Would you invest in a badly-run empire?

Try as you might, you will never be able to explain to dunderheaded red-staters that our massive debt represents something more worrisome than a bill passed on to our children. Many Americans refuse to understand that foreign investors fund our overspending. When these foreign interests stop buying our treasury bills, the fecal matter hits the whirling blades.

We will have to raise interest rates tremendously to attract the investors back, but doing so will destroy the overall economy, which will drive our creditors away again. We will no longer be able to fund our military (that's where most of the spending goes, although lying right-wingers will tell you otherwise), our science infrastructure, our retirements, our police, our roads, our hospitals -- we will become, in short, a third world nation.

They call this "The Doomsday Scenario."

Guess what? On September 9, we got our first taste of doomsday.

Foreigners have been regularly buying nearly half of all debt issued by the U.S. government. On Sept. 9, for the first time that anyone could remember, they stayed home.

Yes, they came back. But will they do so after the next terror attack? Just what is it about this country that makes us such a great investment? The economic environment in Europe -- what the Republicans derisively call "old Europe" -- is much healthier.

Question: When financial catastrophe destroys this country, how will the right-wing propagandists try to fix blame on the Democrats? Question 2: Since so much of the damage has already been done and our course is nearly irreversible, would John Kerry really want to inherit this mess?