Fourth Estate is USA's Fifth Column

Despite the avalanche of negavity the electronic and print MSM spew on an hourly basis about how soon the World Will End [About ten years, says Internet inventor Al Gore, who also discovered Global Warming] and about when the Americans will gain their Dearly Beloved status[clue: who cares except mindless media morons & their groupies?], there is hope, as Michael Barone outlines in a US News & World Report article.

Just like the homeless seem to multiply whenever Republicans are elected President, the world is on its last legs after years of Republican mismanagement---Oops, facts say otherwise!

Just as faux-economist Paul Krugboy keeps telling the far-left cocoon of NYT readers concerning the next depression [ he's called six out of the last zero over two decades, by one count], the hallucinating free thinkers are sure that things have never been worse.

But the Cocoon dwellers, who call people outside its fuzzy borders "bubble people," are thriving just as almost everyone else is on a rising tide of prosperity. Except, of course, for the know-it-alls in that repository of world knowledge, the Eurozone! Europe is stagnating, largely because it has adopted the policies the NYT cocoonites want adopted by the USA!:

First, economic growth. In 2005, as in 2004, the world economy grew by about 5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, and the IMF projects similar growth for several years to come. This is faster growth than in all but a few peak years in the 1980s and 1990s, and it's in vivid contrast to the long periods of stagnation or contraction in history. The great engine of this growth is, of course, the United States, which produces more than one fifth of world economic product and whose gross domestic product has been growing at around 4 percent--4.8 percent in the latest quarter. Other engines are China and India, each with about a sixth of the world's people, and with economic growth of 10 and 8 percent, respectively. But other areas are growing, too: eastern Europe (5 percent), Russia (6 percent), East Asia (5 percent), Latin America (4 percent), even the Middle East (6 percent) and sub-Saharan Africa (5.5 percent).

Free-market benefits. Lagging behind is the euro area (1 percent) and the rest of western Europe (2 percent). Lesson: Sclerotic welfare states produce mass unemployment and stifle initiative and innovation. In contrast, the Chinese and Indian growth rates show how freeing up an economy produces rapid growth, and the continued contrast between the United States and Europe makes the same point. Free-market economic growth is enabling millions of people to rise out of poverty every year, even more than the experts expect. As the IMF writes, "The momentum and resilience of the global economy in 2005 continued to exceed expectations."

Gosh, how counterintuitive is that!?! But the NYT Cocoon depends on great and widely-respected world thinkers like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [who] said in his recent letter to President Bush,

"Liberalism and western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today those two concepts have failed." That's obviously nonsense, of course. Free markets and democracy are chalking up one ringing achievement after another--as we can see from the surge in world economic growth and the reduction of armed conflict--while the Islamists can achieve their goals only through oppression and slaughter. Yes, they can inflict severe damage on us by asymmetric warfare, as they did on September 11, and we must continue to take determined action to prevent them from doing so again. Yes, a nuclear Iran is a severe threat. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, in most important respects, our civilization is performing splendidly.

Oh Yeah? Ask Maureen Dowd! She'll straighten you out on that real quick!
But aren't we also living in times of record strife?

Actually, no. Just the opposite. The Human Security Centre of the University of British Columbia has been keeping track of armed conflicts since World War II. It reports that the number of genocides and violent conflicts dropped rapidly after the end of the Cold War and that in 2005 the number of armed conflicts was down 40 percent from 1992. Wars have also become less deadly: The average number of people killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000; in 2002 it was just 600. The conflict in Iraq has not significantly changed that picture. American casualties are orders of magnitude lower than in the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, and precision weapons have enabled us to vastly reduce the civilian death toll.

Well, I guess I had better take what the Chicken Little Leftoids shriek and moan and whimper and whinge and whine and screech and generally hyperventilate on an hourly basis with a grain of salt, maybe?
"Not with a bang, but a million bee-stings," said T.S. Eliot!