Happy New Year, or Eurozone Triumphant!

This year, we can expect investigations into what one Repugnican Congresscritter is calling the most corrupt administration ever. Even the mainstream media is calling Rep. Darrell Issa (R CA) a crusader. Just like he was in California, when he got Gray Davis recalled because Dick Cheney wouldn't allow for price caps on energy, and Davis was forced to pay folks like Enron whatever exorbitant price for power they wanted to charge, thus bankrupting the state. Issa thought he'd get the governor's job. Who knew that California would elect a celebrity mostly known for blowing things up and shooting things, when he wasn't playng the part of the first pregnant man? Next up, New York Gov. Paris Hilton!

(And California is still going bankrupt, even while raising every tax they can in order to close budget gaps and so on. They've even raised tuition at so-called public univeresities until the price rivals that of a relatively decent private university. The mad spiral continues.)

Issa is also notorious for having once been an alleged car thief, and then a car alarm salesman. Hmmm...

Someone smarter than I recently pointed out that between the last three Republican administrations, no less than 27 people were convicted of breaking one law or other. In the eight years of Clinton's Presidency, with thousands of man-hours spent on investigating and holding hearings and so on, a total of one person was put in jail. (and Clinton got impeached for lying about sex, but a President impeached and ousted for lying would set a bad precedent, so they let him off the hook for that one) And the funny thing is, we could probably rack up a few more Republican felons, if someone (can't imagine who) would just investigate the 2nd Bush administration properly. (but that would be looking backward, and we can't have that sort of thing, now can we?)

I've seen too much in my nearly fifty years to believe that the human race is ever going to dig itself out of the mire it seems to love so much. I know that other countries have a better way of dealing with a lot of the problems that the good old US of A hasn't figured out yet (and may never - too much money to be made by prolonging the problem), but they did so at the expense of bloodshed, war and horrors that we in the US barely understand. Yes, we had our Civil War, but we learned almost nothing from it. Just because you declare blacks to be equal to whites doesn't mean hearts and minds change the moment pen marks a signature on paper. And healing only comes from the folks who dealt the wound to see the wounding as a bad thing.

We've certainly managed to hold fast to that which is bad a lot more easily than that which is good.

And we're going to go into gridlock. So, instead of getting nothing useful done, we're just going to get nothing at all done. For at least two more years. While the economy is having... difficulties.

But the worst part of all this is that the USA is (currently) the biggest player on the block. If America fails, what does that say about representational democracy in a fairly diverse society? Next after us is China, and then maybe India. Will we become marginalized by countries whose political systems are less transparent and more corrupt than our own, and whose populaces are both pretty homogenous?

Or will the Germans & Japanese (and to a lesser extent, the Italians) have finally won WWII?