"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
- P.J. O'Rourke.
Thoughtful people love that quote. Here's why.
Carbon emissions, we're told, cause global warming. Cars cough up carbon. Solution: biofuel.
Brilliant! Politicians shovel billions of subsidy taxbucks at farmers who get rich selling corn to bio-refiners. Brazilians burn down that 1990s eco-chic cause, the Amazon rain forest, and plant soybeans. Indonesians hack down so much wilderness for palm-oil trees for biodiesel they've climbed into third place on the Worldwide Carbon Emitter's Hit Parade.
Turns out leafy growing things store carbon. When they're hacked and burned they cough up their carbon into the atmosphere.
All this leaves less food for food.
Thousands of poor Mexicans protest high-priced tortillas. Flour prices double in Pakistan. Food-price inflation in China is "the worst in decades." Corn-fed beef prices skyrocket. Pilgrim's Pride shuts down seven chicken-processing plants and cough out 1,100 workers because the price of chicken feed is no longer chicken feed.
"We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history," says Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute.
A UN world foodcrat calls agro-fuels a "crime against humanity."
The results are (a) the non-carbon emitting biofuel used in "green" cars is zeroed out by the carbon-emitting process of deforestation, and (b) turning food into biofuel threatens millions with starvation worldwide.
And then there's this: "We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming." - U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.
"Giving money and power to left-wing enviro-wacko politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - any thoughtful person.
But wait! There's more!
The U.S. spends 50 years mucking up the Middle East, deposing elected leaders, assassinating others, forcing dictatorial regimes down people's throats, propping up psychopathic despots, funneling arms to both Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, teaching Afghans how to kill Russians who later use those lessons to kill Americans until ...
... Until a pack of Middle Easterners with al-Qaeda membership cards and a death wish fly jetliners into American buildings.
Can't call this "blowback." Can't call it "America's chicken-hawk-foreign-policy chickens coming home to roost." That would be admitting to 50 years of foreign-policy folly. Politicians never admit they're wrong. Politicians lie like cats coughing up hairballs.
But the president has to "do something" to "look presidential."
Solution: Kill somebody.
But who? Most of the terrorists were Saudi Arabian. But we can't attack Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is our "friend." Saudi Arabia coughs up barrels of oil.
So let's attack Iraq. Iraq has oil. And they have a military just big enough to test our sexy new weapons and our sexy new "light, lean, and lethal" military but not big enough to beat us.
All we need is a pretext for starting a war.
Easy. We'll say they have weapons of mass destruction. They have al-Qaeda training camps. We're giving them democracy.
We'll say, "They hate us for our freedoms." Americans will buy that.
Give Iraq shock and awe, Saddam on a rope, and 90,000 dead civilians. Give America "Mission Accomplished," five years of corrupt military occupation, and 4,000 military deaths.
But there were no WMD, no al-Qaeda bases, no Iraqi democracy. A third of their oil disappears because their own "leaders" rob them blind, our government goes trillions of dollars in debt, the economy tanks, the dollar takes a nosedive, there's still no Iraqi oil flowing into American SUVs, and Osama bin Laden still hasn't been coughed up.
And then there's this: "Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction." - Salon.com.
"Giving money and power to right-wing neo-con-wacko politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - any thoughtful person.
So who coughs up more death: left-wingers or right-wingers?
Garry Reed is a longtime advocate of the libertarian philosophy of non-coercion that espouses personal autonomy and individual responsibility, civil rights and economic liberty, maximum freedom and minimum government. His web site is (http://www.freecannon.com).
