A Road to Nowhere

[Mythsaje]

I've been saying it for a long time. We may have plenty of reasons to hate Dubya. Gawd only knows. But he's not only not responsible for all the problems we're having economically and diplomatically, but he makes a convenient scapegoat for all the people who ARE truly responsible for the various messes we're in.

First and foremost? The Republican Party as a whole. The Lords of Deregulation. The Masters of Trickle-Down. The Icons of Smaller Government. Or, as I prefer to refer to them, those Perverted Purveyors of Short-term Gains and Long-term Consequences.

We can toss the whole Banking industry part of the blame as well. Lobbying for deregulation, then acting with almost no foresight as to the ultimate costs of their actions. No one in his or her right mind makes loans to those they know can't afford to pay them back. It's like letting a drunk teenager borrow a sports car.

Sure, it's easy to blame the customers here... I mean, it's irresponsible to take out a loan if one can't afford to pay it back, right? Except, well, the people who sell those loans to these people are well trained in playing with numbers to make them seem like something other than what they are. It's their JOB to convince these folks that it's possible. If someone much better at the math stuff tells you that you CAN afford a house, you figure they know what they're talking about, right?

Uh...sure.

America has been surviving on credit for far too long, spending money that exists only in theory, not in actuality. Not only as individuals, but collectively. That's been the whole Republican economic plan, after all. Borrow against the future and pray to Gawd that the future will be able to even everything out. They talk about "Tax and Spend Liberals" but how can that possibly be worse than "Spend and Borrow" so-called "Conservatives?" Eventually all those loans come due and then where the hell are we? Stuck up the proverbial creek with a leaky boat and oars too short to reach the water.

Bush has never been anything but a symptom of the disease, and while some of us were running around scared to death that the idiot-in-chief would come up with a way to suspend the elections, the people who gave us the fucking disease in the first place have been hard at work convincing the American people that everything's hunky-dory, that by slapping a bit of paint on the ramshackle ship of state, we can sail it off into a rosy future that hasn't been mortgaged to the hilt.

Anyone who doesn't realize how these present difficulties have come about is in desperate need of an education as to the nature of the beast. They've been desperately trying to built a bridge with nothing more than smoke and star-shine and are now expecting us to go marching off into the sunset on it when those of us who haven't been blinded are fully aware that there's NO GODDAMN BRIDGE THERE. But millions of Americans are all too willing to let the Pied Pipers lead them off the precipice and nothing we can do seems to have any chance of convincing them how bad an idea it really is.

Republicanism is a disease, plain and simple. And we've been far too concerned about treating the symptoms than going after the cause and the original vectors. Let's hope that that mistake doesn't cost us everything.