A Perfect Storm.

Okay – full disclosure time, here kiddies: if you’re looking for a blog post that’s going to be uplifting, funny, or one of those “triumph of the human spirit” things, click off, and come back tomorrow. Consider yourself warned.

Did you see the movie The Perfect Storm? If you’re not familiar with it, or perhaps, took a pass on it due to your natural aversion to George Clooney, what happened was several climatological phenomena came together simultaneously to create a killer storm. Change one factor, and it’s a survivable storm. With all the factors in place, nobody gets out alive. It’s sort of like what happens with airline accidents. It’s never just one thing – it’s ice on the wings plus a de-icer failure plus a pilot pushing on through bad weather to make up time for his airline. Or maybe a pilot who didn’t get enough sleep, combined with cracks in the airframe plus wind shear. Take away one of these, and the passengers live. All three, and the NTSB makes another house call.

I’m afraid that we are looking at a perfect storm for the good ol’ U. S. of A., and I’m not sure that anything short of divine intervention is gonna save us. Let’s take a little inventory of what storms are on the horizon:

• Our energy situation is dire – not because we don’t have our own oil, but because we won’t be able to get it into the market for 10 years, and the idiots in Congress are doing nothing to speed the plow. We are woefully unprepared for a situation if a hostile country (Iran, Venezuela, Russia, et all) decides that we don’t get to import any oil.
• Iran and their nuclear ambitions will soon demand that SOMEbody do SOMEthing. If not Israel, we’ll be the guys that have to step in and fix this mess. If when someone attacks Iran, it’s instant oil crisis, baby.
• Our economy is in the tank – and the self same clowns that got us here expect the taxpayers to bail them out. The guys that are braying the loudest are the ones that ignored the problem for years. And if you believe that the mortgage banker guys and the Congressional banking ‘experts’ in Congress have OUR best interests at heart, I got a bridge I wanna sell you.
• The election – we have to choose between a guy that thinks that “tax and spend” is a way out of this crisis (it isn’t), and a guy who’s a well-meaning, honorable man, but not the dynamic leader that can rally us round the flag like Reagan did. (Palin, on the other hand, is magic. I wish SHE was at the top of the ticket.)
• A Congress that can’t bother to do it’s job. The Senate recently decided that it wasn’t necessary to take up repealing the domestic drilling ban until AFTER the election. They want to focus on the economy – as if the two are unrelated.
• The Islamofanatics still threaten our national security, and everything the Bush does to keep us safe incurs the wrath of the Left, the ACLU, and the liberal media jackals. As a result, a large part of our government spends it’s days trying to thwart the Bush Adminstration’s efforts to keep us terror-free.
• Our border is to national security what an iceberg was to the Titanic. Our only real line of defense – our Border Patrol – is busy defending themselves from attacks by the U.S. District Attorney’s office than they are the Coyotes along the border.

We don’t need all of these problems to End Our World As We Know It…three or more will do quite nicely, thanks. It won’t take much to go from on the edge to down into the abyss. Our leaders seem to be largely out for themselves. There are a few in the public eye that are sounding the alarm (Glenn Beck, in particular), but largely, we’re a nation with our head collectively buried in the sand. Perhaps we should replace the American Eagle with the Ostrich. At least that would be truth in marketing.

So when will this perfect storm hit. I dunno. I’m just a simple marketing guy. Not an economist. Not a soothsayer. Not a prophet. But I can tell you this. Whatever happens, it ain’t gonna be pretty. So if you have some hatches sitting around, you’d best batten them down, matey. We’re in for one mother of a rough time.