At the time of this writing, the Republican Party is torn between Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee and war veteran John McCain. The Democrats have not yet decided between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The American electoral picture is thus divided between three enigmas and a frightening certainty. No one has the faintest idea of what to expect from the first three should they be elected, but the last has the resume necessary to complete the job of dismantling the American presidency, a job that was started with brilliant success by her husband with the aid of Chinese spies, thieving lobbyists, Miss Monica Lewinsky, and drug dealers of the FARC — who struck it rich with the famous Colombia Plan — and last but not least, a plethora of intelligence agents placed in the CIA to serve the Clinton family instead of the American state. The major advantage in favor of Hillary Clinton is that, as Paulo Francis would say, everyone had already seen this movie and knew who would die at the end. At a time of such uncertainty, this could generate some votes.

Huckabee presents himself as the “social conservative,” but at the same time supports stem-cell research, putting his voters in a major quandary. What he has in his favor is that nothing as catastrophic is expected of him as is of the other three. If he manages to prove he is harmless, he might still have a chance against McCain.

Only John McCain knows what is going on inside his head. He has already proven he is capable of changing his mind in an instant and throttling forthwith anyone who opposes the change. Conservatives say he is the most Democratic of the Republicans, that he is impossible to clearly distinguish from Senator Ted Kennedy, and that he can scarcely suppress an orgasm whenever he sees a tax increase; but on the left there are those who swear he is to the right of George W. Bush, that he is the hawk’s hawk, and the first thing he will do in the presidency is bomb Iran and unleash World War III (or IV). Perhaps all of this is true, but certainly, none of it is good. Of the four candidates, he is still the one best positioned to be elected, but it is a sure thing that many of his constituents will vote for him in fear and trembling, realizing they are doing so only to prevent one of the parties from dominating the presidency along with the Senate, the House and the majority vote in the Supreme Court, making it omnipotent (Americans instinctively hate this).

As for Senator Obama, he is certainly less interesting than the reasons many Americans have for voting for him. If someone is constantly accused of a defect to the point of developing a complex about it, he will most likely wind up with the opposite defect. If applied skillfully, the trick is almost foolproof. Accuse a guy of being a skinflint and he will become a compulsive spendthrift. Accuse him of being a male chauvinist and he will wind up being henpecked. While racism in the USA has been a very geographically limited phenomenon, the whole country has been accused so much of racism that Americans in general wound up sacrificing their dignity to a grotesque fad of political correctness. And now many of them feel obliged to vote for Barak Hussein Obama only to show that they are nice. The senator speaks beautifully, but so far no one has been able to discern in his discourse anything that remotely resembles an issue. In the most substantive scenario, there appears to be some promise of a campaign similar to that of his opponent Hillary Clinton, if not that of the Republican candidates. Like McCain, he promises to deliver Osama bin Laden’s head, that is, of course, if he can find it. Like Mrs. Clinton, he promises free medical care for everyone (not only for the poor, handicapped and aged), but without ever thinking of explaining from whom he will get the money to do this, or for that matter, how he will fill the gap in the budget, which is already reckoned in the trillions. The senator has specialized in adolescent exhortations of the type “we’re going to change the world,” because he knows that no one expects him to actually do something in the presidency, only that he’ll be there as a symbol.

A symbol of what? The ancient Latins said nomen est omen, “the name is prophecy.” Barak Hussein means “blessed descendent of the Prophet,” and there is conclusive evidence that its bearer is lying when he says he was never a Muslim (Daniel Pipes made that clear here and here). It is more or less as if, in the midst of the Vietnam war, the USA had elected as its president a guy named John Paul Ho Chi Minh, educated in Hanoi, the son of a party member, who swore he had never been a Communist and became offended when anyone doubted it. Obama’s candidacy is a calculated provocation, serving as a gauge to assess the depth of the acquired habit of politically correct self-censorship now infused in the minds of Americans willing to be thrown into the oven to avoid offending the cook.

A significant detail illustrates this to a tee: when the senator listens to the national anthem, he does not place his right hand on his heart as protocol demands but literally shields his private parts with both hands, and everyone feels too inhibited to say that this is an insult. A similar test was conducted in Bill Clinton’s time. The president took the liberty of transforming the White House into a brothel, lied shamelessly and cried right wing conspiracy whenever anyone thought ill of anything. The air of indignation on Democrats’ faces when they defended the scoundrel’s honor was touching. In both cases, the most cynical ban on perceiving the obvious is imposed in the name of morality, instilling in public opinion the habit of revolutionary inversion. All of this seems quite extravagant, but it is a masterpiece of high precision psychological engineering.

The panorama of this election is dismal in all aspects. Mitt Romney displayed the stature of a statesman precisely in his withdrawal speech. He said the present election was about major issues, not administrative routines. Never has the USA had to decide on such grave matters with such lightweight brains to bear the responsibility. The disproportion between the problems and the cast of characters is tragicomical, but the comedy will pass away and the tragedy will become reality.

The blame for the present situation is shared equally between the Democrats, who put their own political ambitions ahead of the security of the USA, and George W. Bush, who refused to notice this, preferring to embark the country on an illusory national union against the foreign enemy. The union didn’t last three weeks. Any intelligent observer could have seen this, but Bush staked everything on the patriotism card without noticing that the patriotism of his adversaries was completely fake.

In the American tradition, public officials, particularly higher ranking ones, have always been proud to serve the State, regardless of which party was in power. Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party has broken with this tradition, supporting, in the bureaucratic network, militants who served the party, not the state, the people or the nation. We also saw this happening in a certain country. Isn’t it the same thing? And we all know how it ended. Since 9/11, George W. Bush’s war plans have been boycotted from within by the clintonistas in the State Department and the CIA, who thus produced unsustainable situations, the blame for which was shifted to the president. The story is told in detail in the book by Kenneth R. Timmerman, Shadow Warriors, the Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender (Crown Forum, New York, 2007), and anyone who does not know it will never understand what is happening today in the USA. Refusing to acknowledge evil is just as shameful as what caused it. George W. Bush incurs the costs and responsibility of having deserted the internal battle through the subterfuge of an overseas war. Bush’s timidity (or surrender) destroyed it all. “Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie” [through delicacy I lost my life], said Rimbaud. But this prophecy, unfortunately, applies not only to the person of the current American president. It is an entire people who risk misfortune to avoid the indiscretion of naming the names of their enemies.

Translated by Donald Hank