Are We Looking Up Or Just Upside Down?

I haven’t written much about politics in the past few weeks. It’s because I don’t have any real take on what’s going on and, unlike newspaper commentators, I am under no obligation to come up with an opinion when there is no good basis for an opinion.
It’s been interesting to watch various columnists go back and forth lately. One day the world is headed to Hades in a hand basket; the next day there are glimmers of light ahead. As Yoda (the tiny Jedi from Star Wars) might say, “The future, clouded it is.”
Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve said this weekend that the recession might end by the end of this year—and then he appended enough “if’s” to sink any prognosis. The market was so excited by his comment that it rose twenty-eight whole points today—still down about 50% from a year ago.
I’m not really happy about this administration (not terribly surprising since I still identify myself as a moderate Republican). I don’t know what to make of it. I’m not moved to paroxysms of joy at seeing some of the same people who got us into this mess entrusted with getting us out.
As I’ve written before, something inside me keeps insisting that we might be better off in the long run if we stepped back and let this economic collapse reach its real bottom and THEN stepped in with all of our bailout money. That might be a better point to kick start the economy.
Asking if Obama—or anyone in Washington now—really knows what he’s doing is a valid question. The game plans I’ve heard so far have very nebulous goals as they are currently articulated. Where are we really going? What will all this bailout (and attendant pork) actually get us?
We are still dependent on China to fund our debt, and the Chinese are beginning to mumble in a manner not at all inscrutable about the safety of investing hundreds of billions in federal treasury bills. Hillary recently made a special stop to encourage them to keep loaning to us.
I just have a funny feeling. It’s the sort of feeling that—if I had it while out walking at night—would keep me going up a dark alley or walking into a dark and silent woods. I’m not alone in having the “willies”—all sorts of rumors are beginning to circulate about Obama and company.
Most of these don’t really bother me. Take, for example, the one linking his administration to the supposedly arcane and anti-American policies of The Council on Foreign Affairs. This is a group of scholars and business people that meets in New York to discuss and write memos on American foreign policy. Sometimes these memos are quite influential.
But to suggest that such past and present members as Walter Lippmann, Bill Moyer, David Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, Paul Volker, Zbigniew Brezinski, George H.W.Bush, Madeleine Albright, Dwight Eisenhower and Angelina Jolie are all consciously working against American interests leaves me gasping.
My mentor at Georgetown returned from a year working at the council just before I started my Masters program. He didn’t strike me as a dangerous radical. (In fact, years before, he was asked by Kennedy to write large sections of “Profiles in Courage”—at Jackie’s recommendation.)
Then there’s the deep dark suspicion evoked by the presence of so many attendees of past Bilderberg Conferences in this administration. The conferences have been going on since 1954. Each year 130 powerful people from here and West Europe get together to talk out mutual problems.
Much as this may sound terrifying to fervent American isolationists, it doesn’t scare me too much. Back when he was a congressman from West Michigan, Gerald Ford attended several of these conferences. We were rather proud of him for that. He showed no signs of anti-Americanism or any desire to end American sovereignty while he was president.
But, many people worry, these are SECRET meetings. (Remember how paranoid you got in high school when a group of girls were looking at you and whispering?) As the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution well understood, there is a good reason for secret meetings.
A participant can go ahead and air a harebrained notion, have it emended or shot down—without looking a fool in the papers next day. It frees people to come up with ideas. They are free to change them later. Most useful ideas only come out when people feel free to bring them up in private.
If you’re going to ask intelligent people who have ideas to join your administration, Republican or Democratic, you’re likely to land a few Bilderbergers or CFA types.
No—these rumors aren’t what bother me about the current administration. I cannot put my finger on exactly what concerns me. Something does. Years of experience have taught me to pay attention to itches that won’t go away.
This one won’t. I’ll just sit quietly by and scratch it until something happens. Until something is there that I can wrap an opinion around. When some break in the clouds occurs and the future—less clouded it is. There’s plenty other things to write about meanwhile.