"Mercy to the Guilty is Cruelty to the Innocent." Adam Smith

Has the West become a country of weak kneed, cringing, hand wringing cowards? Is America becoming like the late, GREAT, England? France? These are countries who have turned over their nations to Sharia law without even batting an eyelash. They have diminished themselves by giving up their greatness as a people to people who are barbaric in their customs and beliefs. Why has the West arrived at this point of self-immolation? Our intellectuals on the left are depraved powerlusters. We the people have to take back our country and our ideals of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" as endowed to us by our Forefathers.

Many in Mr. Obama's administration are avowed communists like Van Jones or socialists like many in the Democratic party. But as Ayn Rand wrote there is no difference between these two totalitarian systems..."except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide." What would you like your choice to be: murder/suicide or freedom? Is our Constitution to be discarded after it enabled the creation of the most productive, humane, life-giving system of government in history? Hopefully Mr. Jones, a hater of all that is American will be a nightmare memory only (read here). Here is a defender of Americanism, American Exceptionalism (more on this later) and Freedom - Thomas Sowell.

Britain's release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi-- the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people-- is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in the Western democracies in our time.

In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles."

He wrote this long before Barack Obama became President of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the "concessions and smiles" approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.

Western Europe has gone down that path before us but we now seem to be trying to catch up...

The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another Scotsman-- Adam Smith-- said, "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."

That lesson seems to have been forgotten in America as well, where so many people seem to have been far more concerned about whether we have been nice enough to the mass-murdering terrorists in our custody than those critics have ever been about the innocent people beheaded or blown up by the terrorists themselves. Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder. Read at CapMag.com).