The Empire Is Over

Blinded by arrogance, they cannot see that with every passing day, the world needs us less and less and hates us more and more.

by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=881

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.

Our politicians are still trying to play the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2097 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.

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. 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.

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.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese399.html

2007-10-20