Conrad Black: US Suffering Drought of Competent Leaders

The United States is suffering from congestive heart failure thanks to a prolonged drought of competent leaders who have led it into endless political gridlock, according to former media tycoon Conrad Black.

"I do not dare to believe that the people that deserved Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan (and chose them a total of 14 times) deserve this," Black, a renowned historical biographer, writes in the National Review.

"This is the governmental equivalent of congestive heart failure . . .This has all become surreal."

The fight over the Affordable Care Act — "an apparently endless and sterile partisan tug-of-war in Washington"— is "wrought with sanctimonious claptrap about it being the law of the land and untouchable."

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"Anyone resorting to such pious invocations of the law in the United States should be subject to a potential penalty (applied only in the most extreme cases) of the extraction of the tongue with red-hot tongs," he says with tongue-in-cheek.

"This is because that level of respect for 'the law of the land' is almost never how the law actually works in the U.S. The legal cartel has an un-impoverishable ability to drag things out forever; there are always appeals and there is always a window to attack targets in prosecutions again."

As result, people — innocent and guilty — sit on Death Row for decades, Black says. "Over 4,000 laws and regulations with serious sanctions are adopted every year in the U.S., and everybody is regularly committing some infraction of something, adds Black, who was sent to prison himself for 42 months for mail fraud and obstruction of justice.
Black points out that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's population has half of the trained lawyers in the world and says lawmakers "spend their lives creating more herniating masses of official authority to assist their colleagues in the practice of the law in the extraction of their comfortable livings."

"The terminal cancer of legal paralysis spreads every week of every year. Unctuous platitudes from the era when Norman Rockwell painted the country, our grandmothers set out the Corn Flakes and the apple pie, and Hollywood was pro-American won’t cut it now, even if the United States even back then was a much more complicated country than it thought it was."

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