Not too bad of an analysis. If I didn't believe in a messianic redemption coming right in the middle of this great leap to first place by the Chinese, I'd track reasonably closely with you. But putting my religious beliefs aside, there is one big issue you haven't yet dealt with.

The internet and the fact that at present it is overwhelmingly in English. Most of the data one needs to function in a western style society is in English, or European languages written in Latin letters. Compared to any of these languages, Chinese is damned hard to learn because of its use of pictograms to depict ideas... Even Hebrew is easier.

A couple of points.

First, the opinions of a copuple of French communists that China is going to shape the future doesn't exactly constitute an inviolable law. The future is as yet unformed, and for China to really come into its own it's going to have to change so much that Chirac and his comrades probably won't like it nearly as much anymore.

And what have you got against the Peace Corpse of all things? It isn't a CIA front groupa nd hasn't been subverted by the CIA. The CIA puts agents in all sorts of covers, and they haven't used the Peace Corps any more than they've used professional sports teams or dance troups or movie crews. Doesn't tain the Peace Corps any more than anyone else is.

Dave

Wonderland, ehhh. Or is it BubbleLand?

The Bubble Boy

Jonathan Chait:

The bubble boy in the Oval Office

Try to mend Iraq all you want; just don't tell Bush the war was a mistake.

December 10, 2006

THERE IS a famous "Twilight Zone" episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town -- for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

Consider a story in the latest Time magazine, recounting the efforts -- before the commission was approved by Congress -- of three supporters to enlist Condoleezza Rice to win the administration's approval for the panel. Here is how Time reports it:

"As the trio departed, a Rice aide asked one of her suitors not to inform anyone at the Pentagon that chairmen had been chosen and the study group was moving forward. If Rumsfeld was alerted to the study group's potential impact, the aide said, he would quickly tell Cheney, who could, with a few words, scuttle the whole thing. Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that the thing was going to happen anyway, so he might as well get on board. To his credit, the President agreed."

The article treats this exchange in a matter-of-fact way, but, what it suggests is completely horrifying. Rice apparently believed that Bush would simply follow the advice of whoever he spoke with. Therefore the one factor determining whether Bush would support the commission was whether Cheney or Rice managed to get to him first.

And now that the Baker-Hamilton report is out, the commissioners are carefully patronizing the commander in chief. As this newspaper reported, "Members of the commission said they were pleased that Bush gave them as much attention as he did, a full hour's worth. 'He could have scheduled us for 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for the cameras,' said former Atty. Gen. Edwin M. Meese III." Wow, a commission devoted hundreds or thousands of man-hours to addressing the central conundrum of U.S. foreign policy, and the president gave them a whole hour of his time!

In return for these considerations, the commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, "The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration." Of course, "inflame" is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be "inflamed" is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.

Indeed, everybody seems to understand that if you want to help amend the disaster in Iraq, the No. 1 rule is that you can't acknowledge it's a disaster in Bush's presence. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the court stenographer of the Bush administration, recently reported that this was a key factor in the hiring of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Now, I would bet every dollar I own that Gates thinks the war was a mistake. But you can't say that to Bush. "Before hiring him," Barnes wrote, "Bush had to make sure Gates didn't think America's intervention in Iraq was a mistake."

Yes, Mr. President, it's good that you turned Iraq into a Hobbesian inferno of Al Qaeda terrorists and Islamist death squads. It's really, really good!

Thanks - an excellent & IMO impartial evaluation of the truly terrible situation the US is in, & why: because those supposedly in charge are ruled in turn by the corporations, & their sole real motive is profit, regardless of human or world expense.

I predict the French will, heh, retreat from that position. As Dave said above if (or when) China becomes a true future powerhouse it will be completely unrecognizable to us today. They'll have to: have the food the world wants to eat, the movies the world wants to watch, the jeans the world wants to wear, the schools, the jobs, the real estate, Vegas, the Grand Canyon, blah, blah.
Right now they can bearly feed their poor, the young are making money (dollars of course) as WoW gold farmers, and they pirate US software at such a rate that no one even bothers to try to stop them.
They have an incredibly long way to go.

As the commenters to my posts demonstrate, there is no talking to those who refuse to take what you say seriously before they bloviate through the usage of mass quantities of tired canards and ad hominem attacks.

Hilarious! You really attacked those ad-hominem-using jerks.