I Can't Possibly Be The Only One Thinking This...

Okay. With luck -- or rather, draftsmanship -- on my side I'll be posting a sketch of Anomalocaris canadensis later today. But just in case, here's a little political raving to keep things from slowing down too badly. Please feel free to ignore this; and remember, these are the opinions of a raving nutbar.

Right now the economy is a central issue in all our lives. Exactly why is America's economy in the shitter? We're conducting a war -- to conduct a war and ruin an economy at the same time seems like some sort of magic trick.

I'm no economist, I'm woefully ignorant of politics. But it seems to me that when you run a war you have to fucking well run a war. That means paying for the war, not just sending people off to battle.

It means victory gardens, scrap metal drives, war bonds. It means that the civilian population has to throw its support behind the military.

The current administration paid for the Iraq war (or, currently, occupation) with credit cards.

Your credit cards.

To conduct a war and cut taxes at the same time means that the war has to be paid for by going into debt. This is profoundly foolish.

Worse than that much of the money funneled into both the war and anti-terrorism efforts turned out to be straight-up pork. "No-bid contracts?" Wiretapping? Give me a break -- these were excuses to move money from public to private pockets. And given the administration's connections with companies like Halliburton it is difficult not to read this as a case of a bunch of war criminals plundering one nation while bombing another.

If this government had actually conducted the war on a fiscally responsible basis they would have needed cooperation from the nation as a whole. Which means they would have had to justify the whole shebang. Which they could not do.

So they ran the country into debt while a handful of private interests almost choked themselves to death on the flood of dollars cascaded down their throats -- and that money had to come from somewhere.

Whoever comes into office next is going to be reaping the harvest of the last eight years -- or rather, the accumulated harvest of every administration from Reagan on. That's when the deregulazation of the financial industry began and things have been going downhill ever since.

Of course the American people are also responsible for this. By allowing ourselves to be controlled by fear, by listening to the Big Lie over and over again, by simply being selfish and short-sighted we have helped to bring this situation to pass. Shame on us.

Interesting that the bill is coming due just as Bush is on his way out of the White House. I really, really hope there is some legal recourse we can take to bring him, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of that bloody-snouted herd of anthropophagous swine to some kind of justice.

But I doubt it.