The World Can't Wait

You might be surprised to know that I don't read the Wall Street Journal regularly. A friend just sent me Peggy Noonan's column for Friday,"Playing Frisbee on a Precipice." The WSJ generally presents the views of those who run the empire, and clearly they are worried:

"Both campaigns, in the closing stretch, seem not fully worthy of the moment. We are in crisis-a once-in-a-century event, as we now say. And what we got from the candidates, in this week's presidential debate, was a bunch of gummy meanderings-smooth, rounded sentences so full of focus-grouped inanities that six minutes in viewers entered a kind of trance in which we almost immediately gave up on trying to wrest meaning from what was being said and instead focused on mere impressions. The look of things. The men on the plane, the pseudo-tough political operatives who surround both candidates, sometimes grouse, in private, that it's all symbols now, all mood, all about the visual.

But they have some real responsibility here. They send their candidates out to speak such thin gruel, such spat-out porridge, that we are struck dumb, and left daydreaming about the fact that Mr. Obama's suits are always slate gray and never seem to wrinkle, and Mr. McCain tonight seems like a rabbity forest creature darting amid the hedgerows.

Why would anyone trust either candidate to help dig us out of this if they can't speak frankly about what got us into it?"

From the standpoint of those who don't even want an empire, I agree! There isn't anyone "up there" who can fix what is going on with the globalized economy. They won't stop the "war of terror" yet Congress approved, and Bush signed a law today that rewards India for developing nukes. And none of this has anything to do with elections - the people have no say in it.

Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime