Here is the link: http://www.businessinsider.com/its-official-the-whole-world-thinks-republicans-are-dangerous-maniacs-2011-7
The Germans think we have gone nuts. A number of countries are furious that the Republicans are playing with fire and may ruin THEIR futures.
Way to go Republican Party and Congress – YOU are ruining “The American Brand” and the question is, can the dollar and American credibility recover? Check out the links in this story if you think this is a minor matter.
Republican mole vision may just ruin the markets for American exports for decades to come by their Tea Party shenanigans and fiscal nonsense plans.
HINT: other governments are not amused. Government is what makes a strong nation. Hello? Any remaining New Deal Democrats or Eisenhower Republicans OUT THERE listening?
Stuff like this makes the Chinese government think twice about underwriting our entire economy.
…That the chinese aren’t even underwriting so much as a tenth of our economy…
Technically true. Realistically, how is the other 90% going to fare when that 10% disappears?
After reading the papers this morning, I’m mulling over the idea that maybe we’ve reached the point of no return. Besides the manufactured debt crisis, stuff like this doesn’t give me much hope and isn’t going to do a lot for the standing of the U.S. in the world’s eyes either:
The military industrial complex doesn’t work if you don’t have an enemy to fight. Bin Laden, an American educated, CIA trained operative, knew full well how powerful that complex was and how its self-sustaining need for perpetual armament and warfare had to be fueled by dangerous self-destructive hair trigger alerts by a fearful American populace. Andrew Bacevich and other conservatives, along with many on the radical Left like Howard Zinn have exposed what a moderately liberal conservative general named Ike warned us all about. People forget that America mobilized its manpower to fight both World Wars and then demobilized right after. Then Korea was used to justify remobilization, than there was the first continuous peace time draft right through Vietnam which justified further remobilization. After the Iran hostage crisis and the wane of Soviety power it was clear who the new boogeyman needed to be, especially since he sat on crucial geopolitical resources. I am not saying bin Laden was under orders to aid the military industrial complex, not at all, he was a truly evil religious fanatic. But he was a smart one, and he knew he could devastate our country a lot more by goading us into a permanent state of warfare with the Arab world.
Look at us ten years after 9/11, we are less safe than we were before, I am convinced terrorists (and we have made many more of them btw) could easily cause large scale loss of life and destructive acts in this country, we have given them a steady supply of ready made targets by bringing Americans to them to be killed, and we have completely self-destroyed our economic and geopolitical power wasted on a crusade to wage an open ended war of attrition against a non-state entity. I was as elated at his death as anyone else, but imagine how much better off the country would be if we had simply ignored what happened and kept our troops home. I remember a very sincerely Christian influenced student (he was from a peace church, I think the Moravians since he had a German name) say that both from an ethical and pragmatic standpoint the US should turn the other cheek. Ten years later its getting harder to say he was wrong.
You make some interesting and thought-provoking points, but I’m not sure how this is relevant to the debt ceiling crisis that was the topic of this diary.
I am replying to Jaisu’s point about the teabaggers making ‘Sharia law’ the new ‘fifth column’ and how that contributes more broadly to an endless state of permanent warfare.