My last column discussed “the end of the world as we know it” and I speculated that we were perilously close to that Walpurgis Night. Well friends I was mistaken. We are already there!

Banana republics and the Chicago machine are remarkably similar in that both maintain their rule by intimidation, bribery, and swag for friends, and once they have subjugated the masses, rule with arrogance.

Our glorious leader has attained that lofty eminence. Do you recall these thuggish quotes: ”We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends” or how about “They bring a knife; we’ll bring a gun”? Perhaps this will tickle your memory neurons: “Put a boot on their throats.” And the messiah is wondering” whose ass to kick,” and again from 2010; his imperial majesty, the president of all Americans, says of the Republicans, “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in the back.” OK, now that we’ve confirmed our leader’s governing philosophy, let’s look at what it has wrought.

Intimidation: IRS slows, and inundates with unconstitutional questions about donors, e-mails and content of prayers, the applications for tax-exempt status of only conservative organizations.

Progressive applications are not impeded and even speed through the process. The Barack H. Obama Foundation application, headed by his half-brother Abon’go Malik Obama, was approved in less than a month and was granted a possibly illegal retroactive exemption dated back to December 2008.

The IRS department head Lois Lerner herself personally approved and signed it. Ah, yes, reward your friends. Other rewards include donors’ “green” companies that folded with millions of taxpayers dollars in executives’ pockets.

Back to intimidation: Philadelphia Black Panthers swinging billy clubs in front of polling places. These thugs were videotaped but the Holder domain refused to prosecute. Why? As the messiah’s buddy explained voting rights laws were written to prosecute whites not blacks. Besides the IRS, Black Panther and Malik Obama stories, we now have the prosecution of news reporters and the collection of Verizon customer’s phone records. And Verizon is the one company we know about.

Arrogance: Due to word count limitations I can only touch upon the most flagrant examples. Lest we forget, here are a couple of reminders: “Fast and Furious” gun running — responsible for Border Patrolman Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican citizens. “Benghazi massacre” — four died and others wounded, and the secretary of state, U.N. ambassador, White House liar in chief and assorted sycophants all lied to you and me about the cause and details of the Benghazi massacre, the first killing of an American ambassador since Adolph Dubs in Afghanistan in 1979.

The three above-noted scandals all have something in common. All have had hearings, all have seen formal requests for paper trail documents, all have stonewalled or dribbled Friday night document dumps of innocuous paper, and all are in contempt of the Congress. These are just a few of the scandals surrounding this most transparent of all administrations.

Here are more: Holder perjury 1&2, Sebelius requests donations, Pigford black farmer payouts, EPA multi-million dollar seminars, GSA hires clowns and mind readers for Las Vegas $823,000 conference, IRS $50,000,000 line dancing party, VA $6,000,000 for two Disney World conferences, Sebelius violates Hatch Act, green giant Solyndra goes belly-up, Lisa Jackson uses alias to evade scrutiny, Obama violates Constitution and War Powers Act to attack Libya, Bully Biden interferes with press coverage, David Axelrod’s firm was paid millions to promote Obamacare, Sestak pay for play in 2010 primary, and then there are the multitude of executive orders made to evade Congressional decisions, such as ordering ICE to release certain illegal aliens. Enough?

Between the loss of our freedoms, day by day, and the imperial presidency, our republic faces a palpable crisis.

T.S. Eliot wrote a prophetic poem, “The Hollow Men.” I would like to close with two passages from it.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

Our world as we know it has already ended, but we must not sit in a corner and whimper. What will we do now?

Larry Tradlener lives down McElmo Canyon.