Legacy Thoughts, I

Somebody pinch me. Can it really be we only have 13 more days to see, hear, or curse the vile little pretender in the White House? Of course not. He won't be president in less than two weeks--may the gods be praised!--but oh, we'll have to see his detested visage on occasion as well as hear him spout off some of his patented nonsense. We can hardly expect anything profound or noteworthy out of this cretin's mouth; unfortunately, we've probably not heard the last of him either. And certainly we're not done with cursing what he's done to us and cursing him for doing it. My kids and their kids are going to wear this presidency like a rancid albatross their necks for the whole of their lives.

Have we survived this idiot? Well, yes, it's only 13 more days, and we have survived the worst presidency in all of US history. But that says nothing about the quality of our survival. I would submit that we're a nation hanging on by our fingernails. If, and it's a big if, we manage to survive our current economic woes, we will have to get used to the idea that our day as the economic weather vane for the world is gone. We're a a used up debtor nation on the same level as Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. An unmitigated disaster, if you're not aware. Military coups, the "disappeared," hyper-hyper inflation, virtual disintegration of the country's economy. Anybody who thinks this country is somehow shrouded by God from having such terrible things happen to it knows neither God nor history.

The amount of public debt we're leaving to our future generations out as far as the eye can see is so gargantuan that there really aren't any good metaphors to describe it. The projected deficit for FY 2009 is over $1 trillion . . . and that's just the first of our post-Bush deficit years. Nobody knows what any of this means. I keep coming back to the same point. Nobody knows. We've not been down this road before, and all we're counting on is what worked last time. Sometimes what we did last time does work; more often it doesn't. Nobody knows.