Quote of the Day: Tom Ricks on 9-11

Tom Ricks is an author and a Pulitzer award winning journalist who has covered the Pentagon and military affairs for the WSJ and the Washington Post.  In his Foreign Policy blog he succinctly summarizes the whole post-9/11 and Iraq debacle in one paragraph:

I've long thought that this country was knocked off balance by 9/11, and that instead of steadying us, as leaders should, President Bush and Vice President Cheney led the panic, and so intensified and lengthened the period of disequilibrium. The Iraq war was one result -- and also a cause -- of the length of this period, because the hundreds of billions of unnecessary spending led to a huge borrowing splurge by the federal government. Essentially China paid for the war, and our children and grandchildren are on the hook to pay it back.

Maybe the sheeple will remember that it was was their own intellectual laziness and dismal understanding of world affairs and economics that led to the election of a president who previously had never left the country, and permitted that same president to pursue two Middle eastern wars while cutting taxes; the latter a first in the history of the republic.  This morasses is as much the fault of the belligerents and corporate toadies in the White House and US congress, as it is the idiotic and feeble minded dolts who consistently failed to ask the right questions and hold those in power in check.  These red-baiting dunces, who decades ago were shrieking of the terror of global communism, have handed the butchers of Tiananmen Square and the communist hierarchy in Beijing the financial and political leverage that forty years of cold-war posturing could not accomplish.