Indeed, it already has. Whether Newt or Mitt Romney emerges victorious, the candidate who comes out of the Republican convention will be bruised and bloodied.

Consider, first, Newt.

Michael Townley, an ex-CIA
asset in the hire of Chile’s intelligence agency, confessed to using
anti-Castro Cubans to murder Letelier, in what was regarded as an act of terrorism on U.S. soil.

Which raises a question: Are not the murders of four Iranian
scientists associated with that nation’s nuclear program, by the
attachment of bombs to their cars in Tehran, also acts of terrorism?

How did Bain prosper? Says Perry: “These companies … come in and loot the people’s jobs, loot their pensions (and) loot their ability to take care of their families.”

America is bored with Barack Obama. The young and the minorities are still with him but exhibit none of the excitement or enthusiasm of 2008.

Enraged Republicans denounced the appointment as an affront and a usurpation of power, for the Senate had not formally gone into recess.

Friday’s lead stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal dealt with what both viewed as a national affront and outrage.

The tale is about a dog who decides to take a nap in the manger. When
the ox, who has worked all day, comes back to eat some straw, the dog
barks loudly, threatens to bite him and drives him from his manger.

The lesson the fable teaches is that it is malicious and wicked to
deny a fellow creature what you yourself do not want and cannot even
enjoy.

What brings the fable to mind is this year’s crop of Christmas-haters, whose numbers have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas.

For this was the year when what Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc predicted in 1938 would be the “second period of Islamic power” became manifest to all mankind.

From Morocco to Pakistan, a great awakening is occurring. And perhaps the most dramatic example of Islam rising again came in Egypt, with the fall of the 60-year-old military dictatorship.

With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU: “British surrenders of sovereignty come to an end here. And Britain will deny Brussels any oversight authority of any national budgets or any right to sanction EU members.”

The euro-skeptic right is understandably ecstatic.

Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West. 

Political support for TARP, to rescue the financial system after the Lehman Brothers collapse, is being held against any Republican candidate who backed it. Germans and Northern Europeans are balking at any more bailouts of Club Med deadbeats.

This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American
democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.

What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.

After a nanosecond I replied, “Kick ‘em out!”

Let them go to George Washington, the university on the other side of town.

We lost a genuine San Antonio original with the passing of 90-year-old author, Broadway producer, New Age lecturer, confidante to stars and scalawags alike, world traveler, bon vivant and raconteur sans pareil Walter Starcke on October 25, 2011.

In his June 1998 commencement address at Portland State, President Clinton affirmed it: “In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States.” The graduates cheered.

The Census Bureau has now fixed at 2041 the year when whites become a minority in a country where the Founding Fathers had restricted citizenship to “free white persons” of “good moral character.”

With publication today of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? this writer takes up what this portends.

The NWO dates back as far as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, which a Republican Senate refused to enter. FDR, seeking to succeed where his mentor had failed, oversaw the creation of a United Nations, an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank.

In 1951 came the European Coal and Steel Community, love child of Jean Monnet, which evolved into the European Economic Community, the European Community and the European Union. A European Central Bank and a new currency, the euro, followed.

Observing the correlation of forces in this city and the intensity of conviction in the base of each party, the outcome of the ongoing fiscal fight between Barack Obama and the Tea Party Republicans seems preordained.

For example, a family can be classified as poor and own a car, a flat-screen TV and a computer, and have a washer-dryer and a garbage disposal.

In his column, “Democracy Versus Liberty,” Walter Williams cites Hamilton, James Madison and John Randolph, who wrote of “the follies and turbulence” of democracy, and John Adams:

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted:
“Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan replied.
“Ah, but he made one terrible mistake,” Churchill continued. “Obsessed in his youth by fear of the power of Spain, he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?”
Yes, history will say that of Churchill, who in 1946 delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Mo., to decry Stalin’s persecution of that half of Europe into which Churchill had welcomed the monster.

It would last six years, carry off scores of millions and end with Germany in ruins, half of Europe under Josef Stalin’s rule and the British Empire on the way to collapse.

Though it may prove to be the mortal wound that brings about the death of the West, most today accept World War II as inevitable, indeed as “the good war.”

For it is said and believed that Adolf Hitler was not only the incarnation of evil but also out to conquer, first Poland and then Europe and then the world. To stop such a monster, one must risk everything.

“Lenin was certainly right,” John Maynard Keynes continued in his 1919 classic, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”