Time Travel

Almost three years!  That is a very long time for a deteriorating old man (me) … and for a rapidly disintegrating country (the USA) to endure. President Obama has almost three more years of malignant mischief-making in which to vex many of us with his folksy haughtiness, his managerial inattention, his foreign-policy screw-ups, his self-righteous preaching, his corrupt posse, and his profligate spending. I think Ann Coulter hit the nail on the head when she said, “If Obama was trying to destroy this country, what would he be doing any differently?”

But in a very strange way what President Obama is now bulldozing may end up being beneficial for us.  His reign of destruction (aka, "hope and change") may be similar to the early twentieth-century Dadaist art movement and its raucous nihilism ... which fostered some of the most innovative art in centuries.  His attempted razing of many of the pillars upon which this country was founded and prospered has caused many of us to rethink our purpose and rededicate our lives.  The Tea-Party movement is symptomatic of the grass-roots resurrection of what was once great in America. There is, I believe a creative cleansing to take place among the rubble of what Obama is now working.  

Many in the current establishment and media can't or won't sense this resurrection ... but our younger generations will soon compare what we have become to what we once were ... and re-learn those things to be cherished. I firmly believe it's in our DNA. Just as Abraham Lincoln talked about a “new birth of freedom,” I judge that we will be, once our Fearless Leader leaves office, ready to rid Washington of much of the political pollution that persists there.  Of course all may not be repaired, but I pray that enough will be fixed that our country might have another few hundred years of freedom-loving and innovative time travel ... which isn't, I think, what Obama had in mind.

Afterward: If what I am herein predicting does indeed come about, I suspect that some historians of a liberal bent ... of which there are many ... will say that this was what Obama was about all along. Note to any future readers ... don't believe it!  

Capitalism on Trial

Isn't it funny and, yes, a little frightening that Republican candidates for President like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry can make blatant anti-capitalism statements for their own seeming political gain?  (See details at: Newt's Attack and Perry's Attack.)  Fortunately it doesn't seem to have so far worked ... but this is just the beginning of a full-frontal assault on our free-enterprise system that is bound to occur once the presumptive Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, is chosen.  He and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he once ran, will be made the poster children of this onslaught.  This belligerency is what the Occupiers represented this past summer and fall ... and the surprising sympathy that they received among many media types and left-leaning pols was a omen of what is to come in this fall's election season.

The liberals in the United States have for generations been eating away at the foundations of capitalism ... often funded from the profits gained from the very system they despise.  This is despite formidable evidence that capitalism is a wealth generating engine nonpareil and that its many alternatives are not.  Just the contrast that is evident in China where merely a soupçon of capitalism has unleashed mighty forces that are propelling this former denier of property rights into an economic powerhouse ... should be enough to convince the Occupiers that their nihilism is futile.  But no ... the current economic stagnation in the United States, has inflamed the juices of these anarchists.  They would pull down the economic structure of this country around their heads without any thought-through idea of what to build in its stead.

Yes, capitalism does develop some warts from time to time (trusts, insider trading, creative accounting, carried interest, crony capitalism, etc.) but these have, can, or should be easily remedied.  And many politicians, unfortunately including Gingrich and Perry, but more predictably including Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are more than willing to capitalize on this current anti-capitalist fervor to gain or retain their place at that feeding trough called "big government."