SEARCH FOR WORLD LEADERS

We may soon find out that we have elected a strong leader who will forcefully move us in directions we do want to go! As I said to my 'moonbat' friends, planning to vote against Bush: "be careful what you wish for".

Pay particular attention to Soros, the Clintons, the EU and the UN. One world government is just around the corner. Desperate times call for desperate measures and our recent vote shows that we appear to be a confused desperate people. It is time for the evil ones to make their move!

Paul Johnson

This year will be looked upon as a watershed in modern history. The good, easy, fairly tranquil times that followed the collapse of Soviet communism, signaled by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, are over.

We've enjoyed nearly two decades in which the U.S. has been the unchallenged sole superpower and free-market capitalism has been the economic model for all the world, producing rising real incomes almost everywhere. We became accustomed to taking safety and prosperity for granted.

Both now look precarious.

For the first time since Joseph Stalin's death more than half a century ago we have to deal with a major power that has a taste for aggression. Vladimir Putin's Russia bears some of the marks of Hitler's Germany, especially in its desire to recover lost territories by force.

But Putin is not another Hitler by any means. A former secret policeman, he has more in common with Heinrich Himmler, the sinister head of the Nazi SS. Putin won't plunge us all into another world war. Russia, with its dwindling population and total reliance on high energy prices, is not strong enough for that. But Putin will push on every open door he finds, as his invasion of Georgia shows. He can be relied on to exploit any problem the West creates for itself and make it worse.

The sudden, brutal and frightening revelation of the weaknesses of world capitalism has been a shock. This will have serious tangible consequences for years to come--high unemployment, lost production and difficulty in securing capital for investment in new ideas and processes, to name only three. But even more important is the psychological impact produced by the reminder that free markets bring not only routine prosperity but also occasional disaster.

We are now painfully aware that human greed, often allied with reckless incompetence, imposes a heavy price on any self-regulating system. It produces hysteria and intellectual folly, as well as the dreadful temptation to turn to the state as the cure for all ills.

These twin evils--naked Russian aggression and the worst market crisis in a lifetime--have revealed a frightening vacuum in Western leadership.

It is a thousand pities that this time of testing has coincided with a U.S. presidential election. George W. Bush has not been lacking in courage or the powers of decision making. But the fact that he will soon leave the White House has limited his willingness to take on radical commitments.

In effect, the machinery of American leadership will not return to full power until mid-January. This leaves a gap that the ill fortune of the times and the malice of mischiefmakers render serious. We sense the lack of the firm hand of wise and confident government.

To make matters worse, Britain, which has often come to the rescue at times of hiatus or failure in U.S. leadership, has its weakest government in many years--a prime minister struggling desperately to keep himself in office, a hopelessly divided and demoralized ruling party and an untested opposition, whose chiefs lack the experience and ability to inspire public confidence.

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