QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:06 A.M. ET:  From James Lewis at American Thinker, on American weakness and its implications:

For almost a century the United States has been the cop on the world beat, as the British Empire declined and crumbled. The US was the great, civilized power that supported freedom of trade, resistance against the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin, relative peace in the Third World, and the protection of post-World War Two stability, ranging from Japan and South Korea to Israel and Berlin. Europe today would not exist were it not for American protection; it would be a Soviet colony. India and Pakistan might be in a hot war. China might be attacking Japan to retaliate against the horrors of World War Two, which are constantly repeated in the Chinese media. Ancient hatreds exist all over the world, ready to explode when the cop on the beat gets drunk or just resigns.

The United States has preserved the balance of power and kept it on the side of civilization against the mob. All the feeble regimes in the Third World depend upon us to come to their aid against their own mobs and agitators. In fact, those regimes are just the mob agitators who won the last round.

COMMENT:  George W. Bush understood that.  So, of course, did Ronald Reagan.  Carter didn't.  Obama doesn't.  Our international position seems to be deteriorating everywhere, and improving nowhere.  Now, with an economy that won't recover, and an oil spill that he has done so little to stop, Obama seems even weaker to the world than before, and he has never seemed a wall of strength.

In our current state – doing poorly in Afghanistan, refusing to stand strongly against North Korea, unable to stop the Iranian nuclear program, and throwing allies under the bus – we are opening the door to some international explosion that we won't be able to contain.

The urgency to defeat Obama in this year's midterms grows greater by the day, and the urgency to remove him entirely in 2012 must become a national mission.

June 18, 2010