Canada has a Front-Row Seat...

...from which to watch the U.S. go down the drain.  Conrad Black is the author; here's his blistering conclusion:

And now, in an astounding demonstration of national fecklessness, a failed president is running slightly ahead in the polls of a challenger who has a real CV, unlike recent presidents, but who is so politically oafish and plastic, he makes Elmer Fudd seem charismatic. The incumbent has raised the national debt by 50% on what had accumulated in the 220 years of American independence prior to four years ago — that is $17,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, in just four years. And Mr. Obama’s tocsin is the comprehensive assertion that: “Experts agree that my plan will reduce the deficit by $4-trillion.” These magic 13 words confirm the reduction of the deficit from $1.5-trillion annually to $1.1-trillion annually in the next ten years, in a country that four years ago had a money supply of only $900-billion.

About 70% of the American deficit is “bought” directly or through the banking system by the Treasury’s 100% subsidiary, the Federal Reserve, and the minimal interest paid on it is recycled back through the Federal Reserve to the Treasury, so the cost of borrowing is zero. It is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, the fiscal nirvana of endless, mountainous debt, rendered easily bearable because it doesn’t cost anything. It is a fraud, a mirage. It all possesses the hypnotic allure of the Gotterdammerung — as the Gods ascend to a burning Valhalla. If this administration is re-elected, Canada, as it has for the entire mighty spectacle of the inexorable rise of the United States, will have the ring-side seat for a disaster. Prudent, hesitant Canada, ran 14 federal government surpluses in a row. We are the pigs in the brick house — it isn’t a heroic position, neither daring nor stylish, but Canadians are peering through the portals of their stout solid home, transfixed and astonished.

The fact that Willard M. Romney is still running almost even in the polls despite his demiurgic implausibility as a candidate, afflicted by a one-person pandemic of foot-in-mouth disease, illustrates the concern of the American voters. Either Romney lucks through and numerate sanity starts to return to American public life, or the most self-destructively incompetent regime since James Buchanan brought on the Civil War, will come back and stoke up a truly spectacular inferno that will purify America in a mighty economic Jonestown. There will be no more tugging at a trouser leg from Canada — either a comradely pat on the back, or a neighbourly blast with a fire extinguisher, but this operatic crescendo can’t continue for one more full act.

Now go read the whole thing...