"We have over 200 years of experience here. America has the most productive economy -- and the most entrepreneurial, innovative workforce -- in the world. We have tremendous natural resources. So it's a certainty that America will continue to be a very successful place to be, economically."

Entrepreneurial... whatever that means. Maybe. Innovative--not so much. Just look at the people who build cars and houses; there's a flat-out refusal to try anything substantially different.

Tremendous natural resources? I dunno. The oil and natural gas have been burned with nothing to show for it. The soil, once six feet deep in places, has been washed away. The family farms are gone. The water is still good in some places but there isn't enough of it.

On the other side of the balance sheet, America has huge overhead/operating costs (cars, highways, and total automobile dependency that requires you to burn the equivalent of 16 days' human labour to travel eight miles.) No passenger rail to speak of. Housing and commercial building stock built to decrepitate within a couple of decades. Huge and unnecessary costs built into the food distribution system. An educational system that is, well, bad. (Superlatives escape me.) Corporations whose profits are siphoned off by overpaid, self-dealing managers. A military budget and armed forces that are massive overkill for any conventional war while paradoxically being woefully inadequate to the kinds of wars that are actually being fought.

And, to top it all off, an industry of financial professionals whose main assurance is, "Don't worry, we made money in the past, therefore we will continue to make money in the future!"

You're going to zig-zag an OIL TANKER? You're going to make the OIL TANKER go really fast? Ooooo.

I drove a Zodiac with Greenpeace. Rest assured that even an oil tanker doing the full Millennium Falcon is basically standing still. It took us one afternoon to learn how to nose up to a ship and climb over the side.

And as for water cannons--they didn't deter even us comfortable middle-class hippies, let alone desperately poor people looking at a hundred million dollar payday.

As for piercing audio--I'm sure the pirates will never think to acquire basic ear protection.

That leaves the security personnel on deck, who in this case have literally brought knives to a gunfight.

But what do you expect from someone who still refers to "coalition forces" with a straight face?

Some academic will do a thesis someday, and it will be on how a peculiarity of the English language hampered America's ability to really understand the problems it faced on a visceral level and therefore prevented it from reacting as quickly as it needed to.

The fact that people get million, billion, trillion (and all the higher orders of magnitude which rhyme) shows that the numbers blur together. By contrast, people readily understand the difference between one and a thousand, and between a thousand and a million. No one would say "Such and such is going to cost a dollar--or maybe it was a thousand dollars, I can't remember."

everyone has to do some more time in the barrel.

How clearly everyone remembers the waning weeks of the Bush Administration will drive in the lesson harder than any campaign. There's a reason it took an entire generation to even start dismantling the New Deal: they had to wait until the voters old enough to remember the Great Depression were outnumbered by those who weren't.

I think that Obama respects the rule of law and so the fact that there is only one President at a time is enough to justify his sitting on the sidelines, if indeed that's what he's doing. If Bush wants Obama to take over early, he has it in his power to do that: Fire Cheney, appoint Obama his VP, and resign.

But hypothetically, if Obama is standing aside and letting the consequences of the Bush Administration unfold on Bush's watch, and if this is a strategic move to make sure everyone knows and remembers what happens when Republicans get their way--and I'm not saying I think that's what he's doing, necessarily--then that's a pretty smart move. People want small, limited government? Let 'em have it.

Despite everything, I love America (I'm Canadian) and I want you people to make yourselves happy. Electing Obama is a good first step. But you people have no fucking memory whatsoever unless it his horsewhipped into you by traumatic adversity and sometimes not even then. I don't want ANYONE to say, ever again, "Oh, buh... I'm not gonna vote... it doesn't matter... Republicans, Democrats, they're all the same... anyway, we gotta vote for Jeb Bush 'cause TV said the other guy's soft on llamas...." and if it takes getting your stupid fucking faces ground into the mud for another few months to make sure that kind of inanity never surfaces it again... Well, so be it.

You have to take the whole course of antibiotics--if you stop when you start to feel better, the sickness will come back even worse.

Bad decisions have consequences--yes, even in America!--and I don't think you have all learned that yet, and until you do, not just you but the rest of the world is going to suffer.