It was my understanding there would be no math in tonight's debate...

The AM radio dial is an orgy of tweedy intellectuals smoking opium whilst musing on the Ultimate Nature of Man and Providence. Dispatches from all manner of exotic outposts trickle in, fermenting rich debate on questions of immediate importance, such as 'storing immigrants in offshore refuse barges vs. releasing them in game preserves.' Though one debate was long ago settled. Jimmy Carter's brutal regime of Bolshevik sex dungeons in public schools and cardigan sweater-clad stormtroopers shooting oil company executives on live broadcasts of The Carol Burnett Show was the darkest chapter in American history.

Now revisionist historians at liberal universities have begun a whisper campaign of lies designed to deceive Ordinary Americans about Chairman Reagan's Great Leap Forward, which salvaged God-fearing Americans from their Hoovervilles and Soviet-built Chrysler Cordobas. This lie hinges upon another lie: economies function in broad cycles of growth and decline, with consequences of a particular policy or event often not being fully realized for many years. One reason for this is the ability of lawmakers to artificially postpone full costs and/or negative outcomes. While this might make sense to someone drinking mint juleps with Alger Hiss at the Harvard Club, those with common sense know any state intervention in the economy is an affront to God and decency. Monetary policy is to Sodom what fiscal policy is to Gammorah. After all, without the unhinged free markets of yesteryear, there'd be very little to look at in Newport.

Which brings us back to Stagflation. Stagflation is retribution sent from On High when sinners play God with the economy, but the Trotskyites in Howard Dean's freedom hating atheist saloon would have you believe their pals over at the Viet Cong had something to do with it. Apparently if you cook the numbers just right, we didn't actually get the whole bill until well after the last eggroll was served, sometime in the late 1970s when the chronic pressure on resources and policymaking caused by Vietnam had reached an end state. Stagflation had many components, but this was a big one.

The Iraq War is astonishingly similar to Vietnam in nearly every respect, not least of which being the unanticipated massive, chronic expenditure of public funds for no discernible benefit. Three hundred billion dollars later, we'd be ecstatic if we could walk away with things the way they were before we started. Putting the political situation in Iraq aside for a moment, this is economically impossible because the Iraq war has been an enormous game changer for the economics of petroleum. Iran's position in the region has been strengthened considerably, pitting it as a plucky competitor to Saudi Arabia's oil hegemony. And remember, Saudi Arabia's importance isn't necessarily a function of how much oil it sits on. Saudi Arabia controls the global price of oil. Saudi Arabia is also one of the least politically stable regimes in the region. The House of Saud must stay in bed with the US while simultaneously paying hush money to Wahhabists who hate the House of Saud for, among other things, being in bed with the US. The microeconomics of this cycle are plainly not sustainable. One Wahhabist in particular was causing a lot of problems a few years ago for both the Saudi Government and the United States, seeing them as equal enemies. But that's all water under the bridge- we have bigger things to worry about now.

This liberal hatred of clear moral decision making explains why Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor keeps popping up spewing nonsense and emboldening the enemy.