America Has Gone Bananas

I don't always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but now that he's describing how we've slipped from "first world" status to "third world", he has my attention:

Another feature of a banana republic is the tendency for tribal and cultish elements to flourish at the expense of reason and good order. Did it not seem quite bizarre, as the first vote on the rescue of private greed by public money was being taken, that Congress should adjourn for a religious holiday—Rosh Hashanah—in a country where the majority of Jews are secular? What does this say, incidentally, about the separation of religion and government? And am I the only one who finds it distinctly weird to reflect that the last head of the Federal Reserve and the current head of the Treasury, Alan Greenspan and Hank “The Hammer” Paulson, should be respectively the votaries of the cults of Ayn Rand and Mary Baker Eddy, two of the battiest females ever to have infested the American scene? That Paulson should have gone down on one knee to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as if prayer and beseechment might get the job done, strikes me as further evidence that sheer superstition and incantation have played their part in all this. Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.

I've been comparing the US to a Banana Republic for as long as we've had a preznit and his vice who are bananas themselves. When the US was a "first world" country, we had ethics and legal rights like habeas corpus, a right to privacy and we didn't torture prisoners. Banana Republics did those things and they have notoriously corrupt governments and look at what we've got- a retarded cowboy who was appointed preznit by a court the first time around and then stole the election the second time around.

You can read the Hitchens' entire article at Vanity Fair.

The Decline and Fall of American Civilization.

We've all observed that the GOP behaves like pack animals. When Bill Clinton was president, the herd attacked him for having a sexual tryst and tried to remove him from office for it, but when one of their own subverted our constitution, lied us into a disastrous war, broke international law and enabled war profiteering, the herd could see nothing amiss. They blindly followed their leader while stuffing their pockets with cash from lobbyists. They trumpeted loudly that gay marriage would wreck our social institutions while they secretly boinked their gay lovers and chased underage boys.

Just when it looks as though the Democrats have an opportunity to take control of the House and implement some oversight, this frightening rumor has appeared:

From Steve Work:

Human Events claims there's a rumor in D.C. that Justice John Paul Stevens has received "grave medical news and will announce his retirement by year's end."

If this rumor is true, the Supreme Court will be filled with more pack animals and justice will be damned, just like the souls of these stupid, greedy, irresponsible herd animals. The experiment in American democracy will have failed. We'll honor our country's founders for their valiant efforts and we'll accept that we've become a "banana republic"; a nation ruled by corrupt leaders unfettered by the rule of law.