As Randy Newman sang about the U.S., "The end of an empire is messy at best / This empire is ending, like all the rest." Some supporting evidence backs up that mordant assessment. Those of us who hoped that Obama would be the anti-Bush are finding it increasingly hard to hold that view given the facts, which are presented with more footnotes than you'll ever need, via Reddit. The image that the U.S. is a country run by laws and the Constitution is equally problematic, and in the Middle East people are arguing that the U.S.

With its intervention in Libya, the West is on the brink of another historic failure in the Muslim world.

As usual, Canada is there, ready aye ready, to sacrifice blood and treasure in a doomed effort to take sides in an oil-rich country's civil war -- regime change that, despite credulous claims to the contrary, we'd have no interest in if it weren't being fought atop a resource-rich piece of real estate.