Choose to Lose?

Here's some serious, and therefore a little long (8 printed pages), reading for the day for those whose attention span was forged without the impediment of electronic media. Writing in The Weekly Standard, the inimitable Charles Krauthammer points out that if America is in decline, it isn't because there's a "post-American" world out there cutting our hamstrings, "decline is a choice."

Unfortunately, decline is a choice the left and the Obama administration want to make. From Obama's inability to understand American exceptionalism (NB his idiotic response that everyone is exceptional) through his apology tours to his acceptance of a peace prize for diminishing US leadership, the president displays a willful ignorance of international politics, coupled on the home front with policies that weaken the nation's defenses and undermine the national economy...all to the cheers of our enemies and the consternation of our allies.

Krauthammer believes this nation should accept its role as hegemon, "as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen." Resistance to falling to the status of a "normal" nation among nations (say, Italy or Lichtenstein) means having "moral confidence" and also a big wallet.  Krauthammer points out that we are not in "inherent" economic decline...we can choose to end the slow suicidal bleed of deficit spending. We can  strengthen the dollar not by protecting unskilled labor but by continuing to champion the technological innovation and new industries of the information age and by responding seriously to our energy crisis with drilling offshore and in the Arctic and moving to nuclear energy.