Faith-Based Inevitability

The Lord works in mysterious ways,
Our blunders to reform.

We, the American democratic republic known as the United States of America, are in a mighty mess.

The links in the chain of cause and effect can be pursued backward through history as far as oppositely pointing fingers care to point:

back to Bush's (s)election by the Supreme Court in 2000 (a new concept -- letting the Supreme Court choose our president);

or Clinton's embrace of Third Way policies;

or 12 years of Reagan/Bush 1st voodoo economics;

or Carter's disastrous decision of October 22nd, 1979, to grant the Shah of Iran political sanctuary in the USA (an event that almost single-handedly turned the ire of Muslim fanaticism against the USA* instead of Russia, which had thoroughly pissed them off by invading Afghanistan 15 months earlier on August 7th, 1978)
*(on November 4th 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking more than fifty Americans hostage.);

or what we'll just call the Nixon Legacy (1968-1974) as "Graciously" pardoned by Ford, (1974-1976);

or the Johnson Legacy which, despite passage of the Civil Rights Act, Great Society War on Poverty breakthroughs, also turned the Viet Nam conflict into a major war in which several million lost their lives, based on the now known to be fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its associated War Powers Act that has since let presidents make war without Congressional;

or JFK's assassination...

...but I think it makes sense that the Long View of the chains of cause and effect leading to our current state of abomination begins with Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" coming to political prominence, beginning the unholy alliance of evangelical political action groups with the Republican party, spawning a movement that would grow increasingly crucial to Republican political success; while the Short View should begin with the entry into the White House of what an overwhelming majority of historians and popular opinion polls agree has been The.Worst.President.Ever.

THE LONG VIEW: (expressed in one quick short term -- deregulation). The loosening or outright abolition of prudent, useful, even wise regulations on economic functions and institutions bore its first disastrously foul fruit with the 1987 S&L Crisis and Black Monday.

THE SHORT VIEW: (expressed in longer terms as befits satisfactory ranting). Simply put, eight years of Bush and the Religiously Right Republican party of Family Values and "compassionate conservatism" have been so disastrous and discouraging to Americans that we have now accomplished one major goal of the Left -- electing an Afro-American president -- and are hip-deep in another process that the Right has accused the Left of conspiring to do for decades: turn America into a full-blown socialist economy.

Between Bush's brutal bumbling in what some dare call foreign policy but reality perceives as a series of exercises in pissing off the world while making the American taxpayer pay the bill and the American professional soldier endure the horror, and his further deregulating of our economy, turning it into a laissez-faire speculative free-for-all that allowed banks to sell shaky mortgages to other banks which then used them as collateral to leverage investments in some cases as much as 4,000% of their original (speculative) value, all it took was for the underlying basis of modern economic life -- fossil fuels -- to have its supply outstripped by demand (last spring's $4/gallon gas), and these bubbles within bubbles surrounding bubbles containing bubbles within bubbles began popping like the brilliant bright foam of kitchen sink dishwater when the first greasy plate is submerged.

Result: economic collapse, which then kicks fossil fuel prices the other direction, a signal of massive raw deflation, that nasty stuff we had in the early years of the Depression.

And there you have it, folks: God-fearing, free-market, militarily hawkish the-best-defense-is-a-strong-and-lunatic-offense, "trust me for I have the mandate of heaven because I've (questionably) won two elections" government has forced the Republican party into relying on a borderline white-supremacist vote (observe this swing-vote graph, the red revealing where support for the Republican candidate actually increased in this election, and tell me I'm 'playing the racist card' -- I dare ye), and also forced a Republican White House into commencing what is already the biggest bailout (welfare, socialism, whatever) by we the people of private industry in the history of our nation, and it has only begun.

It is not inconceivable that in ten years we will be even more socialist than The Netherlands. Which is fine by me, because I have friends in old Holland and I very much like how they do things there.

If a $700 billion bailout of private industry, paid for by taxpayers, isn't "wealth redistribution", then what is it? Robbery?

When next year rolls around, and Obama inherits the Oval Throne (which has, over the past eight years, become the National Shitter), remember this: it was Dubya who first called for us to cough up $700 billion-and-rising to "save the economy", but it was Democrats who put at least *some* form of regulatory restraint on what those bankers and lenders can-or-must do with that money. Not enough by a long shot, but that is what I expect Obama to do (among the myriad other janitorial duties this seemingly magical Negro will be tasked to perform).

If ever there was a time in recent history when writing letters to your Congresspersons was a valuable investment vehicle, it is now.