Ross Mackenzie
Tribune Media

With key institutions grown effete, standards of right and wrong descend into a moral miasma of relativistic goo.

So today, with more Americans knowing about Miley Cyrus and Charlie Sheen than know about the reasons for resisting jihadist terror, we tend to tolerate the culturally intolerable and reject the demands of our own national interests — and civilizational survival. The enervation of many of these institutions has paralleled their infestation by an insidious liberalism. That's the bad news. And the good? Each day they exercise seemingly less influence on a consistently, insistently, conservative citizenry.

How to define contemporary liberalism? There's no better way than to cite some of the incoherencies of liberal ideology and its most Delfic office-holder (and primary polarizer) -- the president of the United States.

A partial listing....

• Despite his high-toned rhetoric, Obama and his fellow leftists make clear almost hourly that they only will toy with reducing deficit spending and the accrued $14 trillion national debt.

• As France, Britain, Germany and Japan pare their deficits and debt, the administration niggles over even smidgen cuts — and limits them to the smallest portions of the federal budget.

• The administration did a 180 on Guantanamo and trials of jihadists by military tribunals. It no longer defends the Clinton-signed Defense of Marriage Act.

• The administration weakens our national security by diminishing our military. It has introduced open homosexuality into the ranks, wants women in combat and proposed cutting benefits for wounded veterans.

• The president ordered the word "terror" stricken from the name of the war against it.

• He has killed the manned space program.

• His administration and his congressional cronies (1) go slow on nuclear power, offshore drilling, and the use of coal, and (2) stress inefficient peripheral technologies such as tidal, wind, biomass, and solar -- suggesting they prefer dependence for oil on tin-pot potentates who despise us.

• The White House expresses solidarity with public-employee unions and supports their collective-bargaining rights against state and local governments -- but not (of course) against the federal government.

Ross Mackenzie may be contacted at rmackenzie

@tribune.com.