To Wesley Clark, (Someone please forward a copy of this to him if you know his address)
I would have voted for you in 2004. But your advocacy for Senator Clinton convinces me that you have no idea where the real threat to this country comes from. It is not from the outside: this uber-emphasis on being Commander-in-Chief is misguided.
We are rotting from the inside out. Our federal share of the public national debt is about to exceed its previous all time high as a fraction of GDP: it is approaching 90% with a federal public income at less than 25%. That was the way it last was in 1946, immediately after the second world war. At that time there was a state of mobilization of the population, suitably positioned to counter the precarious situation our country had found itself in.
Our private debt is in equally bad shape. That was not an extenuating factor in 1946. Worse, our politics is so paralyzed now that we simply cannot mobilize the country to address our real problems. Our government has made itself impotent by swallowing the ideological ideas of the Reaganists and the DLC, purporting that government IS THE PROBLEM instead of one of the necessary solutions. The only lasting thing that our recent belief in that ideology has brought us is a broken government.
That laissez-faire attitude has denied our country the adequate oversight and the regulatory functions that are necessary for our country's stability and sense of direction. Hence the credit and mortgage crises, about to spill their poisons over the entire economy. Hence the disparity between CEO salaries compared to just about everyone else. Hence the falling value of the dollar, bringing us all time high prices for oil and the rumblings of an impending storm called inflation.
Regardless of their rhetorically constructed distinctions, politicians of both parties are acting just like the "apparatchiks" of the Soviet Communist Party immediately before it collapsed: they saw their mission simply to remain a principle force necessary to keep those blessed by the establishment secure in their "Dachas". They, (and our own politicians), are only too willing to let the proletariat be damned, to let us all enjoy the ride.
Senator Clinton is NOT a solution to our problems. Politicians like her have actually been major contributors to the problem. The attitudes that prevail within the central structures of our politics need to be changed.
If you want to do something useful, General Clark, get yourself onto another boat: the one that is heading in a better direction. He needs your talents should he be elected. Hillary will just ignore you if she offers a position in any administration she wins. She will listen primarily to Bill.
And we citizens will not be listened to either. In her campaign she always talks about what she will do for us. She seldom asks what it is that we need. We will be stuck with that same old, same old, -- whether Clinton or McCain will have won in November.