Spengler reviews the book, 'American Babylon'

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• George Bush's dissociated mumbling at a time when America was hanging by a thread, showed he cared nothing for Americans. He glossed over us, trashing our hard-fought for way of life, eased the way for lobbyists and profiteers in the sub-prime scandal, UN corruption, fake global warming, illegal aliens, disease and squalor previously seen in third world cesspools. He greased the skids for the final nail in the US coffin, the Obama group. As bad as Bush was, Obama is of course, much worse. (sm)

(Spengler): "This is painfully clear, observes Neuhaus (American Babylon), in George W Bush's second inaugural address:

We are led [Bush said in his address] by events and common sense, to one conclusion: the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of

• liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the

• expansion of freedom in all the world. America's vital interest and our

deepest beliefs are now one ... We go forward with complete confidence in the even triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills.

"Both the power and the danger of the story is in the sincerity with which it is told," Neuhaus commented.

• "Good intentions go awry; we blind ourselves to our own capacity for self-deception when we cast ourselves in the role of God's agents in history's battle between The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness, to cite the title of [a] book by [Reinhold] Niebuhr."

Bush's second inaugural was an exercise in American self-worship, in its assumption that the free institutions of the United States were an earthly

• manifestation of the divine, such that the American government should become a Bureau of Missions for the cult of democracy.

• But it is manifestly false that America's security depends upon the success of freedom elsewhere.

China's political system is not free by Western standards, yet China poses no strategic threat to the United States. Dictatorships that support terrorism well may constitute a strategic threat to the United States, especially if they are able to employ nuclear weapons. But the United States could just as well wipe all of them off the face of the Earth through pre-emptive nuclear bombardment, or let them fight each other to exhaustion, as try to foster democracy in their midst.

• America had no strategic imperative to promote democracy, only a narcissistic one."...

It was actually a monetary one in this case. The money, the no-bid contracts, etc. that were handed out for all these foreign projects, it was Bush's intention all along. He rewarded those who financed his election, as Obama is doing today. (sm)