Hey! Whoa! Don't get me wrong! I'm not sayng Bush's actions are moral, just, or even ethically neutral. I'm just acknowledging that they benefit me in the extreme, and not being a hypocrite by decrying them out one side of my mouth while I thank him with the other side.
At some point in US history, possibly just after Jefferson warned against it, the government realized that it could bribe the nation with its own money, and the wealthy have owned this country ever since. The US economy has grown so large, that even the crumbs that fall from the fat-cats' mouths are enough to keep us 'dirt-po' Americans high on the hog. The two major parties in this country are owned part and parcel by business and industry, and there is nothing I can do about it. I live in a state owned fully by the Democrat party, and there is no state I can move to that is not owned by it or the Republicans, and through either of them, by business and industry.
I, and all Americans who are not independantly wealthy, are basically chattel of the plutocracy that runs 'our' nation. Our fortunes rise and fall with those of the power elite, and for all my and other fools' blather about the 2nd Amendment, we really can't do anything to change it, and even if we could, most of us wouldn't bother because as bad as it has gotten, we still have it pretty good. As long as the lights come on when we flick the switch, there's gas at the station to fill up our SUVs, and food on the grocery shore shelves, we're not going to change that attitude one whit.
We are, in a word, domesticated. The days of Davy Crockett and the Wild Frontier are over. The Minute Men are gone, the Armchair Quarterbacks have taken their place, and as long as there's Monday Night Football, that's not gonna change. If the powers that be play their cards right, and slip our freedoms out from under us slowly enough for us to take no notice untile they're gone, then when the store shelves empty, and the gas stops pumping, and the lights go out, we'll be too busy killing our neighbors for what little they have to worry about getting revenge on the ones who did this to us, and they'll be safe in their walled communites patrolled by troops that are well-fed and well-armed (with guns that explode when the right radio signal is sent, no doubt, to prevent any change of hands in power).
I know all of this, and I could tell it to everyone I know, and I have to some of them, and the reaction is always the same: 'So what?'
So I ask you, wise and goodly neighbors...
So what? What is there to be done about it? I can't and won't do anything about it. Can and will you?
