They are pretending to have money and desperately cadging loans from all comers to keep appearances up, but the loans can’t come in fast enough. The appearance of confidence is crucial (as it is, of course, in any “con” game) to keep the investors (depositors) at bay. If a bunch of investors (depositors) all got nervous about the solvency of a given bank, they might try to slip in there during business hours and withdraw or redeem their “money” and perhaps translate it into items of value like gold coins, bottles of vodka, or cases of 9 millimeter pistol ammunition. —Jim Kunstler

I’ve always been optimistic, easy to believe in all things “new age,” and happily naive when being realistic meant feeling awful. As the father of a teenager, who I will too soon be releasing into the wilds of modern America, I want nothing more than to feel that steady optimism — to look her in the eye and tell her about the exciting wonders that await her and to go on and on about how much I envy her.

It’s getting to harder and harder to sustain such feelings these days. I find myself saying things like, “Sounds great, honey, if we still have air travel in the future.” And, “You can get into any college you really want to, assuming it still exists.” And, “Sure, you could start a business with that money grandma left you, unless the markets totally tank and the money disappears.”

I feel a little guilty every time I say or even think such things. But I feel even worse about the frikkin mess we’re leaving our kids. Having come awake to the harsh realities of our times I am determined not to go back to sleep.

Which means, among other things, being totally honest, if depressingly so, about the facts of modern life. The nine horses of the likely American apocalypse — militarism, unilateralism, monotheism, sexism, xenophobia, greed, competition, secrecy, and anti-environmentalism — are all in full thunder, stampeding down Main St, Wall St, and every other street, destroying everything that was once good about this effing country. Enjoy your inheritance, sweetie.

Maybe once Bush and his army of rapture-monkeys are purged from the government things will get better, though not everything can be expected to bounce back after eight years of criminal incompetence. And hopefully, before he unites and reconciles everyone, President Obama will see that prominent members of the Bush-Cheney gang are fairly prosecuted and sent to Guantanamo.

Really can’t say I’m optimistic….

The centerpiece of the Bush legacy is a “war on terror” based on a vast disconnect between military expenditures and actual national security requirements that the presidential candidates all fully understand. The question is whether the voters and media will force them to face that contradiction or whether we’re in for more of the same — no matter how much the candidates go on about change.
—Robert Scheer, Truthdig.com

How perfect that John McCain has become the Republican candidate. Much as the party base might hate the man for some of his fiscal and social policies, he’s got the perfect résumé for taking over America’s War on Everything.

As a confessed war criminal — “I am a war criminal,” McCain said on “60 Minutes” in 1997. “I bombed innocent women and children.” — he’ll be able to step into Bush’s primary responsibilities from day one. High-altitude bombing of dark-skinned people? No learning curve for McCain!

As a former prisoner of war, he’s got the inside track on the whole torture debate. Though he has spoken sensibly against torture in the past, with the White House in his sights he’s changed his story and now appropriately rails against Islamo-fascism and the need to do whatever it takes — break out the waterboards, boys — to stop the evil terrorists.

Though he has complained much about Donald Rumsfeld’s prosecution of the Iraq War, the main thrust of his complaints is that we didn’t do enough. Not enough troops, not enough bombs. McCain LOVES the surge, and thinks we ought to stay in Iraq (and, presumably, anywhere else that America has significant economic interests) for the next hundred years.

Most importantly, as he admitted during a debate, the economy is not his strong suit. So, we could count on a McCain presidency to continue expanding military budgets — More troops! More bombs! — all the way to the monumental economic fubar that awaits our world.

Even if we overlook the many moral issues that inevitably arise for any nation-at-perpetual-war — the death of innocents, the lying leaders, the unconscionable tactics, the suspension of civil rights — even if we ignore all of that, the ever-inescapable problem of war is that it causes a suicidal diversion of national resources from essential social needs to the Military-Congressional-Industrial-Complex.

John McCain is just fine with all of that. There should be no limits on spending for the war machine. Indeed, it’s unpatriotic to even ask the question, “How will we afford it?” Bomb now, pay later.

Unfortunately, the supposedly anti-Iraq-war Democratic party — it’s why we elected all you guys and gals two years ago, if you’ll recall — is just as war-addicted. Since their historic return to power, they have given into EVERY pro-war action or initiative that Bush and his cohorts have wanted. “Shameful” doesn’t come close to describing it.

While we all want to think that either Clinton or Obama will end this madness, the record of the past two years is sobering. America has become one great prisoner of war, from sea to shining sea. Until a viable candidate can stand up and pledge to seriously reduce all military spending and to redirect the nation’s resource to its people, then there’s no escaping from this prison.

Back from another hiatus caused by my inability to process Bush and all the damage wrought. For 7+ years we’ve pointed out the lies and mistakes, we’ve accurately predicted the inevitable disasters, and we’ve called in vain for somebody in power to take a stand against this awful, awful man.

The ‘06 elections returned real power to the Dems and allowed us to believe again in American democracy. For about a month, until our new leaders made clear that they would continue to kiss the ring and bow to the idiot demands of this awful, awful man.

But an end is finally in sight — to him, at least, though his many crimes will plague us for years — so the muse is shaking off the rust and dusting off the keyboard.

While I rediscover my own voice,  here’s a little from Scott Ritter, one of few who has been right about Iraq from the very beginning:

The collective refusal of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration’s overarching Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President Bush’s departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration’s actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil. —Ala Greenspan

For years now, those of us who dared state the obvious — that Bush/Cheney’s obsession with Iraq was all about oil — have been dismissed as left-wing cranks, or worse, as terror-loving traitors.

I doubt that this admission from the former high priest of American capitalism will make a difference. He’s just one of a long line of truth-telling former Bush-abettors.

Still, it’s an important statement, and not just the oil part: our decision to destroy a sovereign nation that did us no harm and push the world to the brink of apocalypse just so we could service our oil addiction is just one of a very long list of hard American truths shrouded in political denial.

The first step in waking from denial is the recognition of how deeply and dangerously asleep we’ve been.

Been on a mini-vacation, getting back just in time for the long-heralded Petraeus report, wisely scheduled for the 6th anniversary of 9/11.

Five minutes into the General’s “testimony” it was apparent that, like Colin Powell’s infamous U.N. testimony, we were getting another load of Bushit. Though I’m no longer surprised by anything this administration does, it’s still dismaying to watch the Democrats just take it.

Not to mention the media dutifully reporting it all, as if it bore any relation at all to the truth. Tom Engelhardt best sums up my feelings:

To grasp the Petraeus moment, you really have to re-imagine official Washington as a set of drunks behind the wheels of so many SUVs tearing down a well-populated city avenue — and all of them are on their cell phones. They hardly notice the bodies bouncing off the fenders. For them, the world is Washington-centered; all interests that matter are American ones. Nothing else exists, not really. Think of this as a form of imperial autism and the Petraeus moment as the way in which the White House and official Washington have, for a brief time, blotted out the world.

Consider it a stark view into the next 16 months of American politics while we wait for President Kick-Ass to lame-out. Nothing will change, certainly not improve, and all of it will be dumped into the laps of the lucky winners of the 2008 elections.

Incredibly, it’s happening again. As if Iraq never happened, as if the innumerable lessons from that national shame and continuing horror never happened. As if the ‘06 election slapdown and clear annunciation of the people’s will never happened.

Incredibly, the same cast of chickenhawk fools and lazy legislators who brought us Iraq are now dragging the country into an even bigger pile of bushit. Incredibly, the media awaits their next sage utterances on the “progress” in Iraq and the need to bomb the hell out of Iran as if they had a shred of credibility remaining.

Incredibly, there’s nothing that we can do to stop it. Democrats either believe the war-think rhetoric about Iran’s evil intentions — why, someday they might be as aggressively violent as us! — or they see more Bush-Cheney-war as good election politics. In any case, Dems are desperate to avoid looking soft on terror, so how can they say no to the indiscriminate bombing of a bunch of Muslims, or Arabs, or whatever the hell they are over there?

As the actually sage Chris Hedges puts it, we will soon be bombing Iran because we’ve lost all capacity for the empathetic communication that international diplomacy requires:

But we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect. We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasn’t worked well in Iraq. It hasn’t worked well in Afghanistan. And it won’t work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.

There is no end to the shame-parade of the Iraq fiasco. Since no one in the Bush administration ever makes a mistake or does anything wrong, and since thou shalt never criticize the troops, how does America explain the big mess over there? It’s the frikkin Iraqis fault!

The established spin — and we’re hearing this crap from the democrats as much as the republicans — is that “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has failed to take advantage of the Iraqi people’s desire for peaceful and productive lives and of the enormous commitment and sacrifices made by the United States and other nations.”

Maliki, along with the fledgling Iraqi parliament, are, according to this narrative, a bunch of ungrateful slackers who have totally botched the nifty gifts of democracy and freedom that we bestowed on them. If they only had the infinite courage of American politicians they would have gotten their political house in order lickedy-split, cleaned up the civil war thing, and signed all their oil over to the West.

And we wonder why they hate us.

Of course, America doesn’t exactly model swift, certain, and effective democratic processes to the rest of the world. There are several hugely important problems that our politicians have written off as “third rail” issues, ie, too politically dangerous to even talk about, much less legislate. Healthcare, social security, the drug war, climate change, federal debt, campaign financing, voting technologies: just a few issues that, in a healthy functioning democracy, one could reasonably expect to find vigorous debates leading to decisive votes.

But years and years can pass without even discussions on these matters, much less results. And our politicians have had more than 200 years to works out the kinks, they are all millionaires with guaranteed job security (when they lose elections they just go on to higher-paying lobbying positions), and they don’t have to worry about being murdered or kidnapped by the electorate.

Yet even worse than spectacle of overfed Americans complaining about those slacker Iraqis is the shucking off of responsibility for the unmitigated and ungovernable mess WE created there.

This is not Iraq’s fault. Not Saddam’s fault. Not Iran or Syria’s fault.

It’s America’s fault — the whole thing. Blaming the victims for our criminal failings is just more American ugly.