First post - Leadership (or not)

Hello blog readers. The following are some musings on politics at local, state and national levels. I shall try to relate how politics at the various levels affects individual lives and what individuals can do to cause positive changes through political involvement.

First, I wish to say that the United States of America has exactly the wrong leadership in office at this critical juncture in history. The Bush administration has used misinformation, disinformation, misdirection, fear mongering and lies to keep itself in power. Unfortumately, it took 6 years for America to figure it out. Meanwhile we are involved in a "war" that kills 2-3 american soldiers a day and costs over a billion dollars a week. Evidently the one book W. read was 1984, or perhaps Laura read it to him, for we have as close to an Orwellian situation as a constitutional democracy can become in 6 short years - constant war, information control, limited civil rights and a nebulous and changing enemy to fear.
Now I am all for going after the schmucks that attacked the USA on 9-11, but the waste of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in Iraq could have been averted had this country had a real leader with real vision.
Imagine having 150,000 soldiers and half a trillion dollars at your disposal for four years. What could be accomplished?
With even less resources it would have possible to make a good start in restructuring the energy infrastructure of the United States toward renewable, non-nuclear sources. Improved subsidies for building energy efficient buildings and purchasing hybrid or electric vehicles, improved mileage requirements for all personal vehicles, government incentives to power companies to build wind, tidal, solar and geothermal power generating facilities all could have been a reality after four years of work by leader with vision.
But of course we have an oil man with a penchant for cowboy diplomacy - "If you're not with us you're against us.".
If we had a leaders with vision we could be well on the way to not caring about that nasty black liquid under the sands of the Middle East, and we would have more real security, and our children would have one less mess to deal with.

Thanks for reading.