Seriously, have many political thoughts these days

First things first, I love George Monbiot:

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won't address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called "the supreme international crime": the crime of aggression.

Go on ....

On Obama: Basically for reasons I can't bother to explain right now, he was fucked when the most pressing decision making he would have to make had to do with the economy; the guy's a lawyer ... how much did he know about it? Two, he was fucked [squared] when he took on Summers and the other Rubin boys as his primary go to guys on economic issues. He couldn't possibly have had enough time to absorb both what these guys were telling him and what alternate thinkers, like Krugman, Stiglitz (or even Volker) had to say. So he ignored them, as a practical matter. Except of course, this was a one way street to mass disaffection. I could have told him that as soon as he named Summers as one of his chief advisors. And I refer not to Summers tenure at Harvard which I couldn't care less about.

Now, Obama is probably going to compound the dissafection by pandering to a mysterious "middle." Bush fucked us because he pandered to his base, and they responded. Obama is fucking himself (and us) by ignoring his base and pandering to a middle that was never as big as his base. It's a weird calculation.

Last thing: at this point we have enough of a government that believers in government like myself think barely exists, but just enough of a government for non-believers in government to get over-exercised about opposing. I mean, philosophically there's hardly any government left; there's a shit load of spending of taxpayer money but it's not really a public institution anymore serving common public interests.

Sometimes, I think stuff it -- we would be better off-- if we didn't have a govt at all. Get rid of it, replace it with whatever the fuck the people who whine about government want: I assume corporations would do nicely, then. At least the whining would stop for a start, and we could actually put to the test this notion that government is such a bad thing. Let's see how fast the whiners and fence-sitters come around. It's not going to happen, I know.