M2RB: Molly Hatchet
I'm travelin' down the road and I'm flirtin' with disaster
I've got the pedal to the floor, my life is running faster
I'm out of money, out of hope, it looks like self-destruction
Well, how much more can we take with all of this corruption
We're flirtin' with disaster, y'all know what I mean
And the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you want to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time, we choose our destiny
I've got the pedal to the floor, my life is running faster
I'm out of money, out of hope, it looks like self-destruction
Well, how much more can we take with all of this corruption
We're flirtin' with disaster, y'all know what I mean
And the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you want to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time, we choose our destiny
Uncle Sam, the sick man of the world...
By Conrad Black
The
United States has endured a dumbed-down, hideously expensive election
that retained gridlock and showcased the modern enfeeblement of its
political process. The only previous time the U.S. had three consecutive
two-term presidents, they were the principal authors of the Declaration
of Independence, the Constitution, and the Monroe Doctrine. Now, 192
years later, a less accomplished trio has taken America’s
current-account deficits from $80 billion to over $400 billion under
Bill Clinton, on to $800 billion under George W. Bush, where it has
generally held under Barack Obama. Accumulated federal gross debt had
accumulated to $6 trillion in the 216 years of American history prior to
Bill Clinton, moved up to $10 trillion after George W. Bush, and has
burst out like the Incredible Hulk under Barack Obama, to $16 trillion
just four years later.
When George Washington handed over command of the Continental Army in
1783, and when he convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and
again when he retired as president in 1797, he enjoined the legislators
and statesmen of the future to create and preserve an indissoluble
Union, ensure that it was adequately defended militarily, and give it a
strong currency issued by a reliable treasury. The conservation of the
Union appears to have been determined in Lincoln’s time. And the U.S.
now spends 44 percent of the world’s entire military outlays but the
wars that it has engaged in since Korea haven’t accomplished much. (The
pseudo-wars against poverty, crime, and drugs have been lost.) President
George H. W. Bush very efficiently evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait,
but President George W. Bush returned a decade later to remove him from
Iraq. In the interim, President Clinton underreacted to the Khobar
Towers, East African embassy, and USS Cole attacks, which helped incite the terrorist onslaughts on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
There is no doubt that the second President Bush inherited a very
serious terrorist threat, though not such a threat as had been
represented by the totalitarian Great Powers, Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union. Terrorists cannot threaten the survival of a great nation.
Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only
by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war. Since the
9/11 attacks were conceived in Afghanistan, the U.S. led the civilized
world into that country, ejected the primitive theocrats who ruled the
capital, and deployed the allies to bring civilization to that ancient,
poor, mountainous, and unremitting land, before abruptly decamping to
Iraq and leaving the allies undermanned to carry out an ambiguous
mission in Afghanistan.
In one of the greatest military blunders in American history, the
400,000 men of the Iraqi armed forces and state police were disbanded:
rendered unemployed and without income, but permitted to keep their
weapons and ordnance. The easily foreseeable bloodbath ensued, and
America’s deterrent influence on the neighbors was lost. Pakistan was
paid billions in assistance for heavily qualified support on the ground,
while it harbored fugitives from the American anti-terrorist drive,
including Osama bin Laden, architect of 9/11 and a tedious sequence of
subsequent belligerent videos. And Pakistan parceled out a sizeable part
of its aid from the U.S. to the Haqqani Taliban in Afghanistan, which
was busy killing NATO forces in that country. The U.S. was effectively
on both sides of wars in the Middle East in which it has lost over 7,000
dead, around 40,000 wounded or seriously affected, and has spent $2
trillion.
It has been accused of chasing oil, but has not received, either in
the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, nor from Iraq since 2003, one free
barrel of oil, or even one at a discounted price. In 1957, President
Eisenhower warned of the national-security dangers of importing 10
percent of America’s oil needs. President Nixon raised the same concern,
and started “Operation Independence” to reduce such dependency when it
passed 20 percent of needs. It crested at 60 percent under President
Obama, in four times as big a national demand at 40 times the 1957
price, before fractional-recovery methods and natural-gas conversions
reduced the import total to about 45 percent, and it should continue to
decline. But here too, as much of America’s payment for petroleum
imports goes to states that finance militant Islamist activity, the U.S.
is on both sides of its self-proclaimed war on terror (and the Obama
administration resisted increased domestic production for environmental
reasons).
The U.S. has nothing to show for its Iraq effort and that country
could break up, or into strife, at any moment. The upshot of the second
Bush administration’s holy crusade for democracy is the victory of the
Hamas terrorist organization in the Palestinian elections, the Hezbollah
terrorists in the Lebanese elections, and the Muslim Brotherhood (which
murdered Anwar Sadat, the modern Arab world’s greatest and most
pro-Western statesman) in Egypt.
Barack Obama had no such romantic ideas about democracy. He
cold-shouldered the Iranian Green Revolution as he tried to “engage”
with the ayatollahs (i.e. appease them), ignored the anti-Qaddafi rebels
in Libya until shamed by the French and British into acting in a
support capacity, and has wobbled irresolutely over Syria as tens of
thousands have died trying to dispose of a U.S.-designated
terrorism-supporting state that Secretary Clinton initially claimed was
led by a “reformer.” Successive administrations have warned that they
would not tolerate Iran’s becoming a nuclear military power and Obama
has given great lip service to arms control, but there is no reason to
believe that the U.S. will stop this program, which it certainly has the
military power to do by air interdiction. If it does not, it will once
again leave it to Israel to do the world’s dirty work for it, and if
Israel does not act, Turkey and Egypt and Saudi Arabia will acquire
nuclear arms also and America’s value and credibility as an ally will
excavate a new low point, other than as a provider of anti-missile
defenses.
America will leave Afghanistan next year, undefeated certainly, but
not victorious either (against a bloodstained gaggle of goat-herders).
The full-time terrorists have moved on to other sanctuaries in other
failed states. NATO has become a relic almost beyond mobilization, and
the famous “reset” with Russia is a fiasco. The pivot to Asia may be
marginally useful to the states that China is now trying to bully in the
usual manner of immature, self-asserting powers. But America’s
relevance and status as a superpower, after all these inconsistencies
and false starts, are now fuzzy. Again and again President Obama and
Secretary Clinton have declared the conduct of other states to be
“unacceptable” and then meekly accepted it. Accept it or stop it; there
is a case for prudent retrenchment, but not for a self-authored rout.
In the last 40 years, as many as 20 million unskilled peasants have
illegally entered the U.S. while 60 million low-paying jobs have been
outsourced from it. An economy geared entirely to consumption and
instant gratification has become more and more dependent on service
industries that add little or no value, such as the legal industry,
which consumes nearly 10 percent of GDP and strangles the country in
laws and regulations. The luxury-goods industries of France and Italy
and the engineered-products industries of Germany and Japan have been
carried on America’s back. Trillions of dollars were borrowed from China
and Japan to buy, largely from China and Japan, goods that America
formerly made for itself.
No country has ever been as broke as the U.S. is now. Its
reelected president has promised to reduce the annual deficit (in a
country that had a basic money supply of $900 billion when he was
inaugurated) to about $1 trillion per year. Most of the bonds issued to
pay for these deficits are sold to the Treasury’s subsidiary, the
Federal Reserve, which pays for them with cyber-notes e-mailed into
existence as virtual money. Federal-government debt is piling up at $188
million per hour. It is a shell game with nothing under any of the
shells. This is what has become of President Washington’s reliable
treasury and strong currency.
In the late election, the Republican challenger was not one of the
four strongest candidates his party could have put forward, but the
others declined to make the race. This president could not run on his
record and just smeared his opponent as a rich asset-stripper, and
frightened women voters with fatuous red herrings about “reproductive
rights.” It was an inane $3 billion election campaign that confirmed a
failed president and inept leadership in both houses of Congress and the
continuation of a dysfunctional system. For the first time, a coalition
of pigmentational minorities and government employees and other benefit
recipients outvoted the bulk of the traditional white majority. If this
is the template for America’s electoral future, strains unimaginable
since the Civil War will result.
Where library shelves are crowded with the elegant prose of
Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, the current trio have given us memorable
phrases of a rather different kind. Bill Clinton had “I feel your pain”
and “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”; George W.
Bush had “Yo Blair” (as he greeted the British prime minister with his
mouth full of food), “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” (the
Katrina debacle), and “This sucker could go down” (in reference to the
economy under his stewardship). We will have to await Mr. Obama’s second
term for similarly lapidary phrases from him.
American exceptionalism is dead, except as a matter of scale. It is
still a monster country; in fact, just 40 years after Mr. Nixon’s
warning, it is perilously close to becoming “a pitiful, helpless giant.”
Its foreign, economic, and national-security policies have been
incoherent since the end of the Cold War. America can do better, but
last week, it didn’t. These next four years will be very difficult.
— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.
Flirtin' With Disaster - Molly Hatchet
I'm travelin' down the road and I'm flirtin' with disaster
I've got the pedal to the floor, my life is running faster
I'm out of money, out of hope, it looks like self-destruction
Well, how much more can we take with all of this corruption
We're flirtin' with disaster, y'all know what I mean
And the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you want to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time, we choose our destiny
I'm travelin' down that lonesome road
Feel like I'm dragging a heavy load
Yeah, I've tried to turn my head away
Feel about the same most every day
You know what I'm talking about, baby
Speeding down the fast lane, honey, we're playin' from town to town
The boys and I've been burnin' it up, can't seem to slow it down
I’ve got the pedal to the floor, our lives are runnin' faster
We got our sights set straight ahead, but I ain't sure what we're after
Flirtin' with disaster, y’all damn sure know what I mean
You know, the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you plan to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time we choose our destiny
Yeah, we're travelin' down that lonesome road
Feel like I'm dragging a heavy load
Don't try to turn my head away
I'm flirtin' with disaster every day
And you are too, baby
Flirtin' with disaster, babe, y'all know what I mean
You know the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you plan to be
When we gamble with our time we choose our destiny
Yeah, we're traveling down this lonesome road
Feel like I'm dragging a heavy load
Don't try and turn my head away, ba ba ba yeah
Flirtin' with disaster every day
I've got the pedal to the floor, my life is running faster
I'm out of money, out of hope, it looks like self-destruction
Well, how much more can we take with all of this corruption
We're flirtin' with disaster, y'all know what I mean
And the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you want to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time, we choose our destiny
I'm travelin' down that lonesome road
Feel like I'm dragging a heavy load
Yeah, I've tried to turn my head away
Feel about the same most every day
You know what I'm talking about, baby
Speeding down the fast lane, honey, we're playin' from town to town
The boys and I've been burnin' it up, can't seem to slow it down
I’ve got the pedal to the floor, our lives are runnin' faster
We got our sights set straight ahead, but I ain't sure what we're after
Flirtin' with disaster, y’all damn sure know what I mean
You know, the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you plan to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time we choose our destiny
Yeah, we're travelin' down that lonesome road
Feel like I'm dragging a heavy load
Don't try to turn my head away
I'm flirtin' with disaster every day
And you are too, baby
Flirtin' with disaster, babe, y'all know what I mean
You know the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don't know about yourself or what you plan to be
When we gamble with our time we choose our destiny
Yeah, we're traveling down this lonesome road
Feel like I'm dragging a heavy load
Don't try and turn my head away, ba ba ba yeah
Flirtin' with disaster every day
No comments:
Post a Comment