasement doesn’t like to admit that certain regimes are totalitarian. . . .

* * * *

. . . [T]he main enemy of the United States isn’t headquartered in Tehran or Pyongyang.

It is a soothing mythology to imagine that one’s enemies are small and stupid. . . .

. . . The truth be told, the United States has become a hollowed-out, ill-disciplined country headed for financial, diplomatic and military ruination.

* * * *

The United States has been undermined from within. Its educational system is anti-patriotic. Its media elite is oriented toward consumer products and entertainment.

One of the great literary images of the Cold War era was in Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22. The hero Yosarian is in Italy and witnesses a GI throw another GI out the window killing him. The MPs race up the steps, burst into the room, and declare to Yosarian, "You're AWOL!!!"

We appear to be like those MPs: vigorous, able, aggressive, faithful in the performance of their duties, and . . . completely clueless when it comes to gradation of threat.

Mr. Heller's scene is surreal but so is the current political climate.

John Kennedy probably inflated the "Missile Gap" in the course of his campaign for the presidency for his personal benefit. Yet you will search far and wide for any subsequent condemnation of this that bears any kind of a resemblance to the outpouring of vitriol that has occurred around the issue of Mr. Bush and the issue of pre-war WMDs in Iraq.

The least hesitation on the part of any intelligence agency analyst or other official on this issue becomes an unimpeachable source on the order of video of a mugger at the ATM machine with a victim's debit card.

And good luck finding any recognition of the possibility of ton after ton of suspect materials' being taken to Syria (with Russian help) before the eventual U.S. takeover.

The Democrat strategy has been to beat this dead horse and pile on with an intergalactic inflation of the so-called Plame outing. Both work toward the generation of an obscuring political dust cloud. It's like the eventual transformation of our sun. It will expand from a white dward into a giant red fur ball consuming the closer plants of the solar system, ours included.

This . . . while we are faced with a vastly changed international system in which we are busily engaged in:

• funneling huge amounts of petrodollars to regimes that are even more backward even than Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson (widely regarded by liberals as lacking opposing thumbs and possessing prehensile tails),


• funneling huge amounts of other dollars to the one remaining communist giant (a for-damn-sure future strategic competitor), and


• trying (and failing) to get some kind of a handle on just what the worldwide Islamic threat is and how to deal with it.

In the U.S., it's common sense that's AWOL. We're not a nation that values liberty. What we value is the calming apparition of Nebraska niceness installed in Peshawar, Qom, Mecca, Darfur, Beijing, Moscow, W. Timor, and like places.

"The Fatal Befuddlement." By J.R. Nyquist, Financial Sense Online, 7/14/06