"Wake Up and Smell the Dim Sum"

When push comes to shove, it's pretty embarrassing. Hard to hold one's head when traveling today. America has become the bad boy of the world.

I mean where do you begin?

We cancelled our nuclear treaty with Russia telling them that we now had a first strike capability. Then we started taking shots at the UN. Then came the follow up to 9/11 where we started labeling countries as Evil Empires. It set us back in Korea for years and almost caused the president to lose control of his country! It set back the move for moderation in Iran and probably the lost the president his re-election bid and enhanced the powers of the mullahs.. This was followed up by our decision to got to war against Saddam. And insulting everyone along the way who didn't play our game.We lost France. And then Germany. It's pretty bad to think that we send a couple of our highest dignataries to Mongolia of all places for sending 180 troops to support our aggression. We blamed the investigators for failing to find weapons of mass destruction. And then we blamed everyone else we could for whatever we could.

Think of it. We even had words with Canada. My God, man, nobody has ever had words with Canada and now our best ally will think twice or maybe three times before going to our support.

In the meantime, while ratcheting up the world's enmity against our capitalistic form of government, we never bothered to clean up all of the enriched nuclear materials on the open market that president Clinton had warned Bush about. That means the terrorists now emboldened by their experience in Iraq have the enriched materials they need to cause chaos around the globe...but especially in the US.

Now, the president paraded what he thought was his victory but turned out to be a Pyrrhic one indeed as anti-western movements grew in number and viciousness over the years since. In the meantime, China takes advantage of every opportunity buying up our scrap and selling us back TV's, DVD's, VCR's and all kinds of products we once used to make here.

All sanctioned under what is referred to as free trade.

Free trade, another code word like 'downsizing', and 'globalization' and 'off-shoring' that means a whole lot more than these euphemisms would attest to. Now, we are not only reviled by most of the rest of the world, while we weren't looking they were siding with China selling them rights we used to buy. And making us more enslaved than ever to a country that is now tapping into our government and all of our agencies using the kind of technology we sold to them in the first place.

A trillion dollars of US debt held by the Chinese is nothing to smirk about. And in the end, Bush understands that he can't afford to apply too much pressure to the Chinese who are in turn stealing our secrets every chance they get through their hundreds of phony businesses run just as covers to conduct espionage and their very professional hacking.

Rather pathetic, one would think. Why don't we say anything?

Because they own us! That's right. China, Japan, England, Holland and Saudi Arabia virtually own us. So, we can't afford to slap them on the risk without being the value of our money being threatened. Kind of an odd situation we find ourselves in brought on by our own hubris, greed and very narrow perspective.

Les Aaron