To be read aloud from all pulpits:
Neoconservative intellectuals, 2003: We must immediately depose Hussein’s Baathist regime. We’re pretty sure they have been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. We will discover the evidence of this after invading. Also, the war will mostly pay for itself when we install an oil-rich West-friendly democratic regime.
Neoconservative inellectuals, 2004: OK, no sign of the WMDs. But as long as we’re here, let’s sink half a trillion of your dollars into creating that democratic state, which we’re sure will pay off in the long run and totally not collapse back into perpetual civil war with Islamic radicals. Also, anyone who disagrees with this is an unpatriotic traitor.
Investment banks, 2006: Please keep interest rates permanently low, so we can leverage ourselves at ridiculous ratios using borrowed money and hedge our investments in ways that will never ever go wrong.
Investment banks, 2008: Whoops! Please cough up hundreds of billions of public dollars immediately to keep the financial world from descending into anarchy. Also, we’ll need those interest rates to stay low forever, ideally low enough to double corporate profits as a percentage of GDP and allow us to go back to being even more filthy rich than we were before. By the way, we still expect our alums to have major roles in the new Obama cabinet. Thanks!
Social liberals, 2004: Why do you keep passing these ridiculous ballot initiatives? No one is proposing national gay marriage, you are just doing this to be spiteful. America is Jesusland on the brink of total theocracy, and we just want enough principled federalism to give a few deep-blue states the freedom to dissent from your religious tyrrany.
Social liberals, 2012: Welcome to the wrong side of history. Please comply with our non-negotiable request to reject several millennia of your religious traditions and adopt some views about sexual morality that we literally didn’t embrace until five minutes ago. Should you fail to comply, you will be permanently barred from all participation in public life. Oh yeah, since these issues are far to important to be trusted to the voting whims of cretins like you, we’ve just invalidated all those ballot initiatives you passed.
The non-Fox media, 2012: Romney may look innocent and guileless, but he is actually a vile racist who hates the poor, wants to stuff women into binders, and loves torturing dogs.
Every urban elite, 2014: Stop whining about your lost jobs that were outsourced to Asia. They are never coming back, plus they are helping important people like us get stupidly rich by lowering our labor costs. Instead, abandon the dying towns where your last six generations of ancestors have lived, move to big cities where your accumulated life savings will get you the downpayment on a two-bedroom apartment, move your lazy stay-at-home moms into the workforce, and shoulder tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get a proper STEM education. We’re pretty sure these new high-skill jobs will be totally immune to replacement by foreign tech workers from rapidly modernizing countries like China and India (or automation). What are the odds of that happening to multiple sectors of the same economy within a century, right?
All the above groups, 2016: Have you taken leave of your sanity? Why would you trust an obvious charlatan with a third-grade vocabulary rather than sensible centrists like us? He’s an extinction-level event. All of these attacks on neoconservatives, the corporate media, social liberals, and investment bankers are just Hitler-ish dog whistling with a horrifying subtext. You have to trust us, this is important. You have to trust us!
Why don’t you trust us?
Boom.
LSP
We're living in a CITY OF BRASS (http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/city_of_brass.html) scenario and watching it play out before our eyes.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad, and the modern day priests of Baal who created the slide will never take credit for it. No matter who becomes president, the only cure is austerity and at the same time, reducing the size of government. Adherence to Constitutional principles and to the Bill of Rights (including the 10th Amendment) will not avert the crisis, but it will allow for a softer landing, but I don't see that happening.
Putting Hillary Clinton in prison would be a good first step because it would set the tone, but that's not nearly enough. We need to re-think the nation and there are a lot of entitled people and elites who will howl when the fat is trimmed.
Boom indeed.
ReplyDeleteI'm accepting leads on any nice cabins in the remote woods of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming....possibly Maine. Compounds in the state (soon to be country) of Texas are also appreciated.
I still say that the only reason we didn't find anything is because we wasted 6 to 8 months trying to get a 'consensus' from the NATO countries before we did anything.
ReplyDeleteBut that, like whether or not Obama is a U.S. citizen, is moot at this juncture in time.
I posted on fb that America would never be great again until we put God first. A family member posted that he disagreed. I told him that was his right, but that I felt current events proved it to be true.
I am going to pray that Trump is elected and that God will bless America again. That's all I can do.
Be safe and God bless you all.
LL, I'd say City of Brass is entirely appropriate and Viz. austerity and smaller government -- surely that's going to happen despite the best efforts of the elitocracy. Then they'll howl and so, perhaps, will everyone else.
ReplyDeleteSmart people are building homes in the mountains.
Boom's the word, Theodore.
ReplyDeleteYou're always welcome here in Texas, btw.
Linda, a country and a people, the West, that turns its back on God and kills its babies is doomed.
ReplyDeleteRemember the old phrase, "heading to hell in a handbasket"?
I'd say that fits.
Oh yes. I have used that saying a couple times.
ReplyDeleteFunny thing about building homes in the mountains, I originally wanted a home in the mountains. Not because of the coming zombie apocalypse, but because I don't handle the heat well.
But when hubby was given his chance to own the home he grew up in, I couldn't say no. Even though it is pretty much indefensible.
So now we have another plan, should we need it; but with the addition of two sons, not sure how well that plan will play out.
We try to be ready and play it by ear.
God bless.
LL: a tedious read (City of Brass), but Kipling and Orwell saw this coming a century ago (give or take).
ReplyDeleteWhat Kipling calls 'The eaters of other men’s bread, the exempted from hardship,' are now called the U.S. Democrat Party. And they are on the verge of becoming the dominant power in the US for a generation, or more...