Personally I can only scoff at all attempts to transform the wondrously high-varied art of statecraft into some trite natural science of taxonomy and measurement. Good economic arguments are generally praxeological and apriori in nature, and, as with most other things that reminds one of civilization and culture, the 20th century has left such economic sciences mostly in shambles.
Were I to write some Gibbonesque 'Rise and Decline of the American Empire', I might perhaps be tempted to describe Ronald Ray-gun as a good emperor, but fundamentally I remain staunchly aligned against imperialism as such -- at least against such imperial ventures as are undertaken under the guise of being motivated by some ephemeral public good, or, worse yet, when propagandized as some sorts of samaritan acts undertaken only -- oh-so only -- in the best interests of the conquered. I'm also against Emperors, at least when they don the garbs and regalia of republican government.
Conquest as an honest and explicit motive I can at least respect. There is something very sound about an honest thief.
Speaking of theft: Occupy Wall S:t is in a sense a wonderful movement -- Wall S:t is comprised of conglomerates of crony capitalist, unlimited tenure bankster Megacorps in fundamental symbiosis with the omnipresent state, fed and nurtured by a thousand government privileges, contracts and bailouts, protected by draconian gubmint regulations on the freedom of enterprise, and certainly deserves nothing but to be occupied -- unfortunately Occupy is by and large comprised of latte communists and college leftist with BAs in Womyns studies and critical theory, merely on the prowl for free lunches and some great, petty little cause to take the boredom and ennui out of everyday life under modernity. Free lunches, of course, sounding the death knell of all great civilizations, se ex viz Rome. Panem et circenses -- bread and circuses -- you start feeding the mobs of the great cities, and little-by-little they swell and grow, 'til eventually they inevitably swell and grow only restless when the food -- or new tax cows to pay for it -- runs out. A Malthusian trap, and perhaps also some grand circle of life.
Debating American Puppidents in a spirit of partisanship is a meaningless exercise, as doing so necessarily implies ignoring the fundamental underlying unity of the political establishment, the political class, and Goldman Sachs' board of directors.
The Bush family are a bunch of petro-corp thugs to be mentioned in the same breath as, say, the Corleones, and Oh'blamby mostly strikes me as a rather obvious Manchurian candidate for some forlorn communist putsch. Let no man, thus, fool himself into believing that democracy is in any way, shape or form an actual functioning system of government or a realistic alternative to anything. Democracy is entropy, tribalism, the very absence of constitutional government, and a mere prelude to anarchy and dictatorship, inevitably ending in bankruptcy when the public at one point or another discovers that it can
vote and manipulate itself to largesse and a place by some cozy food trough, but frankly, small-dime welfare hustlers look down-right benign on an individual level when compared to the outright monstrosities of the financial sector and the megacorps. Looking at you, Monsanto, Haliburton, the Morgan banks, &c&c.
Five years with Bamby, eight with Bush? Who cares! Vote Cthulhu -- the stars are right!
Whoever wins; the wars, the creeping socialism, the surveillance, the drones, the false flags, the taxation, the deficits, the demagoguery of democracy, the culture of fornication, individual rights instead of civic duties, globalism, the war on drugs, the bailouts, the inflation, robbing Peter to pay Paul, feminism, the IRS, the NSA, the CIA, the culture of victimization, mass-immigration, multiculturalism and every other wicked and base scheme and implement to be hatched by the riddle-mages in that Babel-upon-the-Potomac that is Washington D.C., is dead set to continue until it all eventually ends in some pathetic rehash of the crisis of the 3rd century, after which we can all perhaps rest soundly for a couple of hundred years in the comforting umbra of a second dark age.
I try to be an optimist about these kinds of things: At least dark ages allow for ambition, something which egalitarian mass-democracy for its part dreads about as much as nature dreads a vacuum.
#my10¢