Ah no, don't ignore the "foundational stuff", I'm in more of a philosophical than argumentative mood, and that's the good stuff!
When I get a few idle braincycles I've found myself pondering your various lamentations of late, and in a roundabout way I'm addressing them.
It's not that you're wrong, or that we're all too stupid or brain-damaged to see it.
You're simply basing your conclusions on incomplete data. There is a very large dimension of the human experience that isn't amenable to logical analysis, yet it must be considered in the governance of a free society.
The idea that "happiness" is an integral part of our political system is neither mine nor new. Its concrete role in the system is as a metric: Pollsters ask us if we're "happy" with the performance of our leaders, and try to divine the "mood" of the country. Professional politicians of all persuasions know and use that knowledge, even as you deny its relevance. Politicians understand that the system is set up to reward them for making the people happy, and to punish them for making the people unhappy. It's not rocket science.
It mattered greatly that FDR made people feel a little less bad during the Depression with his encouraging talk and admonishment that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself"; and matters greatly today that Bush is talking of mushroom clouds and images of fear. It matters greatly whether the American people feel strong and confident, or weak and afraid. Irrational emotions aren't irrelevant to good governance, they're the essence of it.
Although I'm not feeling argumentative, I can hardly let you slide by twisting the words of one of the sacred texts:
"Pursuit of happiness" is not a state-supplied guarantee of it. It's just the last of three items in a list where government is not supposed to interfere.
That's not quite how it reads in context:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
The full statement goes much further than just admonishing the government to passively stand aside. Rather, one of its fundamental purposes is to secure the right to pursue happiness.
Puts me in mind of George Lakoff's theory that Conservatives and Liberals define freedom differently. Lakoff's characterization of the Conservative definition as simply freedom from is wholly backed up by your interpretation of that phrase. A great many other people, me included, see freedom defined there much more proactively, as freedom to, that freedom-from enables only a theoretical freedom, and that true freedom depends on opportunity as well. Where there is no opportunity to exercize freedom, it hardly matters that the government isn't actively working against it, there is no freedom. That's a simple, and--dare I say it?--logical proposition.