And, after all, how were the Clinton years anything but an extension of Bush I? While Bush II's policies - expanding war, the USA PATRIOT Act (HR 666 recycled!), burgeoning wealth transfers to the power elite - were nothing Clinton hadn't done or tried to do. And Obama has made it clear "change" means "the same, only more and harder."

He's blatantly planning a massive expansion of US military assaults on the rest of the world. There's no money for this. The military is broken. It doesn't matter: this "administration" - or what we probably should call the power elite's new management team - is no more reality-based than the one about to be flushed.

Clearly, The O-Bomber's a stooge; clearly, the same people pull his strings as did the two Bushes and Bush Sr.'s smarter, adoptive son Slick Willie. And who'd've pulled McCain's if voters had decided to elect an overtly mad, evil old reptile instead of a handsome young demagogue (with a Nuremberg Rally-friendly constituency!)

Meanwhile the Mad Christers who wanted to set the world ablaze so the demon they imagine is Jesus could return to assert dominion are on their way out - well, except for right-wing fundie Hillary Clinton, who belongs to the Mad Christer DC insider group called the Fellowship. (See also here.) But bizarrely the secularist nuts who were equally responsible for executing the mad US-vs-the-World program are still firmly entrenched.

After all, how did Clinton's overtly fascist "neoliberals" differ from Dumbya's overtly fascist "neocons? " Barely if at all, in rhetoric or policy. Just the switching-in of meaningless syllables: "conservative" for "liberal." And now back.

Of course the same people are still in charge. At the top, as well as in the lower, public ranks. People who possess real power may lose it through accident, incompetence, or action by their rivals. They do not suffer themselves to be displaced by majority vote of their livestock. Why in Hell should they? In what way is it rational to imagine that they would?

As some wise libertarian asked after the initial $700B bailout - the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich and powerful in known human history, even before it mysteriously expanded by an order of magnitude to north of $7 trillion - was enthusiastically endorsed by both major party candidates, "How can anybody doubt the existence of the Power Elite now?" (Or words to that effect - if you turn up the original quote + author please let me know, and I'll credit both.)

And the people who really run the show now (to the extent anybody does) are clearly too stupid to leave their homes without helmets and knee-pads; and entirely delusional into the bargain. The risk now isn't so much whether they'll destroy the US; that's in progress now, the only issue being the eventual body count. It's whether they'll, in their arrogant imbecility, will launch a global thermonuclear war that'll render the Earth untenable for human life.

A cheerful thought as we wait for the deflation to trough and the hyperinflation to kick in.