If it wasn't so damn sad I'd be LMAO.

Look, I'm down here in the oil patch, right? Here's a clue for you: George Bush owes the Enron people *nothing*. Marlowe is right. If Enron owns anybody, it's the Democrats with the price tag on their butts.

Yeah, he and a bunch of others in the Administration probably own some stock. A friend on another forum was cheering the California energy crisis, because he owned Enron stock, and it was making him money. He's a retired cop who has now gone into truck driving. Another clue: the whole point is that _lots_ of people own stock! In Enron! In Exxon! In a lot of companies! Stock ownership -- it's not just for fatcats any more!

Bush, like most Republicans, tends to tilt toward the corporations. There are lots of bad things to say about that, some of them justified -- but at bottom, a corporation is just a way for people to get together and cooperate. How come the Defenders of Truth And Justice, a.k.a. the Guys who Really Won the Last Election, haven't generated some laws to see to it that that cooperation is done in a way that doesn't generate hardship for non-members? Because Democrats' understanding of economics is limited to "See money. Gimme some."

And the middle east nonsense currently on stage: George Bush made his [fairly modest] fortune here in the oil patch. Then, in the early Eighties, Saudi Arabia and OPEC shifted to their present strategy, which is simple: keep the price of oil just low enough to make it uneconomic for the United States to develop its own resources. It ruined a lot of people. The only Reagan-contributor fatcat I know personally is just fine, thank you; he had to trade in his LongRanger for a used JetRanger, poor fellow. Bush didn't get ruined, but he saw a very nice business vanish in '82-84; you think he's really got any soft spot for those people, or is really looking hard for foreign oil? Heh. If the ME thing was about oil, we'd be bombing the Saudi oil fields, and guys around here who used to be roughnecks, riggers, well loggers, etc. etc. would be grinning ear to ear at the prospect of giving up burger flipping for real jobs.

It ain't always as simple as it looks, folks.

Sorry, Ash.

As a severely humor-impaired person, I'm going on the assumption that that's straight, and not another hand 'im the wowser.

For what it's worth, I get, from time to time, just as exercised as you do -- I just don't have your lyricism. And sometimes I Just Don't Get It, and get hauled up short, with perfect justification.

As for US vs. Them -- Them picked it. I'm a bit of a militarist, as you've probably noticed. This has a curious effect: I'm not impressed by the ability to kill people. Killing people is easy; it happens all the time. A "weapon" is just a gadget for applying enough energy to overload the target's systems. By that definition, every participant in an industrial economy is oversupplied with weapons, starting with that 1.5 megagram bludgeon out there in the garage.

Pournelle pointed it out: the deaths at the WTC add up to, what, a month of trafic fatalities? -- nothing, in the general scheme of things. And the WTC buildings were already starting to give trouble, with noises being made of demolition or major repairs -- don't think they ever made much money. In the long run, blowing them up might be doing us a favor. As a nation, one of the things the United States is really good at is killing people -- Indians, Germans (twice), Japanese, Vietnamese. Wholesale lots, and with the reinstatement of the Marine Snipers and oh-so-quiet reactivation of sniper training, at retail. Value Added Death...

So I have trouble understanding people who are impressed by it. There's enough background distrust of the Government and Jews (quiet anti-Semitism) that the "Palestinian people" and the "Arab World" have had the total destruction of Israel in their grasp for fifty years. And they keep blowing it. Literally. No matter how liberal anyone might be, it's hard to be sympathetic to people who seem to like blowing up what can only be described as innocent bystanders. Never mind -- Osama bin Laden and the whole Wahabi sect have decided -- the Only Way[TM, pat. appl for] is to destroy the West.

I decline to be destroyed.

And if I'd like to have Ashcroft dressed in a robe and turban and dumped in the line at Dulles, well, chalk it up to a sense of irony. [Maybe I have some...]

But I get real, real tired of Left-Liberal cant. The Communists used to use the term "political maturity" -- that is, anyone who disagreed with them was doing so out of childish ignorance. The current Left-Liberal attitude seems to be that anyone who disagrees is doing so out of either stone stupidity or actual malice. On another forum we're discussing Michael Bellesisles, who as near as I can tell went ahead and made up reams of research out of whole cloth, simply because he was contemptuous of the "right" -- thought nobody would call him, because Left-Liberals would have no reason to, and the "right" was too stupid to figure it out. Didn't happen that way.

And I think a lot of the things corporations do, and are required or allowed to do, are open to huge challenges -- but I'd like to see the challenges made on real grounds, not by the Socialist mistake of conflating "corporation" with "rich person". Many, many of the problems we have with Corporate Behavior derive directly or indirectly from Leftist requirements for ever more and larger tax collections. Our taxes are taken strictly as money; in order to tax it, you have to value it, and in order to do that you have to put a price on it. The result is "knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing", as the saying goes. Also known as the Law of Unintended Consequences.

In other words, It Ain't That Simple. All other slogans are either wrong or oversimplified; but sometimes you need simple.