Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Bankrupt

"And now, we're [Americans are] the most religious nation on earth - that's why we kill so easily. We're sending people to heaven. And because we are now terribly, terribly religious in a sense that no proper American ever was when I was young - I was in the Second World War." - Gore Vidal.

And they are bankrupt in the finacial sense as well due to Iraq (and other causes of course). The speaker also follows a line I've seen often where the war has been fought without enough commitment from the government (i.e. decreasing taxes instead of increasing them, hiring fighters instead of drafting, etc.). One rather shocking statistic was that 48 percent of returning troops will be disabled in some way - maybe that's because more a living than dying but it's still quite an amazing number - but it means "...we've created just for the disabled in this war in the last five years, a gap equal to the gap that we created over decades in the social security system...It's an order of magnitude worse than the Vietnam War."

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