America is the best country in the world. Just ask an American. We’ll tell you. But America’s currently doing its darndest to squander more than two centuries of exceptionalism.

It’s not America’s nearly embarrassing wealth that makes America great. Nor is it our overwhelming military power.

America’s greatness has, since its inception, lain in its classically liberal traditions and values. From America’s concept of limited, democratically elected government to its enshrinement of individual freedoms, America created the required conditions precedent for its massive success.

Yet today, America’s rapidly tearing down the foundations of its success, and conservatives are every bit as much to blame as liberals. We’ve ignored the Constitution and denied reality for too long.

America’s once-limited government has turned into a writhing, chthonic, multi-tentacled beast of destruction, metastasizing with predictably awful consequences into private lives and private businesses. One need only look as far as ObamaCare or Dodd-Frank for proof. Limited government is dead and gone because no one stood up for it.

Extensive government redistribution programs have made Americans into beggars, and angry ones at that, voting again and again for the politician promising to steal more from their neighbors to give to them. Large numbers of Americans, many over multiple generations, prefer to live off the backs of their neighbors rather than on the sweat of their brow. Our work ethic is damaged, perhaps beyond repair, because Americans succumbed to the false promise of a free lunch.

Colleges and universities have stood the cherished concept of freedom of speech on its head, punishing those who dare speak against the accepted wisdom of modern liberalism’s orthodoxy. Our once great colleges have destroyed themselves, hewing to insipid intellectual fads rather than Truth. And yes, professor, there is a capital-T Truth.

Law enforcement agencies have abandoned the quaint notions of serving and protecting the public, resorting to civil forfeiture and excessive militarization. Due process is an outmoded concept only dead White male oppressors and crazy civil libertarians believe.

Our president refuses to acknowledge reality, claiming the heinous attack on Charlie Hebdo by two Muslim men claiming to have avenged Big Mo the Prophet are not “Islamic extremism.” Educated in America’s “elite” schools and universities, who can blame him? These schools adopted radical moral and cultural relativism as their lodestar, and Obama is the natural result.

And two days ago, scores of Washingtonians cowered on a smoke-filled Metro subway train, meekly obeying orders to stay put, for over 40 minutes until firefighters deigned to mosey in to rescue them. One woman obeyed these counterintuitive orders to her death, such is the power governmental authority holds over the average American’s psyche.

America’s disregard of its foundational principles and its embrace of radical moral and cultural relativism have created the world we have today: meek citizens unwilling to take care of themselves choosing subjugation by weak-willed leaders promising illusory safety unable to tell truth from fiction.

America continues on this course at its mortal peril.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.