It's Evening in American..........

The news as of late has been rather overwhelming. Pakistan is in a higher state of turmoil than usual, with Bush's military lap-dog/dictator suspending the Pakistani constitution and jailing every lawyer in case one of them might want to practice law. While Musharraf is packing the jails with protestors (mostly lawyers), the Taliban is brazenly taking over one end of the country, apparently not the least bit concerned that the Pakistani army will use any of the new hardware we are buying them to take back that territory. Meanwhile, there are nuclear weapons sitting in a supposedly safe place within easy reach of Bin Laden if he really, really wanted them.

The economy is getting real stupid. Having given free reign to the capitalists, we are now reaping the benefits of a free market, which has freely been losing money down a deep, dark hole called the sub-prime mortgage market. What is this, you ask? Well, what you do is you go after people who are barely getting by as it is, loan them a ton of money they could never hope to repay, especially since you conned them into signing for a mortgage that starts out with a nice little interest rate which balloons into an outrageous rate guaranteed to put the borrower into default. Of course, a whole phalanx of middle men get nice commissions to generate these deals which in any other world would be recognized as the blatantly predatory deals that they really are and never allowed by law in the first place. Then, when the shit hits the fan and the chickens come home to roost, you report huge loses and shrug your shoulders and lay people off, grab yourself a nice golden parachute and retire to the Bahamas. Isn't that what the American dream is all about?

Add to that this strange mechanism we have which allows people to buy huge chucks of oil supplies, jack up the price on said supplies, and sell them BACK to the oil companies far in excesses of their true value, using such excuses as "the President of Iran cut a fart at the negotiating table; that's worth at least $1.50 a barrel....." The Republicans like to remind us how good they are at national security issues, while they conveniently overlook how their friends are threatening our security by artificially inflating energy and commodity prices simply to line their own pockets while we common folk wonder how we are going to afford to get to work or pay for that tomato that trucker is paying a hefty ransom to get to the supermarket.

Don't even get me started on the insurance companies, the ones who will soon begin denying claims filed by all those white, semi-rich Californians who got burnt out of house and home this summer. Or, maybe not, since DUBYA assured them that we Americans really, really care about them, as opposed to poor, black Americans in Southern Louisiana.

I honestly am beginning to believe that this administration has caused more harm to this nation than Richard Nixon could have ever hoped to. I truly believe that the entire Bush Administration and all his neo-con taskmasters should be brought up on charges, convicted by a jury of their peers, and sent to prison WITHOUT the benefit of any kind of pardon. No golden parachutes for Dick Cheney. No bronze statues of Donald Rumsfield outside the Pentagon. No pension for Karl Rove and his merry band of election riggers. If we cannot hold THIS band of crooks accountable for the mess they made of our government, then we might as well give up on this idea of America and what it always stood for, at least to those of us who truly loved her.


And let's give our wounded veterans first dibs on the firing squads.