It's high time we faced the facts:  our Republic is terminally ill, and has been for decades.  All the wailing and chattering by the patient's bedside won't change that -- it's pointless and, frankly, getting to be a bit irritating.  Those of us alive today will likely see it finally pass away, and with it, Lincoln's "last, best hope of Mankind."  Whether the Constitution will be replaced by Sharia Law, or some other form of totalitarian rule, remains to be seen.

The symptoms are clear, even though the endless yammering of the chattering classes tends to distract us from them.  All of the vital organs have ceased functioning, or are so sclerotic as to be useless.  The Legislature was the first to go, once they realized they could stop representing us and still attain 90+% re-election rates.  The 16th Amendment has guaranteed them a steady supply of money and power, unfettered from the nuisance of having to explain, justify, or defend their ill-gotten gains.  The lifetime politicians -- of both parties -- and career bureaucrats do as they please, expanding the State and enriching themselves, with even criminal behavior going unpunished.  Their unchecked spending and borrowing cannot be reversed, and leaves us increasingly indebted to our enemies.

The press, and the education bureaucracy, have become nothing more than propagandists and indoctrinators.  The vital supply of factual reporting, critical thinking, and reasoned debate has been choked off.  In this hypoxia, the uninformed electorate keep voting themselves bread and circuses -- and re-electing corrupt politicians that continue to extort their earnings and eviscerate their liberties.

The Judiciary has succumbed to Judicial Supremacy and legislative activism.  They have spontaneously generated special waivers for infanticide, sodomy, gay marriage, racial preferences, and State seizure of private property -- all without normal legislative process or ratified Constitutional amendments.  As with the dysfunctional politicians, their only constancy is the unrestricted expansion of their own power.  As black-robed oligarchs, they are beyond the reach of the citizenry.

And, of course, the Executive is distended to the point of morbid obesity.  There are Departments, Agencies, Czars, and regulations to restrict every conceivable aspect of business and individual affairs.  Every year, there are contracts and grants for innumerable meaningless exercises in fraud, waste, and abuse of the taxpayers' monies.  The nation's military forces are deployed all over the planet, at staggering cost, even though there has been no formal declaration of war since 1941.  Not once, but twice, they have been rented out as mercenaries to the House of Saud, to fight in their Muslim civil war.  Even when impeached, presidents operate outside the law.

The long, slow, painful decline in the health of the Republic has been evident for decades.  Like syphilis, the symptoms seem minor at first.  But, untreated, the disease grows over time.  In 1913, eliminating the Constitutional prohibition against an income tax seemed innocuous.  Now, the malignancy of the IRS is a tyranny afflicting tens of millions of citizens every year.  The binges of the 1920s and 30s were major assaults that seemed to produce only temporary hangovers.  Yet today, the cancers of Social Security -- and its secondary infection, the Great Society -- are draining what's left of the nation's economic vitality.

The symptoms were long masked by a healthy economy.  But now, as the State nationalizes the banking, automobile, energy, and health care industries -- while driving others out of the country with ever-increasing taxation -- the systemic failures are plainly evident.  The decades of decline cannot be reversed.  The brief remission of the mid-1990s brought some respite, and false hope.  But, as this century has unfolded, the sad reality has reasserted itself.  The Republic, though not yet dead, is clearly dying.  And, as ever-increasing numbers of immigrant parasites consume the remains, my only hope is that I not live long enough to see the sickening end.