Does it seem that everything is in chaos today? Does the rising level of illogic in our country today just seem unnecessary?

From the ridiculous inability of the Big Left Media’s to get the reporting right in covering the #Occupy[yournamehere] “movement” to the overt bias of the coverage of a black conservative who was accused of making someone “uncomfortable” and proven serial sexual harassers on the Left (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” ring a bell? Because “it is only sex, right?”), to the insane prosecution of our border enforcement officers to the co-opting of our language where we are told that the facts in front of our faces are lies (Black3 has brought this to the forefront with his excellent posts on the subject), the world seems to be spinning out of control.

In critical global financial crisis the “leaders” of the world have effectively taken the position that rather than lead, it is better to apply for more credit cards and ignore the nightly phone calls from the debt collectors. More than any other, this situation and the world’s flailing response to it indicate that there is one commodity that is in short supply.

That particular commodity is the very characteristic necessary to be the next president and should be the primary discriminator for our choice of Republican nominee.

That characteristic is leadership. Without the ability to lead, there is no possibility of programs or policies being implemented, no reform actions being initiated or followed through to success.

Leaders are out front, they are the face and the brand of the effort. It has been said that leaders are leaders because they have followers – but the mark of a leader is to have people over whom he has no direct control do things due to his influence and his ability to so people how the policies are correct and effective.

The noted management consultant, Philip Drucker said:

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Since 1988, the United States has suffered through a series of “managers” focused trying to do things right with varying degrees of success. They have focused on tactics, not strategy. They have focused on executing individual “things” without a vision of how those “things” combine in the larger strategic scope.The last president that could even be remotely classified as a leader was Ronald Reagan.

Why is it important for America to have a strong leader as president?

Because the world needs America to lead.

The world is in chaos today for two reasons:

1. There are countries, political systems, and religions in the world that are using the chaos to damage and weaken America. It is to their benefit to keep the instability going as long as possible to do as much damage as possible.
2. American leadership is missing from the world today. Over the past 100 years, global crises were met with definitive American leadership. WWI, WWII, Korea, the defeat of communism at the Berlin Wall, being first at the scene of natural disasters, the eradication of terrorism, the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, defense of Israel, funding and providing the majority of support for NATO and the UN and providing the lion’s share of funds for the IMF are just a few examples.

Where are we today?

Leading from behind.

This is not a fad; it is an ethos within the Democrat Party and the “progressive” movement. The epitome of this ethos is the Obama administration.

There are people who are cheering for America to be just another country, one country among many; America is not that special – we have no “right” to lead due to what they classify as past “sins” of imperialism, colonialism, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. They see the world as a kindergarten class lining up for lunch and it is someone else’s turn to lead the line to the lunchroom – little Johnny was head of the line yesterday, now it is Suzie’s turn…

Froma Harrop is a “progressive” and one of my favorite moonbat columnists, she is the one to thank for this “brain dump” because this past week she penned a column that is a perfect illustration of this ethos. In “A Less Super America Will Be Happier”, she writes:

A perceived decline in “national greatness” haunts Americans of all political persuasions. Many equate it with the drop in our superpower status. But others ask, “Are the costs of perpetually commanding the high ground worth it?” Money we spend defending the world, others spend building fast trains. In the past, countries suffering economic seizure went straight to our ER because we were deemed the only country strong enough to save them — and ensure everyone’s financial stability. Things have changed.

A crisis-ridden Europe is now knocking on China’s door, not ours. America’s cupboard is bare, as China’s overflows. So it is now up to China to bail out European banks. And as the Chinese demand tough concessions in return, Europeans will send their resentments to the complaint department in Beijing.

The Greek prime minister’s call for a referendum on a new debt deal with foreign lenders sent global markets into a dive. When a reporter asked White House press secretary Jay Carney for an official response, he said, “It is a European problem that needs to be addressed, and they have the capacity to do it.” Sort of like Dad telling Junior that he has great confidence in the kid’s ability to do his own homework. In other words, do it yourself.

President Obama will, of course, attend the Group of 20 economic meeting in Cannes, France. We can expect him to give Europeans a pep talk and wish them good luck. Way to go.

So it is just great that we aren’t a leader anymore because leaders have to do, you know, like hard stuff. We have to take risks but we can’t do that because we might get bored with it and need to go home for dinner and the other kids would get mad at us.

Froma has just turned into a deficit hawk with her heartwarming concern for the American taxpayer:

In his most pointed remark, Gates said that some NATO members were “apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.” Why wouldn’t they be? Our unilateralists have been happy to pick up the bills, quickly depositing checks in the military-industrial complex. As a less-super power, America can insist on going Dutch.

Forget that she is for Obamacare, taxing the evil rich, she is anti-energy production, pro-illegal immigration (under the guise that Obama has done all the hard work) – so essentially a doctrinaire “progressive”, one that is not concerned about the taxpayer as long as the money goes to “progressive” causes. She is even cool with a war as long as we don’t lead and we don’t officially call it a war:

When Moammar Gadhafi seemed set to massacre Libyan dissidents, Europeans were especially keen to stop him. Obama basically said: “Good idea. You go first.” His famous phrase — that America would “lead from behind” — rankled conservative hawks who prefer to stick their chests out, George W. Bush-style, and tell the world what’s what. Being one of several in a coalition was somehow demeaning.

That cowboy Bush…yeah, he had this bad habit of leading in times of crisis – that really disturbs “progressives” who would rather ride low and in the middle of the herd. Damn those cowboys…if we were just nicer, like Obama, the world would love us. That’s working out well.

This fear of leadership goes all the way back to childhood where we are told that no person is better than the other and every time kids clearly run faster, do better or otherwise stand out, they are discouraged from doing so – because they are hurting the self-esteem of others. We have all heard and those of us with children have seen, the drive in sports to avoid keeping score and everyone gets a trophy – even the team that finishes last (sort of explains the #Occupy[yournamehere]. In a post titled “Crisis Management”, I wrote this:

We also have segments of our society who have received awards just for participation; they are rewarded for pseudo-talent while true talent goes unrecognized or is equivocated so everyone appears the same. There is a cultural revulsion against the very notion of greatness itself. Competition, capitalism, leadership, merit and excellence have been replaced by participation, redistribution, deference, concern for self-esteem and simply trying. The Pentagon proposes a military award for “courageous restraint”. Trying is equivocated as doing. Have we lost the drive to compete and more importantly, to win? Life keeps score even if our society doesn’t.

There is an institutional fear of leadership that permeates the Left in America today, they are so afraid of leading, of standing out, that they are on an endless quest for their Holy Grail of Mediocrity. The old saying goes is that there is safety in numbers; the collectivists seek a crowd so that no one can see who threw the brick that broke the window.

This is the reason that they want to cede American sovereignty to a “global” leadership, to avoid the hard decisions and to keep people from hating us (note – they will still hate us until we become them – that’s how it works). The Left used the term “New World Order” as a pejorative against Reagan and Bush the First but there was a difference – Reagan and Bush wanted a world order where America’s interests were primary and our leadership was unquestionable because they believed that we were truly the “shining city on the hill”. “Progressives” want a NWO because they see it as an opportunity for us to become one of the collective.

In yet another quote of something I wrote here in “First President of the United Federation of Planets?“ (sorry – this gets repetitive because there really is nothing new about this argument):

What has to happen for “global” governance to occur”?

A weakened America. An America who is “just one of many”. An America who is reluctant to lead or seems indecisive about who her friends are. An apathetic population who are disinterested and disaffected. An America in hock to the world for its debt. An America that is morally weak and destroys its moral authority with self-loathing navel-gazing. An America divorced from the core principles of our founding – drifting, directionless and subject to sort of a political version of “Brownian Movement” – a directionless bumper care ride from crisis to crisis.

A compliant American body politic with a globalist, socialist or communist worldview. “Community Activists” who see illegal immigration as an opportunity to create another victim class that can dilute the power of traditional Americans and is ripe for “organizing”, per Andy Stern, former president of SEIU: “We created global trade. We created global finance. We created global companies but we forgot to create a global government or a global organization or global regulators.”

A national leadership who is willing to cede power to the UN, sign treaties that are completely against the interests of the country (i.e. Kyoto), willing to commit unilateral or disproportionate disarmament, willing to abandon our historical allies and those who need our protection. A leadership that actually proposed global governance through global financial rules and global taxes. A leadership willing to include foreign law in our Supreme Court decisions and turn over the adjudication of its citizen constituents to a world court. Elimination of our space program, effectively ceding that leadership to Russia and eliminating our direct access to the last “high ground” of the future. A leadership no longer willing to shoulder the responsibility of being president of the glee club and would prefer to be just one of the chorus.

A “global” crisis. Of their own volition, a majority of Americans would never submit their liberty to the control of another country or governing body, it would take an “event horizon” magnitude event to change that. Several have been tried over the years, the most recent being anthropogenic global warming. There has been an entire infrastructure built around this theory. Cap and trade, restrictive environmental policies, governmental creation of a “green industry” that is tightly controlled and federally funded, all were sitting in wait. This “crisis” was perfect – it was worldwide in scope, had universal appeal (who could be against saving Mother Gaia?), it had the backing of the scientific and academic communities and had attained religious status among the “believers” (primarily on the Left), so much so that “deniers” were equated with Holocaust deniers. There were calls for prosecution of people who dared to question the Gaia worship. Reasonable people were being won over or beaten into submission by the ubiquitous and relentless marketing campaigns – at least until the revelation of the emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Angila, aka Climategate.

Match up the actions of candidate Obama, President Obama and his administration with the criteria listed above. The speeches in Germany, the globalist worldview, the curriculum vitae of his appointed Czars, our current domestic and foreign policies, his associations with ACORN and the SEIU, his lack of a traditional American childhood, his tutelage by Frank Marshall Davis, his flirtations with the New Party in Chicago, the influences of Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Saul Alinsky would seem to form a basis for his support of “global governance”.

This kind of thinking on the part of those who would subjugate the interests of the United States to a global collective and sell our sovereignty for the price of not being blamed is why leadership is important. It is also why it must be part of the Republican offering to the electorate in 2012.  I say Republicans must because they are the only political party who still have a vestige of the Reaganesque beliefs about America, a view that the Democrats have abandoned – their “America” is not America, theirs is looking through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12) at an America that they are afraid to comprehend.

I believe that regular, rational America is fed up with malaise, the incompetence, the indecisiveness and the general unwillingness to lead.

If Republicans put forth a candidate with leadership qualities, the country wins. If not, we all lose. America needs a leader, not the night manager at Wal-Mart or the president of the United Federation of Planets.

It is up to the Republicans to provide one.