Intelligence communities the world over weren't duped by Saddam or grossly unprepared and incapable to divine the terrorist threats, and it doesn't matter that Joe Wilson lied about what he didn't find in Niger and got caught by the Senate Intelligence Committee, or that the media has consistently ignored Iraq's ties to terrorists, Saddam's pattern of aversion and deception related to WMD, his quest to erode sanctions, and the largest financial scandal in the history of the world (Oil for Food) that ensnared the major powers of the world and tied them to a bargain of blackmail and money while a nation lay enslaved - Bush must have "lied" us into war.

Gas prices don't go up due to market forces such as supply and demand, the growth of Asia, the threat of terrorism, the warm summers, hurricanes, a flooded New Orleans, lack of refineries, environmental mandates for countless variations of gasoline, and the ravings of that madman in Iran - it's evil Big Oil conspiring to make a gallon of gas cost as much as a gallon of Evian.

Iran's mullahs don't want nuclear weapons, or to wipe Israel off the map, or to dominate the global oil supply, or partner their nuclear technology with countries like Venezuela; they don't put terrorists in positions of power, or want to foment seeds of Islamic fundamentalism across the world, or want to hide their nuclear weapons technology, just because they say so - as a nation awash in oil they obviously just want nuclear energy, and we have to keep on negotiating and announce that we'll never use force to dissuade the largest supporter of terrorism in the world from acquiring nuclear weapons, because obviously then Iran will give in.

It doesn't matter that the terrorists cannot beat our military in Iraq, that we've built schools, docks, power stations, countless government infrastructure, enabled free elections (repeatedly), that Iraqi dithering is a result of our improved security combined with political and religious backbiting, that Iran is fighting a war against the U.S. by terrorist proxy because they desperately fear our success, or that Iraqis continue to vote for freedom with every election - pull the troops out right now because the New York Times and John Kerry said we've lost.

Foreigners entering the United States illegally (and the businesses that enable them), taking advantage of our free society and open border, our security (afforded by our police and military), our prosperity and available jobs, our government services, our hospitals, our schools, our transportation systems, our laws and our national goodwill, while disrepecting every foreigner and immigrant family who followed the rules for citizenship, not assimilating into our culture yet demanding rights and citizenship, driving down wages below the legal minimum wage (effectively locking out American citizens from the job), not paying taxes, following traffic laws or using car seats for infants, getting insurance, and opening themselves up for indentured servitude, the human slave trade, drug trafficking, and a whole host of business abuses, are not a problem - they'll 'do the jobs Americans won't do,' they deserve respect, and the rule of law does not apply (unless of course you try the same thing in any other country on the globe).

The earth isn't one big chemical reaction the likes of which no computer will ever model accurately, and scientists jonesing for grant money and ex-vice presidents and media hand-wringers aren't bullying and badgering their colleagues and suppressing scientific fact contradictory to their ideology of earth worship - "The Day After Tomorrow" is so factual it's darned near a documentary, and Al Gore's new movie is...look the debate is settled, okay? - NASA claims that even black holes are 'green,' so obviously it's humanity that is dirty and evil and just a threat to the entire Universe.

Europe, Japan, and Russia aren't entering an unstoppable spiral of population decline, and sha'ria won't dominate Europe within the next twenty five years - you're just not supposed to talk about it because if you do you might offend someone.

And leaking classified secrets about government programs and tactics, during a war mind you, doesn't aid the enemy or violate the law or endanger America just because the former head of the NSA and the current head of the CIA says it does or the enemy issues a tape praising journalists and changes tactics accordingly - the Pulitzer, terrorist's rights and (as John Kerry tells us) "telling the truth" about our government because you disagree with the administration are what's important.

In every example, it is not even the primary threat that menaces, but losing sight of reality - nay - losing the will to seek the truth, due to an unstoppable quest for ideological and political vindication.

Recent proclaimations that Global Warming is the world's greatest threat, even greater than terrorism, merely cements a certain blindness on the part of our media, social and political elites.  Will the world warm up one degree in the next hundred years?  Just thirty years ago we were plagued by dire warnings of Global Cooling.  Sometime between Clinton's first sex scandal and that odd Tickle-me-Elmo craze the hysteria shifted to Global Warming.  But all of this is pointless babbling, as the earth's temperature won't really matter if there are no people around to experience it anyway.  Russia is aborting itself out of existence, with Japan not far behind.  Europe is already fighting an unwinnable war of fewer births, more social services, immigrants who cannot assimilate and youths who want to work less but have more secure jobs.  Give it fifty years and their cities will be around in name only.  As Mark Steyn notes:

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .

These real world actions, they drive the future, not distant and potentially non-existent fears that U.N. bureaucrats or hysterical media reporters blather about.  And in the future America will have to deal with something a lot more pressing than the potential for a higher sea level.  As Robert Kaplan explains (quoted at length, because the analysis is just that impressive):

The future problems of the United States lie more with regimes that thrive on information exchanges with the global media, using it as their megaphone, in the way Chavez does, and ones in such a condition of underdevelopment, tribal animosity and physical insecurity (take Taylor's Liberia) that the state, to the extent it exists, becomes psychologically isolated from any mitigating global forces.

Globalization is a cultural and economic phenomenon -- not a system of international security. Indeed, the notion that a state's sovereignty carries less weight these days because the international community will not tolerate grave human rights abuses seems relevant only in the case of poor, marginal states like Liberia, Somalia and Haiti, where no great power has an overriding interest in maintaining the regimes. Nevertheless, just look at how hard it has been to get Sudan's president, Omar Hassan Bashir, to cooperate in alleviating the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur. As for Taylor, multilateral action has finally brought him to justice, but only after the "Lord of the Flies"-style children's army he supported killed and mutilated thousands of people in Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, the tyrants from big states continue to use the global media as an equalizing weapon against the United States and the rest of the West. They may also use what Yale political science professor Paul Bracken calls "disruptive technologies," referring to nuclear and biological weapons -- the secrets of which cannot ultimately be protected. A host of new powers, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, can, by concentrating on such technologies, render our tanks, bombers and fighter jets impotent. Our military edge against these traditional bad guys is slipping even as our military gets better because our relative power in the world depends on a status quo that cannot be maintained.

We are entering a well-armed world, with more players than ever who can unhinge the international system and who have fewer reasons to be afraid of us. That's why a resentful state leader, armed with disruptive technologies and ready to make use of stateless terrorists, poses such a threat. Hussein was a wannabe in this regard. According to a Joint Forces Command study, parts of which appeared in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, he was preparing thousands of paramilitary fighters from throughout the Arab world to defend his regime and to be used for terror attacks in the West. Looking ahead, Ahmadinejad would also be a prime candidate for such tactics, as would Chavez, given his oil wealth and the elusive links between South American narco-terrorists and Arab gangs working out of Venezuelan ports.

The future of the world does not hinge upon the Kyoto treaty, or scoring a political "gotcha" on George Bush, but upon owning up to the new terrors that we face.  The desire to deny, to evade, to forget, to take a break, and to condemn symptoms and effects instead of the actual causes of world strife, is very powerful.  And confounded by a weak-willed media, who are so quick to proclaim failure for every human endeavor that does not result in pure joy before the next commercial break, it has become ever-harder for the world to cope with the stark reality that the truth hurts sometimes, that growth is often painful, that people and companies and politicians are not perfect, that joy is fleeting and not a right, that terrible things will happen in spite of our best efforts, that peace and prosperity are never gained without great effort and constant vigilance, and that bad people doing bad things will not stop for want of peace or the threat of endless dialogue about the hope of a world in harmony.

This is what confronts us in the real world of tomorrow, and we ignore the truth at our own peril.