Look Who's Arrogant Now

This could be a first, watching someone on television and become infected. In this breakthrough case, George W Bush demonstrates how a tv screen is unable to stop fear from spreading rapidly. Months from now, a retrospective study should establish how many people stroked-out during that performance.

Who put that guy and Cheney up there in the first place? How they succeeded in convincing millions that a Vietnam veteran was less patriotic than somebody who used his connections to stay out of harms way or got out through multiple deferments is the great question now haunting all law-abiding taxpayers.

Bush gives a simple description of how we got to this mess but takes absolutely no responsibility for the utter failure of his administration to regulate the abuses that could occur in an environment of untrammeled capitalism. How the very wealthy and billion dollar corporations continue to benefit from inequitable tax laws. How the billion-dollar-a-day war in Iraq has siphoned off much needed capital for improvements in education, healthcare delivery and infrastructure.

He did succeed in scaring the living crap out of everybody and asked us to blindly trust him with a blank check for $700 billion. Just what is a retiree who depends on some dividends do? Or someone nearing retirement with a portfolio that is 45% smaller than what was projected? Or couples looking to secure a loan for a house, a vehicle, tuition?

This crisis should decrease the super-saturated climate of arrogance prevailing. Whenever we reduced social services because we wanted our own little tax cuts, whenever we began blaming immigrants for our societal ills and restricted them from working jobs that nobody else wanted, whenever we thought we could save entire nations by violently deposing their leaders, whenever we thought we were doing things for the very first time and putting order in the world through our measly efforts.

“What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, ‘See, this is new!‘ has already existed in the ages that preceded us. There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.” Eccl 1: 9-11