Blagnet.net

Grade-A tirade

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an absolutely fantastic tirade about the complete embarrassment and failure of the Bush regime. Some highlights (the majority of the article, perhaps):

You are not paying taxes merely to fund torture and bomb-dropping and the killing of countless innocents in Iraq in a futile and lost war that’s not really a war and is far more of a massive fiscal, tactical and moral failure which will end up costing the nation an estimated $3 trillion, burn through any remaining sense of national dignity and leave repercussions that will last for generations.

Ha. You should be so lucky. Because your tax money is right now also funding the Fed’s unprecedented and rather shocking multibillion-dollar bailout of rich bankers and fund managers who have, through their greed and excess and with the implied blessing of former Chairman Alan Greenspan (whom many consider the architect of the collapse in the first place), helped bring about what is shaping up to be the worst fiscal crisis since World War II.

By the way, I know this blag post is supposed to be praising Mr. Morford, but I can’t just leave this be: What idiot refers to this current and long-from-over recession as “the worst fiscal crisis since World War II”? Um, wouldn’t that be the same as the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression?

The other problem with Morford is that he seems to be enamored of environmental legislation and sees doom in every State or corporate action that doesn’t meet the approval of the environmental lobby. Either way, taking a grain of salt with that, his excellent tirade continues with well-made points:

It turns out that Bush himself stepped in to force the already troubled Environmental Protection Agency to defy its own mandate, its own scientific recommendations, ordering it to raise the limits for allowable ozone (it was about to recommend the exact opposite), all for the benefit of his pals in Big Energy.

No president ever dared such a move before. In fact, Bush’s action was so unprecedented, so galling, so against the very structure of government itself that an army of White House lawyers had to scramble to rewrite the legal justifications for the lower air standard. Do you smell that? That’s the scent of the most shamelessly foul leader of the free world. Breathe deeply, because it ain’t over yet.

So then, torture, pollution, more war, Wall Street megalomania, incompetence like some sort of satanic mantra. If you had any lingering doubt that Bush was an arrogant and petulant man-child with the mind of a violently overpampered 10-year-old, please abolish it now.
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But now Bush is in his final year. This is both the good news, and also the very, very bad news. Because we are now in the death throes of the worst administration in modern history, entering the period of serious consequences, of economic collapse, environmental impact, record oil prices, international recoil, rashes, boils, inexplicable vomiting. Fun for the whole family.

Know this for a fact. Bush does not care. He is detached, supercilious, viciously ignorant of anything but how beautifully he has served his corporate masters, of how he has raked in billions of dollars for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and Exxon and the coal industry, mercenary armies and military manufacturers and his dad’s Saudi friends. He is on no one’s side but theirs, and he always has been.
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But I’m more with those who say, no, the truth is we will never truly recover, that America’s former ranking as Gilded and Irreproachable Empire No. 1 is dead and gone. India and China are dramatically changing the game, peak oil is nigh, fresh water is the new gold, the planet itself is in paroxysm, Mother Nature is quickly revealing her hand — or rather, maybe just that one big, stormy middle finger.

But maybe this is the best news of all. Because the sort of gluttonous empire Bush so disgustingly represented was doomed to failure. The center could not hold. Dubya may not have hastened the apocalypse like the evangelicals desperately prayed he would, but he certainly is hastening the end of the bloviated American ego.

So maybe the real question is not can we return to our former ill-gotten superpower glory, insular and unparalleled and reckless and arrogant, or even peaceful and defensive and ironclad. The true question is, do we have the slightest clue what we want to become instead?

Well, that is, of course, one of the most important questions the United States and the world faces, but the answer is not the environment-obsessed utopia of politically correct multiculturalism that you and fellow “progressives” would coerce us into.

I hope, rather, that Americans can see past the inter-party squabbling and recognize the answer to terrible, corrupt, criminal, irresponsible, murderous government is not less terrible, corrupt, criminal, irresponsible, and murderous government. The antidote to a bad gang of Republocrat criminals is not more Republocrats. The solution is a different system altogether. The answer is less government and more freedom, less coercion and more private property rights, less submission to the State and more rebellious skepticism!

Hat tip: Wendy McElroy.

Posted in Economics, Foreign policy, Rants