Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

From Erica Jong's "Why Am I So Afraid?"

If anyone in Washington read history, they'd understand that any empire that spends more in war than on its people eventually goes down in flames. The Persians, Greeks and Romans proved it -- see Herodotus -- and the British, French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans proved it all over again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But does anyone care?

Apparently not. It's a rule of history that when an empire gorges on guns and forgets butter, that empire winds up on the scrap heap of history.

Dubya could have learned this at Yale had he not been drunk or stoned all the time and figuring out ways to avoid going to 'Nam.

The rest after the click ...