Rag doll leaders and the missing sense of urgency.

There is about American leaders these days the quality of the rag doll. They simply cannot be made to stand up. And the hand of a sovereign people simply isn't there to hold them up.

Islam is – beyond a shadow of a doubt – a malign doctrine that maintains itself by the threat of death to . . . well, practically everybody. Western governments one and all cower at the threat of on-demand coordinated worldwide riot, murder, and mayhem. Yet our leaders continue without the least acknowledgement of the appalling record of slaughter, subjugation, theocracy, and down-to-the-bone backwardness that is Islam, jot and tittle.

Rush Limbaugh was talking today about the puzzling inaction on the part of virtually the entire leadership and opinion class of America to do something about energy supplies – other than just sitting there, or holding hearings on oil company responsibility for high oil prices.

Day after day the picture of an economy dangerously dependent on malevolent foreigners becomes clearer and clearer but never is there action. No new refineries built for 30 years? Nothing. No nuclear power plants in 30 what years? The same. Chinese oil drilling right off our shores? Not us!

On another issue of sovereignty, consider that 20-25 million illegal immigrants have entered the country in the last 25 years placing immense burdens on U.S. health care and criminal justice systems, claiming huge amounts of public benefits, and ensuring that the culture of the land will be forever changed and diluted.

Reaction?

As Baron Bodissey elsewhere puts it:

[Crickets chirping.]

In the latter case, the leadership class yearns to go beyond inaction straight to excusing the illegal entry and adulation of the foreigner, of the invader. Poor Manuel! See how hard he works. What is mere "citizenship" in the global economy? Let it be his for the asking.

In all these cases there is the complete lack of any hint, any glint, the slightest tremor of the spirit of our ancestors that was distilled in the slogan on that early ensign of ours, "Don't Tread on Me."

No. There is none of that prickliness, that thoumos, if I have that term right. Rather, it's "Oh pardon me your Camelic Excellence."

No spine. No urgency. No anger that persists longer than a long weekend.

Diana West describes this in an excellent post:

Americans in 1940 widely shared Gusto Nash's [Claudette Colbert's movie character] loathing for Hitler's totalitarian message [expressed in her throwing "Mein Kampf" out the train window]. In 2008, the superiors of the soldier in question [who used the Koran for target practice in Iraq], right on up the chain of command to commander-in-chief George W. Bush, only express their respect for, and, in a very frightening way, submission to the Koran despite its totalitarian message . . . .

* * * *
. . . Would Gen. George S. Patton have kissed a new copy of the Nazi bible as he presented it to a cadre of former Nazis? . . . [T]he anti-Semitism and imperialistic supremacism contained within "Mein Kampf" were recognized and treated as an existential threat to the rest of the Western world. In the so-called war on terror, however, our primary strategy is directed at masking or ignoring the overall anti-infidelism and imperialistic supremacism contained within the Koran.

It's difficult to have any confidence in the priorities of the present political leadership. Remote and unproven though anthropogenic global warming may be, it is the major burning passion of many of our leaders. In descending crisis order, they also appear to be in a frenzy over polar bear extinction, caribou habitat disruption, slavery reparations, Western cultural hegemony, being without hope, the engulfment of earth when the sun becomes a red giant, and the now certain collision of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies.

Serious near-term threats don't seem to excite anyone overly much.

Which is a puzzle. A retail establishment wouldn't thinking of leaving its doors open for years at a time without clerks and a manager to mind the store. In matters political, however, that seems to be the only approach any leader with a Harvard degree or less will seriously consider.

"Sniper shooting Koran hardly 'criminal behavior'." By Diana West, 5/23/08.

H/t: Baron Bodissey, "Gates of Vienna."