Yesterday, Christopher S loaned me James Delingpole’s (relatively) new book, “Welcome to Obamaland; I have seen your future and it doesn’t work".  Delingpole is an extremely entertaining libertarian/conservative British blogger whom I had a chance to speak with, albeit rather briefly, at the recent Heartland Institute Conference on Climate Change.  (Check out http://jamesdelingpole.com/ and http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/jamesdelingpole/)

Delingpole knew of my writing because he also writes for Human Events. I have to admit I thought it was pretty cool when he said he knew who I was.

Delingpole’s thesis, if you didn’t grasp it from the title of his book, is made crystal clear in the first few pages: Britain did great damage to itself by electing a handsome, grinning socialist in Tony Blair.  Blair “left the British bulldog castrated, whimpering, and sick".  Barack Obama will do the same, if not worse, to America because Americans didn’t learn from the Brits’ error.

I’ll try to read the book in the next week or so and report back with a fuller review.

In any case, it was an interesting coincidence to find, on the same day that Delingpole’s book was handed to me, this fascinating American Spectator article with earlier British lessons for America, namely when Britain first became a socialist country after WWII.

The article by Andrew Wilson, a must-read for anyone interested in seeing how history repeats itself when our schools stop teaching it, is entitled “Rolling Back the Socialist Tide“. Wilson explains how Winston Churchill went from the ultra-popular war-time Prime Minister to huge political loser in just two months, how the Labour Party then destroyed the British economy with policies that sound disturbingly like ideas we hear regularly from the Obama Administration, and how it took Margaret Thatcher as almost a one woman Tea Party to undo much of the damage the leftists had done to a once-great nation.

Otto van Bismarck is reported to have said that “A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others."  Now, while I wouldn’t say that someone who learns from his own mistakes is a fool, except to the degree that he shouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place, the latter half of the Bismarck quote is apt here.  America watched our closest ally be destroyed by Progressivism…and then voted for someone who, if you were paying attention, was promising to go down the exact same path.  By Bismarck’s standards, we have already proven ourselves unwise.  The November elections will soon show whether we’re fools as well.