Stealing Our Future: Conservatives, Foresight, and Why Nothing Works Anymore

from OurFuture.org:



Stealing Our Future: Conservatives, Foresight, and Why Nothing Works Anymore
By Sara Robinson

January 22nd, 2008 - 12:50pm ET


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Brad DeLong once said that "'Nobody could have foreseen ______' is the Bush administration's version of 'The dog ate my homework.'" It does seem to be their handy-dandy Swiss Army Knife, all-purpose explanation for the various disasters that have happened on their watch.

We first heard this excuse all the way back in May 2002, when Condoleezza Rice blithely dismissed Congressional queries about 9/11 by saying, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

A nation of Tom Clancy fans — and those who remembered Sam Byck's too-close-for-comfort White House flyover back in the 70s — wondered what on God's green earth these idiots were thinking. But the Bushies decided they were onto something.

In fact, they liked this excuse so much that they trotted it out again after Katrina. As New Orleans' Ninth Ward vanished under the mud of Lake Ponchartrain, W went on the national airwaves to insist, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breech of the levees."

That was wrong, too, of course: everyone from the City of New Orleans to the Army Corps of Engineers had seen this one coming for decades. In fact, the New Orleans Times-Picayne had done an entire series on just this subject as recently as 2002. You’d think that the coast-to-coast derision that followed might have alerted Bush and crew they were reaching for an excuse that no self-respecting third-grader would touch.

But, instead, they clung to an earnest, childlike hope that the third time might be the charm. So, when Hamas took power early last year, Condi was out there pitching it one more time: "I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming. It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/stealing-our-future-conservatives-foresight-and-why-nothing-works-anymore

Our Congress isn't even willing to go that far with this administration. :(

in either case.

in the interest of serving the top 0.5% of American who couldn't spend their money if they lived to be 1000.

"the American way of life" and how important it is to maintain it indefinitely means that most Americans either don't know or refuse to believe that the American way of life is, and always has been, wasteful and unsustainable . . . a way of life based on waste, inefficiency, planned obsolescence, and lifetime debt cannot possible survive . . .

Americans are convinced that everyone has the right to pursue and get their own "slice of the pie," which generally includes their own oversized McMansion, two cars (at least one of which is an SUV or a Hummer), consistent economic growth, cheap (and fast) food, cheap gas, regular pay raises, the "world's best healthcare" (ha!), and the very latest version of every gadget and geegaw that the electronic wizards in Japan can come up with . . . they see this "American dream" as their birthright, and they are bombarded daily with advertising that reinforces this perception by telling them to accept nothing but the best and the newest . . .

the American people are in for a very rude awakening in the next couple of years, no matter who is elected president . . .