Check out this liberal fantasy posing as commentary in the UK’s Gaurdian today (hat tip: RealClearPolitics). There’s nothing like a good fisking in the morning to start your day – and an easy one at that. I am running short on time so this will be an abbreviated fisking

First the title of the piece drips with wishful thinking:

America’s neo-conservative world supremacists will fail

Current US megalomania is rooted in the Puritan colonists’ certainties

Dude, your desire for the pre-Bush days is quaint, if not a bit sad. But now to his revisionistic history, which makes this a purely finctional piece (must be a friend or relative of Krugman the Great):

Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001.

We did not assert world supremacy since 2001 – we have had that position for a long time. We avoided using it until 3000 people where killed by uninformed and niave terrorists who did not appreciate our world dominance, and ability and will to use it if needed. We also did go out to dominate the world in the sense you are implying. We went out to change it, to free 100’s of millions trapped in brutal dictatorships. Dictatorships which fostered these terrorists. What has happened is we flexed our muscle and might and overruled the Euopean timidity, and now you EU-rons are feeling rather inferior.

The first is its position of international domination, outside the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global manufacturing.

Sounds like the chap misses the USSR. The USSR that killed 20 million outright and millions more in the gulags. Yes, those gulags. BTW, our economy has grown since 1945, obviously. What this chap is trying to explain, in his awkward way, is that our share of the global economy has dropped as many nations climb out of 3rd world status. Something we have been working hard to accomplish in our efforts for world dominance. Like being the dominant protector of free nations, the dominant giver to humanitarian and charity needs (that would be public + private), the dominant engine for new, life altering technology. And the dominant source for damn good Rock N Roll. So there.

The influence of the American economy today rests largely on the heritage of the cold war: the role of the US dollar as the world currency, the international linkages of US firms established during that era (notably in defence-related industries), the restructuring of international economic transactions and business practices along American lines, often under the auspices of American firms.

Geez, Paragraph two and I am already bored with this mindless and totally inaccurate droning on about the impending end of America. OK, a few final shots at this quacking duck. The American economy does NOT rest on the cold war infrastructure. At least that would be news to Coke, GM, Hollywood, PCs and related technologies, the World Wide Web!! Yes, many breakthroughs in our broader economy where the results of ground breaking work in the military community.

Global satellite communications was the result of the race to the moon, which in turn was the result of the race to build missile systems and show them off in a non-threatening manner. GPS is a military system for force enhancement which also serves an enormous commercial sector. But these military funded technologies exist now totally independently in the commercial sector.

A fantasiful wish, from someone who either can’t or won’t acknowledge reality, doesn’t deserve more than a 2 paragraph fisking.

UPDATE:

Mark Coffey is willing to delve much deeper into this pile-o-stuff than I was and provides a top notch fisking

I also wanted to know more about why such a strange person would deserve any notice in a large paper. The Gaurdian is happy to oblige me here.

When Eric Hobsbawn came to England in the 1930s he became a Marxist and began a distinguished academic career. His new autobiography reveals that at 85 he remains an ‘unrepentant communist’

Unrepentant Communist? Isn’t that like saying this guy is one of the few people on the planet who has not realized what a disaster communism was? I mean the guy pretty much was an eye witness to the fact communism failed at all aspects of bettering human life and only excelled in becoming the most murderous societal structure ever conceived by man.