"I think what it REALLY means is that now that Bush has essentially been neutered by the results of the election... he's tellin' his big oil buddies that they'd better get back to GOUGING the American people at the pump while they still can!"

4Salt, it's interesting that you wrote this, as I've been thinking on it a bit, and came up with a similar theory over the past week.

Here it is:

From the war in Iraq, the economy, the pork barrel spending, the growth of corporate welfare, the massive federal expansion and spending, explosions in coroporate scandals, not to mention personally hypocrital scandals of many on the right, and many more decidedly un-conservative programs and activities of the current crop of Republicans, the last election cycle has shown that those in charge of the Republican machinery are either so incredibly imcompetent...

...or they're not.

They knew that they were throwing the entire party, and the half of America that supports the party, firmly, and with unerring accuracy, directly under the proverbial bus...along with the credibility of not only the entire government, but the entire nation as well.

Why?

Are they so utterly incompetent that they actually thought this was a good way to go about making good, and were horribly wrong, or did they do it on purpose, or at least with the full knowledge that it would happen?

There are too many smart people that were involved, too many smart people that couldn't have missed the multitudes of warning signs along the path that they have taken...so why did they take the path?

I think it may tie in to what 4Salt said above, whether or not his specific observation was accurate or not.

Assuming they weren't so woefully incompetent and mistaken, and blind to reality, that they actually thought they were doing the right thing, what does this leave as the other possibility?

The other possibility is that they didn't care.

They did it for greed, setting themselves up to be in the money, the rest of the world, including their millions of supporters, our country, the truth, and everything else...be damned.

It was "get while the gettin' is good", and while they knew it couldn't possibly last, they knew they could rape and pillage all that is good about our country, and the world for that matter, as much as possible before it all came crashing down...around everyone else but them, the architects of this massive destruction.

Those architects are either so bad at making decisions that would benefit the nation and the world, or sly like foxes.

Is the whole situation an Enron-like play, but one that bilks the entire world, rather than just the millions of Enron stockholders? To them, is the whole f'n thing just a game to win, with the rest of the nation and world just playing pieces to them?

Thoughts?

Fish on...

Todd