It's Good News Year
Perhaps you remember the song from the mid-Sixties that began, "It's good news week, someone dropped a bomb somewhere, contaminating atmosphere, and blackening the sky." It went on with a litany of mano a mano horror stories around the globe. That may be what the Bushies are singing tonight as they toast in the new year.
The problem with the Bush agenda, which they revealed today day when not a lotta folks are paying attention to things newsy, is that we not be the bomber but rather the bombee, and the results could cripple our economy. Herein they are revealing their strategy for dealing with the problem of our crumbling economy: they're gonna stage the IraqAttaq, inviting inevitable retaliation from Iraqis or Al Qaeda probably with some hyper-nasty weapons, and they won't have to take responsibility for rampant deflation.
The American people may be gullible -- nay, naive -- or even plagued by wishful thinking, but surely we can't be so stupid as to buy into this crypto-suicidal insanity as a successful 2004 re-election platform. Surely...but if they are -- maybe 'cause we're so tightly wrapped in a faux flag of patriotism -- then those who are going to be hurt the most are those who buy the poked pig; and they deserve it, even if the rest of us don't.
Because there's plenty of evidence that the economy is a mess, and the economy looks good compared to our foreign policy. The White House also just announced that fighting Iraq may be cheaper than first thought, lowering their estimate to $50-$60 billion from a hunnert bil, more in line with the Gulf War, but still totally out of line with reason. These numbers are pure fantasy, and whatever the dollar figure, it will simply be added to the mushrooming national debt. The numbers they won't talk about are of the dead bodies, home and abroad, that will be piling up in the thousands, maybe millions.
No wonder consumer confidence is sinking fast. The experts (tee-hee) thought the index would climb from 84.9 in November to 88, but instead it sank to 80.3. It was the sixth decline in seven months and suggests the public knows a lot more about what's going on than do the forecasters who say they think everything is hunky-dory. Of course, their dory is sinking; they lie because they're paid to produce rosy forecasts.
Certainly a good number of Americans have it figured out, which is why 64% of them in a recent poll said they thought that the much ballyhooed tax cuts should be deferred. This makes sense on two levels: first, they know the economy is in the t'rlet, and second, they know the tax cuts -- the hallmark of the Bush-Lite economic program -- will never reach down to them.
Also going down the drain are the state economies, which are in the most dire straits since the end of the Second World War. That giant sucking sound are the careers of the pols who didn't see the truth in the facts or who simply lied their way into office in the last cycle. The irony is that 2003 is probably gonna look pretty dang good, in retrospect.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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