Have you ever been robbed?  I don't mean burglarized.  I mean robbed -- ambushed by armed men, your valuables taken by force.  I have -- in broad daylight in downtown San Francisco -- and that's what happened to conservatives in the recent national election.  We can analyze and rationalize all we want, but the basic act was a crime that took decades to set up and only a day to perpetrate.

Hurrying, I rounded a corner and met a "homeless" man looking straight into my eyes holding a knife to my stomach.  I looked to my sides for escape and saw two more armed "homeless" covering me.  They had seen me coming and set me up -- a practiced routine -- and they smirked at each other as I realized my predicament.

These were genuine criminals who made a study of decent citizens, took advantage of their innocence, and waylaid them into traps.  Leftist leadership studies the American citizenry in exactly the same way.

The man before me motioned to give over my money, and sullenly I did so.  Three to one, unarmed against their knives, violence would have been useless.  As Mao said, "political power grows from the barrel of a gun."

I felt like the victim in Claytie Williams' famous joke: if you're going to get raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.  In San Francisco, why call the cops?  Authority has broken down in the cities, much like all America will be when the leftists spring their final ambush.  I counted my losses and moved on -- lesson learned.

In the same mood we bewail the election.  This is our fault!  What should we have done to attract the minority and women's vote?  And so on.  What a waste of time.

Many rape victims do not report the crime and turn inward, wondering what they did to deserve such brutality.  They often accept blame -- their world shrinks; their circle of friends dwindles; they are broken in spirit.  They might still be physically present, but they fall away, defeated, purposeless, convinced that somehow they are in the wrong -- sad, but a true aspect of human behavior.

Conservatives are behaving like that victim.

Our enemies saw us coming -- Karl Marx laid the plan, and leftists of many stripes have eagerly set the details for over a century.  Mostly members of the privileged classes playing Robin Hood, totally self-centered, with an aggressively violent spirit held back by strategic concerns, they attack the home of the free at no risk to themselves, quivering in glee as their plans progress.  Their victim looks around in confusion, dismayed as her world dissolves, wondering what she is doing wrong.

Imagine how hilarious this must be to the leftists, watching American values fall one by one like birds on a wire -- the remaining birds looking about, wondering where everyone went, yet not flying away.  And here the rest of us sit -- duh.

It's hard to determine when the attack on America began -- the Fabian Society in Victorian England, the Jacobins of the French Revolution?  But those were ideas percolating in foreign countries.  Where did the physical attack in America begin?  With the veterans' riots in Washington, D.C.?  The attack merges seamlessly with the end of WWII, the same president who finished that war recalling Gen. MacArthur from Korea six years later, patterning military victories from then on.  The communist bloc hung over America, embedding a defeatist attitude in the formerly victorious United States.

The strategy was reassured in the spring of 1964, when LBJ visited MacArthur on his deathbed.  MacArthur advised LBJ to stay out of Vietnam, and what did we get?  Total defeat, and America hiding its head in the sand ever since.

That same year, "students" began demonstrating at UC Berkeley, and American voters decided to avoid the difficult decisions concerning brush wars to instead "fight a limited war in Southeast Asia and a War on Poverty here at home," as our kindly spoken Texan president said at the time.

We were led directly into an ambush, exactly as conservatives said.  But it's so easy to avoid self-discipline, to allow oneself to be schmoozed instead.  The American majority, coddled by their enemies, discounted those conservatives as extremists, disallowing all they said -- that if America did not make the difficult decisions necessary to defend herself, she would be lost, defeated by the long-term plans of the leftists.

Now here we are, 48 years later.  Would those conservatives be surprised at our predicament?   No -- we are right where they and our enemies said we would be.  Those who knew pre-welfare America are mostly gone now, replaced by a population that knows only comfort.  Our parameters to determine the number of those living in poverty are so high that our "poor" are far better off than most people in the world.  Really, we have achieved President Hoover's goal: a state of permanent prosperity -- but we are so hooked on aiding the poor that if we don't maintain the illusion of generosity, we would lose part of our self-esteem, our Robin Hood mentality.

Americans are so steeped in leftist thought that even conservatives blame themselves for their failures, like the rape victim, and accept the welfare state as permanent.  We walk the aisles of our supermarkets walled in by foods, wonder how to regulate the overabundance of agriculture, and we believe that this is all the normal state of man.  We have forgotten that America is to the world as Disneyland is to Los Angeles.

Our enemies have not forgotten.  Their ambush is being set up as we weaken, and when it is sprung, we will not have the strength to resist.  The majority of the electorate, as of last week, is now in their grasp.

My article last December in the American Thinker detailed a practical plan to end the welfare state; several people commented.  Many believed that the welfare state is an unsinkable bureaucracy while others, conservatives, thought me a heartless beast for abandoning the "poor" -- an admirable job of leftist indoctrination.

The welfare state is our enemy's supreme masterwork, a miraculous machine that takes by force the cream of America's profit and processes it, magically, into an acidic, viscous substance that clings to people and destroys them.  It then pours that destructive substance over the American people, anesthetizing them while it kills.

Best of all, from the enemy's standpoint, America itself is financing the whole thing.  Once set into motion, our enemies have only to sit back and watch, coaching here and there as necessary, or to elevate their pleasure.  In their construct, it's a steady pace toward the inevitable, and when they rewrite history a few decades from now, the blight of America will disappear forever.

Will enough Americans wake up in time to save our experiment in freedom?  Well, I hate to be pessimistic, but as the sign at the funeral parlor says, "It's Later than You Think."