Politics: Our CEO president

As I recall, Bush styled himself as the CEO president when was running back in 2000. He would run the country as a business, cutting out the fat in our bureacracies, and give us a leaner, meaner, better-performing government.

One of the hallmarks of modern businesses is the desire, or even need for growth. Not the size of the building, or the number of employees - I don't think Bush intended to bloat the size of the government, it just kind of snuck up on him - but its marketshare, number of customers, and overall heft in the market place. When a company has reached a plateau of natural expansion based on current assets, products, and customer needs, it expands through acquisition.

So, that's kind of what we're doing, right? A sort of 21st century ideological imperialism is allowing us to expand the marketshare for American-style capitalism by acquiring failing countries and rebranding them as American satellite democracies? Now it makes more sense to me.

But, I'm worried - usually companies who have recently gone through a merger/acquisition become profitably operational by trimming mid and low-level staff. I expect some of Afghanistan's and Iraq's population to be laid off, but what about us? Even the purchasing company is not immune from redundancy. Perhaps some of our positions in the democracy will be outsourced to third-party organizations and contractors who will promise our American executives sweet kickbacks for bad contracts. Err... Hmph.