Making sport while a foe can

By Wesley Pruden

Writing the obituary of a mortal enemy is cheap fun, but only the foolish man indulges such fantasy. He who laughs loudest rarely laughs last. This is a needed caution for some of our European friends who are eager to write us off before bad news turns good again.

Igor Panarin is an amusing professor and political "analyst" at something called the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and he thinks America is doomed, exhausted, and about to go the way of Atlantis, or at least France. Some of his colleagues take him seriously.

"The American economy is already collapsing," he writes in the Moscow newspaper Izvestia. "Due to the financial crisis three of the largest and oldest banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator."

Here’s the rest of Pruden’s column

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