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Decline and Fall
How not to act like a great power.
by Irwin M. Stelzer
11/27/2006, Volume 012, Issue 11
AMERICA IS FINISHED as a great power. Not because it no longer possesses the resources, but because it has lost the will. That was brought home to me on both ends of a recent trip through London's Heathrow airport en route to Phoenix.
* No great power permits its citizens to be discriminated against. Yet just keep your eyes open as you go through security at Heathrow (or any other international airport). Off goes your jacket. Off comes your wife's jacket, like yours, to be deposited in a heap in a plastic bin headed through a machine designed to detect something or other. Next comes a Middle Eastern woman, clad head to toe in a black garment, loose-fitting enough to conceal a weapon of mass destruction. No one dares impede her progress through the detectors.
America makes no move to tell the world's authorities that its citizens are not terrorists, and that any sensible program based on statistical probability--some call it profiling--would reverse security priorities. Jimmy Carter proved that any third-rate power can lay hands on American citizens without consequences. The world got the clue, and now treats us accordingly.
* No great power would allow itself to be held hostage to desert kingdoms run by medieval theocracies. Yet America does. We land in Phoenix and hop into a car that can be brought to a screeching halt if our supplies of oil are cut off. So we are afraid to tell our Saudi suppliers to stop financing terrorists, and to stop polluting the minds of their young with anti-Semitic, anti-Western rants. We allow Russia, a country with a GDP less than that of Italy but with lots of oil, to tell us to take a hike when we protest its increasing tendency to return to the good old days of a KGB-dominated society. After all, if we support democratic forces in Russia, Putin might divert his oil and gas to China instead of giving us the privilege of buying it at inflated prices.
Instead of doing what a great nation would do--take steps to stem the flow of our dollars to what Reuel Marc Gerecht aptly described in these pages as "the Saudi Wahhabi multitentacled missionary-money machine, still the most influential conveyer of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian hatred in the world"--we unleash our secretary of energy to beg the OPEC nations to please let the price of oil drop from an outrageous $70 per barrel to a merely extortionate $60, but most important, please don't cut us off. And, by the way, you have us so much under your thumb that we will send our fleet to protect you should terrorists threaten your oil facility at Ras Tanura. But if our sailors pull a Bible in their duffles, look out. Groveling is easier than paying the price of getting off oil.
* No great power loses control of its borders. We have. The beautifully tended lawns of our Phoenix hotel, its well-staffed kitchen, are as likely as not the work of illegal aliens. These are admirable, hard-working people for the most part. But they are here illegally. And so unsure of itself has America become that we feel a need to adjust to them--to their language, to their demands on our social services. And most come from a country that refuses to allow American firms to invest in its oil and gas industries so as to increase available supplies. Surely a great country would find some way of saying, "No oil, then no immigrants, no remittances." Never in history have so many illegals dared to organize protest marches and assembled in so easily arrestable a mass, secure in the knowledge that their host country's addiction to low-cost pool-cleaning trumps its desire to control its borders.
* No great nation allows itself to become dependent on the goodwill of hostile nations in order to carry out its foreign policy. Yet America is rattled when left-wing governments in Spain and Italy withdraw support for our attempt to establish a government in Iraq that does not support terrorists. Earlier this month in London, a coalition of Welsh and Scottish peacemongers enlisted the support of opportunistic and anti-American Tories--the party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher--to come within a whisker of passing a parliamentary motion that would have made it even more difficult than it now is for Tony Blair to stick with us in Iraq. Would the government of a great power have received these same Tories in Washington only a few months ago, giving them much-needed credibility at home?
* No great power allows others to insult it gratuitously. I happened to be in America when one of our leading universities--housed in the safety of nuclear-free Cambridge--gave a platform to Iran's former president, and in Britain when St. Andrews gave him, get this, an honorary doctor of laws, no doubt a morale-killer for the political prisoners rounded up during his tenure. Yet we continue to pour government funds into Harvard to appease Ted Kennedy, and our ambassador to the Court of St. James's said not a public word to the Brits about their taste in honorees.
* No great nation allows itself to get into hock to a potential enemy. Yet we owe hundreds of billions to the Chinese because we don't have the nerve to tell them to get the value of their currency in line with market forces or keep their sneakers, toys, and television sets. And no great nation stands idly by while another pilfers billions of dollars worth of its most valuable product--its intellectual property. Yet we watch while DVDs of first-run, copyrighted American films are sold for $1 in Beijing even before the film has been released in theaters here at home.
There's more. But you get the idea. Travel the world with your eyes open and you will see that America is no longer a great power. Not that it can't still be one--with our astonishingly lethal soldiers, our daring entrepreneurs, our workers willing to put in long hours, and a productive economy that is still the envy of the world.
But so long as we prefer to fund shopping sprees rather than a military adequate to meet the challenges of our era, and so long as we allow uncertainty about our virtues as a nation to swamp our good judgment, we will continue to doff our jackets obligingly to security personnel who are surprised--just ask them--that we allow our people to suffer such indignities.
I read this in I think the Tribune this am:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/982zjkxs.asp
I read this in I think the Tribune this am:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/982zjkxs.asp
* No great power permits its citizens to be discriminated against.
No great power would allow approximately 10 percent of its citizenry to be denied the rights to which the other 90 percent would be entitled by virtue of marriage to the person of their choice.
I wanna let you in on a little secret: Jillian is Jewish, not Christian. And just because you throw something out of your holy text does not mean anything except to people who believe in the same holy text as you.Romans 1:26-32 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
Doing as the Romans did is the surest way to destroy your super-power status.
I think we should do a gaycensus.The 10% posted is not right....it's more like 4%.....
But hey, whats a little streeeeeetttttcccchhiiinnnggg of the truth to get the results you want......
I think we should do a gaycensus.
I wanna let you in on a little secret: Jillian is Jewish, not Christian. And just because you throw something out of your holy text does not mean anything except to people who believe in the same holy text as you.
But it'd be funny to read a report called "The Gaysensus." The more moderate/slightly left homosexuals wouldn't freak out. But it'd be something to show the accurate number so we can put to end the dispute of whether its' 1%, 4%, or 10%.Homosexuals would freak and accuse the pollster of gathering evidence to use against them. Besides--who cares ?
flaja said:Only until judgment day.
BTW: The things that St. Paul condemned in this passage are also things that are condemned by the Jewish Holy Book, i.e., the Christian Old Teastament:
Leviticus 18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
Only until judgment day.
BTW: The things that St. Paul condemned in this passage are also things that are condemned by the Jewish Holy Book, i.e., the Christian Old Teastament:
Leviticus 18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
Leviticus also says that you should be stoned to death if you plant two crops or wear mixed fibers, no?
I don't put much stock in that stuff. If G-d creates nothing imperfect and he created homosexuals, then they, too, are perfect in their way.
By the by, it's the Jewish Old Testament... you guys have the NT.
And what Kag said... your Bible is only going to be valid authority to someone who believes in it
No. Leviticus 19:19 Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
Where does Leviticus say these offenses are stonable offenses?
If God (I see you are afraid of the Word) created sodomites, why did He issue a commandment against sodomy?
The Jews have only 1 testament because they reject Jesus Christ.
As well as the God who gave it and who will condemn you for rejecting it.
BTW: If the widespread societal acceptance of sodomy (if not the widespread practice thereof) qualifies you to be a superpower, why did the Greeks and Romans go by the wayside?
I don't believe in your Judgement day. I also don't believe in Pauline Christianity (i.e. mainstream Christianity) nor do I believe in Judaism. And I don't mean that as in I don't believe they exist (that'd be asinine on my end). I just don't believe they have it right. Some of the core messages are right (Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, etc.) and therefore they have merit on those grounds to go to whatever heaven may be (or just be reincarnated again).
* No great power permits its citizens to be discriminated against.
No great power would allow approximately 10 percent of its citizenry to be denied the rights to which the other 90 percent would be entitled by virtue of marriage to the person of their choice.
Unless that more like 5% of its citizens were atrtempting to force their aberrant behavior on the other 95%.
* No great power would allow itself to be held hostage to desert kingdoms run by medieval theocracies.
No great power would engage in behavior with respect to other countries which it would not tolerate with respect to its own.
Unless those other countries were a direct threat to the US or one or more of its allies, or the existence mankind.
* No great power loses control of its borders.
No great power would deny medical care, education and basic sustenance to children simply because of the immigration status of their parents.
No great power forces its citzens to foot the bill for for people who aren't supposed to be where they are to begin with.
* No great nation allows itself to become dependent on the goodwill of hostile nations in order to carry out its foreign policy.
No great nation allows itself to lead by bullying and by the gun instead of leading by example.
Neither does this one. But what "leading by example?" Leading by example has gotten us what out of radical Islam/the ME? The result was 9/11.
* No great power allows others to insult it gratuitously
No great power insults others gratuitously.
Abusrd comment just to be posting something.
* No great nation allows itself to get into hock to a potential enemy.
No great nation allows itself to persist in policies that CAUSE it to need to get into hock to ANY other nation, friend, or potential foe.
And here's one more....
* No great nation needs to tell others constantly how great it is. Its greatness is apparent based on it's wisdom, benevolence and control of all situations. It is better than those around it and never loses its dignity by lowering it's behavior to the lowest common denominator.
Awww, I wanted to tell him it was a cultural thing!You'll forgive me. I don't do conversations about religion with people who think my religious beliefs are going to be "condemned". And I also would rather not derail an interesting thread by making it yet one more on the gays are going to hell thing.
Oh yeah... I will educate you, though. We don't write the name of G-d. It's a cultural thing. No fear. It's just considered disrespectful.
Cheers!
I know! I'm such a horrible person. :/How dare you question the Christians' self-proclaimed authority over all mankind?
