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by AL THOMAS
TEDDY vs BARACK
Teddy Roosevelt vs Barack Obama. Any similarities? Let’s look. One of the great lines TR was known for and is repeated today is, “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.
Our new leader speaks loudly and has no stick. Actually he does have the biggest stick in the world with the U.S. military, but will not and cannot use it. The world has changed since TR.
Military is not what controls the world. Wars today are economic.
World conditions have changed massively since TRs time. Then you could send battleships and troops to impose U.S. will on other countries.
Not any more.
When Russia went belly up as a result of Ronald Reagan’s economic policy my comment at that time is we need to find a new adversary and I said it would be China. Looks like it has come to pass.
We have picked up a rag tag bunch of new little foreign punks (Iran, North Korea) who recognize the U.S. is becoming powerless. It is happening because we have lost leadership of those who care more for their personal power and money than care for their country.
There will be no shooting wars. Nuclear has made that unthinkable. It doesn’t mean that some nut like Ahmadinejad won’t send a nuke or two into Israel. The retaliation by Israel will wipe out the entire country. But Adminijerk doesn’t care.
It takes leverage to make foreign policy work and our Congress has dug us into a hole and they and our new president are digging it faster and deeper. We are losing our leverage by diluting the U.S. dollar with stimulus dollars that do not stimulate.
The dollar has been recognized as the reserve currency of the world. At one time the USA was a creditor nation. People owed us money and therefore had respect for our decisions.
Today we are a debtor nation and we owe everybody. We owe China ¾ of a TRILLION dollars. That is 750 thousand million dollars. No normal person can count that high. Just politicians. China has told Barack to stop printing money and he will have to do it. They have threatened to stop lending us money. That’s what they do when they buy our U.S. bonds. That is their big stick. They can (behind the scenes that us folks out here will never see) tell us what to do. Barack and our greedy Congress can make all the loud rhetoric they wish and it won’t make a particle of difference.
Little bums like North Korea and Iran don’t have good leverage so they threaten with nukes. You can’t predict what crazies will do.
Unless some semblance of sanity is returned to our leadership in Washington our foreign enemies are going to beat us with our own weak stick – the dollar. There is no Teddy Roosevelt in Washington.
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