America may be the land of the free and home of the brave, but increasingly it's morphing into an image of the absurd.
Take the U.S. president traveling abroad. Today, he arrives on the world's swankiest, most photographed and most expensive airplane, an upgraded Boeing 747 monster costing $325 million, designed to impress and influence global leaders about our prowess. Yet, everyone, everywhere knows by now this is a façade: Washington can't afford to pay its bills and must borrow hundreds of billions of dollars, most often from Communist China, a nation so brutal and inhumane Washington once declined to have any links with it.
Then, the spectacle of Senate and House Democrats with their majority power for change scattering like frightened roaches when the Republican minority barks.
What must the rest of the world, let along a majority of Americans, think about Sarah Palin, a giggly, winking, adult, big-hair version of an airhead Valley Girl who devoutly believes she's qualified to be president? And what to make of followers who agree? Plus the man who created Sister Sarah's fortunes, Sen. John McCain, himself defined by New York Times columnist Frank Rich this week as "the crazy man in Washington's attic"?
Next, the voters. A troubling percentage of voters show an alarming ignorance of facts and a horrifying reliance on rumor and smears for opinions. A barely wavering 30 percentile of Republicans believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates whites; was born in Kenya and should be impeached.
A portrait of U.S. politics in decline must include figures once considered presidential timber—South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Nevada Sen. John Ensign, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards—but all finally unmasked as arrogant, uncontrollable sexual psychopaths.
Monty Python would be stretched to find characters this absurd—Alabama's Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, who held up 80 pending White House appointments for weeks (and thereby stalled government) because he's hacked about an unfulfilled government project for Alabama, and Republicans who demanded a deficit/debt study commission, then voted against their own idea when President Obama endorsed it.
In his farewell address in 1796, President George Washington warned of a dangerous threat to democracy:
"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive ... and of fatal tendency."
A prophecy come true?
