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Andrew Sullivan writes about Barack Obama (via Richard Florida’s blog):

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

THEN

A slight young man who was considered a god king 3329 years ago when he died. With a long narrow skull which some people make out to be part of an ancient alien-worship cult, but that’s another story. He lies in his box for those thirty centuries while the world slowly turns into airplanes, nuclear weapons and the idiocies of television. Three thousand two hundred and forty-four years after his death, English colonials raid the tomb and use hot knives to remove the famous golden mask, glued to his face. Media frenzy ensues. A boy-king legend in born. King Tut enters the vernacular.

NOW

A shriveled leather prop for Egyptian tourist revenue.

The USA is collapsing. Is this like the USSR circa 1988?