Wipeout

The Iraq Invasion and Occupation was supposed to make it all better. The Iraqis would welcome the U.S. as liberators and in their undying gratitude give us their oil at rock bottom prices. The remarkable thing is-- it might actually have worked were it not for the fact that George W Bush has the diplomatic acumen of a 5th century Vandal and Dick Cheney loves money more than his own mother or even Donald Rumsfeld.

But thanks to cronyism, hubris and greed, along with some treasonous subterfuge,the war has been a debacle featuring incompetence, corruption, and brutality, all of mind-bending proportions and tragic consequences. When histories are written a hundred years hence on the remarkable decline of the American Empire, the war for Iraq will likely be judged as the greatest act of self-destruction the world has ever seen.

So here we are, five years after "Mission Accomplished", with an economy in the toilet, unemployment hovering at 13%, a government debt of nearly 10 trillion dollars and an annual deficit running @ $700 billion. The path to our swift disintegration we can trace to the great Ronald Reagan who convinced us and his clueless supplicant George W Bush., that by putting the poor in debt while pampering the rich we could eat cake every day and always have a good-paying job in the offing. His future vice-president George Bush Sr. described it aptly as "Voodoo Economics". Judging from his son, that may have been the last honest thing the man ever said.

So how has sailing a country of 300 million souls in a sea of red ink worked out? Well Fanny and Freddie, our two mortgage giants, are about to be shored up by more tax-payer credit, meanwhile Merrill Lynch and the Lehmann Brothers have just fallen on their knees, praying that our brave leverage king, Bank of America, will survive the bloodbath and be their savior. However, as much as I'd like to lay all the blame at the feet of Sir Ronald, credit for the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression belongs to the moronic Phil Gramm, he of the infamous Enron Loophole, and the peerless Alan Greenspan who can't resist blowing bubbles and apparently has never met with a white-shoe banker without experiencing the urge to genuflect.

All of which means that the fiscal discipline responsible Democrats tend to practice in public and in private-- you know the idea that it's better to invest in the public as well as in private to insure the country's future-- has just gone up in smoke-- blown with the wind just like the neo-con dream that we would conquer all of Arabia, drill oil from now until eternity and live happily ever after, singing praises to dear Dick and Donny.