Future historians will indeed look back on this day as an historic day, but not for the reasons the slobbering, celebrating Obamaniacs think. Today marks the day when America makes such a radical and deliberate departure from those things which made us the great nation we are that it's unlikely we will ever recover our current stature. We have lost our footing as a nation of rugged individualists working hard to make lives for ourselves and our children, and become a nation of sheep meekly turning over our children's inheritance to fund "the common good" as determined by Big Daddy Government.

Today is the day when a President takes office who was elected not on the basis of capability, experience or even a specific agenda, but purely because he looked and sounded good. While those may be more than adequate criteria upon which to base one's vote for American Idol, it paves the way for a disastrous American President.

We never before elected a President who promised in advance to ruin our economy by forcing energy prices to skyrocket. "So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can," Obama said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, "it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted." We've never elected a President whose answer to a looming recession was to take as much money from the job creators as can be grabbed and fork it over to those who caused the problem in the first place... while throwing the most expensive inauguration bash for himself the world has ever seen. And you thought those AIG executives who spent bailout money on fancy weekend getaways were bad? At least we didn't elect them President.

America has never elected a President who deliberately populated his cabinet with known criminals and people of questionable judgment. But here comes Obama, nominating a Treasury Secretary who refused to pay his taxes, a Secretary of State whose husband takes money from foreign governments, and an Attorney General who pardoned terrorists and those who did business with an enemy state. Why not put GM board member Erskine Bowles in charge of Transportation, or America-hating professor Ward Churchill in place as Secretary of Education? Dr. Kevorkian for Surgeon General?

This is the first time we've elected a President who promised to lose a war and treat enemies captured on the battlefield as though they were American citizens caught committing ordinary crimes. It's the first time we've elected a President who promised to take away any of our Constitutionally-protected rights, or deliberately make them too expensive to exercise for the ordinary citizen. It's the first time America has elected a President whose only legislative accomplishments involved ensuring that children who manage to survive an abortion, don't.

Never before have we elected a President who campaigned on the basis of giving everything to everyone and solving all problems. We were never that naive. Either Obama voters really believed he could deliver on all his conflicting promises, or didn't care how much he lied to the other guys as long as THEIR agenda item was taken care of. We never before elected a President because of his skin color, or because he could read a script well, or because he looked nice on camera and had a soothing voice. But now we have the American Idol President, the Affirmative Action President, the "community organiser" who worked his way up through the Chicago political machine by hobnobbing with known terrorists and fiery anti-American radical preachers.

During Obama's tenure, China will replace us as the world's most powerful nation, expanding its sphere of influence to include South and Central America as well as much of Africa. North Korea and Iran will become nuclear powers (unless Israel sacrifices itself to stop Iran, beginning a war in which we will not back them up). Russia, in cooperation with China and North Korea, will regain much of the power it held at the height of the Cold War. Europe will continue to slide weakly down the path to Islamic domination.

Al-Qaeda and their allies will be emboldened and strengthened by the closing of Gitmo, the end of strong interrogation methods and the quick retreat from Iraq. When Obama shows them weakness by "reaching out" to terrorist groups (Hamas) and their supporters (Iran), they will surely strike us again on our own soil.

Meanwhile, our economy will shrink as corporations move overseas, and much of what's left will come under the direct centralised control of the Federal government. Our military will become smaller and weaker, while Obama's "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military will grow. The power of the Federal government will expand until nearly every aspect of our lives, from which cars we buy to what medicines or operations we get, will have to undergo approval by someone in Washington DC. And the Obama government will provide "free" money for all sorts of entitlement programs until we drown in them, taking that money from those of us who continue to work harder and harder for less and less. We will follow Great Britain down the path through socialised medicine, to the lapse of law and order, to determined submission to foreign cultures proliferating on our own soil, to the ruination of the economy by unfundable Big Government programs.

None of this is yet set in stone, but the chance to stop the decline of America is small indeed at this juncture. Only at the local level can enough people get involved in politics to make a difference. If enough big-government Democrats and, yes, big-government Republicans are replaced at both State and national levels in 2010, we may yet have a chance to stop the slide. But I fear we have already passed the high point of America's greatness, and too many will settle for the immediate gratification of getting something for "nothing" to turn the country from its path. Entitlements are a drug to which more and more people will become addicted every day between now and the next elections.

The election of an inexperienced, untested, far-Left chameleon candidate who makes promises no one can deliver will be seen in the future either as an anomaly or the real beginning of America's decline. Whether that anomaly becomes the norm depends on us.