Yeah, this gets to the heart of the matter. When you reflect for a moment, just about every election in the past 40 years or so has been a reaction against the previous administration to elect what is perceived to be a radical shift in policy or direction. The end result is that most everyone agrees that the successor is disastrous compared to the predecessor. No small feat for Hopey, when you consider the near unanimous discontent with Bush.
That says it all. The terrorists have been very forthcoming about their strategy. It is to ruin the U.S. financially. They have said as much over and over. On 9/11 the terrorists leveraged a few hundred thousand dollars (if that) to an amount yet to be determined, but on the order of ten to the twelve. This is a leveraging up of 7 powers of ten -- 10 million fold! We, the U.S., have been incredibly obliging. We have now reached the point where they (Al qaeda) don't even have to carry out a threat, just the threat alone is enough to cause us to spend millions more. It is a brilliant strategy. If you are clever enough, you can defeat a great military power, even though your resources are but a minuscule fraction of your enemy's. But your success depends on your enemies cooperation. So far, the United States has cooperated to the nth degree.
+1 Just from a pure business perspective.. they certainly got the most bang for their buck. Considering 90%+ were Saudi's and we have proceeded to annihilate their competition. They don't need to do anything other than an occasional threat// We are imploding all by ourselves. What we fail to realize is every brown skin life we have ruined through collateral damage is a new potential terrorist. Unless we intend to exterminate all these folks.. they live for vengeance. US has their own little Islamacaust going on here and abroad. You know Iran and the Paki's are next. The Chinese are waiting in the wings and will pounce when we are spread out and vulnerable. 10 years in Afghanistan this tour and what have we accomplished? At least rape and pillage their mineral wealth to offset some cost. legalize hash and send each taxpayer a ration... The biggest problem is we wouldn't even know if we won. Nothing is clearly defined... This is not even officially a war.
the repubicans nominated a clueless old man. the idiotic religious wing of the party could not stomach a mormon ie romney a businessman who was the last individual to run an olympics with a surplus who would have made a superb president. Instead the US got an anti business anti market president who does not even believe in the US but in some world government .