It's my genuine belief that when the ball in Times Square dropped and displayed the year "2000" nine years ago, something must have occurred to transform our nation and the world into a permanent version of "Alice in Wonderland."

Early in the decade, America sustained an unimaginably devastating attack on our soil, and yet the media refuse to do more than mention in seeming embarrassment that Islamic terrorists were responsible -- and are probably trying to it again.

We quickly came to recognize that the hiding place for those who want to kill us was Afghanistan. So we went there in force and cleaned it up a bit. Later, we let it simmer. Now we have a president who once declared this the necessary war, and yet who now isn't sure he wants to send the additional troops there to try to keep this breeding ground of evil from becoming a permanent base for future attacks on America.

Fiscally, we have seen a Republican administration and Congress, and now an all-Democratic government, go to town spending money with reckless abandon and printing money like rolls of toilet paper to keep up with our unbridled expenditures.

Now I see schoolchildren in a public school somewhere chanting and singing a song praising our president with lyrics that steal lines from the old religious song "Yes, Jesus Loves Me." Just a few decades ago, such antics would have been reserved for Chairman Mao in China.

What is the world coming to?

Not in a million years did I ever believe that in one year alone there would be an attempt to basically create a backdoor national health care system, an effort to tax companies for "energy emissions" and the creation of so many new positions in the White House as to force any remake of the television series "West Wing" to have a cast of at least a thousand.

Our race relations are not any better, but not because there are giant crowds of racists everywhere. Instead it seems that every time anyone has any criticism of our president, who happens to be black and who happened to get elected because of a large number of white votes, that person is labeled a racist.

For eight painful years, I had to watch George W. Bush serve as president. He was a really nice man with a permanent goofy look on his face and a real talent for fumbling his words in public. All the while his brother Jeb, who is as sharp as edged flint, played a distant second fiddle as governor of Florida. It made no sense. Continued...