"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
– Hussein Massawi, Hezbollah

Every generation must confront threats to its survival. American blood, treasure and courage have thus far defeated all who would harm us, often with clarity of purpose no other nation could equal. Our victories define us, our defeats haunt us and we endlessly review both, trying to learn, to prepare for the inevitable, when we must next send our soldiers into harm’s way. Our strength has always been our irrepressible energy, coupled with the knowledge that, despite missteps, we always strive to do good. Rather than wallow in the sins of our ancestors, we learn and move forward, we forgive ourselves our past even as we remember it.

Yet evil is always with us. It is the lot of human kind to face it endlessly. It comes in many forms and from many directions; it grows and spreads when we are distracted, or weary of the struggle, our vision unfocused, our way unsure. As often as we have heard that the price of peace is eternal vigilance, we were caught unaware on 9-11 and we will only triumph after great effort and sacrifice in a conflict which in historical context has been going on for millennia.

Many pretend it does not exist, from either fear or ignorance. They tell us that charity and forbearance will ensure goodwill in the world, despite the harsh reality of evil bombarding us at every turn. It is a precarious balance between the ideal and the real. The ability to weigh ideology against consequence, so that ideology in all its permutations does not dominate, has been an American blessing.

Nevertheless, ideologues chip away with manic energy, spinning utopian fantasies, promising idyllic outcomes should they come to power. They use insidious weapons built of falsehood that create the expectation of the impossible and spread moral confusion, diminishing our national self-confidence and encouraging inaction. Blaming all the world’s ills on our success, they infect our democracy with a guilt that has no basis in fact, and use it to underpin an agenda of deconstructive contrarianism, which they cleverly call progressivism. They no longer revere what has made us great; they embrace what will bring us down. Mired in the past, they have no realistic vision of the future. Theirs is the legacy of nihilism and hopelessness, the belief system of fools. They are shackles on the American soul.

Jean Francois Revel said it best in How Democracies Perish: “But democracy can defend itself only very feebly; its internal enemy has an easy time of it because he exploits the right to disagree that is inherent in democracy. His aim of destroying democracy itself, of actively seeking an absolute monopoly of power, is shrewdly hidden behind the citizen’s right to oppose and criticize the system. Paradoxically, democracy offers those seeking to abolish it a unique opportunity to work against it legally. They can even receive almost open support from the external enemy without its being seen as a truly serious violation of the social contract. The frontier is vague, the transition easy between the status of a loyal opponent wielding a privilege built into democratic institutions and that of an adversary subverting those institutions. To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying it principles.”

In our hemisphere, the presumptive dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, a strutting Marxist thug, finances terrorism, insurgency and drug smuggling as well as radical groups in South America, Mexico and the US. Chavez proves Revel’s observations as he dismantles democracy and builds a totalitarian state that will drag down surrounding nations, stifle the freedoms of millions and cause misery and ruin. Food shortages wrack his country, student protesters face gunmen, the free press is dismantled and the rule of law perverted. Venezuela’s enormous oil revenues buy explosives, missiles and weapons to destabilize Central and South America, and Mexico. Chavez has allied himself with Iran and China. Ecuador and Bolivia have elected populist socialists allied to Chavez, who also provide covert support to terror, and mimic his anti-American rhetoric.

In Mexico, former Mexican Special Forces troops and police are running drug gangs. The Zetas group, which openly recruits former soldiers with public banners and signs, offers benefits and good pay. They work our border, operate inside the US and fuel the drug traffic and resultant crime that afflicts our cities. A weapons shipment discovered in Vera Cruz recently was destined for anti-government Mexican guerillas. It originated in Venezuela. Chavez will soon produce Kalashnikov assault rifles under license and is spending billions for rocket-propelled grenades, jet fighters and submarines. How soon will new weapons find their way into the hands of the Zetas, other criminal gangs and revolutionary groups? Very soon, I wager.

Columbia is the last real democracy in the region. It has long suffered from vicious Marxist Guerillas (FARC) and opposing para-militaries, both of whom use the drug trade to finance their operations. The Democrats in congress are sidestepping the Columbian Free Trade Act, claiming a high number of union assassinations in Colombia, a blatant exaggeration and a shallow excuse for undermining a close ally. The Columbian Free Trade Act would have bolstered trade and supported President Uribe in his successful efforts to bring peace and stability to his nation. He has dismantled the militias, seriously undermined FARC and greatly reduced violence while reinforcing the rule of law. His approval rating is 80 percent.

Chavez is close to FARC and funds them with millions of dollars, while Ecuador and Bolivia provide safe haven. They are Marxist terrorists akin to the Khmer Rouge and Sendero Luminoso, brutal, ruthless and enemies to everything the United States stands for. To keep labor union support in their pocket, cowardly and unprincipled congressional democrats are helping them, indirectly perhaps, but helping them none-the-less. The well-being of an ally be damned for political expediency.

In the Middle East, Hezbollah has taken control of Lebanon while the world sat silent. Wrongly identified as a “civil war” by the press, the external influence of Syria and Iran has destroyed a once vibrant democracy. Masked gunmen and fanatic clerics have replaced the rule of law and the electoral process. Invaded by “Palestinian” refugees and Syria, Lebanon has been dying for a very long time. The UN has been useless, a patsy for the lies of radical Islamist groups and leftist revisionists. Nancy Pelosi has visited Syria with her own agenda and against the advice of the state department, as has Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Obama’s foreign policy advisors. Syria, a terrorist state with American blood on its hands, successfully used the visits as anti-Bush propaganda. Nothing changed; weapons and Iranian fighters still flood the south, pushing the world toward the day when the cataclysmic confrontation between democratic Israel and a totalitarian Muslim world will come in fire and death. Dialogue has never long influenced them: it never will. Their goals are simple and constant, destroy Israel and control the Mideast.

In Iran, President Ahmadinejad openly predicts the coming demise of Israel. This while he works on a nuclear weapons program in concert with Syria and North Korea, and buys weapons from a resurgent Russia. The calls from the left for diplomacy without precondition are nonsensical, the predictable “peace in our time” gobbledygook that guarantees failure as it has in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it did in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Bosnia, Somalia, and as it will in Darfur. The US, with all the naiveté we have come to expect from our state department, is going to provide enriched uranium to a Saudi nuclear power program, inserting another potential weapon into the hands of fanatics. Our most congenial enemy, the Saudis have always played us for fools. The Wahabbi radicalism the Saudi’s nurture provides foot soldiers and funding for Islamic radicals worldwide while we whistle past the graveyard.

The Saudis are funding Islamic Studies Centers in American Universities to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Their goal is not international understanding or cross-cultural communication; it is religious supremacy. Saudi Arabia is a nation of religious intolerance, racism and misogyny. They make the old apartheid South Africa look noble. The institutions that foster every nonsensical post-modern philosophy and anti-American academic ignore a nation that violates every ideal they claim to support. Their ethical standards, so strident when it comes to water boarding a handful of genocidal murderers, get fuzzy when looking at grants of tens of millions, grants from those that celebrate beheadings and punitive amputations, hold women and children as chattel and unbelievers as little more that animals. This monumental hypocrisy ensures that new generations of young elites emerging from our universities are poisoned with the Islamist propaganda of one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Our elite institutions were bought without so much of a peep of protest.

We face an increasingly belligerent China, which sponsors espionage and computer attacks on our military and business infrastructures with alarming frequency. The Chinese support the most repressive regimes in the world, eager to befriend Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, or depopulate Darfur to gain resources for the ever-hungry maw of Chinese industry. They play to win, and they know it is a long fight. Russia is back peddling into totalitarianism and selling its weaponry to every despot on the globe. Russia and China care nothing for high ideals such as “human rights” or “global justice.” They know they will not be taken to task. It is far easier for useful idiots to pick low hanging fruit and use America as a scapegoat and target, our freedoms let them do so without risk.

Our press is prejudiced, partisan and duplicitous. They distract us from real issues with concocted economic “crises,” false disasters such as man-made global warming, and staged political theater. Our own academics, actors and elected officials undermine and disparage us, enabling those who would destroy us. Ideology has replaced citizenship. Our internal threats have become as dangerous as our existential ones, and they are all too frequently allies, each demanding the same defensive vigilance to prevent the slow steady chipping away of American unity and strength.

As we approach this Presidential election, two very different visions of America battle for supremacy. One will bleed our spirit and our energy with taxes and entitlements and regulation. It will foolishly try to appease unredeemable tyrants, giving them status and legitimacy and prolonging the suffering of millions. It mouths the words of the founders it despises to hide its true nature, and when in power eagerly dismantles freedom after freedom, diminishing what was so proudly fought for and so lovingly built. It demands change, it demands we take success and call it failure, it demands we bow our heads and accept ridicule from those who cannot equal us.

The other vision recognizes who we are and where we came from. It will not sacrifice the virtues that brought this prosperity and it will not let ideology overcome it. It is called many things by the “progressives” that hate it; fascist, racist, capitalist, imperialist, even “Nazi,” but it is none of those things and never was. It is the vision of liberty, free people with the free choices to make their live the best they can be in a society that respects their labors. It is freedom from government excess and interference. It is the freedom to build, invent and participate. It is the vision that nurtures individual endeavor because it understands that we succeed as a nation only when individual citizens succeed on the merits of their own industry and labor, and accept challenges according to our own desires and ambitions.

This is a world filled with violence and corruption, fanaticism and hatred, where the naive and timid perish. We are at a nexus in history, a dangerous place where the decisions the next President will make could affect the world for centuries, where the far-reaching consequences of American weakness will be profound and the lives of countless innocents affected worldwide. It is a time where the possibility of a nuclear device delivered by terrorists or a rogue state detonating in New York or Tel Aviv is very real; much of the world would applaud, as many quietly applauded 9/11. We were not safe before 9/11 and we will not be safe when the war on terror is a page in a history book. We must choose strength and freedom above all else, and choose the leader that understands that this struggle is endless, evil and wickedness are always with us and the price of peace is eternal vigilance.