I just heard Barack Obama’s first public remarks about the Malaysian plane disappearance twelve days ago. He spent all of one minute ‘informing’ the American public that the U.S. is doing much in the way of helping in the investigation. He had great difficulty recalling the American agencies that are involved, and then simply said ‘and other groups’. His one-minute ‘assurance’ contained the passion of a weatherman reporting that it is cloudy today. There was an implicit yawn in his remarks. It was apparent that he would rather be jetting off on vacation, to a campaign fundraiser, or schmoozing with the Hollywood elite.

I also saw snippets of his appearance with comedian Zach Galifianakis, and parts of his phone-in with Ryan Seacrest, earlier in the week. He also made a public spectacle about announcing his NCAA bracket, while pointedly remarking about how seriously he took this ‘challenge’. During all of these meaningless appearances he was, without exaggeration, bubbly, animated, and laughing/smiling as if he were vying for the title of Entertainer of the Year. He is also scheduled to be on the Ellen DeGeneres show tomorrow, and I am willing to bet that he will be equally animated, enthused and interested in the subject matter to be discussed, which will no doubt include twisting the arms of America’s young people to sign up for the debacle that is Obamacare.

In the meantime, during this same week, Vladamir Putin has redrawn the world map to include Crimea as part of Russia – a map that will remain in unsettled flux until the Russian president has decided he has gobbled up enough territory to suit his voracious appetite for power and domination.

The American president held the position of ‘Most Powerful Man in the World’, until our current president reduced the American presidency to the equivalence of a second-rate carnival barker. It’s no wonder the free world no longer has a rudder or a sail, and is simply bandied about by an omnipresent evil wind.

Most conservatives believe that, in order to extricate America from the toxic black mud into which Barack Obama has intentionally steered her, we must find, and elect, the likes of another Ronald Reagan. Even if we are successful in awakening an ignorant and apathetic populace, how do we put another Reagan in office when the elections going forward are deeply corrupted in favor of the left? Major voter fraud in just about all big cities, few or no voter I.D. requirements, countless illegals, dead people and family pets voting, the IRS disallowing tens of millions of conservative campaign dollars by targeting groups that support conservative candidates, a completely porous southern border and Border Patrol agents ordered not to shoot, even when attacked, and a ballooning ‘entitlement class’ that will always vote for whomever promises them the most government handouts. Sounds like a prescription for left-leaning leadership in D.C. as far as the eye can see.

I consistently hear friends expressing the belief that history always runs in cycles, and that we are simply sitting at the bottom of one of those cycles. ‘Take heart!’ they say. ‘Things will eventually right themselves when the American public has had enough.’

Feel free to label me an inveterate pessimist. You most certainly wouldn’t be the first, by a long shot. But I prefer to think of my mindset as that of a reluctant realist:

I believe there are several historically unprecedented forces at work in the world today that preclude the notion of ‘historically cyclical’ analogies, and those forces may very well stop the global pendulum from swinging back toward human liberty.

America is a country that has served, literally, as the beacon of liberty for the rest of the world for centuries. Yet when, in the course of history, has humanity been witness to such a civilization being lead by a leadership class (the president, and congress, in this case) that was systematically working toward weakening, if not destroying, its own standing on the world stage, its own national sovereignty, the soundness of its monetary system and economic principles, and its people’s liberty, safety, work ethic, sense of personal responsibility, and personal prosperity?

I contend that this American president, in conjunction with a congress that has been reduced to nothing more than yes men for him, is intentionally doing all of that and more. The majority of congress, if not in ideological agreement with the president, are, at the very least, being used a dupes for his anti-American, anti-liberty agenda.

Concurrently, the birth rate of the Western world, which has for centuries served as the hope of all global movements toward liberty, has plummeted, while the birth rates of, for example, the Muslim world, and those nations ripe for Muslim indoctrination, are skyrocketing.

The fact that the American citizenry is, for the most part, unaware of the fact that the most moral and prosperous civilization in the history of mankind is being premeditatedly dismantled right under their noses does not bode well for human liberty worldwide. Where else will the spark to turn back the tide of global tyranny originate, if not here?

Socialism is not our greatest enemy. Apathy and ignorance on the part of people fortunate enough to be born under liberty’s flag, and a brutal, barbaric enemy, with hundreds of millions of followers, that obsessively seeks world domination under the flag of its ‘religion’, are.

Add to all of this the historically unprecedented potential ability of a mere handful of tyrannical, agenda-driven madmen – Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong-un, to name just two – to get their hands on weapons that have the potential to obliterate major portions of the globe and I do not believe we can look to the swings of past historical pendulums in order to make predictions about the future of human liberty.

A cycle requires a certain force in order to re-set itself, and I am not entirely certain the American citizenry has either the strength or the courage to exert the requisite force for liberty to be restored to our republic. The world will pay a terrible price should we prove ourselves unable to muster that strength in sufficient time to see that the cyclical nature of liberty continues on into the future.