More Scooter's VDH lovefest

Some nice thoughts heading toward the weekend:

Fourth, the war in Iraq is no longer even a war in a traditional sense…. The cost of deploying American troops in Iraq is nearing the expense to station them elsewhere abroad. As Iraqis continue to take over additional provinces, the American presence will shrink further.

There are also long-term reasons to believe the United States will better weather the current storm. We are a transparent society that blares out problems, affixes blame, and then fights publicly over solutions. Japan’s real estate meltdown of the 1990s took years to correct, given the emphasis on secrecy and shame within Japanese financial circles.

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American banks are subject to uniform national policy and are forced to act in concert. In contrast, British, French, and German lending institutions are often unwilling to bail out other countries, and compete with each other to attract scarce capital in times of crisis.The United States military remains far stronger — and more battle-hardened — than the rest of the world’s armed forces combined. Rogue nations and terrorists try to take advantage of economic uncertainty, but America remains the best-defended democracy in the world.

The current financial crisis has startled America from a hypnotic trance of self-indulgence and irresponsibility. But as we return to American fundamentals, we may discover that our political, social, and economic system — despite all the current election-cycle hysteria — is still by far the most resilient in the world.