Uncomfortably Numb

China

China is undergoing its most significant upheaval since becoming a communist state.  Any communist revolution is by definition an attempt to deny and suppress the spirit of man.  The current transition will be both more important and more successful than the revolution there, because this move has been anticipated for thousands of years–it is led by reality, rather than the other way around.  China, long famous for deprecating any knowledge or influence from barbarian realms, is becoming oriented beyond its own borders.

While we dither and kowtow by re-forming NASA into the North African Space Administration (with a mission to make Muslim countries feel proud of their accomplishments, no less), the Chinese are pushing into deep blue water and deep black space.  Black and blue is a wonderfully apt memory aid for describing our begging and pleading approach toward those tyrants.  We still owe the butchers of Beijing a porchful of their own bloody and broken teeth for what they did at Tiananmen.  Now Iran and Syria replay Tiananmen, Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia (again) and we call Assad a “reformer”.  Sure, those remarks have been walked back and our compliant media raise no issue–but it was wrong at the time and obviously so.

China has demonstrated the ability to shoot down a satellite, and the willingness to do it, showers of space debris be damned.  The real message was not that they could do it, but that even for a test, they care so little about the environment in orbit.  Our technological advantage is now highly dependent upon unopposed use of space, but only a fool would assume a lack of opposition now.  It is a vulnerability of ours which the Chinese do not have.  

[pullquote]We once put a man on the moon.  Now we can’t build a fence.[/pullquote]The shoot-down event created thousands of trackable bits of space litter travelling at ludicrous speed.  Recall that in response, we moved the International Space Station into a higher orbit so that folks there wouldn’t get killed by a chance encounter with something no bigger than a AA battery going incredibly fast.  The ISS, by the way, was supposed to be an American project called Space Station Freedom.  It is difficult for people now to remember that we used to have the ability to do these things on our own.  We put a man on the moon to show the Soviets that our missile technology so far ouclassed theirs that they had better not try anything.  Now we can’t muster the willpower to build a fence.

Obama

Note how, as a bus-sized satellite fell to Earth last week, nobody made the obvious Carter/Skylab comparison to Obama/UARS.  Heck, I thought it would be all over the place, but it looks like even our humor is becoming fatigued.  Not a good sign.  People are profoundly tired of President Obama.  Perhaps his biggest advantage is that we are too tired of him to listen to his inane speeches.  He now has a marvellously self-selecting audience of sycophants and barely-restrained bolsheviks.  His surroundings now consist of those who pull him to the left, and those whom he pulls, but they all go willingly.  Obviously, this will all end badly for him as he is overtaken by what I call “Michael Jackson’s disease”, in which a shifting baseline of “normal” provided by well-paid parasites and fellow-travellers leads the host to his doom.

[pullquote]People are waking from a nightmare of fire and embracing the frying pan[/pullquote]If Obama does not retain the Presidency in 2012, that does not mean that the Democrats won’t.  People are waking from a nightmare of fire and embracing the frying pan, a merely socialist Hillary campaign vs the full-blown Marxism of Obama.  I have posited Mary Landrieu as a real surprise, one which would generate real buzz, not recycled Clintonism.  Rick Perry has the advantage of coming from hardy Democrat stock, which could be a doomsday weapon in the general election.  Unfortunately, he is hemorrhaging conservatives in the primary, which is how not to get to the general.   Landrieu has opposed President Obama about half of the time, which similarly positions her toward the center but unlike Perry, without necessarily giving up anything on the base.

A Democrat victory with a “moderate” i.e., non-Marxist President taking office in 2013 would be in many ways worse than an outright Obama victory.  It would deflate much of the criticism by laundering the image of the wrenching changes currently being stomped down our throats.  America is in the middle of a lost decade, which will become a lost generation if a moderate democrat steps in.  A moderate would be able to secure the “ratchet effect” for items which will be rolled back if the Republicans win, or at least fiercely opposed in the unthinkable event of an Obama re-election.

America

Several of the President’s speeches individually would be enough to scare the crap out of anybody who understands the Constitution.  Taken together, however, they form a smothering patchwork of detachment which will kill us if we let it.  In the nineties, thoughtful people scratched their beards in coffee shops and pondered “donor fatigue” as charity events seemed to proliferate and blur.  Now even our own survival is of passing interest, something that we will pay attention to only if kicked hard enough.  In our dark moments, we wonder: If this is freedom, what’s the big deal?  We become a nation of neither wolves nor sheep, but of Eeyores.

Our policy toward China has been one of ever increasing appeasement and surrender since Nixon was President, with rare and welcome exceptions.  The Clinton Presidency was the low point, with the satellite shoot-down capability that currently exists coming directly from the Clinton-era “technology transfers”.   We fought and died, invented and built for literally decades of Cold War to amass a huge technological lead over our nearest competitors.  Clinton gave much of that away while breaking our military, which has never recovered. 

[pullquote]For America, the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, but not for the Communists.[/pullquote]The complete abandonment of strategic thought at the “end” of the Cold War will hurt us for a very long time.  Rumsfeld’s Defense Transformation to re-constitute the military along new lines was a great project, rudely interrupted by September 11.  The threat from radical political Islam is real and will continue, but the Communists are already conquering our institutions and agencies.  For America, the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, but not for the Communists.

We are being eaten alive by parasites here and scourged by our adversaries abroad, and under the chloroform of political correctness, we find it distasteful to resist.  We must get over it, or that numb feeling will become permanent.

China is winning.