Osama Bin Laden and the US economy

A few posts below, I wrote why I wasn't quite celebrating the death of Bin Laden:

Now there is all of this jubilation that bin Laden is dead, we got our revenge, fine. We're still fighting a war in Afghanistan, we haven't made much progress, and we're almost bankrupt as a nation. That was OBL's entire strategy. He knew he couldn't beat the United States in a conventional war, and he didn't try. His plan was to draw us in and bleed us with a thousand pin-pricks. Are we playing his game or our game? Did we play right into his hands? I'd be more willing to celebrate if OBL's strategy had failed.

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein writes more about Bin Laden's war against the US economy. He reaches the same conclusion that I did. How could one not come to that conclusion? Pre-9/11 the US economy was running surpluses with a minuscule debt relative to GDP. We were arguably the first hyper-power in history. Now, when the dollar starts to fall, I'm reading WSJ articles about how this is almost certainly not the start of a collapse of American currency and its economy...certainly not, right? We're at the point where we have to reassure ourselves that an economic collapse is not imminent.

I'm not always right

Actually, I originally thought Joe Lieberman was a loser, so I was initially right. Then for some reason I warmed to him. He has been solidly back into my loser category for some time now, though. Here is Joe:

"I think it's time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorists organizations, whether or not they should also be deprived automatically of their citizenship and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act."

That's right. If you are accused of terrorism, you are stripped of your rights and presumably then shipped to Guantanamo. Awesome.
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This is why it is important

...to keep American forces in Afghanistan so we can beat the Taliban:

Because if we don't, they will manage to find mentally unstable and technically incompetent American recruits to fail to start really big fires in Times Square.
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