I am glad to see the doddering, ill-tempered warmonger McCain sent back to the Senate, where he can live out what's left of his political career as the addled Maverick. Those of us who feel that way should not welcome the advent of Obamanation, however. Hitchens tells us why in this "must read." Some salient points:

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

Ireally don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts. . . .

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to. . . .

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

 

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

 

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

 

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

 

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

 

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

 

It's going to be a helluva ride, boys and girls. Better cowboy up.

It's no secret that my sympathies are with the Russian and Serbian nations.  There are two reasons for this:  1) I am Orthodox (though of a very quirky, Western sort); and 2) as a paleoconservative, I see in those two nations the potential for traditional Christian culture to be reborn, in a way that currently seems impossible here in the West.   

As well, my sympathies for Russia and Serbia are fueled by my utter disdain for the empire that the United States have (yes, that's "have", not "has") become.  America was never meant to be such, as our Founding Fathers clearly argued.  Washington DC has been in the hands of usurpers since the middle of the 19th century, and I lament not only what that damnable Rome on the Potomac has done to our republic, but what it is currently doing overseas in the name of "spreading democracy."

The realizatiion of what happened to America has propelled me in a "neo-Confederate" direction.  Though that is clearly a pejorative term to many people, I'll own it, though it's really more accurate to call me a "confederalist" or a "neo-secessionist."   My principal concern is a return to America as orignally conceived, and not so much the CSA (though, as a Son of the South and of Confederate veterans, I fly her banners with pride).

I see the causes of a free and sovereign America and a free and sovereign Serbia as linked.  That's why I recently wrote that it's equally true to say that "the cause of Serbia is the cause of us all" as it is to say, with CSA VP Alexander Stephens, "the cause of the South is the cause of us all."  Both causes are currently stymied by the Federal regime here and the powers of Western Europe.  But there is reason for hope, as those two Leviathans may soon be undone, a result of their own internal rot. 

So, thank you Melana.  I am honored to have my blog linked at yours, and yours linked here.  Long live Serbia.

The fiendish Russian prime minister has struck again! According to neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, Vladimir Putin dreams of subjugating the world. Indeed, he has already begun - with his household pet. Putin recently had his totalitarian techs whip up a satellite-tracked dog collar for his black labrador, Koni. "She looks sad," Reuters reported Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov as saying. "Her free life is over." Nyet, said Putin. "She is wagging her tail. That means she likes it." Expect some future Republican presidential contender, high on anti-Russian hysteria, to announce we are all black labs now. (Link to the Dreher article added by Caedmon.)

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It’s Alaska."

Who Lost Russia?

"Bernard-Henri". . . BEARnard-ONree.

Self-important little frog. 

Reading this interview reminds me of this spoof that circulated during the early days of the War in Afghanistan:

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God

The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taleban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking."

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmens' endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

Speculation was mounting last night that Britain may also contribute to the effort by dropping Professor Stephen Hawking into Afghanistan to propagate his non-deistic theory of the creation of the universe.
Other tactics to demonstrate the non-existence of God will include the dropping of leaflets pointing out the fact that Michael Jackson has a new album out and Oprah Winfrey has not died yet.

This is only one of several Psy-Ops operations mounted by the Allies to undermine the unswerving religious fanaticism that fuels the Taleban's fighting spirit. Pentagon sources have recently confirmed rumours that America has already sent in a 200-foot-tall robot Jesus, which roams the Taleban front lines glowing eerily and shooting flames out of its fingers while saying, 'I am the way, the truth and the life, follow me or die.' However, plans to have the giant Christ kick the crap out of a slightly effeminate 80-foot Mohammed in central Kabul were discarded as insensitive to Muslim allies.

A senior official of the Russian Orthodox Church has made a scathing attack on Western countries and has said they should not impose their standards on other nations. "We should have a strong State and a strong military, for we would then have the will and ability to repel any invasion against our way of life and interests, and our ability to influence events developing in the world," said the Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations.

In an interview broadcast on Russia's Soyuz television channel, the church official urged his country to defend "its free, original political choice" and reject Western models, "setting its laws and rules the way which is natural for our nation, its destiny, mentality and historical ways".

Speaking of Western countries, Chaplin said, "In spite of all their talk of adhering to international law and respecting self-determination, these countries have always acted solely in their own interests and applied quite contrary principles. . . ."

Defending the Russian army action (in Georgia), Chaplin said the United States and NATO had sent troops to countries where "the people have never asked for it, and neither referendums nor votes were held on the question".

He added, "Why does the West believe, as [U.S. President George W.] Bush has clearly stated, that only one form of democracy and of people's participation in decisions, the Western form, is compulsory and should be set out for all nations and countries?"

Chaplin asserted, "Survival is impossible for a society deprived of faith as a foundation of public life and of any purpose except consumption, and which embraces the ideal of imposing a particular form of democracy around the globe simply because it is expedient for American banks, Western governments, and the world economic and media elite."

Which is why we can only hope this is true. 

Death to neoconservatism and the American empire; long live the restored American republic(s).

The Russian president said in a speech Thursday that the financial crisis in the United States should be taken as a sign that America's global economic leadership is drawing to a close, reiterating an argument that leaders here have been making for some time, though investors in recent weeks have been fleeing Russia and depositing money in U.S. Treasury bills.

Perhaps inevitably for a country long lectured to by the United States, Russia is using the occasion of the U.S. financial crisis to do some lecturing of its own.

President Dmitri Medvedev said Thursday that the U.S. crisis showed that "the times when one economy and one country dominated are gone for good." Speaking of the United States, Medvedev said the world no longer needed a "megaregulator."

Ow, that hurts.  But as they say, "no pain, no gain."  America's return to its proper constitutional, political and economic perameters won't occur without some pain.   But we will be the better for it.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Empire.

OK, so it angers you.   What are you going to do about it?

UPDATE, UK:  Anti-terrorism laws used to spy on noisy children

EU moves to ban "sexy ads

EU plans to regulate blogs

You don't know how lucky you are, boys. . . .

Tell me, Europeans:  who's going to steal your liberty and your historic cultures first, the Muslims or the EUrocrats?

Wake the hell up, and throw these fascists off.  Thomas Jefferson and Co. have shown you the way.

But I digress.  Tonight I want to address the Georgia-Israel connection:

NATO guarantees that an attack against one member country is an attack against all are no longer what they used to be. Had Georgia been inside NATO, a number of European countries would no longer be willing to consider it an attack against their own soil.

For Russia , the geopolitical stars were in perfect alignment. The U.S. was badly overstretched and had no plausible way to talk tough without coming across as empty rhetoric. American resources have been drained by the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the war on terror. The European Union is still a military dwarf that swings no weight in the Kremlin. And the ineptitude of Georgia's leadership gave Russian leaders a huge new window of opportunity.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili evidently thought the U.S. would come to his side militarily if Russian troops pushed him back into Georgia after ordering an attack last Aug. 8 on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. And when his forces were mauled by Russia's counterattack, bitter disappointment turned to anger. Along with Abkhazia, Georgia lost two provinces.

Georgia also had a special relationship with Israel that was mostly under the radar. Georgia's Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili is a former Israeli who moved things along by facilitating Israeli arms sales with U.S. aid. "We are now in a fight against the great Russia," he was quoted as saying, "and our hope is to receive assistance from the White House because Georgia cannot survive on its own. . . ."

The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 12 reported, "Georgian Prime Minister Vladimir Gurgenidze made a special call to Israel Tuesday morning to receive a blessing from one of the Haredi community's most important rabbis and spiritual leaders, Rabbi Aaron Leib Steinman. "I want him to pray for us and our state," he was quoted.

Israel began selling arms to Georgia seven years ago. U.S. grants facilitated these purchases. From Israel came former minister and former mayor of Tel Aviv Roni Milo, representing Elbit Systems, and his brother Shlomo, former director-general of Military Industries. Israeli UAV spy drones, made by Elbit Maarahot Systems, conducted recon flights over southern Russia, as well as into nearby Iran .

In a secret agreement between Israel and Georgia, two military airfields in southern Georgia had been earmarked for the use of Israeli fighter bombers in the event of preemptive attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. This would sharply reduce the distance Israeli fighter bombers would have to fly to hit targets in Iran. And to reach Georgian airstrips, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) would fly over Turkey.

What else can we do, I wonder, to feed historic Russian anti-Semitism?

No need to say more.  Read the rest of the article, linked above.