This is slightly edited from the cross-post at Daily Kos, partly because a few commenters there reminded of two points that should have been made but for the fog in this bloggers head:

This is not a news bulletin nor does this post lay any claim to either a novel idea or any stupendous prescience. It is noted here as simply a fact, one which many find very sad but which ought to concern everyone and it is this:

We are in a precipitous and almost dramatically speedy decline as a nation, as a forefront of ideas, as the last best place on earth to live and to thrive. We are, as discussed here a couple of months ago Drowning in Delusions based on things that may have once been so and are no longer. But the rate of our decline is growing faster and faster and anyone who travels at all can feel it palpably.


  Here, for instance, is Tom Friedman the other day, with Rachel Maddow talking about his return from the failed conference held to attempt to do something about global warming:

I was staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Copenhagen, which is near the -- the conference center. They had a monorail running back and forth all day. If you wanted to go into Copenhagen, it came every ten minutes. My cell phone, I could call home, call my office, call my wife; any time, anywhere, from Copenhagen. I come home, I landed in Newark airport. It's like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. Your cell phone... goes out half the time on the Acela from Newark ... to Washington, DC. We need nation-building at home now.

We remain huge, and economically powerful and our much maligned legal system brings a degree of dependable stability that makes it almost impossible for us to fall too far, but we are no longer the cutting edge laboratory of ideas and commerce that we were, and we are slipping further behind every day.

There are many reasons for this, well beyond my meager level of knowledge, but foremost among them (at least to me) is the decline of our political system to a nearly dysfunctional state. Tom Friedman's conversation with Rachel Maddow and his column the next day discussed how Denmark responded to oil crisis set off by the embargoes imposed by Arab states after the 1973 war with Israel and its resultant development of alternative energy sources.

To Rush Limbaugh his comments said this:

These elitist snobs just hate this country so much they want to turn us into Denmark? Look... Nation-building? We need to nation-build at home now? What the hell was the stimulus package to be about? What was Porkulus? What's Obama's whole agenda supposedly about?

To suggest that some other country handled a situation better than we have is to "hate this county." To urge that we change our ways makes one "an elitist snob."

Is it any wonder that our Congress, with its formerly diverse segments, moderate Republicans, Southern Democrats, operates now under a parliamentary system? The New York Times kept running thumb sucking stories noting this development but we have been heading to this state for many years, beginning with the election of President Clinton despite a majority of voters favoring either the re-election of the first President Bush or H. Ross Perot.

The election, two years later, of massive numbers of Republicans to take over Congress, which elected a belligerent Speaker of the House who presented an alternative "contract with America," shut down the government by refusing to fund its operations and hounded before finally impeaching the President essentially for breaking his marriage vows, presented a new face of politics which put everyone on one side or the other: Democrat or Republican. Liberal or Conservative. Blue or Red.

This is not good for the country, which, by the way, we love and treasure.
Seeing everything the way the party does, or political loyalty does, would not allow for Republicans to, for instance, hear a tape recording of the President of the United States directing that the C.I.A. should instruct the F.B.I. not to investigate the break in at the headquarters of the major opposition party by suggesting that it was a secret national security operation and then advise that President that he had to resign.

Yes, spending all that time and energy on putting the minority-elected President in his place not only got him re-elected by a resounding majority, it wasted precious time while, for instance, Afghanistan fell into chaos and housed people once funded by the United States, now dedicated to attacking it. And while wasting all that time, our country did nothing about its own energy problems or health care for its citizens. We spend time yelling at each other about whether people of the same sex should be able to get married, while myriad problems effecting the lives of huge majorities of this country, go unresolved.

And yes, oh New York Times, it is getting worse. The stimulus Limbaugh demeans was, indeed, way too small for the crisis we face. The health insurance bill which seems to be close to passage is, while historic and a great achievement under the sad circumstances, far from what is required and other important issues are likely to be put to the side.

Consensus is simply no longer possible, except within the party in nominal control. The filibuster is no longer the device of last resort to prevent progress on civil rights, cloture now has to be imposed in order to allow the military to get paid.

No. Thomas Friedman is not considering Danish citizenship when he observes that:

doing the optimal things -- whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit -- are "off the table." They've been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything important but hard makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn't even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

Sorry, but there are no good ideas proven to work in other democratic/capitalist societies that we can afford to shove off our table -- not when we need to build a knowledge economy with good jobs and everyone else is trying to do the same.

His colleague on the Times Op-Ed page, the young man trying to be a conservative thinker, Ryan Douthat, writes as if the problem revolves around the current President's way of doing business:

He campaigned as a postpartisan healer who would change the cynical ways of Washington -- as a foe of both back-room deals and ideology-as-usual. But he's governed as a conventional liberal who believes in the existing system, knows how to work it and accepts the limitations it imposes on him.

Aside from what exactly Douthat considers "governing" (again, that confusion between President and Emperor that pervades and distorts our political thought), we have a President willing to talk to people who will not talk to him. Ever. About anything. Well, they will talk: Olympia Snowe probably has developed habits about how to enter the White House given the number of times she has been there to hear the President tell her how much he wants her support, but not one would vote even for the sixth of a loaf that the only sixty Senators who matter could construct.

This is not a road out of our problems. Senator Reid deserves all the accolades he has received for getting anything done in this atmosphere, and the President, too, has managed to craft an excellent record of achievement despite the circus that passes for a legislative body.

Once, it seemed we had a way out of this mess. The McCain efforts against the tobacco industry, then for campaign finance reform and then against George W. Bush in 1999/2000, presented a glimmer of hope but he now has become a vindictive, sad, parody of himself. Sen Spector switched parties, and Senators Snowe and Collins seem unwilling or unable to buck the tide.

As a result, with a large majority of people favoring at least a public option to their health insurance, if not a simple single payer system, we have neither and seem no closer to getting one, than we are to a cap and trade program or doing anything dramatic to wean ourselves off foreign oil.


President Kennedy was talking about our historic allies when he said it, but his exhortation to them applies to the nation at large today:

United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do -- for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

It took only a few minutes after a post similar to this one appeared at Daily Kos to receive one of those other comments which make the whole slide into the mudpile seem even worse.When we operate within these blocks, it is only the blocks that can divide further and, since, division seems to be the imperative of the day, (and we on the left invented the ideological purity that is destroying the right) all that's left is to devour one another.

Witness this DK commenter suggesting that our message with President Obama is that

The US is a country where anyone, even a Black man, can become President as long as he does nothing to challenge those with real power"?? we no longer represent freedom, certainly

It is funny, but sad, how the "even a black man" has to be part of anything said about the President, whose father, indeed, was a black man (though not elected President).

What is it that a President should or can do to "challenge those with real power" if they have the "real power" beyond what he has accomplished? Why complain about the President, and not those with "the real power"?

Our greatest President (at least of the century gone by), with and stronger mandate and a more Democratic Congress, did as much as anyone could, but with the Supreme Court, southern Democrats, and the Fox-style uproar among the right of its time, was frustrated over and over again. Running for a second term he explained:

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

and later in the same campaign:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace‹business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.

President Obama is not the problem; he is the only hope for a solution.

We have a politics that is failing us, and will ruin this beautiful country and its message to the world. We are a divided country, and always have been, but our successes have come from trying to bind those wounds as imperfectly as we have. We will fail if we hold to this course, not because some of us do not love this country, but because we are unwilling to look beyond politics at what is wrong and how to make it right.