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It was the waste of several hours, but I had been hoping that I could find the Wallstreet Casino. Preferably it would be in Cripple Creek, since that's the closest gambling town, but I'd have settled for Black Hawk or Central City.
As I understand it, this casino has peculiar rules. If you're a small player, you wager and win or lose with the breaks of the games.
If you're a big player, of course you get to keep what
you win. And if Lady Luck is not on your side, your claimed
losses are covered by the U.S. Treasury's Paulson Plan
for High Rollers,
because you're so important to the
health of the international finance system that you can't
be allowed to fail.
Alas, I couldn't find that casino in Colorado, so I switched attention to the presidential election. The conventional wisdom has it that if the economy is the main issue, the Democrats win. If foreign policy and national security are the big issues, then Republicans win.
Currently, the economy dominates the news, but we have a Republican president, and George W, Bush certainly could stir up a foreign crisis to shift attention away from Wall Street.
But where?
At first the possibilities seem as vast as the whole wide world, but it is possible to narrow the range.
South America has plenty of leaders that don't like us, the main one being Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Bush might arrange for some American drug-enforcement airplane to fly over an area where it's certain to be shot at, then claim that our flag has been sullied, and it's time to rally.
But it's hard to imagine that anyone, even Fox News, would take Peru, Colombia or Venezuela seriously as a threat to our national security.
Better to look elsewhere. The Republic of Georgia recently suffered an invasion by Russian soldiers, leading to the effective loss of some of its territory. Georgia had wanted to join NATO, and if it had, then under the treaty we would have been compelled to respond to the Russian attack.
However, Georgia isn't in NATO, the invasion is old news, and if we didn't get riled up then, we likely won't now.
Pakistan has possibilities. Some witnesses say Pakastini forces have fired at American military helicopters coming into the South Waziristan region in search of al Qaeda terrorist camps. There have been official denials, of course, since Pakistan is formally an ally in the War on Terror. So it's not a good time to elevate this one.
But there is a place where everything could fall together for a contrived crisis. The polar ice cap has been shrinking, making more of the Arctic Ocean navigable. That means more potential off-shore oil-drilling areas.
Bush and Vladimar Putin, now Russia's prime minister and
formerly its president, might still have a good working
relationship, since Bush once claimed to have a sense of
his soul.
So they could arrange for Russia to send oil-exploration ships into some portion of the Arctic Ocean that might be claimed as Alaskan waters. Gov. Sarah Palin can exercise her authority as commander-in-chief by calling out the Alaska National Guard to defend the state's oil resources. The Russians can respond with a destoyer or two, and we send up a few Coast Guard cutters. The charade can escalate through most of October, with Russia eventually backing off.
Thus national security and energy development return to the front pages. Sarah Palin gets some serious foreign policy credibility. And Republicans win.
Just remember, if anything this bizarre happens, you read it here first, and you shouldn't take it seriously no matter how much they say our security is threatened.
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