And by “we” I mean “us.” And by “us” I mean “U.S.” That is right, Dear Reader, the United States stinks.

“How does the Happy Pessimist know this?” you may ask. Well, I’ll tell you. I know it because our enlightened government tells me so.

Dear Leader slithers around the world on his belly, announcing to all and sundry, particularly foreign potentates, how arrogant and pushy the WE has been up until his accession to the throne, I mean, the White House. (In 1956, a humorist named Robert Nathan wrote a brilliant comic piece describing the findings of an archeological expedition in the year 7956 which dug up the remains of the US of A. Since so many objects had US on them, the learned archaeologists decided that the extinct population were known as the “Weans,” or the “us” for short. So I stole his idea. Tough.)

Dear Leader’s Lord High Executioner, Eric Holder, has never met anyone who should not be indicted. The minions of the exchequer, the IRS, announce hourly that we are a nation of cheats and swindlers, who deserve nothing but the worst for our inability to remember all one million pages of the tax code. Dear Leader’s Envoy to the larger world, Samantha Powers, likens us to the Nazis and screeches that we will never be absolved until we all wear hair shirts and genuflect in the direction of Moscow. (To give her her due, she does look terrific barefoot in a red dress that goes halfway up her thigh. But back to work.)

The great historian Arnold J. Toynbee, author of the twelve volume magnum opus “A Study of History,” observed that civilizations do not die — they commit suicide. Choosing people who hate us to run our country is about as close to political suicide as you can get. So what should we do?

Well, it seems to me that, if we stink, the good old American approach would be to be the biggest stinkers on the planet. I am not recommending that we join the “throw the baby in the bonfire” school of thought. I suggest, rather, that we adopt a program of international relations that is affirmatively directed to making everyone else really, really hate us.

Some might argue that is ALREADY what we are doing. Au contraire! We continue to contaminate our meddling with the dross of phrases like “we are bringing democracy to people who yearn for it.” We should replace these vacuous phrases with comments like “we’re here to steal your raw materials, and if you don’t like it, we will blow you up.” “We don’t give a damn what happens to you and your ugly progeny. All we care about is keeping you and yours far, far away from our door.” “Collateral damage is fun.”

At the same time, we can stop sending assistance to the victims of natural disasters. Instead, we lecture them on why God hates them. And then we wait for the reaction.

You know what the reaction will be, of course. Suddenly the US will be portrayed by the press of the nations that count (you know, Iran, Saudi Arabia. North Korea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, et al.) as comrades in arms. Our behavior will be just like theirs, and they’ll love us for it. Dear Leader will be elected to the Tyrants’ Hall of Fame. We will be elected to the UN Committee on the Prevention of Torture.

How’s that for a strategy?