Sunday, June 01, 2003

Short Term Memory. El Busho is over in Europe at the moment, being feted by Putin et al.  This does a nice job of covering for the fact that there really isn't a whole lot to talk about.  The fact that the conservative wing of this country just can't seem to understand why Europe is still upset about the Iraq thing tells us a good deal of what we need to know.  According to the Adminstration, the war was over, like, 25 minutes ago already?  Why are we still talking about the subject?  What's wrong with these Europeans, anyway?  Can't they just forgive and forget? I don't think they're going to, and I don't think that they should.  Wolfowitz has already admitted that the WMD claim, prior to the war, was a smokescreen.  We could also go ahead and just call it a lie -- a lie that was played out on the world stage.  That lie has now been revealed, and we are faced with a simple situation: Either the American intelligence services are unreliable, or the Administration just plain lied to the people. I seem to remember an incident not too long ago where a President lied about sex.  Nobody died, but people were pretty upset about it.  Here we have a freakin' war that's happened.  Somebody lied.  Either the intelligence people lied because they were pressured to "find" evidence of WMD, or the administration lied about the importance of WMD, and did not accurately characterize what the intelligence services were telling them. What's curious to me right now is the systemic effect of everything that's going on.  We have the war.  We have a pretty dramatic freeze in investment right now.  We have a giant tax cut that is going to the wealthy, ostensibly to "create jobs" because they'll invest in America. Of course, the fact that practically all of the capital in this country is just sitting on the sidelines right now seems to be lost on those in power.  Providing tiny additional incentives to individuals to invest seems pretty dumb.  After all, if the corporations don't pay the dividends to individuals, those corporations are just going to go ahead and invest the money anyway. Are we creating an overall situation here where the country and the economy will drop into some kind of death spiral?  How exactly is the country ever supposed to recover from these kinds of deficits?  How many years of sustained growth will it take to do it?  What worries me is that I feel like the country is being run by loan sharks.  Next time I'll illuminate that. 6:58:43 PM    comment []