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Published: August 3, 2008
It’s all the rage today in the liberal and socialist political circles: the argument that America’s time on the world stage is on a steep, downward tumble.
High oil prices, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subprime mortgage crisis and the resulting economic downturn … all evidence, the know-it-alls claim, the nation is toast. Stick a fork in America, ’cause she’s done.
The New York Times, over the weekend, even had a video op/ed featuring two political philosophers, Francis Fukuyama and Robert Kagen, arguing which presidential candidate can best manage an America with its power in decline.
What a load of pseudo-intellectual garbage.
And it’s not even new garbage. Rather appropriately, considering it’s coming from the political left, it’s just recycled, pseudo-intellectual garbage from a generation ago.
For anyone old enough to remember, the 1970s was a horrid decade. The Vietnam War. The Arab oil embargo. Watergate, the mother of all political scandals, and President Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. The Carter presidency and its infamous national “malaise.” The Iran hostage crisis. Skyrocketing interest rates and inflation off the charts.
A whole bevy of “experts” quoted in the media back then said America’s best days were behind her, that we needed to prepare for a gradual descent into our national twilight days.
And then came Ronald Reagan.
Dismissed as a B-movie actor, a “did-nothing” two-term governor of California and an intellectual dolt, Reagan told the nation in the 1980 presidential campaign that America’s best days were not behind her, that the future belonged to those who dared to believe in it.
Reagan moved past a razor-thin margin of victory over Jimmy Carter and embarked on a remarkable eight-year-long journey of turning around the ship of state, exhorting Americans to believe in themselves and their nation once again as being on the leading edge of history, not on its ash heap.
That’s what America needs to find right now in the 2008 presidential election: a leader who, like Reagan, believes this nation’s best days are yet to come, a leader (whether liberal or conservative) who can inspire citizens to buck it up and get over the hurdles we face as a nation, a leader who believes wholeheartedly in America’s role in the world and purpose in history.
There are folks in this world today who believe America and the American people are the greatest dangers the world faces, and they’re not just Islamo-fascist terrorists huddled in caves in Afghanistan. They’re supposedly intelligent people, at home and abroad, who resent America’s place on the global stage and its economic, military and social prominence. They relish in every bit of bad news they come across as evidence of a nation about to tumble.
If we as a nation start to believe what these kooks say we are, indeed, done. Getting us to buy into their drivel is half the battle for them.
That’s the biggest challenge the next president will face, making Americans believe in themselves and in America again. It’s a challenge either President McCain or President Obama will have to meet.
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Reader Reactions
el queso grande = Randolph Knipp
Both writing from la-la land!
Absolutely the last thing this country needs is another Ronald Reagan.If you want to read some pseudointellectualism read Goldberg’s column today. Just like with Reagan it’s always blame the victim. Both columns sound just like McCain’s Phil Gramm. It’s just all in your head. When Reagan came into office the US was $900 billion in debt. When he left we were pushing a debt of $4 trillion. Any impact he had was purely because of the economy being feed by indebtedness.As an aside why do we get two National Review columnists(Goldberg and Lowry). Cant the conservatives find another voice.Lets deal with the real problems of this country and forget all the Reagan and Goldberg rah rah stuff. Singletary at least had some non fluff suggestions.Hurry Obama. Bush has us almost down the tubes.
True, George Bush has really made a mess of things over the past 8 years, but you cannot blame hime for everything that is wrong with America today. Some of our problems go back to the Great Depression and World War II, and I think that some of those that post here have allowed their hatred of Bush to blind them to fact that Clinton and Carter did as much to give the country away as any other president.
The writer of this editorial is correct in stating that we need a president that can inspire Americans to lift our country up, and we need our government to get out the way while we do it. Reagan said the 10 scariest words are “I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help.“ Washington is full of clueless politicians on both sides of the spectrum, and things will never get better as long as we allow them to run the show.
Whatever we believe and expect usually fulfills itself. I try to see the bad for what it is, but I’ll be damned if I accept it and not try to make things better for my community and my country.
Why doesn’t the author of this drivel say the truth? He needs to say that we need a president who can turn the U.S. back into what it was before George Bush turned this country into something we couldn’t be proud of. A country that has sent it’s jobs, money and soldiers overseas never to return.
The next president will inherit a mess that Reagan could not have imagined. The economy is a mess with it’s industrial base surrendered to the Chinese. The dollar is at it’s lowest value in memory after eight years of a monetary policy that could only be described as laughable. The Middle East is in shambles due to the dearth of American leadership on the world stage and a State Dept first used as a tool of the Pentagon and then run by the surprisingly incompetent Ms. Rice who has shown herself to be much more competent as a Bush toady than as a diplomat.
In the next two weeks Bush will go to China, hat in hand, and grovel before those that hold the key to the U.S. treasury. The Chinese have funded the Iraq Debacle since Mr. Bush didn’t think the American people were willing to sacrifice their precious money by funding his war. So he told us to go shopping and borrowed the untold billions from the Chinese. It is rather ironical that the man who wanted to be Reagans heir would fund a so-call war of liberation using communist money. The mighty military, after six hard years of war, is practically broken. It’s hardware worn out and it’s men demoralized thanks to this endless war without a military objective except freeing the Iraqis from a regime that didn’t want to be free of.
The next president will have to deal with a future of dwindling oil supplies and rising demand. He will have to devise an energy policy that will work instead of one devised by rich oil men behind locked doors. The list of problems in practically endless.
So what does the author of this piece want to do? Does he want this person to lie and say all is well or someone who can start repairing that shining city on that hill and once again start turning on those thousand points of lights that have been dimmed by eight years of misguided incompetence?
What the N&A;misses in its editorial endorsement of another Ronald Reagan is that we live in a far, far different world than we lived in the 80’s. And, if that isn’t enough to end this example of Reagan worship then I remind whomever wrote the editorial of Reagan’s complete support of Saddam Hussein in the war with Iran (wherein, Mr. Hussein gassed tens of thousands Iranian soldiers), Reagan’s illegal oil for weapons swap, the Marines killed in Lebanon, a deregulatory philosophy whose implementation under Reagan gave us the savings and loan mess, the banking debacle, the unraveling of the airlines, and the largest deficit in history up to that point (our current fearless leader who has screwed up everything he touched, is the current title holder of biggest spender in American history. The current deficit is so big that no one actually knows what it is). The N&A;editorial just continues the Reagan mythology.
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