Living Up To My Name Again

I don’t think anyone wants to look into this crystal ball.

As a response to Dubya, more countries in Latin American are electing leftist leaders, including Daniel Ortega again in Nicaragua (though time will tell if he’s mellowed or learned anything from his missteps back in the ‘80s), and now, Rafael Correa in Ecuador (who, coincidentally, is a friend of Hugo Chavez). Correa defeated “a conservative, Bible thumping banana baron named Alvaro Noboa” in the election (oh, and did I mention that Ecuador exports about 540,000 barrels of crude a day and plans to rejoin OPEC – all of this is noted in this Yahoo news story).

So as our energy sources become less reliable (and as I noted last week, we’re only minor players in this international energy development project), we will have a harder time maintaining our standard of living, to say nothing of maintaining our debt. And the benefactors of our debt are ascending on the global stage to the point where they will be the dominant economic players into the future (as stated in this article, India and China are actually investing in Africa – should be interesting at the very least).

Meanwhile, we are stuck in Iraq where both Shi’ites and Sunnis are simultaneously outraged at us but want us to stay anyway (nice – and of course, that doesn’t even account for al Qaeda in that country) in a war that has now officially lasted longer than World War II.

(By the way, Michael Moore spoke of atonement in his column; I believe we should feel that way as a nation, but I don’t feel that way personally. I never supported this war for one single, solitary second, and I, along with a great many other people who feel the same way I do I’m sure, did all we could to persuade people that it was the wrong course of action).

It’s only 11:30 A.M. EST, and I already feel like I need a drink.