The Hangover Of A Lifetime

I think we're all feeling that way right now. TomDispatch offers his view:

Now, I look at my son and I imagine a draft. I look at him and I think of the young Americans who should never have been but are desperately in harm's way in Iraq. I think of the Iraqis and try to wrap my brain around the next 100,000 of them who will die in the urban killing fields of that country, while the second Bush administration pursues its mad, murderous policies. I think about those northern glaciers and the polar ice, and try to imagine them gone in a globally warmed world. I think about being in the heart of the heart of a vast (possibly failing) empire and my heart sinks -- and so, unfortunately, does Tomdispatch's.

In the meantime, a little over half of voting Americans -- and there were a lot of voting Americans this time around -- have now signed on to the rashest presidency in our history (short perhaps of that of Jefferson Davis); they have signed on to a disastrous crime of a war in Iraq, and a losing war at that which will only get worse; they have signed on to whatever dangerous schemes these schemers can come up with. They have signed on to their own impoverishment. This is the political version of the volunteer Army. Now, they have to live with it. Unfortunately, so do we.

My small guarantee. Much of this will change over the years to come. This world of ours already spins on a dime, economically, politically, militarily, environmentally. (Just wait, for instance, until the tactic being developed in Iraq, thanks to our President, the blowing up of oil pipelines, spreads beyond that country's boundaries, as it certainly will, and then check out oil prices and the stock market.) But, to sound a small note of hope, as the world spins on a dime, so often do administrations. And you just never know when one of them will indeed implode. Take Richard Nixon, who sailed through a disastrous war in Vietnam and into office as second time in 1972 on a veritable landslide of votes, and then slide slowly into Watergate and disgrace. These will not be quiet years and, I suspect, they will not prove good ones for George Bush.

I hope for his head on a pike. Read the rest of the article.