Slumbering Giants

THE RUSSIAN HOCKEY TEAM not only failed to win the gold medal, it failed to win anything at all. Did it even win a single game? Will the Siberians build a new rink for their new team? You put too much pressure on a bunch of kids, and see what happens. Maybe the "just relax and have fun" approach works best after all. Just another lesson, probably unlearned, by another all powerful government which does not seem to know the limits of power. In the Ukraine, the people have spoken, and many have died, showing the Russian ruling oligarchy who's really in power, at bottom. They have watered the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots. Let that be a lesson to all would be mass protestors for just causes: mass protesting works! But you have to do it long enough, and strongly enough, which is to say with enough screaming people, and probably, tragicallly, enough violence. Is it possible to achieve success with a mass protest without resorting to violence? According to Thomas Jefferson, it is not. But at least there are only a few hundred dead heroes in the Ukraine, and not a few thousand. Meanwhile, back in the good old U.S.A., that ceaselessly entertaining fun house of the imagination where nothing is as it seems, Obama continues to run free, signing executive orders, while the people slumber, and their government sits paralyzed. The American people, like the world's teeming masses, are a slumbering giant.