Wilkerson's Analysis

Thanks to Bernie Quigley for posting a link to the following on RK. Is the U.S. Being Transformed into a Radical Republic?By Col. (Ret.) Leonard Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.

... As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great ...

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin ...

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that ... will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck ...

This administration has expanded government ... and government intrusiveness. It has brought a new level of sleaze and corruption to Washington ...

First, it was Mr. Perle and people such as he who put us where we are today, not the terrorists of 9/11. A somnolent Congress assisted - a Congress that, as Democratic Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia said as the Senate failed to debate in the run-up to the Iraq war, was "ominously, ominously, dreadfully silent."

Second, people such as Mr. Perle do not represent the bulk of Americans, who are anything but radical. Instead, they represent the Robespierres and Napoleons of this world, the neo-Jacobins of today ...

Congress can awaken and discover that the Constitution is correct, that Congress is in fact a separate and equal branch of government ...

We can halt the precipitate slide in our standing around the world, convince the majority of the Islamic world that we can and must co-exist - and eventually prosper together - and at the same time confront, confound and defeat the small element in Islam's midst that lives to murder innocents, Christian, Jew and Muslim alike.

All we need do, in reality, is return to our roots. Never in our almost 800-year history since the Magna Carta have we been radicals.

I can't really add to what Col. Wilkerson says. This is a strong defense of the America which appeals to and has always been a beacon of liberty to the world, not the scared oaf stomping about the world looking for enemies and trying to force its version of democracy down other countries' throats.