The Badass Karma of George & Co. [View All]

The Badass Karma of George & Co.
pm carpenter


It is the law of unintended consequences, or unexpected 180s, or grand paradoxes, or just plain karma, if you like. But whatever you choose to call it, every passing day corroborates the thesis that Bush-Cheney's nearly exclusive reliance on hard-power muscularity has doomed the United States to the status of a whimpering beggar, of a global laughingstock, of a besieged bad boy, of an overstretched and impotent giant.

If fear, as opposed to respect, was what the Machiavellian duo had in mind, they're coming up stupendously short.

China has us by the financial short ones; the Russian bear is seeing U.S.-cultivated opportunities everywhere; the Middle East speaks for itself; Latin America is toasting rabidly antiAmerican but effective demagogues; Europe is little more than puzzled by, and barely tolerant of, our bad-boy immaturity; and large swaths of Africa remain defiantly adrift in unaligned turmoil.

We are, simply put, increasingly an international joke. Still dangerous and unpredictable, of course, but more in the sense of an untrained monkey with a machine gun. The monkey, however, is about out of bullets -- and the world knows it.

The latest to embrace the joy of Bush-Cheney's imperial impotence is that sterling ally and irrepressible dictator, Generalissimo and Presidente Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Our friendship in the vast currency of military hardware has indeed kept him propped up, but that friendship was also about to bring him down. We took the world's extraordinary good will of the post-9/11 period and promptly launched a religio-ideological assault on it, and fewer Middle East populations took kindly to our rudeness than that of Pakistan's. All of which, to understate matters, has put the general at risk.

So Pervez had a choice: continue kissing the imperially befuddled who fed him and maintain the illusion of righteous democrat as actual democracy proceeded to string him up; or tell the Bushies to shove off, knowing they could do no such thing in all their splendiferous frailty.

more...

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2007/11/the-badass-karm.html