Words Fail Me

Like Obama! He won't tell us who the next leader will be in Egypt! He won't cut spending as much as we will! He probably wants the Muslim Brotherhood in charge because he's secretly a Muslim! He wants to spend our country to ruin because he's also secretly a terrorist!

I think that's my quota for exclamation points for this month. Please read the two stories I linked because they deserve their own time. If Mrs. Palin actually read all of the magazines she said she does, she would know very well that nobody knows who the next leader will be. Nobody even really knows what kind of leader it will be yet. I'm really glad that her speech will be aired on the same show whose host said that America deserved 9/11 on 9/12.

Mr. Hensarling is also an idiot. At the bottom of the article he says quote, "There is no limit to the amount of spending that we’re going to be willing to cut." Well actually there is a limit. Another Republican congressman returns his salary to the Treasury minus the cost of his living arrangements, travel, and other necessary costs. How much money would we save in ten years if the other 534 members of Congress did that? Somebody work on that.

What about cutting the Defense so that it matches the next highest defense budget in the world?

According to a guy who knows more about this than I do, China is second on the list of military spending with $125 billion. We could save $875 billion dollars every year right there. That's not even really asking us to fall behind the curve, that's asking to get back in line. Russia only spends $69 billion a year. So matching China's budget would still be almost double Russia's and neither of those countries wants to go to war with us.

Social Security is next on the list of top three expenditures. I'm sure Republican Michele Bachmann of Minnesota wouldn't mind ending the program. At least in theory. If she, or anyone else, actually proposed to end Social Security there would be no re-election. For all the vitriol, congressmen are still at the whim of their constituents. The elderly are the most likely to vote regularly and also benefit the most from Social Security, so good luck cutting that and surviving November when your number is up. However, sometimes leaders have to sacrifice themselves for the good of all. Even if the good of cutting spending means not providing for the poor and elderly. I guess you have to then go into a discussion about which is the greater good (I'm not going to).

What about Medicare? Score two for the elderly. If Congress were to approve a budget without any appropriations for Social Security or Medicare and an 87.5% reduction in defense spending, not only would spending be down, but the national debt would probably be paid off in a couple of years (just a guess, if anyone wants to do some number crunching I would love to hear about it). Then we could cut taxes to a bare minimum. That's assuming that by the time we've made those kinds of cuts, other things like the Department of Education has been shut down, grant funding and other silly things like that have been disapproved. We could probably do away with income taxes, lower property taxes, and do with just a sales tax. Wouldn't that be great?

Of course, without any of that spending we wouldn't be able to afford to have an intelligence network that spanned the globe. Without that intelligence network we wouldn't be able to know who the next leader in Egypt would be. Then again, even with their $80 billion per year budget they didn't see the uprising in Tunisia going how it did. Talk about a bad return on investment.

I suppose what I'm saying is that before you go out into the world and say something stupid, run it by someone who knows what they're talking about first. Otherwise you turn into the one thing nobody in Washington wants to be:

The Jasmine is Budding

Jasmine, the national flower of Tunisia, is derived from Persian meaning "gift from God." It is widely popular as a fragrance, a tea, and as a houseplant. When protesters in Tunisia were looking for a name for their cause, they decided upon the Jasmine Revolution. Like the scent of the flowers, the revolution is spreading.

Tunisia is that purple one at the top of Africa between Algeria and Libya. Contrary to normal wind patterns... the revolution spread to Egypt next (read the previous blog for more on that). As soon as people saw, through Twitter and Facebook, that normal Arabs were standing up for freedom, they knew it was possible everywhere. Jordan, which is east of Israel, watched their king immediately fire the whole cabinet and bring on new people to prevent the wide spread protests. The new Prime Minister of Jordan, Marouf al-Bakhit, has already started talking to opposition parties to try to implement major democratic reforms. Yemen's President has vowed not to run for reelection. There have been call for protests in Syria. Some people have been talking about possible uprisings in Morocco. Iraqis and Saudi Arabians are looking on to see how the events unfold. To put that into a sentence: every Arab nation in the Middle East is about to throw off the post-colonial chains of the West and become self-governing nations.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has vowed to not take advantage of the situation. Hamas, an extremist Islamic group in Palestine, told people not to go out in public to show solidarity with the Egyptians. Hizbullah in Lebanon has been fairly quiet about the whole ordeal. I mention this because it is incredibly significant. The fundamentalist religious groups that everyone fears will prevent democracy are stepping aside to help it grow. Certainly the Muslim Brotherhood would like to have a few seats in the new Egyptian Congress, but they don't expect a supermajority.

Israel needs to move very quickly and efficiently. If every major Arab nation becomes democratic they will be led by the popular will of the people instead of the Western-backed leaders. If Israel doesn't make peace with the Palestinians very soon their problems will be two-fold. First the new governments will move to impose sanctions on Israel until peace is accomplished. Some might even go so far as to try military options. If you look back at the map you'll notice a lot of Arab nations surround Israel. Sanctions would be devastating to their economy and the United States is already pulling back from Israel. If the entire Arab world, as a democratic whole, were to condemn Israel the US would be hard-pressed to back them as the US currently does. Second, all of the Arabs that live in Palestine will see the effects of uprisings around them and get a few ideas in their heads. The roughly 4 million Arabs that live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank might decide it's time for them to join the Jasmine Revolution and protest against the 5.8 million Jews in Israel. Israel has been able to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state so far because every government around them was supported by the US. That seems to be about to change.

To be sure, it is going to take time for the new democratic governments of the Middle East to become fully functioning. They are going to need help and guidance and they probably aren't going to ask the United States for it. There are two governments in the Middle East who are thought of as democratic, Turkey and Iran. As discussed in the last post, Turkey is moving away from the Western circle. Iran is as far from the Western circle as it gets. So which government will these new ones follow? Both countries want to be leaders in the Middle East and both are poised to be so. Nobody, here or there, knows what is going to happen next.

I can only hope that the people who live there decide what will happen for themselves.