Adam Smith famously said, "There is a
lot of ruin in a nation." Barack Obama seems hell bent on seeing how much
ruin he can inflict on this country as part of his "legacy."
The Iran nuclear arms deal is a dire threat to America.
We could easily lose a major city to a terrorist nuclear weapon hidden in a
hijacked ocean freighter. We also run the risk that other countries who once
depended on the US to defend them from nuclear threats will feel compelled to
make their own arrangements. This could easily lead to a general, perhaps
nuclear war in the Middle East.
Putin is taking crazy chances because he knows his grip
on power is threatened by the rock bottom price of oil. Energy is Russia's main
world class export. The last time oil prices crashed, Russian inflation hit 80%
a year, Russia defaulted on its bonds and Boris Yeltsin was forced from power.
That's how Putin came to power. Putin believes, probably correctly, that losing
power will be the death of him. He has resorted to risky military adventures to
bolster his popularity. Putin has found no US resistance to his attacks on the
Ukraine and Syria. In the Ukraine, Obama has not supplied any weapons at all.
Putin's next trick could be attacking Lithuania, a former Soviet Republic and
now NATO ally. At the moment, Putin has just finished quietly negotiating
basing rights in Belarus, next door to Lithuania, while everybody is watching
the Russian Air Force bomb civilians in Syria.
I am also concerned that Obama's disdain for the
Constitution and rule of law has created dangerous precedents that his
successors will emulate. I don't want a dictator even if he's on my side. I
think it will probably take a Constitutional Convention called by the states to
fix the mess, because the courts have not acted to restrain the
administration's extralegal moves. In many cases they have piled on themselves,
for example in the Obamacare cases where they rewrote the law twice without
benefit of Congress.
As to the amount of ruin in the US, I am
fearfully asking myself, "Are we there yet?"
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