Bush Did Not Win the Election?
Originally posted by Darkwolf@Dec 23 2004, 01:29 AM
Dansho, I don't see anyone nuking us in the near future. Any small country that fired one at us would be perminantly wiped off of the map, and they know it. The only people who might be able to do us any major harm are the Russians, and right now, we aren't ratteling each other's cages much.
That's why they have been busy for years carefully putting together the policy structure to legitimize preemptive strikes. The Iraq/Afghan/"Terror" war can be understood as a "rehearsal" of this policy, in that it is handy to prove the proposition that the U.S. is now capable of striking at anyone
first, in any direction, without negative consequences from either allies or old enemies. The new American Imperialism is brainlessly seductive to the rich, inasmuch as it seems to offer up the world's resources on a silver platter, while the rude crowds tussle over irrelevant, localized power. But it has two extraordinarily dangerous aspects:
1. It represents a radical, anti-conservative approach to the world, an undemocratic move away from the homestyle, populist power base just manipulated to give the tinpot Bush a "mandate." This might mean that the same "red Staters" who allegedly put him into the White House would revolt against him and everything he stands for-- given that the common person has no stock in Exxon, and believes that Jesus told us to be charitable and honest. This, in turn, could throw over the country yet another Constitutional crisis as a louse tries to stay in power by any means possible. President Rove?
2. The world adjusts itself to the shifts of international power quite slowly, and, once in motion, with an almost fateful momentum. You cannot within one Presidential term in office reverse the damage to the paranoid truce that ended the Cold War; then again, the neocons believe that
Reagan ended Communism. Anyway, whether it was Reagan, or the nefarious McDonalds/Levis conspiracy to make every culture in the world stupid and fat, it all depended upon a trust in the U.S. not to follow the template of Western history and become a military empire. Now, of course, those in the Old Countries recognize their grandchildren pretending to impose nobility upon poor people who seem to want to govern themselves. It's not quite up to the snuff of Yale standards the way they do things overseas, and a lot of them, if you can imagine, don't speak English or have DVD players.
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The forecast is dire. On the one hand, within a very short time, the country could be wholly preoccupied with a banal and expensive Washington crisis, involving the usual dreary Congressional hearings and confessions of familiarity with prostitutes and secret videos, and resulting in crying at press conferences and midnight swilling of whisky in the West Wing. In the heartland, people who make their living selling seed or Toyotas will find Fox News full of unavoidable casualty figures and grim predictions of City Hall and Walmart going bankrupt. Some of us will wonder whether Nixon really just tricked us all by waving at the helicopter, and will expect to find Sen. Ervin grilling White House wonks on another channel.
In another continent, a wouldbe Castro with an army of teenagers uniformed in mall rockstar Tshirts will put two and two together and realize that this is probably the best time to whack "the only superpower"-- now, before Americans go through the laborious process of trying to save their form of government. Almost at the same time, one of the "nuclear club" will begin to understand that the government to emerge from the American crisis will probably retain the preemptive strike option, due to the threat to the U.S. from the forces of darkness; the best way to get to the top of the heap and obtain some greater power will be to strike us first and often.
