America is, indeed, unique.

To the rest of the world, the innate boastfulness of America, the tendency for it to regard itself as the center of the universe, the insistence that it alone knows best for the world, all fly in the face of the depth of its present inner corruption, its moral turpitude and its rapacious self-centered consumerism.

Yet, despite these American vices, there is a sense in which the free world largely owes the past 60 years of comparative peace to the United States of America. After brave old Britain, together with its dominions, stood for two years in the breach during World War ii, holding back the tide of tyranny, it must be said that when, in 1941, the U.S. was eventually bombed into action at Pearl Harbor, it did rise to the occasion with a vengeance that was to see fascism, Nazism and Japanese imperialism crushed into dust.

That was the last occasion when such determination to utterly vanquish an enemy of world peace was seen emanating from America’s shores. It was, indeed, as Herbert W. Armstrong proclaimed, the last war that the Anglo-Saxons would win.

Since then, the Americans have engaged in numerous wars and skirmishes, yet none has been brought to consummation with complete victory gained and the enemy vanquished.

Something has happened to the hearts and minds of Americans to change the nation from the great hope offered by the “city on a hill” 60 years ago in the immediate post-war years, to its state of rapid political, economic, moral and spiritual decline.

Americans have simply forgotten the reason for their greatness.

That tendency for America to forget the source of its blessings was highlighted by Abraham Lincoln’s signing of a proclamation in March 30, 1863, which freely and formally acknowledged the source of the nation’s blessings. That proclamation declared in its preamble that

Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme authority and just government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the president to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation.And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

As Barack Obama takes the solemn oath of office to lead the 44th presidency of the United States, his hand will rest upon the book that defines the basic laws of God acknowledged by America’s Founding Fathers. In fact, it will be the very same Bible upon which Lincoln’s hand rested when he was sworn in as the 16th president of the nation, destined as he was to be the first president to commence the process of emancipation of the enslaved in America.

Yet, in his speech delivered in Philadelphia at the start of his whistle-stop ride to the national capital, Mr. Obama indicated that he denies some of the clearest directions of Almighty God that are embedded in that book to guide leaders of government in how to establish a nation so as to guarantee the freedom and the moral strength of its peoples.

Not only that, in his Philadelphia speech the man who will become the latest U.S. president made it clear that he impugns the very constitution upon which the greatest single nation in history was founded.

By these two acts, President-elect Obama demonstrated that, unlike President Lincoln, he simply does not understand the reasons for America’s prior greatness, nor does he begin to understand the reasons for the continuing, and rapidly progressing, fall of the nation over which he will preside.

The sad fact is that few within the U.S. population really understand that either.

There is a great charade being played out this week within America. It involves the warping of the character, the beliefs and convictions of the sixteenth president of the United States as the nation’s latest president attempts to legitimize his radical agenda by attaching it to President Lincoln’s legacy.

By deliberately using the persona of Abraham Lincoln to legitimize his rejection of the founding Constitution of the United States of America, Mr. Obama is basing his administration on a huge lie. It is a lie that is being played out to the point of euphoria by a terribly blinded press and mass media, which is powerfully leading the minds of the American people toward a moral abyss out of which they will exact a most heavy penalty.

That perverse media machine is playing on one tragic flaw in the American character—the tendency to forget its very own history, leading to a mass rejection of its great heritage.

In the speech he delivered when he launched his train ride to Washington, Mr. Obama declared that “we should never forget that we are the heirs of that first band of patriots, ordinary men and women who refused to give up when it all seemed so improbable; and who somehow believed that they had the power to make the world anew. That is the spirit that we must reclaim today.”

Yet, carefully inserted within that speech were phrases that ought to ring alarm bells in the minds of every true American patriot, elements of a spirit the very opposite to that which moved the founders of this nation to embed within its Constitution acknowledgment of the reality that there is a far higher law than that created by man—a law that governs marriage, family and the manner in which the future of a nation may be made secure for generations to come.

The appeal of Mr. Obama’s eloquence is in the careful way he handles sophistry. By subtly weaving the very elements of national destruction within language that appears to appeal to the virtues of our Founding Fathers, Mr. Obama is priming the mind of the nation for drastic changes to the very key elements of its foundation.

In that speech delivered Saturday in Philadelphia, Mr. Obama stated, “And yet, they [the early pioneers] were willing to put all they were and all they had on the line—their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor—for a set of ideals that continue to light the world. … That our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come not from our laws, but from our Maker. … It was these ideals that led us to declare independence …. The American Revolution was—and remains—an ongoing struggle ‘in the minds and hearts of the people’ to live up to our founding creed.”

Who could fault such a declaration?

Yet the breaking of the link with that “set of ideals that continue to light the world” occurs when Mr. Obama foreshadows the prospect of changes to America’s foundational Constitution with subtly-crafted language, referring to “documents that were imperfect but had within them, like our nation itself, the capacity to be made more perfect.” The mountainous self-righteousness of the liberal mind is reflected in that statement. It ought to stagger the minds of the most sensible among the American populace to think that one of the least experienced American civil servants would have the gall to infer that the very generation that is more guilty than any other of trashing the very Law that is embraced by the nation’s constitution has the right, let alone the moral strength and character, to fiddle with the nation’s Constitution.

What makes this even more galling to the upstanding realists within our midst is the subtle injection of the nation-destroying leftist ideologies of multiculturalism and the family-destroying perversity of aberrant social behavior as being part of an agenda to make the governing instruments of the nation “more perfect.”

Mr. Obama declared, “I believed that our future is our choice, and that if we could just recognize ourselves in one another and bring everyone together—Democrats, Republicans and Independents, north, south, east and west, black, white, Latino, Asianand Native American, gay and straight … not only would we restore hope and opportunity in places that yearned for both, but maybe, just maybe, we might perfect our union in the process.”

To infer that the “perfecting of our union” involves the infusion of multiculturalism and homosexuality into the social stream of America would surely make the Founding Fathers, let alone the nation’s sixteenth president, were it possible, turn in their graves.

Our editor in chief recently warned of the tragedy that would strike this nation should the extreme radical ideologues of the left seize control of its government. In our January edition of the Trumpet magazine, Gerald Flurry referred to then-Senator Obama’s claim that the 1953-1969 extremely liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren was insufficiently radical in that it “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

Mr. Obama sent an early shot across the bows of every truly freedom-loving citizen of the United States in his Philadelphia speech. It gives fair warning that his administration is intent on changing the very fundamentals upon which the United States of America is founded as a nation. For the radical left to begin fiddling with the very document that declares the reasons for the nation’s existence spells the gravest of dangers to the descendants of those who, as Mr. Obama rightly stated, were “willing to put all they were and all they had on the line—their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor—for a set of ideals that continue to light the world.”

Mr. Obama unwittingly hit the nail right on the head when he mentioned that “[t]he American Revolution was—and remains—an ongoing struggle ‘in the minds and hearts of the people’ to live up to our founding creed.” Yet he is already guilty of preparing a foundation for his presidency that declares it will be intent on influencing the hearts and minds of the people to take a very different direction to that which is embedded in America’s “founding creed.” And he has the lapdog, radical liberal press and media already primed to deliver that message as the American people are led by the nose into what can only become a blind moral alley with a very bitter ending.

The contrast with the orientation of the nation’s sixteenth president could not be greater.

As extreme radicalism seizes control of American governance, the people would do well to revive and remember the ringing proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, that

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

If you are one who sees the danger in this radical-left push toward the destruction of a once great and powerful nation, you need to read our booklet No Freedom Without Law. It is eye-opening in the direction it gives to those who desire to counter the thrust of the radical left with the only power that can truly resist and ultimately overcome it.