Warning: I woke up pessimistic this morning. From Hullabaloo:
. . . One of the most salient indictments of the Bush-Cheney regime was that they were stupid enough to fall for the biggest sucker bet in history, a pointless land war in the Middle East. A sane person might wonder how, with the benefit of 500 years of repetitive history to guide us, and the fall of the ancient empires to boot, even they could have been such idiots. But, as Orwell reminds us in "1984", the very purpose of war has changed, with the sole object now being to keep the elites in power perpetually:
"The primary aim of modern warfare...is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living...The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence in the long run too intelligent."Will the President have the brains and guts to steer us away from this course of self-destruction? Even if he does - and I become lass sanguine about that every day - it's hard to believe the Owners will let him. And yet with their aversion to reform, their short-sighted greed, their celebration of their own ignorance, they are going to end up being failed parasites; because once they kill the host - we, the people - they'll end up on history's trash heap too. Reader Cleon at Hullabaloo
And of course it doesn't matter how much pointless, endless wars add to the deficit; we need to be fiscally responsible only when it benefits ordinary Americans. It's becoming clearer that the "Owners" (I like that as a stand-in word for the biggest players in the Defense and Financial sectors) let Obama become president despite his opposition to the Iraq invasion because he did an about-face on FISA and embraced the war in Afghanistan. For the Owners, one protracted war without any clear objectives or end in sight is as good as another.
So rejoice, the Dems, despite an overwhelming House majority just barely passed healthcare in the same week they gutted Oxley-Sarbanes, and yet the rabid right, with a lot of airhead media support, gets taken seriously when it depicts the Dems, these creatures mostly owned by the Owners, as far-left socialists. It's facetious. And this battle for sensible healthcare reform: It's like a small bone the owners begrudingly are willing to let us have, but they are going to make us tug and grapple, like a dog playing a game, to pry it out of their hands--good sport--but it's sport that better not hurt any of the really big owners--the Senate's will make sure of that. All the insiders, including Obama, understand this is the real world in Washington.
It's becoming clearer to me that bin Laden and others like him who want to destroy America understand how things work in this country better than most Americans do. They understand that the Owners care not a whit for the long term so long as their bank accounts are fat and getting fatter. The Owners are like monkeys whose hand gets stuck in the jar because it won't let go of the banana. Iraq and Afghanistan are the jar. No way the owners are letting go of that banana, and this refusal to be sane will--already has--hurt us more than the attack on the twin towers ever did. They are going to bleed us to death there.
Probably not much Obama can do about it, because the only way we get out is by Obama cutting off too many hands that are in that jar, and he knows he would be beat to death by their bloody stumps if he did it. The Owners tolerate Dems so long as they are well behaved, but we saw what happened after Carter and Clinton. That's what we should expect after Obama unless things change dramatically before then.