Welcome to the Real World

I'd like to know when we're going to put partisanship aside and address the real threats to our ever being able to restore a republic.

Look at this graph of "defense" spending over the last 55 years (scroll about one-third of the way down the page to see the graph). Can anyone doubt that the war machine has dominated our politics, economy, and culture for the last half century?

Author and blogger Arthur Silber points out accurately that "Bush would not have been possible but for the Democrats who...preceded him."

If that's not true, then point out the Democratic president who has seriously challenged the growth of the war machine, and its lethal domination of our government and society.

Not Carter. Not Clinton.

The war machine has given rise to the quest for empire, which currently expresses itself in attempts to dominate the Middle East and its petroleum resources.

People who oppose this policy -- and there are many of us here -- have generally not thought through the consequences of opposition. As Jim Kunstler points out, many of us are like the lady driving the Ford Explorer with the "War is not the Answer" bumper sticker, when for her, war is the answer.

The war machine, the quest for empire, and our addiction to cheap gas and easy motoring have come together in a gigantic clusterbomb which threatens our republic, our civil society, the world's social order, and the planet's environmental integrity.

The Democrats show no more willingness to confront these problems than the Republicans do. The liberals think we can abandon our Middle East policy and still drive our cars from suburbia to the big box store, and enjoy prosperity and justice for all.

I've been accused of chicken-littleism. I'd encourage anyone making that accusation to read a little history, only with an open mind this time. The histories of the Roman and Chinese empires, just to cite two of many possible examples, clearly show the almost infinite capacity of things to get worse than we ever thought they could.

Ten years from now we won't be living the way we're living now. Good-bye cars. Good-bye suburbs. Good-bye mountains of debt. Good-bye mega-multi-billion dollar "defense" budgets. Good-bye imperial hegemony. Good-bye Baghdad. Good-bye republic.

We better wake up folks. Our time's not long, and the Democrats aren't helping.