Bogdan Kipling, Special Washington correspondent to the Fort Nelson News

Washington – What more can Christmas bring that many Americans already want and those that don’t could do with?  Sobriety, I’d say – and I don’t mean less booze, either.
Now, gentle reader, you must take it from here and cross examine me. Boggers, you might say, you’ve just all but spelled out that, collectively, America is as p…ed as a newt.
If that’s what you really mean then you had better give a few convincing explanations for your harsh judgement — and maybe a hint or two on how America can sober up.
Forgive me if I weasel a little. As an ordinary believer I invoke hope as the leading edge, but as an ordinary rationalist I’m not holding my breath.
Cut the stuff.
What are you saying: Is America wheeling off the road or isn’t?  Put this way, my answer is yes, it is wheeling off the road right now.
Whether it sobers up in time should start emerging perhaps within days or weeks at the most.
I see two powerful reasons why Americans are on the spot and why they have no time to lose: Newtown is the obvious first here. The crime at the grade school in the small Connecticut town a week ago is so horrible it makes the stones weep.
Though a different category, the fiscal cliff comes in a close second as an indicator of the American disease. No matter how I approach it, the knowledge that 20 children and seven school teachers were murdered in their schoolrooms is horrifying though hardly a first in America.
But the additional fact all the children were only seven and eight years old and several of the innocents had been shot eight and nine times is bone marrow-chilling.
Add the fact that the perpetrator first killed his mother at home before driving her car and the crime borders on the unspeakable.
Now, consider the fiscal cliff.
As I write, the president of the United States and the Speaker of the House of Representatives are gambling with their country’s economy.
What more, they are gambling with the daily bread of just about everybody else in the world because yet another economic crush in the United States poses a clear and present danger to economic stability around the globe.
To fully comprehend the American sickness it is essential to look at American foibles that, in healthier times, would make you shake your head, laugh with mirth or contempt, and brush it off with a ‘there they go again.’
For example, what’s there to say about vending machines dispensing caviar at 500 dollars a dollop?
They have them in Beverly Hills, the home of the ultimate bleeding heart liberals in Movieland. Right, let them eat caviar.
That’s easy to say for the disciples of excess forever posing as defenders of the downtrodden. They don’t feel the pain and, to be charitable, they probably don’t even realise how phony they are.
Now look at the political powers that be.
Here’s President Barak Obama firmly believing that he’s leading the United States to a bright future blind to the ever deeper hole in to which his country is sinking.
He poses as a great leader on the world stage, the restorer of respect for America, the patient architect of peace in in a world tormented by wars that fit no past pattern.
But so far in his four years in the White House a bright Christmas is still out there, coming, someday…
Is that anything to cheer about?
Hardly, when new dictators build and plan to build nuclear weapons regardless of how many times Mr. Obama says he’ll not have it. And look at Mr. Obama’s Republican opponents. They don’t miss an opportunity to confirm the American dictum that judged them
“The Stupid Party” was so long ago nobody’s quite sure who came up with it first. What else can I say?
I know:
Nevertheless, Merry Christmas!

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