Monday, May 7, 2012

Stupid Brutes!

"Stupid brutes?!?" How dare she call them that?

"Stupid brutes?" What was she talking about? Wait a moment. Perhaps the delightful and beautiful Colombian senorita was speaking metaphorically. Could her skills include international relations? Might she have been talking about the long decade of neo-con and neo-con-light U.S. foreign policy based on force? Might she have had the long U.S. focus on the drug war and the poisoning of Colombian crops (be they coca or whatever vegetables might be growing in the vicinity) and the arming of the local military and the expansion of cattle baronies at the expense of cleansed small farmers? Might she have been summarizing the destruction of Iraqi society in the name of removing a dictator? Might she have been advising the White House to change its Afghan policy?

Surely not. I'm sorry; I just do not see her as a specialist in international relations. But she is a self-confessed businesswoman, and the whole sorry episode did revolve around fraud even more than around violence (threatened or real). So...a more judicious analysis suggests she was referring not to U.S. foreign policy but to domestic U.S. economic policy. The stupid brutes were not the soldiers sneaking off base in the middle of the night to commit acts of terrorism or the remote pilots of drones killing possible suspects but the titans of Wall Street sucking the financial lifeblood out of the American worker.

I guess she had more brains than those dim-witted gentlemen bargained for.

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