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0bama and Kerry - you know, I didn't think there was a worse choice for Secretary of State than Hillary short of a guy named Zawahiri, but by golly 0bama managed it. We have three more years of this idiocy to endure.

I'm hoping Black is overstating the case here with respect to something as nebulous as "influence", but he might not be: should geopolitical alignments run along the lines of the Great Powers years, the potential for the whole thing blowing up as in 1914 will as well.

There is, to be sure, a class of Leftist radicals worldwide and especially in U.S. academia and government, who await the fading of U.S. influence eagerly and some sort of resulting cosmic punishment for largely fictive crimes of oppression. The U.S. will be humbled and the world a better place for it, goes the usual song. I wish them luck, but not much of it. This is what a Golden Age looks like when it ends, and what comes after is never golden.

Barack Hussein Obama is the world’s first Cloward-Piven acolyte Chief Executive of a major world power, which he found to be too much of an influence on the world stage, and so stated during his first campaign for election to the U. S. presidency. He and his co-conniver, one V. Jarrett,
are making great progress in bringing America to heel. The machinery for achieving this goal has many interactive moving parts, and at times gives the impression of hopeless confusion. But just look at the results that have been achieved. The magnitude of our national fiscal debacle, a debt of incomprehensible magnitude that will not ever be retired, dictates that America’s capacity for influencing world affairs will be tenuous at best. Our debt holders can virtually neutralize America’s military capability if they so choose.

"The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful, and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year by year: It is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto “In God we trust” were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, “verboten,” substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest."

~H.L. Mencken, The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920)