The old news: There’s a wisdom drought throughout America. The drought is truly nationwide but is at its most destructive in Washington, D.C.

The new news: Dear Leader and his minions are deeply, dangerously unaware that that their advisers—both secular and sacred—are feeding them not the hard-won nurturant wisdom from ages past but rather the deadliest potion of all: the Great Power Pill.

Among the many debilitating effects of this pill is blindness.

Thus, Dear Leader (and those around him) attack tyrants in the cause of what they understand to be "freedom" and "democracy." Bye-bye, Taliban. Bye-bye, Saddam. Bye-bye, whoever’s next.

With the sort of splendid military that you can get for $500 billion a year—and it is a military that is theirs alone in all the world, Dear Leader can carry the belligerent day pretty much anywhere he chooses following whatever set of rules he devises and ignoring whatever other sets of rules he dislikes.

Such is, and always has been, the nature of absolute power.

What Dear Leader and his current American ilk fail, in their complete lack of wisdom, to see is that when you behave in just that manner in pursuit of bad guys you become precisely like the bad guys.

Folly hates mirrors because mirrors don’t lie.

Dear Leader, like all tyrants, is surrounded by fake mirrors (Potemkin mirrors!) which do not reflect because on their surface have been painted images of what Dear Leader WANTS to see.

Dear Leader WANTS to see himself as knight on white steed, carrying two flags, one bearing the stars and stripes, the other the Christian cross, charging ever forward to bring "freedom" and "democracy" to the Great Un-free of the world.

Since the American system of checks and balances is, at least for now (if not for good), out of whack, there is no one to stop Dear Leader 1) from doing just that, and 2) from believing that that is what he is doing.

While creating the conditions for the shakiest of elections in "liberated" client states, Dear Leader also pursues his crusade at home, determined to restore his own nation to what he perceives as its original values. The unthinking "think tanks" on which he and his advisers rely are fond of talking of the "constituion-in-exile." In other words, in their blindness, they "see" the socially enlightened, internationally cooperative democracy that America was becoming in the 20^th century as, simply, unconstituional.

Precisely there is the seed for the present and future American tragedy. Dear Leader, mirrorless, becomes the tyrant he defeated, and he turns his own nation into an image of the shackled, authoritarian state he hated most in the world.

And is totally blind to what he is becoming and to the sham democracy he is making of theocratic America.

Dear Leader, his puppets in Congress and his fellow non-thinkers on the Supreme Court, rule now as kings once did: by divine right. They get up in the morning, look in their Potemkin mirrors, and think: Not my will but thine be done. They, day after day, then act with the utter impiety of those who think they not only know but embody the divine will.