PEACE: Foreign Policy & Terrorism | November 28, 2004

HOW KING GEORGE MAY WAKE UP AMERICA

A Posting in "Comments From Left Field"

By "The Scarecrow" *

A respected colleague and I were just discussing how it will apparently, unfortunately take some sort of crisis to get the American people to "wake up" to what is really going on in this country -- a crisis that "King George The Divine" will no doubt provide (and will no doubt try to blame on the Left).

As I see it, the "wake-up call" will be one or more of the following (of varying probabilities):

Geo. and the GOP Congress gut Social Security (near the top of his wish list).

An economic crisis is precipitated -- disastrously quickly or excruciatingly slowly -- by the continued fall of the dollar (resulting from higher deficits, from higher tax cuts, also at the top of George's wish list) -- the resultant rise in interest rates (to attract foreign investors back, to bail us out of our profligate ways) will prove way too much for way too many people, just getting by as it is with their variable-rate mortgages at historically (read, unsustainably) low rates.

Geo. "pacifies" Iraq and then from there and from Afghanistan goes into Iran (He's called them part of the Axis of Evil, of course; and Geo. is "a man of his word"). Say hello to a new draft -- I'm sure some sort of Gulf of Tonkin thing can be cooked up to void his campaign promise against it, and the machinery for the draft is reportedly (as in this blog) already being re-activated.

Geo. fails to "pacify" Iraq, which descends into outright civil war, with us caught right in the middle, with no real way out. If the elections aren't held by Jan. 30th (and there's more and more talk of that possibility), the Shiites (and the U.N.) will be really pissed off; if the elections are held by then, with security iffy at best, then a lot of Sunnis et al. will be effectively disenfranchised and, thus, really pissed off.

Geo. pushes that nut in North Korea over the brink, and a city in the western US goes up in a mushroom cloud not unlike the one Geo. & Condi warned us about from Iraq. Although Iraq lacked missiles with sufficient range to reach us (and Saddam knew better than to attack us), North Korea has almost if not already developed such missiles (in the multi-stage, Taepo Dong class of launch vehicles); and I doubt that if Geo. pushes him into a corner, Kim Jong Il will sit back and allow himself to go the way of Saddam -- the Cold War game of "chicken" only works if your opponent is not psychopathic to the point of suicide (Hmm, come to think of it, does that better describe the North Korean dictator or King George The Divine?). Or the Alaskan oil terminals (almost certainly within North Korean missile range now) could be rendered radioactive for several centuries, which would send world economies crashing sooner than you can say "Why didn't we develop solar?!" -- then we, like the North Koreans, could go out and graze on grass. But at least we could still tell the gays they can't get married.

Al Qaeda gets lucky, especially with the "Yes, George, anything you say" mindset being propagated in the CIA. "Intelligence" in the Bush Administration? The ultimate oxymoron.

OR a "smoking gun" somehow emerges to show how Geo. et al. could have rigged, did rig, or tried to rig the election...in which case all bets are off (The Ukrainians seem to be handling things well -- non-violently, through the courts, with a call for new elections).

Then again, peace and prosperity could blossom under the Bush Administration; pigs could fly; and Jeb could be elected in 2008 by acclamation. And I move to the Ukraine!

* My alter-ego, after the classic 18th Century character created in the early 20th Century by Russell Thorndike in his Doctor Syn novels, adapted in various films. No endorsement of my commentaries by any other individual or company exists or is implied.

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