Posted on January 11, 2008 - by Venik

Presidential primaries and the idiot’s war

Like many of you, I was watching the Democratic presidential debates. They almost convinced me to vote Republican for the first time ever.

The first question on the agenda: nuclear terrorism and, of course, Osama. According to the leading economists, the country is heading toward a deep recession (1). Even with the buy-out of Countrywide, there is no end in sight to the mortgage industry crisis. Unemployment and debt delinquency are on the rise. The price for a barrel of oil just hit the hundred-dollar mark and is expected to continue growing. Dollar is losing value faster than the Soviet ruble during the 1980s depression. Basic food and clothing items are rapidly growing in price.

A huge number of Americans are about to lose their jobs, health insurance, cars and homes. And we are talking about attacking Pakistan? Should our primary concern at this point really be the security of the Russian nuclear stockpile? Are we really this fucking stupid? The bottom line is that our military, our security and law-enforcement forces, our intelligence organizations are all very expensive. If the economy takes a nosedive, as is widely expected by analysts, we will have no money for any of this anti-terrorism rubbish. Forget the Saudis, we will have unemployed Americans hijacking the planes.

The four Democratic presidential candidates – Hillary, Barack, John, and Bill – got cornered by an old man with a stupid question (whould you attack Pakistan if you had ‘actionable intelligence’ in regard to Bin Laden’s whereabouts) and spent the next half-hour babbling like idiots. Not one of them had the courage to say that the US will abide by international laws and respect Pakistan’s sovereignty. Of course, “actionable intelligence” means you need to bomb somebody. But what can you expect from three people (forget Bill – he’s out) who consistently voted to prolong the war in Iraq? They may criticize the war in public, but they have always been quite willing to write blank checks for George W.

Should we expect the Bush vs. Saddam war develop into Obama vs. Osama duel in Pakistan a year from now? Maybe by the time we finally get Bin Laden, Russia will be in a position to offer us economic aid. What happened in 2001 was tragic. It was doubly tragic because it was preventable, had our Commander-in-Chief been actually reading the security briefs prepared for him. So should we now run our economy into the ground chasing ghosts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Afghanistan, by the way,  did miracles for the Soviet economy, may it rest in peace. Do we want to follow our Soviet comrades?

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(1) Countrywide gets rescue deal, The Wall Street Journal, Jan-11-2008

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