...what did 9/11 change, exactly?

What *single* thing in Cheney's analysis back then is wrong now? What did 9/11 change about that analysis?

Of course, neither Cheney, nor anyone else, can give a coherent answer to that question. Because there isn't one. Nothing changed.

So, don't let those office neocons get away with saying "9/11 changed everything." It changed NOTHING. Press them. What, exactly, is it about Cheney's comments back then that are wrong now?

They won't answer. They can't. We have to press them.

I've done it a couple of times...and they get very, very angry. A good sign. Just don't do it if they have any kind of weapon in hand. Primitives who get hung on their own stupidity can be unpredictable.

"...This long episode of market mania, running for seven years, was based on the idea that non-performing loans could be turned into money by removing them from their point of origin and dressing them up in respectable clothes -- like taking all the winos in downtown Los Angeles, putting them in Prada suits, and passing them off as the faculty of the Harvard Business School. It was a transparently ludicrous racket and the wonder is that America proved to be so utterly bereft of regulating authority -- not to mention plain decency and self-restraint -- at every stage."

"It's really hard to account for the stunning failure of responsibility. What you had was a whole industry that surrendered the standards and norms that brought it into being and enabled it to function in the first place. Mortgage lenders stopped requiring house-buyers to qualify for loans; bankers stopped caring what stood behind the paper they issued; dubious loans were bundled and resold like barrels of rotten anchovies -- in such numbers that no individual stinking minnow would stand out -- and the barrels were traded up the line, leveraged, hedged, fudged, fobbed, and fiddled until, abracadabra, they were transformed into so many Tribeca lofts, Hampton villas, Piaget wristwatches, million-dollar birthday parties, and Gulfstream jets."

"It worked for the Goldman Sachs bonus babies, and the private equity scammers, and for the corporate CEOs and their board members, and for the politicians who parlayed their votes into cushy lobbying jobs, and even for the miserable quants in the federal government's termite mounds of statistical reportage. It even worked for about 18 months for millions of feckless US citizens gulled into contracts for houses they could never hope to pay for, under arrantly false and ruinous terms."

I misunderstood your post. My bad.

But now that I've read it more carefully, I think it's a mistake to suppose that capitalism is like a force of nature.

Maybe it is to people who profit from it...or are crushed by it.

But capitalism isn't even in the same ballpark with the laws of thermodynamics. We can choose to change how we organize ourselves and our "business." We probably won't, because it's too hard. Instead, we'll be forced to change by capitalism's ultimate failure, in the not-too-distant future.

But we could choose something else.

We can't choose whether to live or die by the laws of thermodynamics. That's true Nature in action.

In short, capitalism is merely a human construct. One in harmony with our genetic drives, it's true, but hardly a law of nature. We can change it. If we want to badly enough..or if we're forced to.

As for whether capitalism can be tamed enough to be more creative than destructive...I dunno. Most of the creativity I see in this world has not much to do with making a profit. A lot of it does. But hardly all of it.

But I see a great deal around me that is being destroyed by capitalism. In a world of infinite resources, and infinite capacity for absorbing waste, capitalism would be great fun.

But we don't live in that sort of world. That fact will, before too long, become undeniable. If it hasn't already.

he's not only a nut. He's a *stupid* nut.

Podhoretz probably ghost-wrote the whole thing.

Is Giuliani really this stupid? I know he's a crazy fascist whackjob, but is he really that stupid?

It's the Age of the Stupid. We had an Age of Enlightenment, and look what that got us: The Terror, and Napoleon's wars. Then all the usual suspects got their power back...to be slapped upside the head in 1848... I can't go on. It's too depressing.

If some of the best and most devious minds in Europe--along with, admittedly, a number of profound mediocrities in key positions--could essentially sleepwalk their way into WWI...what in the name of sweet jesus would Giuliani do? That guy has GOT to be stopped.

I tremble to think of the result of the Age of the Stupid.

...Rove is "revenge of the nerds" in quite savage form. Most of the neocon cabal could be characterized that way. A bunch of nerds taking revenge on the world that laughed at them.

As Lewis Lapham notes in a recent essay, war is essentially an adolescent adventure. Grown adults, the best of them, anyway, have no need of war. They find other ways to "advance policy."

Rove is beneath contempt. He's also very, very dangerous. Be nice to figure out how to defang him, but no-one seems willing to try it.

man, he really does think we're all ignorant sluts. He knows perfectly well that what he's saying makes no sense. And, if he *doesn't* know that, then he's as ignorant as he thinks WE are...

I'd be in total despair over someone like Karl Rove being allowed so close to the seat of power..if I hadn't been doing some reading in American history this weekend, and realizing that our country has ALWAYS been like this. When we get good leadership, it's a lot more luck than system.

Sad to say, the Karl Roves of this world are the normative standard.