It must have been a scatological moment for dictators around the world, as they soiled themselves watching George Bush’s inaugural address on global television. They must have known this was coming, for GW has been telegraphing his punches for a long time.

That’s why they put all their hopes on GW’s defeat last November. They knew John Kerry would never come after them. Now they know George Bush will.

The appropriate reaction to Bush’s Inaugural Address yesterday is: awe-struck. This was a Babe Ruth moment, pointing to where he wanted to hit the ball and swinging for the bleachers. I couldn’t help laughing when I read Peggy Noonan’s petty, small-minded essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning, grouchily complaining about Bush’s “mission inebriation.” She didn’t like the speech because it was so much better than any she wrote for Ronald Reagan.

I saw three of Peggy’s former colleagues - White House speechwriters for President Reagan - at one of the Inaugural Balls last night, and they all agreed that Bush’s Second Inaugural will be seen as one of the historically greatest of any American President.

So Peggy can cluck, and British newspapers can smirk, but anyone with an ounce of common sense had better start perceiving the reality behind the Left’s myth about GW. You can be sure folks like Hugo Chavez and Aleksandr Lukashenko have no such illusions.

For they know, as do their fellow dictators such as Robert Mugabe, Kim Il-Sung, Than Shwe, Ayatollah Khameini, and Fidel Castro, that there is now a bulls-eye painted on them by someone scary-smart and scary-serious who happens to be the most powerful man in the world.

I’m writing this from a place called Mea Culpa City. It’s not a lot of fun being here, but it’s where I have to live until I finish this essay. It turns out that I have wronged a friend. The silver - well, pewter - lining is that in attempting to rectify it I learned how easy it has become for the Federales to turn any of us into criminals.

The Cato Institute in Washington has just published a book on this:
Go Directly To Jail: The Criminalization Of Almost Everything. It documents how the federal government now views its jurisdiction as limitless - which means almost anything you or your business does can be a federal crime. The Cato book paints a frightening picture - but the truth is, it’s much worse.

It’s worse because of the depraved collusion between politicians and their buddies in the media to demonize and criminalize someone on the front pages of newspapers. This of course is not exclusive to Washington. States are on to the game as well. New York’s Elliot Spitzer has turned the State Attorney General’s office into his private Gestapo. But he’s New York’s problem. Federal agents and federal politicians are a problem for all of us.

The most monumental mistake of George W. Bush’s first term was his Medicare Prescription Drug bill. You have read that it is going to cost American taxpayers an estimated $6 trillion. That’s more than the entire current federal debt. But - it is much, much worse than that.

Let’s begin with the asinine assumption that in order for the cost to be only six trillion over the next 40 or so years, average American life expectancy will increase by just two years. For the last 125 years, life expectancy in America has been increasing by three months per year. For the last 30 years, as infant mortality rates have shrunk to be statistically marginal, all of the increase has gone to the elderly. By 2050, Americans will be living at least 11-12 years longer than today - which doubles the time folks will collect Medicare (and Social Security) benefits.

So now we’re at twelve, not six, trillion in prescription drug costs alone. Yet we are just getting started. George Bush’s bribe of prescription drug “benefits” for old folks who still refused to vote for him in the numbers he expected is going to cost our kids and their kids well over 20 trillion dollars.

I can tell you what the solution is - but unless you’re a fan of Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, economists who fully understand how government regulation can ruin a market sector, it will take getting used to.

It is a humbling experience to have a deep conversation with a truly great man. Harry Wu has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is in the same league with Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is Harry Wu who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize last year, not a racist kook, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who believes AIDS was invented by white scientists to exterminate black Africans.

When I had lunch with Harry this week, we agreed that China faces chaos - and that the Chicoms will most likely try to cure the chaos with war.

The New York Times reports (12/31/04) that there were over 60,000 - sixty thousand - riots, disturbances, and public protests throughout China in 2004. "People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," a demonstration leader was quoted. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."