Remembrance of things past

I've been browsing around my early posts at random, partly in response to today's "holy shit" market reports. I wanted to see how much if any of my laments, prognostications hysterical warnings have been accurate. After about three and a half years of this, I don't remember writing much of what I wrote but of course I have been predicting a dire recession almost from the start, along with continued heartache in Iraq and several other things that got me in big trouble with some readers back in the Republican majority days.

Ok, so some of my tongue-in-cheek predictions: like an invasion of Venezuela and the bombing of Iran seem, fortunately, to have been gutter balls, but of course the recession has not been. Back in January of 2006, one young man chastised me severely for saying the economy was in trouble, the armed forces stretched too thin, the Iraq enterprise becoming mired in corruption and oil prices on the way up. What do you know? he asked. It became a heated exchange, bleeding over into his blog where I was called demented, a Marxist and the rest of the standard litany. He was in his 20's and shortly to go off to war and simply couldn't believe I was anything but a fool for hoping he came back in one piece.

I still don't know whether he did or not. His blog, A Soldier's Diary, was abandoned a long time ago and of course we were stretched too thin, the prosperity the Republicans were preaching turned to dust and rubbish, the corruption bled off billions. I would love to know what happened to him and whether he is still a believer.

Of course all those who laughed themselves sick about suggestions that massive borrow-and-spend policies would be a disaster, that massive tax cuts would drive us into irrecoverable circumstances and would produce no more of the prosperity than it ever had: those who insisted things were great, from Limbaugh to Fox News; those who talked about "victory" and the lack of patriotism of "liberals" who were somehow ruining the markets with negativity aren't going to remember what they wrote either. The condescending comments about my doubts concerning the Americanization of the Middle East and the sheer military genius of Bush and his "surge" are still there in the years of comments, written by people I don't hear from any more, or who have changed their names or found new things to snicker about or to attribute to "liberals."