Reduced dominance is predicted for U.S.

Really? You must be kidding me.

Really?

Who could possibly have seen this coming?

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

On the bright side, I have to say I'm glad we have somebody in our government somewhere who is assessing our near-term challenges in a clear-eyed way, reasonably free from the Mickey-Mouse fantasies of American exceptionalism, American inerrancy, and American hegemony which have become the rhetorical obligation of every politician in the nation - though of course wielded with especial gusto and proto-fascistic furor by our Republican friends.

(By the way, did you see those guys chanting USA! USA! USA! at their convention the other week? Downright frightening.)

--Or, now that I think of it, maybe that isn't on the bright side at all. That is, to think I now so implicitly expect our leaders to live in a fantasyland wherein America is always and in everything #1 - or I at least expect them to have to pretend whenever they open their mouths in public that they live in such a fantasyland - that I can be impressed to learn somebody among our 1.8 million nonpostal federal employees is noddingly acquainted with reality? Yich.

That, indeed, is a lot of how we came to be so screwed in the first place.



P.S. Kevin Phillips explains some of the problem quite well.

P.P.S. And so does David Letterman.