The Sept. 30 newspaper column I submitted won't see print. My editor said it amounted to an endorsement of Mitt Romeny, and I guess it does, however tepidly. So now I have to come up with a replacement column.
In the meantime, the original piece has to be disseminated as widely as possible, so why not start here at LITD and then take it to the social networks?
Here's what I turned in last Friday:
You know what America’s situation is. You know its global-competitiveness ranking has slipped from first to seventh over the last four years. You know unemployment has been over 8 percent for 44 months. One in seven Americans is on food stamps. Standard and Poor and Egan-Jones have downgraded our creditworthiness, and Moody’s will probably do likewise.
While it’s time to consider how economic opportunity has dwindled and uncertainty has increased, that’s not all you need to consider. You see, it’s deliberate. America’s decline is on purpose.
The challenger for the position of U.S. president doesn’t seem inclined to make the ideological argument against his opponent, so I will do it for him. His opponent is the culmination of three waves of leftward shift of the party he leads. The first was the progressive wave of a century ago, guided by such figures as Herbert Croly, John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson. The second was the statist-yet-nationalist wave that lasted from the onset of the 1930s through 1968. Its political and intellectual leaders advocated pervasive government involvement in domestic economic matters, but were willing to face external security threats. The third wave has its roots in the moral-equivalency thinkers of the 1950s such as historian William Appleman Williams, who thought that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally to blame for tensions on the world stage. Williams’s disciples took to the streets in the 1960s, eventually bombing public buildings and making common cause with communists in Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere.
These radicals saw that their tactics did them no good in the 1968 election cycle, so they decided to work within the system. They finished law school, journalism school and divinity school, worked with labor unions, took control of the entertainment world and infiltrated the education world that had just spawned them.
The incumbent striving to keep his position as president was deeply involved in the web of socialist groups in Chicago in the 1990s. He was mentored by people who had begun their work as hands-on radicals in the revolutionary phase of the New Left. He clearly saw himself as countercultural and made sure no one could view him as a “sellout.”
He embraces an ideology that sees America and the West generally as fundamentally flawed, arrogant and in need of having their stature diminished. It sees what you and I call basic freedom as unfairness.
To try to explain why this current government is squeezing the oil and coal industries even as we learn we’re awash in both resources, even while it subsidizes non-viable energy sources, as anything other than orchestrated decline is futile. The same is true for its contempt for our culture’s Judeo-Christian foundation, as exemplified by a Health and Human Services Department that forces Catholic institutions to provide insurance coverage for the extermination of fetal Americans. That contempt is on full display in the open rift it has allowed to develop between the United States and the only Western democracy in the Middle East, Israel. It has utterly disregarded the urgency of Iran’s threat to annihilate Israel.
Of course, we just saw its priorities on full display in its insistence that a silly, obscure video was behind the torching of several Middle East embassies by a jihadist movement it had told us was dead. America suffered worldwide humiliation, and it concerned the overlords not a whit.
You are not going to see increased opportunity for yourself from this regime. You will see your freedom and wealth shrink further.
That’s the choice you are faced with. Certain grimness, or the possibility of revival. It’s up to you.
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