- The American government has come to resemble the characters
in The Wizard of Oz. We have the Cowardly Congress, a president without
a brain, and a foreign-policy establishment without a heart.
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- Our politicians are still trying to play the empire game
long after the age of empires has ended. Blinded by arrogance, they cannot
see that with every passing day, the world needs us less and less and hates
us more and more. We are passing through that phase when the grandeur of
the empire exists only in the minds of politicians who have insulated themselves
from reality.
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- A friend of mine, a classical scholar, sometimes tells
his students, "No one woke up one morning in 476 A.D. and said, 'Gee,
I'm in the Dark Ages.'" The transition from the heyday of Roman power
to a stage of barbarism was a gradual process. We are in a process of change.
No one is going to announce on TV that the U.S. is no longer a superpower.
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- Nevertheless, the signs are there if you look for them.
A nation that was able to help crush the Axis powers in three and a half
years hasn't won a war since then. We have had four years of struggling
with an insurgency in a small, poor and broken country. Our economy is
shaky under mountains of debt. Half of our people make less than 42,000
inflated dollars a year.
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- Where we were once the arsenal of democracy, today there
is hardly a major weapons system that doesn't rely on imports of one kind
or another. Much of the industry that is left is foreign-owned. Japan,
which once lay prostrate, dominates the American car market. It is extremely
difficult to find anything today that is not made in China or some other
cheap-labor country.
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- In the meantime, the cowardly Congress doesn't have the
guts to tackle any of the major problems confronting the American people.
Our president continues to embarrass us practically every time he opens
his mouth in public. The foreign-policy establishment is riddled with aging
draft dodgers agitating for more wars against small countries, of
course.
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- True, we still have lots of nuclear weapons, but do you
think any American president would want to get into a nuclear shooting
match with China or Russia? Look at how we reacted to two airplanes crashing
into two office buildings. What do you think we would do if San Diego,
Los Angeles and San Francisco became radioactive ruins with millions of
casualties? We are not prepared mentally, spiritually or materially to
deal with a nuclear war.
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- We are like all empires in their final stages. We have
grown soft. We like our comforts. We don't wish to be inconvenienced. We
like poor Mexicans to do our stoop work and poor Americans to do our fighting,
provided they do it far away so we won't be disturbed by explosions and
screams. We enjoy our decadence, and there are always people in the media
who can rationalize anything, no matter how sick and revolting it is.
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- As for trying to understand the world, we are just too
busy being amused and following the adventures of Britney Spears and other
celebrities. We like to let the TV and the politicians do our thinking
for us. It saves energy. They tell us whom to hate.
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- The only way to avoid a bad end is to find some realists
and put them in public office. We need a brave Congress, not a pack of
cowards. We desperately need a president with a brain. We need to retire
the warmongers in the foreign-policy establishment. Otherwise, we will
join the other third-rate countries, once empires, on history's discard
pile.
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- _____
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- Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.
- © 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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