Bent Notes

That’s the only characterization I can come up with for the current dance going on amongst Congress, Chrysler, Ford and GM.

This is changing the character and spirit of America.

Before the late 1890s, there were no automobiles in America. No one was making them.  No one was buying or owning them.   A few people in that era did indeed make some and asked themselves pretty quickly that initial inventive burst, “Now, what’s the model for doing this on a large scale and getting lots of these into the hands of lots of people?”  The necessary array of players, from investors to designers to engineers to line workers to sales people, was put together.  The automobile became such an ingrained element of the nation’s life that somewhere along the line we, at least subconsciously, came to have the term “indispensible” at the ready to describe the product’s role in the great scheme of things.  The companies that prevail after a century-long shakeout of the industry are deemed “too big to fail.”

Now we have their CEOs descending on Capitol Hill on a twice-weekly basis, begging and puking all over themselves with ever-more frantically cobbled together proposals for not only getting their financial and organizational houses in order, but also complying with petroleum-based fule effeciency standards as well as coming online with all manner of “hybrid” vehicles, so as to appease the green appetite of the totalitarian leviathan. 

The FHer overlords lean back in their chairs, stroke their chins and try to fully let in the magnitude of their power.  They are in a position to force mergers, dictate product lines, decide the destinies of executives and shop-floor participants alike.

I’m reminded of something financially focused talk show host Dave Ramsey hammers home whenever he gets the chance:  If you beg for a loan out of desperation, you have essentially become a slave of your lender.

This is the current state of the American automotive industry.  Not only is it saying, “We’ll submit to a socialist arrangement if we have to.  Just please, please rescue us.”  It is also serving as a role model.  The message going forth is “entrepereneurial zeal and that combination of creativity, courage and energy that fueled our success are no longer the way to improve human life.”

And it’s costing us, big-time.  We’ve all seen the newspaper stories about how many skyscrapers you could build for $700 billion.  We’re shoveling our dwindling supply of hard-earned dollars into a madly symbiotic dance between a delusionarily utopian vision of what is valuable and important to do on the one hand and a cowering, hopeless industrial sector on the other.  

And meanwhile the global jihad directed at us rages on.

I’ve seen some wacky stuff in my half-century-plus, but this breaks all records. 

As if you needed any more challenges to your resolve to remain robustly sunny and possibility-oriented, here comes a report from a bipartisan commission that says you can pretty much count on a nuke or biochemical attack by 2013.

eharmonycom settles a lawsuit by agreeing to post homosexual profiles.

So much for free markets, respect for individuals’ moral codes, the definition of family that served humankind quite well for 10.000 years and still serves all other species well, and sanity generally.

You have to ask yourself why the person bringing the lawsuit didn’t take the entrepreneurial route and set up a matchmaking site for those who see things his way.

Freedom is dying before our eyes without so much as a whimper.

It’s 9:50.  The Chicago Marxist has 200 electoral votes.  I don’t have much to say.

I know I won’t watch any Grant Park Triumph-of-the-Will gloatfest.

This was such a glorious country.  We showed the world so much about freedom and possibility and dignity and how to create prosperity.

I think I’m going to go to bed.

It’s early afternoon.  There’s still this resolve to see things optimistically on the part of my people, both personal friends with whom I’m in touch as well as the boggers I’m reading and the talk-radio hosts I’m listening to.

The situation in Philadelphia - Black Panthers blocking a polling place - is getting a lot of attention right now.

Part of me is emotionally exhausted and part of me is on fire.  It’s weird to be host creature to both states simultaneously.

I only knew one person in the line at my polling place, an artist buddy of mine whom I know to be a consistent FHer voter.  It was so weird to make small talk with him about what’s going on around town musically, and then watch him get behind the machine, knowing full well what he was doing, what buttons he was pushing.

At the risk of sounding like some therapist’s patient, I am wondering what I do with this thought I harbor whenever I come in contact with someone who I know full well voted the FHer ticket.  There’s a lot of someones in that category - social friends, professional associates, relatives.  The inescapable fact is that there is some level on which they are the enemy.  These are people who have taken a concrete action which jeopardizes my freedom and my future.  So, as I say, wht do I do?  I can’t jettison the lot of them and re-people my life. Plus, most of them are nice, even wonderful, if horrifyingly misguided, folks.

I know one thing.  Whether Mr. Reasonable Gentleman can squeak through, or whether the Chicago Marxist emerges victorious, there must be a from-the-ground-up reassessment of how to get conservatism to flourish again.

The first principle by which we must be guided is zero tolerance for anything less than total clarity. No McCain-esque distractions and vacuous platitudes about “fighting the status quo in Washington” or “fighting for what’s right for America” or “putting country first.”  Such crap means nothing.  An FHer could utter the same phrases.  Indeed, the Chicago Marxist does employ very similar rhetoric.  No, what we talk about are the specific principles for which we’re willing to fight to the death: the original intent of the Constitution’s framers, free-market economics, American exceptionalism, an America that does not hesitate to respond fiercely and ruthlessly to its enemies’ provocations, and America that demonstrates unwavering loyalty to nations that share these principles, the primacy of family as the basic unit of human organization, and a culture characterized by dignity, depth, decency and real inspiration.

We must expect loud arguments amongst ourselves, finger-pointing and bitterness.  Obviously, the wheels came off our movement and we must find out why.  This is why we’d all be well-advised to enter into this foundational examination with as much prayerfulness and mindfulness of our common aims as possible.  Eventually, the the useless sand of confusion will get sifted out and the nuggets of what we were seeking will be all that remains on the fine-mesh screen.

I look back at this year - my personal successes, some episodes of illness in our household and family, memorable times with friends, the spring’s tornadoes and floods, the spike in gas prices, the financial meltdown, the embrace by a frighteningly large segment of the population of socialism - and ask myself what it all has taught me.  I’d say that the biggest lesson at this point is that, in human life, the visceral and the spiritual are inextricably intertwined.  In fact, I’m sort of considering the possibility that the more one progresses on the spiritual journey, the more reality’s upside-the-head aspect becomes impossible to avoid.

While world markets crash and burn and America’s enemies continue to work their machinations, Bareny Frank says he’d gut the military budget by 25 percent, ladle out another Santa Claus-style stimulus, and of course, increase taxes on “the rich.”

And he gets an award from some “affordable housing” outfit.

Remember, this guy’s homosexual lover was a bigwig at Fannie Mae when the wheels started to come off.

Can the madness be stopped?

Since my conversion to conservatism happened over twenty years ago, I’ve had plenty of election cycles to learn how to process all the feelings I have about knowing how most of my friends and professional associates are going to vote.  It’s not been easy, and when I thought the situation warranted it, I’d speak up - come out, so to speak.  And, of course, there were ongoing policy schisms even between elections.  People at a Unitarian-Universalist “fellowship” in which I once was active still recall the day I stormed out of a service over the minister’s use of his sermon to bash Reagan’s Central America policy.  During my stint as board chair of the Indiana Council on World Affairs, I wasn’t always completely successful about biting my tongue.

Several factors, some obvious and noted elsewhere, make this campaign season different.  I wouldn’t be the first to point out the fact that this year’s FHer presidential candidate is far to the left of anyone that party has ever fielded, including McGovern and Carter.  There’s the unavoidable hooplah about his race, and there’s his perfect suitability for rock-star status, and the MSM euphoria about that.

The perfect-storm quality of the scenario shaping up this fall, though, stems from the combination of the above factors with the inevitability of larger FHer majorities in both houses of Congress than were established in 2006.  Harry “This war is lost” Reid, Nancy “There’s-been-Catholic-debate-about-when-life-begins-going-back-to-the-third-century” Pelosi and Barack Chicago-Annenberg-Challenge-ACORN-Rashid-Khalidi-corporate-tax-hikes-talk-to-Ahmadinejad-federal-judges-who-decide-based-on-how-beleagured-groups-in-society-feel-citizen-of-the-world-who-will-stop-the-rising-of-the-seas Obama will form a triumvirate, a triumvirate that, unlike the ideologically muddled George Bush or John McCain, will have a keenly precise vision of the direction in which they want to take this country.  When they sit down and roll up their sleeves and say, “Let’s get to work,” horrifying things are going to happen quickly in the United States of America.

I guess I’m saying that, as I would look at friends’ yard signs, bumper stickers or lapel buttons in election seasons past and shake my head or, in rare, generally carefully chosen situations, start something, even in my rage and frustration and sadness, I was bolstered by a backdrop of confidence that in a big, free, prosperous, rambunctious country like ours, any damage caused by the reification of their vision could eventually be undone.  After all, I’d seen the startling change from the Jimmuh years to the Dutch years.

What the nice folks down the block, the folks I serve on boards and committees with, teach with, get gigs and writing assignments from, order crab cakes and wine from, party with are lining up with this year is the permanent alteration of this country’s basic character.  What they’re signing onto is the curtailing of my freedom.  What they are casting their lot with is the tipping of this economic downturn toward deep and long recession.  They are, as Joe Biden said in a moment of indulging that goofy candor of his, ensuring a grave threat to the United States and a weak U.S. response to it.

They are just fellow citizens, fun, interesting people, people with car payments and/or kids in college and/or exciting career opportunities and/or interesting hobbies, just my buds and neighbors and colleagues.  But they are about to deliver me, themselves and a civilization that has led the way in bettering the world for thousands of years into a darkness they haven’t stopped to consider.

Bill Ayers on how to deal with comrades for whom re-education didn’t take.

It’s a marvelous autumn Sunday morning - colors nearly at their peak. I’ve had a great weekend so far.  Great gig Friday night with Carolyn, my violinist collaborator.  We added some new tunes, got lots of positive response from the crowd.  did a great radio show Saturday morning.  Took Mrs. BN to the airport yesterday afternoon, then went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art for a while, then went downtown in Indy for some beers and wings.

It’s just noon and I’ve already written in my journal, gone to the gym (chest, arms and cardio) and church, and now I have some Sunday-dinner chicken in the oven.

I must be pretty good at compartmentalizing, because I am grateful for and gratified by all these things, but I also still feel that undercurrent of nausea and doom I’ve mentioned in some recent posts.

At the gym, I caught a bit of McCain’s appearance on Chris Wallace’s show on Fox News.  The dread I felt duting the primaries is back full force.  This guy is beyond lame.  In a response to Chris’s question about whether he has become too focused on attacking THe Chicago Marxist for the Ayers connection, he drools the same lame, meaningless, harmful sputum about “reaching across the aisle,” “Americans hurting,” and “getting the economy back on track.” Nothing about how The Chicago Marxist’s tax policy, financial-meltdown policy, energy policy and health-care policy are completely to be expected given that his views were shaped by the likes of Ayers, Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals” and Democrat immersion in general.  No a word.

Then there’s the fairly-official leaking of probable cabinet choices, basically the same lineup Bob Beckel predicted and to which I linked a few posts ago.  A Who’s Who of defeat and socialism.

Then there’s the Colin Powell endorsement.  Of course, we always knew he was from the same mush-head wing of the GOP that gave us W and McCain, the wing utterly lacking in any kind of consistent worldview or set of core principles.  Nice people with good hearts all, but, and I mean this will the utmost seriousness, ultimately intellectual lightweights.  Hell, Powell comes right out and says that more conservative appointments to the Supreme Cout would bother him.

As I say, I must be good at compartmentalizing.  Or maybe I’m just savoring these final days of the normal, free, prosperous American life I’ve experienced for fifty-three years.  My fridge is full, as is my inbox for writing assignments.  Some good gigs on the calendar.  Time to savor the moment.  A year from now - no, I can’t go there.  Not on this gorgeous Sunday.  I just can’t.

During the primary season, when it looked increasingly likely that John McCain would be the GOP nominee, it was hard not to despair.  Except for the never-in-the-running Ron Paul, none of the candidates was further away from a consistent and robust conservative vision.  Where is a succinct defense of human freedom, American exceptionalism and common sense going to come from, we howled into the darkness.

Once he was nominated, things didn’t improve until that late Friday morning in Dayton when Barracuda made her national debut.

She was, and remains, a repository for our principles, values and passions, but it quickly became clear that her persona was too fraught with particulars for the focus on her to remain on the level of ideas.

I’ve - and I know I speak for millions of us - have been walking around in a state of combined numbness and nausea for the last few weeks as McCain has proceeded true to form.  Lame debate performances, poisonously harmful crud about how “you wouldn’t have to be afraid of an Obama presidency,” a muddied message on the roots of the current economic mess.  When I could muster up enough hope to pray, it would be for some vessel from which to dispense the conservative message with unmistakable and instantly appealing clarity to any and all Americans still capable of actual thought and mature reasoning.

He came along this week.  It started with his question to The Chicago Marxist about raising taxes, which pointed up in less than fifty words the naked socialism of what TCM’splan is about more forcefully than all the blog posts devoted to the subject here and at hundreds of other freedom-loving sites.  Then came his round of appearances on various MSM outlets yesterday in which he got the chance to share his - our - views on a few other subjects, such as immigration.

Then this morning came Biden’s inevitable attack.  What’s the applicable word here?  Arrogance doesn’t do it justice, nor does hubris.  What’s the proper way to characterize the mockery of someone who stands up for the right to keep his own hard-earned money rather than turn it over to the government for the furthering of totalitarianism?

We know just enough about Joe.  He’s healthy fit, smart, articulate, good at what he does, and ambitious.  If ever there was a public figure, which he now is, about whom family arrangements, tastes in food sports or music, mode of transportation, or even level of formal education was not relevant to the thunderous undeniability of what he said that made him famous, it’s Joe the Plumber.

He wants the America we’ve had for 230 years, not a socialist dictatorship.

Again, a figure perfectly suited to populist rallying has emerged to give John McCain yet one more shot at, as Rush puts it, “being dragged over the finish line.”

That these out-of-nowhere lifelines keep appearing despite McCain’s indifference to the only vision that can prevent the end of the American experiment I take as evidence of a God who is indeed on our side.

1994, Citibank.

Have you noticed the meme being puked on command by the Chicago Marxist’s camp all day today whenever asked about the Ayers connection?  It’s instantly “I think the American people want to talk about the big issues, whether they’ll be able to keep their jobs and houses and retirement accounts.”

Th paraphrase the Chicago Marxist, a leader must be able to focus on a few things at a time.  We can examine his freedom-hating career and life and still obliterate his freedom-hating position on what to do about our current economic situation.

He was buds with Ayers and knew about his past. 

There, that one’s dealt with. 

 His tax hikes on capital gains, corporate earnings and inheritance - and let’s not forget the incomes of people making over $250,000 - would be disastrous. 

And the economic front involves his connections as well.  Frankin Raines, Jim Johnson, ACORN’s bank fairs that were staged to intimidate lending institutions to grant mortgages to unqualified borrowers.

There, that one’s dealt with.

At least here.  Let’s just hope The Maverick gets both messages across this evening.  

 The only real problem for me, and all my homies here at BN, being that our freedom, and this Western civilization that has made our lives so liveable, goes down the tubes if you don’t get a clue, and pronto.

 This s— of not letting your campaign bring up Rev. Wright is not just suicidal but genocidal.

You thought that he-will-change-the-world video featuring the real young kids was bad, check this out.

One commenter at Free Republic, one of the myriad sites where this is being seen and discussed, ho-hummed it, saying that one of these days these guys will come across The Next Big Thing, or, more likely, discover girls, and that will be that.  I look at the level of discipline going on here and I see something else.

More than one person has accused my characterization of Democrats as Freedom-Haters as being over the top and unproductive.  It’s cost me some BN readers and I think even a friendship or two.

Because being liked is rather important to me, I’ve frequently examined my employment of this term, asking myself, “Oh, Jeez, have I burned some bridges I’m going to regret?”  I’ve looked back over the last seventy years of American history, made a point of seeing what FDR and Truman and JFK did right, reminded myself that the party of Jefferson has had in its ranks admirable people of principle - Scoop Jackson, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman - figures who, however misguided on economic policy, understood what American exceptionalism was all about, as well as the spiritual nature of the foundation of the American experiment.  In short, I’ve wanted to cling to some shred of possibility that the modern Democratic party was really just one of the two main American political organizations, the one whose overall orientation I agreed with less of the time than that of the other, but which was nevertheless operating out of good faith.  I wanted to see it as still grown-up, embracing trustworthiness, sanity, bedrock love for America and freedom.  I wanted it to be a legitimate force in modern society.

This year, more than the last twenty-five, has absolutely squelched the last ounce of hope against hope within me.  There is no other conclusion but that the modern Democratic party is indeed the repository of Freedom-Hatred.

When this party can come up with a piece of social engineering like the Community Reinvestment Act (instituted under the Jew-hating utter failure Jimmy Carter) and turn over its implementation to a gang of thugs and intimidation artists like ACORN, with its bank fairs and voeter-registration fraud, and say, as Barney Frank and Maxine Waters did four years ago that they saw no problems with the viability of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and then have the nerve, when the whole thing leads to a financial crisis like our present one, to try and place the blame on “right-wing ideology” and an “unsupervised” free market, we are witnessing a chilling level of deception indeed.

When the monolithically Democrat-voting MSM does nothing to put together the whole picture conveyed by Barack Obama’s trail of thuggery - the attempt to have Missouri law-enforcement silence free speech, the phone-bank flooding of the Chicago radio station on which Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso appeared as guests, clear back to his first run for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, when he directed his volunteers to discredit the legality of incumbent Alice Palmer’s nominating petitions, forcing her off the ballot - the result is that this affable and good-looking Stalinist is positioned with a five-point lead in the race for U.S. president five weeks from election day.

When the Speaker of the House goes to Syria to undermine America’s objectives in the mideast, when the Senate Majority Leader declares a war lost that the U.S. is now on the verge of winning and we are so deadened to evil that we will return them to their posts for another term, we have arrived at a foul scenario indeed.

Someone in the McCain campaign must address the moral level of what’s going on.  We are not dealing with just another bunch of folks who see things a little differently.

At the very least, if McCain can’t find something to say about Obama’s Stalinism, the urgency of low taxes, dismantling Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and winning a decisive victory in the current world war, he needs to shut his stinking mouth about bipartisanship.

The pathetic and poisonous efforts of the left to destroy Sarah Palin gives the lie to the meme that the oh-so-moderate chin-stroking urban/coastal chattering class has been trying to get us to swallow for a while: the notion that the culture wars were winding down and Americans were now more concerned with efficient delivery of health care and energy and other dry, arcane considerations.

The delicious irony is that it’s that sector of our society that, so far, has been the most shrill and murderous about the Palin candidacy.  It’s the magazine writers, TV commentators and lefty bloggers who are pulling out all the stops in their attempt to wreck the governor’s career and life.

John Edwards was wrong about what comprised them, but he was right in his basic assertion that there are two Americas.  The division is deeper than it’s ever been.

As a historian, I am interested in the roots of the schism.  It certainly goes back farther than the 1960s.  The New Left movement in academic circles got going in the 1940s and 50s with the works of William Appleman Williams and C. Vann Woodward.  But the whole thing really goes back even further.  There’s the Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, Walter Duranty’s puff-piece treatment of the USSR under Stalin.  Maybe it goes back to the salons in the Greenwich Village brownstones of the turn of the century.  American folk art is full of pairings of cousins, one a country bumpkin and one a city slicker, and I think that’s an element.  One could even make the case that the Enlightenment, which originated in Europe, with its forthright reliance on rationality and empiricism, paved the way.  In America, it led to a lot of offshoots from core Judeo-Christian thought, such as Unitarianism and the array of New Thought denominations.  Also, here one would need to concede that even such Founding Fathers as the Deist Jefferson were looking into interpretive ways to relate to scripture.  Still, relate to it he most definitely did.

In any event, at some point, a mindset ingrained itself into certain sectors of our society and spread to others.  It was based on a divorce from a foundational and commonly held set of assumptions that had, up to that point, been part of American life in such a broad sense as to be considered universal.  Church, family, gender differences, the relationship between industriousness and prosperity, sufficient understanding of human nature to make obvious the need for strong national defense - these were givens for pretty much everybody.

I was in the thick of the period when the Big Split became codified, when a sufficiently large plurality of citizens embraced it as to legitimize it in schools, workplaces and arenas of civic participation.  I sat in the back of high school math class and read Ramparts magazine and Do It! by Jerry Rubin.  I had shoulder-length hair, told my dad he was a fascist and a corporate fat cat. Spent days on end in the lysergic trenches.  Made a point of running as far away from square old Jesus as I could and insisting that some kind of all-is-one state of so-called reality constituted ultimate truth.

So I bear some culpability for the current diseased state of our precious nation.  What is so blessed about time, though, is that once you get smarter than you used to be, you can genuinely change.  You can pick a moment and declare, “That’s not me anymore.”

The horror, the ghastliness, of what the enemy in the culture wars is attempting to do to Sarah Palin has been a wake-up slap across the face for me.  I thought there was some tiny possibility that this was going to be a civil airing of differences, perhaps with some raised voices, close elections and strongly-worded polemics. 

No, this is an actual war.  My main encouragement about the odds for what is good and true prevailing stem from the resolve of those like the woman currently on the front line.  I think tonight she will serve notice that she can outgun any comers.

Did you hear what she said in response to someone’s question about whether she’s up to this state of affairs?  She posed a question and then answered it.  “Do you know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” she asked.  And then she said, “Lipstick.”

Israel releases nearly 200 more Palestinian prisoners, this time of the Fatah variety, and including Said al-Atba, who bombed a market in 1977.  (He would be this release’s equivalent of Samir Kunta, the child-skull-crusher who was part of the July release). 

Condi Rice says this is good because it’s “something that matters a lot to the Palestinians.”

Why are clarity and resolve so easily muddled in this world?  Why, in spite of irrefutable evidence that one is dealing with bad actors, does one yet again expect goodwill and civility out of them?  We’ve seen it in the utter failure to get Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear programs.  We’ve seen it in the tepid moral equivalency that characterizes the NATO statement about Russia’s war against Georgia.  Is it the high stakes involved?  Or is it some kind of bureaucratic mindset, along the lines of holding a meeting to discuss the household’s options when fire breaks out in the kitchen, a sense that anything can be solved in a conference setting?

This one, though - appeasing the thugs of Fatah and Hamas - is really puzzling, as it all occurs at such close range.  There are no oceans to cross.  In fact, prior to the enhanced security measures of the last few years, Israel got a very up-close-and-personal look at many of these vest-and-belt-attired “partners in the search for peace.”  They were infiltrating Israel proper and blowing up pizza parlors and bus stops with increasing regularity.

A complete recognition of evil entails acting on that recognition.  It means “co-existing” with those who embrace evil in an appropriate way.

It’s often pointed out that suicide is a serious transgression against God. Some argue that it’s on a par with murder.  That’s becasue one’s life is not one’s own.  One is granted stewardship over it by it Author.

Carelessness has suicidal overtones to it.  Certainly, recklessness does.  The interesting thing is that an overabundance of caution - known in its extreme form as cowardice - constitutes a type of recklessness.  In the case of dealing with evil, this is clearly so.  It’s a plain spiritual truth that you can’t interact with those given over to evil the way you can with normal people.  You invite your own demise.  Seen this way, the folly of negotiating with those known to hate you may qualify as sin.

In any event, it’s a dumb thing to do.  To return to my question about how resolve anc clarity get eroded, it may be that what happens is that the principle of habit comes into play.  Something done once becomes easier to do a second time, and then even easier subsequent times.

The real answer to this question would come from observation of more instances of it.  The problem with that is that we can’t afford any more of such data-gathering. 

Then again, maybe all 200 of these prisoners released by Israel today will go home to families, jobs and lives of productive civilization-building, and everything I’ve asserted here will be proven wrong.

Any bets?

It’s not even so much the Jerusalem waffling with which this Powerline post begins, and, really, the matter in question - the claim to not just sit on the Senate Banking Committee, but that it’s somehow his - has been covered enough in the last 24 hours that my point here is not to present it like it’s breaking news.  It’s just the file that we’re building up on this guy here at BN in our Barack Obama category.  Taken as a whole, it portrays a frighteningly empty and irresponsible novice with delusions of being a visionary statesman. 

I sometimes question myself and the way I couch things here at BN.  I have asked myself before whether some of my terminology or assertions are over the top.  In particular, I occasionally question whether my view that Western civilization’s continued vitality and importance to humankind’s freedom and dignity are doubtful.  After all, I’ve been around for fifty-two years, so I’ve seen a time when it wasn’t even remotely in question.  But when all of Europe and an alarmingly large segment of American society - particularly nearly all American news media - swoons over someone so ridiculous whose only semblance of substance is a fierce allegiance to socialism, I fear I’m operating in a world that has truly gone crazy, that has irreversibly lost its ability to recognize real character, intellect, vision, and love of freedom.

So far it’s not affecting my ability to maneuver through my daily life, run errands, knock out my to-do list, set goals, fashion strategies for my career, be an attentive and affectionate husband, enjoy the company of friends and kin, find interesting things about the world to poke my nose into.  But there’s this backdrop of demise against which I proceed.  As I’ve said in previous posts, I understand the optimism and basic faith of the likes of Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Kudlow and Rush Limbaugh in a huge swath of the American people to invent solutions to vexing dilemmas and rally from hard times, butI look at how far this charlatan - and the party whose zeal for defeat and tyranny he embodies - has come, and I can’t but conclude that real damage has been done to humankind’s last, best hope.

Independence Day finds BN waxing reflective like many another punditry outlet.  The word “paradox” keeps surfacing as the most apt characteristic for the juncture at which this marvelous country finds itself on the 232nd occasion of the signing of Mr. Jefferson’s thunderous document.  Comparatively speaking - compared, that is, to other nations, and to other periods in time - we’re doing great.  We are, however, beset by some unique and unprecedented challenges, some of which ualify as threats requiring a sense of urgency.

I can’t argue with such sunny perspectives as those of Ed Fuelner’s Townhall column, or Victor Davis Hanson’s NRO piece.  Such problems as high oil prices, the mortgage-market upheaval, and even the array of undeniably hostile countries and forces on the world stage aren’t making much of a dent at this moment in our ability to exercise our freedom, enjoy our prosperity, invent, consume, wander, wonder, form and raise families, worship, not worship, become civic leaders or become hermits.  We’re comfortable, secure and free beyond the imaginings of most human beings alive either today or at any time in the past.

To call that the end of the matter, however, is to turn a blind eye to some glaring aspects of everyday life.  We are not okay.

Our most immediate threat is moral and intellectual atrophy.  We no longer have any idea how our circumstances came to be, their real value, or what’s required to preserve them.

The most handy piece of evidence to offer in substantiating this assertion is the Democrat candidate for president: a member of the Senate for three years, an Illinois state senator before that, and a “community organizer” in the mold of the radical Saul Alinsky before that.  His radicalism, his ambivalence (at best) about America’s greatness, his ties to both Marxists and corrupt Chicago-machine figures, his cultural elitism, and his phony religiosity are well enough known that in a country with solid intellectual and moral bearings, he would be an embarrassment with no chance of going past a couple of primary races.

It’s not as if anyone were offering a hopeful alternative, either.  The current administration is apparently going to let Iran build, test and use a nuclear weapon, and let North Korea keep its asernal of same, along with its uranium-enrichment capabilities, and its network for proliferation.  It’s also the bunch that is determined to get Israel to allow a state to a group of people dedicated to its obliteration.  Obama’s opponent in the current race to succeed this administration is a vacuous, tired and stubborn has-been who thinks we shouldn’t drill in ANWR and has a problem with corporate profits over some arbitrary level (at which they become, in his worldview, “obscene”).

Our preoccupation with silly, fabricated non-issues that distract us from what ought to be our real concerns is another manifestation of our atrophy.  When corporations and universities alike rush to form “diversity councils,” when federal judges find “rights” to homosexual “marriage,” when developers rush to build “green” housing units and commercial structures, it is clear our ability to muster rigor and clear-sightedness is slipping away.

When you opened your web browser home page just now, you saw yet another ominous sign of our emaciation.  Where were the headlines dealing with issues of economic challenge, jihadist design or nuclear proliferation?  Well underneath coverage of the attire or the sybaritic antics of celebrities who have no more qualification to be pop-culture icons than Barack Obama has to be a presidential candidate.

Yes, our most pressing problems - after this breakdown of our moral and intellectual health - could be solved fairly easily, but that’s a lot like saying the stroke victim could easily reach the water glass beside his bed.

It’s a fine Fourth.  I’ve seen happy people all over town as I’ve driven and biked about.  I’ll be throwing a T-Bone and a mahi-mahi filet on the grill this evening.  I’m about to pour myself a sparkling cocktail.  Checks are in my mailbox and gigs on my calendar.  I know lots of people who love the one true God and who understand free-market economics.  Somehow, though, it all has the feel of the last tune the orchestra on the Titanic played before dance partners in the ballroom started to say to each other, “Did you feel that?”

Michael Weiss at Pajamas Media details the nature of Bloomberg’s stint as NYC mayor.  A classic portrait of an opportunist who has been so busy climbing some percieved success ladder while harboring vague notions of what he ought to care about on a policy and overarching-philosophy level that he’s a hugely easy mark for every goofball Freedom-Hater in the book.  A whole city suffers as a result. 

Money line: “The kind of velvet fascism that rules American corporate culture now rules Gotham.”