America, recuse thyself!

[Undertoad]

To hell with the rest of the world; let's have the US just leave. A tongue-in-cheek look at the effects from P.J. O'Rourke:

The benefits will be immediate. We can cut $300 billion from our defense budget. This will be almost enough to pay for the aging baby boomers' prescription drug benefits, which can now include Levitra, Botox and medicinal cannabis.

America will enjoy cleaner air and less traffic congestion as oil goes to $200 a barrel due to chaos in the Middle East. A U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East will cause chaos, of course. Then again, a U.S. intervention in the Middle East has caused chaos already. And, during those periods of history when the U.S. was neither intervening in nor withdrawing from the Middle East, there was . . . chaos. The situation is akin to the famous complaint women have against men: failure to acknowledge that not every problem can be fixed. Sometimes the best thing is just a little sympathy. America had everyone's sympathy after the World Trade towers were attacked. We can get that sympathy back if we limit our foreign policy objectives to whining.

Not to mention the $30 billion or so we are going to spend rebuilding postwar Iraq. Am I the only one who sees something fishy in Cheney's going from Secretary of defense to CEO of Halliburton to VP and THEN we attack Iraq, hire Halliburton and its subsidiary companies to supply our military infra-structure over there, as well as do post war clean-up? Halliburton et al were mostly given these contracts which were not made open to public bidding as most government contracts are supposed to be. Why do I have this suspicion that Cheney manipulated Bush into creating this straw dog out of Iraq, so that it could be knocked down and rebuilt, all at the expense of the tax payer's dollar? I think Cheney has got to be the biggest welfare queen on the roles.

[xoxoxoBruce]

A NATO alliance that does not include the U.S. will acquire a new sense of mission and purpose, especially in Gdansk, Istanbul and maybe Hamburg, when Russia resumes its historic quest for warm-water ports.

Hmmm, it may not be all bad.

[Elspode]

I've been reading PJ since his National Lampoon days in the 70's. He cracks me up every damn time. He's always seemed to me to be sort of a hyperintellectual Dave Barry.

I'd love to have Dave, PJ and Dennis Miller over to dinner sometime. Can you imagine the chat over brandy and stogies (or, more likely, Cuervo and doobies)?

[zippyt]

I'd love to have Dave, PJ and Dennis Miller over to dinner sometime. Can you imagine the chat over brandy and stogies (or, more likely, Cuervo and doobies)?

Now that would be a conversation to record !!!!!!!