He-e-e-l-p Me! I'm M-e-l-ting!

True.  But as I have often thought, and then said, in some ways we should be reassured that Saint Thomas Aquinas was right: you really can trust the authority of your senses. Under what economic theory can a nation actually spend its way to prosperity?  If you base your economy on consumer spending, to the 70% level, and if the largest single sector of that same economy is "financialization," that is, money manipulation, isn't that economy bound to crash as soon as the citizenry runs out of money?

Of course.  We can make the problem as complicated as we want, we can listen to half-wits like Tom Friedman with his "flat Earth" nonsense, we can pretend that there are Cosmic Free Lunches and Perpetual Motion Machines, but our intuition rebels against such thinking.  If you keep sending all your money abroad, and can only get it back by borrowing it from the foreigners' intermediary, the U.S. Federal Reserve, pretty soon your capacity to borrow that money will be exhausted.  One way I would calculate the rate of depreciation is as follows: if the average rate of a good mortgage was about 5% per annum, then over the course of Bush's eight years in office, the cost of re-borrowing the money we send overseas adds up to about 40%.  If you compute the depreciation of the dollar against other currencies during that same period, you will find that it adds up to about 40%.  There are no great mysteries here.  Like 40 days and 40 nights of rain before the Deluge, or Jesus's 40 days in the wilderness, or the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert, this is simply one of those totemic numbers that spell the end of American dominance, for a while, for a long time, maybe forever.

Securitized mortgages were first.  Securitized credit card debt will be next.  The true unemployment rate, freed from Bushian propaganda, is about 14%, as computed by the reliable John Williams at Shadow Statistics, who refuses to buy into the pop-fraud computations of the Clinton era.  Inflation is over 13%.  160,000 jobs were lost last month, and if you consider that about 150,000 jobs per month are necessary to keep pace with new entrants into the job market, we're falling short by over 300,000 jobs per month.  Retail business is drying up, car sales are nonexistent, discretionary spending ist kaput.

Against this background, John McCain, the candidate for one of America's two principal political parties, wants to talk about Barack Obama's "association" with William Ayers, a radical from the Vietnam Era.  Quite possibly a nation that frivolous deserves what it gets.