Woe, the choices they’re making

“Where do we go now?” —Guns and Roses

In a rare moment of maudlin sentimentality I could almost feel sorry for politicians. Given their bovine ignorance and universal incompetence, that moment of empathy has thankfully evaporated under the glare of objective reality.

No matter where one turns presidents, prime ministers, premiers and governors exhibit few, if any, signs that they have any grasp upon what Will Rogers once remarked isn’t so common, i.e., sense.

Let’s start with Europe. Any man on the street without a highfalutin education can see that there really is no crisis caused by Greece. It’s a mere pimple lucky enough to have surfaced on real economies by “intelligentsia” who couldn’t see from their ivory towers that combining the good credit ratings and borrowing powers of Northern Europe with the non-productive economies in the south would water down the whole zone. If you mix dog feces half and half with ice cream, it would be no surprise to most of us proletariat that you end up with something that tastes more like one than the other. The solution is also earthily similar; lance the pustule by allowing the Greeks to riot themselves into complete irrelevance. The Euro will take a small wobble and then rise because it’ll be better off less one welfare case. The other troubled countries will see that their days of living high off of others’ productivity are numbered.

The next basket case has to be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. By threatening to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, he’ll strangle his Gulf neighbour states’ income as well as his own country’s. That won’t help anyone and will really turn his people against him. Look what happened when he reduced gasoline subsidies, they were un-reduced after about a day. Besides, there’s more than just the U.S. Navy in the area; the Chinese and Indians depend upon Middle East oil too and with their resurgent sea power they’ll not allow some local bozo to sabotage their ambitions.

Closer to home, it appears that Obama’s understanding of capitalism matches that of Fidel Castro. Gas prices in the States are up 82 per cent since he took over, unemployment is up 40 per cent, housing prices are down 40 per cent, national debt is up 50 per cent and so forth, ad nauseum. Even wind power, solar farms and high speed rail haven’t seemed to help, given their dependence upon subsidies. Preventing pipelines and aircraft factories from opening seems to be the only thing this former boy-wonder is able to accomplish. His hair is getting greyer every month because he’s in over his head, and after three years in power, blaming Bush for everything is getting stale. It’s a good thing for him the Republicans can’t get their act together, otherwise, B.H.O. would be destined to be a one-termer for sure.

Oh, did I mention Christy Clark’s wheels falling off, Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty presiding over a former “have” province, Jerry Brown’s California losing people, David Cameron getting told by India to keep his foreign aid (good idea, actually), Premier Hu Jintao of China watching rich people leave his environmental disaster of a country . . . ? You get the idea.