If there was ever evidence that America as a nation has failed, this is it.

There is a famous “Twilight Zone” episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town — for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

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…The commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, “The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration.” Of course, “inflame” is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be “inflamed” is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.

Indeed, everybody seems to understand that if you want to help amend the disaster in Iraq, the No. 1 rule is that you can’t acknowledge it’s a disaster in Bush’s presence. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the court stenographer of the Bush administration, recently reported that this was a key factor in the hiring of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

This is the kind of nonsense one would read about in history books about decaying empires and corrupted societies. The undeserving leadership of heredity leading a nation to ruin while the courtiers look on and the sycophants grab whatever the spoils around them for themselves, oblivious of the fatal damage being inflicted. Works the same everywhere, whether Bourbon France, Czarist Russia, Hitler and his bunker entourage (led by Martin Boorman), or even Elvis Presley and his ‘Memphis Mafia.’

The fact that we as a society are tolerating this is proof that America is pretty much done, stick a fork in it.

Read The Full Article from the Los Angeles Times