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Ah, I should point out that: 1. Japan was never the highest holder of U.S. public debt (China now is); 2. Japan never had nuclear weapons poointed at us, nor had they any military designs on their surrounding territory; 3. Japan has never been a COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP (hello! remember the Soviet Union? Communism is our enemie's ideology!) 4. We've NEVER been a net exporter of capitol to Japan (ever, and my present PhD dissertation covers this in part); 5. Japan has never spied on us, overtly bribed our public officials, nor has our national security been compromised with the wholesale transferring of our industry to Japan (as opposed to a slave state). I'm sorry, Mr. Bot, we're in deep s**t, and no amount of W worship is going to change things.

Ahhh, but your crowd's screams were just as loud and paranoid. You may end up being right someday in the future, but your cries of "Wolf!" have left the rest of the town ignoring for at least a few years. Why do you think Pat Buchanan can't even get 1% of the country to vote for him?

Pat Buchanan can't get votes because he has all the tact of a roaring bulldozer. And, not occasionally, he comes across as an idiot. And television hates him (teevee is 100% of politics in this country).
I give us 15 years, at the outside, before the breakup starts. California will be first, then, hopefully, Southerners will get their snouts out of sports, face reality, and realize that they are a nation again.

Another sign of decline is a kind of late imperial complacency about the future, even when the signs of trouble are everywhere.

In declining empires you see the Theodosius, Olivares, Joseph Chamberlain, etc who saw what was coming and tried to discard doomed policies and adapt. But they failed because the Texas_Dawg's around them shrugged that everything was AOK, the empire was God's Will and therefore eternal and present problems would just go away.