WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE:

Imagine the Worst: In 1984, Mother Jones asked writers and artists to imagine what another four years would be like under Ronald Reagan. (Kurt Vonnegut, October 01 , 1983, Mother Jones)

If Ronald Reagan gets re-elected, which I think will happen, he will continue to be an actor who pretends to steer the United States of America. He will go on spinning a great ship's wheel this way and that, although it is connected to nothing but the floor of the set. He will go on issuing orders to a nonexistent engine room, "Full speed ahead" or "Half speed ahead" or whatever, which will, then as now, be solemnly reported on the front page of The New York Times.

His compass might as well be a bowl of goldfish and his barometer a cuckoo clock, for the real power in this country now resides entirely elsewhere, in the hands of anarchist money managers and militarists and so on. [...]

As for militarist anarchy: Nobody, obviously, can prevent the Pentagon from spending our children's and grandchildren's money however it likes—no matter how foolishly or wastefully or crookedly. No braking mechanism exists. I remember The Atlantic reporting years ago that getting officers of the Army Corps of Engineers to testify before Congress about where all the money was going was like "rounding up the Vietcong for an appearance on the Lawrence Welk Show." Things have gotten a lot worse since then, and Caspar Willard Weinberger, who can't act for sour apples, has a little steering wheel all his own. He grabs for the emergency brake, which comes off in his hand, and the gorilla in the rumble seat wraps it around his neck, and so on.

It goes without saying that this uncontrolled militarism, based as it is on the powerlessness of the presidency, is not only ruinous financially for our heirs but bloody as well.

Poor guy just died, do you have to humiliate his ghost by reprinting such obvious inanity?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 15, 2007 8:14 PM