The Discerning Texan

It is not merely as bad as it seems--after reading 'A Fatal Trajectory' from the esteemed Thomas Sowell, I am now convinced that it is far worse!

For example:

.... It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender--and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb--dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles--might be enough to get us to surrender.

If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.

It doesn't matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians--at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies.

Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.

How did we get to this point? It was no single thing.

The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of "non-judgmental" affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.

The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind.

We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before in our history. The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington's army was totally immobilized by a vast impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape. That is how they ended up in Valley Forge.

In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did, at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet.

Over the years, we have had our share of miraculous deliverances. But that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair.

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson makes a good case that our collective plight is no mere coincidence (emphasis mine):

I don't understand why, after Obama's brilliant campaign, some are surprised about his conduct in office. From the Wall Street panic instilled by Obama's gloom and doom rhetoric and Europeanization proposals, to the sloppy nominations of serial tax dodgers, to the surprise that the Bush 'shred the Constitution' protocols — hope and change rhetoric aside — were mostly adopted by Obama, it is as if the professional on the campaign trail is mysteriously stumbling after assuming office.

Two observations: It is a lot easier to serially blame Bush than to conduct governance (raising taxes to new highs in recent memory while serially nominating to high office tax dodgers isn't wise); and, more importantly, the media simply were advocates rather than disinterested journalists. They did us all a disservice by not collating Obama's soaring rhetoric and metamorphoses against his actual record and past statements, giving a pass to a gaffe-prone Biden in a way not true of Palin, and thinking that trashing Bush was synonymous with offering a practical antithesis.

Even if such overt bias did not, in itself, affect the outcome of the election (and I think it did), it proved to be a terrible thing for both us and the future President, since we never really vetted our President. The media gave him the impression that in times of controversy that he can simply go back into campaign mode, do the town meeting thing, and once more hope-and-change his way out of answering tough questions and explaining ideas to those who are deeply skeptical of their utility. Unfortunately, the world's thugs abroad, markets, Wall Street, etc. don't care much for what the American media says, only what they think Obama is really trying to do or not to do.

I think we are going to see a gradual hangover among the journalists from their 2008 binge, followed by a sort of anger on the part of Team Obama that for the first time in its history their in-house media is not so mesmerized as in the past.

(Many well-paid elite journalists, after all, have lost another 10-20% of their portfolios since January 20, and in high-state-tax places like California and New York, along with federal tax rates returning to 39-40%, and FICA caps coming off higher incomes, will soon be looking at ca. 70% of their incomes going to new bites from federal, state, FICA, and Medicare taxes. Journalists can't go the Daschle/Geithner/Rangel route, but perhaps may not be content with the "patriotic" pats from the White House.)

This Obama/press break-up, like all infatuations gone bad, won't be pretty on either side. In the meantime the recepient dêmos seems as happy with Obama's new deal as markets are skittish.

Count me as one person who is not saddened that the serial destruction that the Democrats' cheerleaders in big media have wrought on our Republic is now coming back to haunt them; if ever there was evidence of "what goes around comes around"--big media's collapse would be a perfect ironical ending to years of their ever-intensifying treachery and propagandizing. I won't be losing any sleep over that one.

Speaking of treachery, did you see the story today on Drudge about Washington State sending out 250,000 separate ONE DOLLAR food stamps this week?? All courtesy of the gigantic blank stimulus checks that Obama's catastrophic pork monstrosity issued to irresponsible (i.e. mostly Democrat) State legislatures and Cities. Man, I cannot wait for that new Frisbee golf course in Austin: all $886,000 of it... Woo hoo!

A dollar in food stamps, 250K of them sent out, each with a .40 stamp--now that is "change" you can believe in: pocket change. When Obama ran on a platform of "Hope" at the time even I did not interpret that slogan to mean "Hope for a miracle..." Yet this realistically is where we find ourselves.

President Bush: would you consider an encore performance? If we apologized and begged?

So, yes--tonight I find myself looking for a parachute. But who knows; maybe Bobby Jindal can somehow make some lemonade out of all these lemons. Notwithstanding that in less than one month Mr. Obama has already left us one enormous pile of lemons. And that pile is growing at an unprecedented--unheard of--exponential rate, greater than any spender in all of Presidential history... in fact this one bill had enough pork to have funded the last eight years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then some.

What really sent me over the top was listening to Obama the other day talk about "cutting" this massive deficit he "inherited" (this means by raising your taxes)--in a speech where he used the word "crisis" some 46 times in less than 10 minutes.

The facts, naturally are a bit different: if you consider that Obama "inherited" a deficit of $740 billion from Bush, which in less than a month has grown to about 3 trillion (if you count the interest--otherwise it has only doubled in one month to a mere $1.2 trillion -- but with health care "reform" and bank bailouts still to come...). In all, our reality and humility-bereft orator-in-chief has truly done a remarkable job in making that "inheritance" explode...

Jesus was said to have taken a couple of loafs of bread and fed ten thousand people with it. Our current "messiah" seems to be going the other direction: he has taken a loaf of bread and reduced its long-term future value to about one ten-thousandth of what started with--in just 4 weeks! You can almost make book on it: every time he or Geithner open their mouth, the Dow drops another 500 points. The Dow has lost half of its value...since the election.

The markets don't listen to the preaching of the New York Times or MSNBC--they deal with the real world.

At the rate our country is disintegrating, I'll take Pharaoh over this "messiah".