My Paranoid Fantasies

I get really paranoid when I'm by myself in my apartment, thinking about things. I've taken a couple of naps today because I didn't sleep so well last night; did a fair amount of thinking.

My dear friend Alex, who is currently residing in Bulgaria with the Peace Corps, sent me the disturbing news that Putin has returned Russia's air defense bombers to the skies, just like the Cold War all over again. In true Max Thom Stahl form, I'm watching Wargames right now to celebrate this little daydream of mine.

Since the US has gotten stuck in the quicksand desert that is Iraq, people have been coming out of the woodwork everywhere just to do whatever it was they wanted to do if the US would ever drop its guard. Afghanistan's poppy fields are churning out more heroin than ever before, North Korea's gone off the crazy-charts, and now this from Russia. I had a bit of a scary thought earlier....

While the US is out there trying to make money for big Oil and for the Halliburtons of the world, playing in their 169,234 square mile sandbox, the grownups are finally coming out to play. Everybody sees that we're occupied and can't really muster the resources to deploy anywhere else right now, so they're just doing whatever they want, wherever they want. There's nothing to stop them now.

I don't believe the line that Iraq was enough of a danger to the US that we had to invade them, at all. I just don't. There simply was not enough evidence to support the idea and then once we invaded most of the "evidence" turned out to be what leading insiders would call "bullshit". The anthrax factories thing was an embellishment at best, but a complete fabrication at worst (I lean towards complete fabrication), and ruined Colin Powell with that shameful presentation of his at the UN. Nobody was buying it, but we invaded anyway for some reason. And now, this war is a clear and present danger to the US and to the whole world, because the balance is gone. In the good old days, ten years ago, the US was the most powerful nation in the world but the whole world could, together, keep us in check. Now our president has tried to grab more power than this nation is entitled to, it's backfired, and every rogue state out there knows we've got our pants down.

This sucks, people.