Heterodox Views on Politics and Public Policy from Michael Blaine

Sunday, October 12, 2008

I Told You So

For years, I told anyone who would listen that borrowing money from the Chinese to make wealthy Americans even wealthier, while simultaneously wasting hundreds of billions dollars on a pointless war in Mesopotamia, was terrible economic policy.


For years, I told anyone who would listen that the invasion of Iraq not only would produce no foreign policy success, but that the resultant death and destruction would also contribute to severe domestic moral erosion.
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Today I feel vindicated but extremely rueful. I hope my country has learned its lessons so that it soon can begin to heal and evolve into a far better place.

3 comments:

Richard Cretan said...

You were right, Michael.

Looking back over our dialogue, I will say not only were you reliably accurate in your predictions and warnings -- you were also admirably fearless.

I don't know anyone else who made as many interventions inside the fences of the herd with his heterodoxies.

Well, a nation with Prozac in one palm and a credit card in the other isn't one to listen.

And I'm sorry to say that it won't improve now, either. Hard times may concentrate the mind, but usually upon the hobgoblins and new mischief.

I like to think of Auden, in his dive on 52nd street, reckoning finally with what can be put raised against the fists of history "as the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade":

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Anonymous said...

Great posts, you two. I agree with Richard that we won't learn our lessons. There's far too much static in the air for that. The most popular game in town is Point The Finger, and now we are learning that it's all the Republicans fault. All of it. If we'd only listened to the Democrat pols that were saying from the beginning that these sordid policies would drive us into the ground.

Get the GOP out so Barak "The Messiah" Obama can save us. He's real smart that way. Sure, he has no track record of doing anything but that only matters if you are the governor of Alaska. Obama will be different, he really gets it about what's wrong with America. Which is the GOP.

The next crisis will be the Democrats' fault and then we'll have to get them out to save ourselves from their stupidity. No lessons to learn except unless you count learning who is to blame and then voting them out. Get the other side in there and then we'll be OK. Until the next crisis.

And so we dance.

Michael Blaine said...

Well, Louis, I agree with you that in any kind of just world neither member of the partisan duopoly would be returned to Washington, DC, this fall.

But Republicans and Democrats have gamed the system; it's locked up.

So, despite the colossal foreign policy and economic failures of the past few years, we citizens have little choice but to send the foxes back to the henhouse.