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Anti Federalist
01-01-2012, 04:10 PM
Is America Losing Control?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan204.html

"Events are in the saddle and ride mankind."

In describing 2011, few cliches seem more appropriate. For in this past year, we Americans seemed to lose control of our destiny, as events seemed to be in the saddle.

While President Barack Obama maneuvered skillfully to retain a fighting chance to be re-elected, the economy showed no signs of returning to the robustness of the Reagan or Clinton years. And Obama is all out of options.

By January 2013, he will have added $6 trillion to a national debt that just earned America a downgrade on its AAA credit rating.

The nation hearkened to the tea party in 2010, giving the GOP 63 new seats in the House. But Republicans, too, have little to show for it, if their goal was reducing the deficit.

During 2011, the European Union was gripped by a crisis caused by a collapse in confidence that eurozone nations like Greece and Italy will be able to service their debts and a fear that they will default and bring down the European banks holding trillions of that debt.

Europe could plunge into a depression like the one in the 1930s, which would leap the Atlantic and cause a recession here that would spell the end of Obama's presidency.

Should the Greeks or Italians, chafing at the austerity imposed upon them and seeing no way out for years, choose to run the risk of bolting from the eurozone, the consequences could be catastrophic.

And, again, there is little Obama could do about it. Events in Europe could decide his destiny. The same is true in that most volatile region that engaged so much of America's attention in 2011.

With the withdrawal of all U.S. combat soldiers from Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has begun to attack his Sunni rivals, accusing his own vice president of instigating acts of terrorism.

A return to Sunni-Shiite sectarian war is a real possibility.

Should this occur, Obama would be savaged by Republicans for not negotiating to keep a U.S. force in Iraq. No Americans would be clamoring to send the troops back, but we would live with the consequences and they would poison our politics.

With the uprisings against the Arab autocrats, 2011 began as a year of hope. The Arab world, we were told, would be like Eastern Europe in 1989, with peoples marching to recapture God-given rights from despots who had misruled them for decades.

But the Arab Spring gave way to the Arab Winter. The Facebook-Twitter crowd enthralled the media, but when the lid of tyranny was lifted, older and deeper forces buried in the psyche of the nation rose to reveal their latent strength.

Undeniably, millions of Arabs wish to live in nations modeled on the West. But more, it appears, wish to live under regimes rooted in Islamic law.

We seem unable to appreciate that much of that world detests our culture, abhors our presence, loathes Israel and is as committed to Quranic absolutes as devout evangelical Christians are to biblical truths.

Our one-man, one-vote democratists who would remake the world in our image and whose ideology has guided foreign policy for the Bush-Obama decade failed to understand what our Founding Fathers taught:

A democracy, which they detested, empowers majorities to tyrannize minorities. "In questions of power," Jefferson admonished, "let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."

Democratize the Middle East along one-man, one-vote majority-rule principles, without guarantees of minority rights, and majority tribes and sects will use their democratically won power to crush those minorities.

Is that not what is happening there today to the Christians of the Middle East?

The old influence we had over events in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is slipping away. Even the Israelis tell Obama they will build on the West Bank when they wish, where they wish.

China, beneficiary of a decade of trade surpluses running into the trillions at our expense, now instructs us that the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea and Taiwan Strait are territorial waters – and the U.S. Navy shall behave accordingly.

Despite boasting a vast nuclear arsenal and the world's largest economy, America is perceived as weaker than she once was.

Though fighting for a decade, she is unable to impose her will on Iraq or Afghanistan. She cannot control her borders. She cannot balance her budgets. She cannot get her spending under control. She cannot stop the steady hemorrhaging of her jobs and factories overseas.

America is losing control. Why? A failure to understand human nature and the lessons of history – and the mindless pursuit of Utopian dreams.

We wagered the wealth of a nation on a Great Society gamble that through endless redistribution from top to bottom, we could create a more just, equal and productive society.

After the Cold War, we embraced the idea that using our immense power, we could remake this world into a more egalitarian, cooperative and democratic place.

Long after reality caught up to us, we continue to chase the dreams.

LibertyEagle
01-01-2012, 04:20 PM
Paul and Buchanan are two of the last stalwarts of the conservatism I grew up with.

Luckily, we have people like Rand Paul and Justin Amash to carry forward, but we need many, many more.

Uriel999
01-01-2012, 04:30 PM
Buchanan for vp?

GeorgiaAvenger
01-01-2012, 07:19 PM
Didn't know they carried his column on LR.

I read it today on Human Events(They have been fair to RP, and I go for the columns of Buchanan, Stossel, Sowell, Williams, and Norris)

ca4paul
01-01-2012, 11:33 PM
Pat fails to mention that tea party candidates don't own the senate or even congress yet. Once that happens then blame can fall on them.
You can't exactly block bills or get things passed when you are a minority.

Pat is just playing the republicans vs dems game again. I don't trust him anymore. I can't believe I actually used to like him and bought 2 of his books.

LibertyEagle
01-01-2012, 11:39 PM
Pat fails to mention that tea party candidates don't own the senate or even congress yet. Once that happens then blame can fall on them.
You can't exactly block bills or get things passed when you are a minority.

Pat is just playing the republicans vs dems game again. I don't trust him anymore. I can't believe I actually used to like him and bought 2 of his books.

Well, to be fair, a number of the people who said they were tea party, sold out after they got elected.

ca4paul
01-01-2012, 11:49 PM
Well, to be fair, a number of the people who said they were tea party, sold out after they got elected.

Well that's the thing, did WE or the original tea partiers endorse them? If so then shame on us. I think a lot of them were simply unvetted and outright LYING.

The thing is, I don't think that many of them really got elected. I remember reading daily paul and only a few were elected.

So I stand by what I said. More true ones need to run and win before any judgement can be cast.

I clearly remember people saying that Rubio was a phoney and that turned out to be true so you cant call him or even michelle bachman one. They're phonies.

Blue_Merle
01-02-2012, 12:02 AM
Has P. Buchanan officially and openly endorsed R. Paul yet?

cindy25
01-02-2012, 12:24 AM
most Tea party congressmen focused only on fiscal issues; this needs to be expanded, to civil liberties (SOPA, Patriot act) and committe chairmen must be primaried, and taken down, starting with Lamar Smith and Paul Ryan

heavenlyboy34
01-02-2012, 12:31 AM
Nice. Pat's one of the few remotely rational voices in media today.