“It never rains when I can make it pour“
Honestly, I really do try to be cheerful, I mean, every Monday I give you, free of charge, several jokes to cheer you up but the fact is it is impossible to avoid the really bad news. And ‘over there’ the news is getting ‘worserer and worserer’. You might reply something to the effect of who gives a damn? Well, I do! I love the place despite its manifold faults and vices. And, like it or loath it, it looms alarmingly large on the global landscape. So for me, reading Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph and then Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator has made me even more miserable than the steady rainfall outside my garret window has already done.
Mr. Warner (such an appropriate name) warns of the imminent death of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In doing so he joins a growing chorus:
That this position – what Giscard d’Estaing referred to as America’s “exorbitant
privilege” – could so casually be put at risk by politicians on Capitol Hill is
an extraordinary spectacle that may be indicative of a great power already
seriously on the wane.
However, he suggests that it might be a slower decline and fall than some suppose not least because so much of the world’s trade is conducted in dollars. Nevertheless, he sums up the predicament, thus:
Serious alternatives to the dollar, such as a global reserve currency, are
still a long way off, but the latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill have given the
search for them renewed and added momentum. The US is recklessly throwing away its future.
All that, of course, is a symptom of a malignant disease at the heart of the American body-politic. Jeffrey Lord, in a long and detailed examination seeks to define the cause. In his opinion, and it is one I share, it is the incessant and semi-secret attack of surreptitious Marxism. If that makes me (and him) sound like born-again Joe McCarthys, so be it, but any detailed examination of the Democrat party, the higher reaches of the American academy, the civil service, the judiciary and now, according to Mr. Lord, the armed services, would convince anyone that whilst most of the participants are the usual “useful idiots” the controllers are Red in tooth and claw! Meanwhile, the stupid and stupified traditional leadership of the Republican party remain oblivious still believing that they live in the ‘good ol’ days’ of schmoozing and deal-making:
The difference — the central and critical difference — is that after decades of left-wing devotion to the hijacking of America, to the idea of transforming it [my emphasis], there are still Republicans and even some conservatives who don’t understand the nature of either their opponents or their opponents’ objectives.
They simply do not understand that the nature of the Democrat beast has changed irrevocably and thus, the war inside the Republican party between those who do and those who do not is infinitely more lethal than that between them and the Democrats. If indeed a catastrophe occurs then the benefits – oh yes, there are always benefits to someone! – will flow to the organisation that has planned it and instigated it.
The above post from October 16, 2013 has been reprinted with permission from the erudite David Duff at Duff and Nonsense, who writes about news, politics, lots of military history from a wonderfully refreshing British point of view (pssst, and he posts a lot of jokes too).
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