{"id":50177,"date":"2015-01-02T09:24:30","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T15:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50177"},"modified":"2015-01-02T09:27:08","modified_gmt":"2015-01-02T15:27:08","slug":"mission-nearly-accomplished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50177","title":{"rendered":"Mission Nearly Accomplished"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to urge us to &#8220;pretend&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Pretend for a minute that President Obama doesn&#8217;t believe the United States ought to be a superpower, that it ought to be equal with other nations (not a big stretch &#8211; that belief motivated the Atom Spies to give nuclear secrets to the Russians and no doubt is shared by billions of people worldwide, today). How would he go about bringing America down to second or even third-world levels following the model of, say, Argentina?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Alienate traditional allies. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Weaken military power, numbers and morale. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Nationalize major industry. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Weaken domestic energy independence, increase foreign dependence. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Widen wealth gap. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Reduce earners, increase idlers. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Use government employees to intimidate political opponents. Check.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Crush middle class with regulations and taxes. In progress.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Debase the currency by printing money. In progress.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic;\">Debase the citizenry by flinging open borders. In progress.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what&#8217;s next on the agenda? What will it take to bring the USA down to the economic, military, social and political level of, say, Spain?<\/p>\n<p>Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>About the only thing he hasn&#8217;t done is enlist Visigoths and Vandals into the military as auxiliaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to urge us to &#8220;pretend&#8221;: Pretend for a minute that President Obama doesn&#8217;t believe the United States ought to be a superpower, that it ought to be equal with other nations (not a big stretch &#8211; that belief motivated the Atom Spies to give nuclear secrets to the Russians [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,51,109,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-liberal-tyranny","category-sovereignty","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50179,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50177\/revisions\/50179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}