Chronicle of Doom Fortold X

They say that you should be nice to the people you meet on the way up, since you may meet them again on your way back down. I don't know that that works for countries, but in any case America managed to pick the ultimate unpopular asshole as leader just in time for him to annoy and enrage practically everybody while launching us on our downward trajectory.

Tom Friedman actually has a NYT column worth reading this week.

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our “addiction to oil.”

Amen.