Both Ed and Allahpundit have weighed in on a comment made by President Obama at the end of his nuclear security summit.  Asked about the relationship between the summit and peace-making efforts in the Middle East, the President said:

It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them.  And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.

For my part, I found these remarks more… melancholy than outrageous.  Ed asked, “What exactly is there not to like about having the dominant military in the world?”  Let me ask a slightly different question: What other nation, beyond the Western democracies, would not like it?  Everyone from heavyweight contenders like China, to the comeback empire of Russia, down to nasty little street fighters like North Korea and Iran would love to be dominant military superpowers.  Their dreams include detailed plans for using that power, should they ever acquire it.

There’s nothing factually incorrect about what the President said.  It’s the tired, bloodless way he said it that provoked a sharp Sarah Palin response.  It was a far cry from the way someone like JFK or Reagan would address the same topic.  They would have seen the responsibility of power as a challenge we should rise to meet, with confidence and determination, and offered thanks to God that America is the nation entrusted with this challenge.

Sadly, the America of new frontiers and bright mornings was long ago.  Today we live in Hospice America, where caretakers with first-class temperaments and sharply creased trousers make us comfortable in the face of inevitable decline… and forward the bills for our end-of-greatness care to our children, who will go bankrupt paying them.

Consider the controversial revisions to our nuclear retaliation policy, announced earlier this month.  The Administration told the world we would not retaliate to a biological or chemical weapons attack, unless the attacker possessed a stockpile large enough to pose a risk of a “devastating strike.”  This betrays shocking ignorance of the importance of resolve when facing down barbaric aggression, coupled with an attempt to win favor in the salons of Europe with empty moral posturing.

Let’s not mince words: if thousands of Americans died in a chemical or biological attack, and Obama responded with talk of sanctions and censure, or blew up a couple of tents with cruise missiles, he would be dragged out of the White House by a howling mob.  You know it, and so does he.  He made this statement because he sees himself presiding over a dying country that won’t be a threat to the world’s bad actors for much longer.  We’re so meek and reasonable that nobody would bother flooding our subways with sarin gas.  We might as well make a big show of disarming ourselves, and score a few points with those who love to indulge their moral arrogance by pretending we’re dangerous.

Muscular foreign policy is an expense Hospice America can’t afford, and a distraction from the more urgent business of keeping its clients sedated and nourished.  They’re too feeble to handle their own finances, or manage their own health insurance.  A modest unemployment allowance is provided for them, paid from cash advances on Uncle Sam’s credit cards, because they can’t really find work on their own any more.  Genuine freedom and independence have been dismissed as unworkable.  Instead, our congressional candy-stripers will quietly relieve their clients of meaningful decision making, while gently congratulating them on how “free” and “independent” they are.

Democrats may lie incessantly about the solvency of massive entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and ObamaCare, but you can rest assured they’re privy to the real numbers.  Their long-term plans involve assuming control over an exhausted population, which will trade the energy and risk of prosperous capitalism for evenly-distributed mediocrity.  Top Party officials, and their well-heeled admirers from Hollywood to Goldman-Sachs, will retain lavish lifestyles and platinum benefits… while sternly lecturing the little people about their moral responsibility to accept the end of the American century, and lie quietly in their socially just, environmentally sustainable deathbeds.

Obama and his party view investment, entrepreneurial adventure, private ownership, and personal responsibility as the epic fantasies of a young nation.  Geriatric America is expected to accept the socialist wisdom of zero-sum, no-growth economics, in which prosperity ends at the waterfall edge of a flat Earth, and private innovation fades into a blank space labeled “here there be dragons.”  Wealth is viewed as a dead mass to be redistributed, not the living energy that flows between the needs and abilities of free people.  The healthy ambition to build a better life is replaced by hatred for those who already have it.

We don’t have to accept this vision of Hospice America.  It must be rejected with the very spirit of defiance that proves it false.  The promises of our self-appointed caretakers are lies anyway, soon to dissolve in an avalanche of impossible debt, crushing taxes, and enemies who have no intention of leaving us to fade away in peace.  There will be no comfortable slide into national oblivion.  Rising up to reclaim control of our lives and fortunes will be difficult.  The Democrat Party will spend every day perched at our bedside, telling us it’s impossible.  Over the next few years, we must help each other find the honesty, courage, and self-respect to shove them aside and stand tall again.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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