While Washington Sleeps

You make it sound like a bad thing that Washington sleeps, when actually it's the best we can hope for under the circumstances. Had Washington been asleep this past year, our economy would be humming right now; our businesses booming; our people working. We all knew that countries would be scrambling to re-define their alliances once Obama came to power. Well, you’re beginning to see it happen. The unknown in all this is whether or not America will continue on its present trajectory after Obama is gone. The smart money says no.

People around the world find the Obama administration an aberration. They do not see Obama and the American people as a match. The extent to which Obama can do damage to the country while in office is as of yet equally unknown – especially overseas. We ourselves are still at odds in this regard. We applaud small victories - like the delay of health care reform legislation - while we all but ignore the lit fuse: the trillions already spent in the form of future obligation to various sundry entitlements. We ignore the fact that our economy is not producing enough (tax-paying) jobs. We ignore the warning signals from China which continues to be an integral part of the three-legged stool that sustains our fiscal illusion. It could all come crashing down in the blink of an eye. ...and it will.

If there is an 'after Obama' (and, in my book, that's still a big IF), you can expect things to return back to normal. The Russia-German alliance is purely one of convenience; it will never be stable. Neither will Putin’s strong-arming of Eastern European countries lead to anything productive or lasting.

If America can return from its dalliance with socialism, things can be expected to go back to how it was. My own suspicion is that our recovery is booby-trapped; that precisely that which we all wish for and expect once Obama is gone will detonate and take us irrevocably down for the count. It reminds me of what both sides did during the Kosovo Conflict and in other modern wars as well. They’d find the body of an enemy combatant and place a landmine underneath it. When the body is then found by his mates, their natural instinct is to retrieve it in order to give it a decent burial. When they do, the mine explodes and kills them all. (See “No Man’s Land” (’01); Foreign. Dir.: Danis Tanović.)