Yesterday morning, lifting a stack of emails my eye fell on the note written across the top of the first page, ‘This one looks serious.’

It was from Richard the Intellectual. All it said was, ‘Has the world ended?’

Richard is what he himself describes as a ‘decliner’ which, I can tell you from experience, means he can see symptoms of the decline of western civilization in just about anything (and most times it’s hard to argue with him).

I got the answer to his question from an unlikely source a couple of hours later. When I told a Democrat about Richard’s email he laughed and said, ‘Well, wait a while, we’re perfectly capable of screwing it up, too.’

That ‘too’ is the new political truth for Democrats. What happens next is almost completely in their hands. If they whip the terrorists, straighten out the economy, save the planet and clean up corruption in Washington they’ll prosper politically and it’ll be the best thing that’s happened to the country in years.

And if they don’t? Well, they may prove the ‘decliners’ are right but, on the other hand, this is a mighty resilient country and, hopefully, we’ll soldier on through that too.

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