American Economy at the Crossroads

There was one arresting moment at the conclusion of Ben Bernanke's testimony today before a joint Congressional economic committee where he was asked to comment on Senator Charles Schumer's non-question about the state of the U.S. economy. Schumer likened the USA to a giant which had become "overweight," now importing more than it exports and spending more than it saves. In Schumer's view, it could not be predicted that the latest financial crisis in the country would arise from "mortgages," but that such an underlying, unhealthy situation would eventually produce big problems of some kind was inevitable. Bernanke simply said that he agreed with the points Schumer was making.

Schumer's question was a kind of "aha!" moment for me; it was clear that the garrulous, collegial senator from Brooklyn was another card-carrying member of the "Big Picture" club. When you think about it, what was the point of Schumer's "question?" Did he think Bernanke could shake out of his sleeve, or pull from the recesses of his heavy beard, some nostrum that would reverse economic trends which have been underway in the U.S. for decades? Yet everything before that question had concerned the short term. Bernanke gamely predicted that prosperity was just around the corner; we might have to weather a technical recession for this first part of the year, but after Bush's Bribes were issued starting next month, America would go on another mindless shopping spree for imported goods which would get the economy humming again.

There is an inherent contradiction between these two visions of the future. If the economy "recovers" along the lines Bernanke predicts, then it will simply worsen the situation which Schumer described.

Roger Cohen's column about Asia in Monday's New York Times described the "end of the white man" as the world economic leader. He was in Hong Kong when he wrote his column, apparently, and under the influence of the usual hysteria which sets in while you're traveling, he talked about the astonishing growth rates of the Chinese and Indian economies. The Asians now speak of "decoupling" their economies from the West and developing their own domestic markets to replace the fading American and European powerhouses. Cohen talked about all the high speed rail being built, the feverish construction of commercial buildings, and sadly lamented that America's day (and the day of the dominant Caucasian) had come and gone.

I suppose that one problem America has is in coming up with a new identity for itself. We can't compete with these giant Asian economies, of course, nor should we have the slightest desire to do so. They work for tiny wages in anthill societies using ruinous amounts of carbon-based fuels and depleting their water supplies at a completely unsustainable rate. The entire world is in a state of 40% overshoot of natural resources, and China and India will soon displace America as the greatest wastrel nations on Earth.

Long, long ago (like 30 years ago), homegrown environmentalists and deep ecologists like Barry Commoner and Wendell Berry and other writers described the need for a "zero-growth" economy. For a "steady state." For a sustainable economy based upon natural replenishment rates of renewable energy. Instead of moving coherently in this direction, of course, the U.S. went on a growth binge, moving recklessly toward the condition which Schumer briefly described in his closing remarks. The game actually petered out about a decade ago. I at last found some corroboration among Big Shot pundits a few days back for one of my pet theories, that there has been no increase in the Dow Jones for about ten years, in a column written by Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy (which despite its title is really about the American economy). Phillips went me one better, noting:

"In fact, phony Washington statistics and warped market measurements make it doubly hard to tell. The federal Consumer Price Index is already regarded by many Americans as a con job, and the press periodically quotes investors who state their belief that current U.S. inflation is really 6 to 9 percent a year, not the 2-4 percent the government alleges. I agree. On top of which, because the value of the dollar has dropped so far, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the end of March was not really 12,200, a number barely up from its 11,700 peak in 2000. If you measure the Dow in Swiss francs or euros, two strong currencies, it has already lost some forty percent of its 2000 value. Too many Americans live in a dream-world of economic misinformation."

People who make money in the present American stock market, by and large, do it by playing Wall Street like a casino: shorting the market, hedge funds, betting against the dollar, buying gold, and so forth. Not by buying equities and waiting for sustained growth. Sadly, America's transition to a sustainable economy, if it ever happens, will not occur through orderly processes. That ain't the way humans do stuff. It will be a train wreck, and the economy will be put together again out of parts scavenged from the still smoking machinery. And even as the American economic locomotive approaches the point of lift-off, Congress folks like Chuck Schumer will still be posing those Big Questions for their own amusement and self-aggrandizement.

What is the authorization for remaining in Iraq?

I confess to a bias toward structured thinking, legalistic in character, which has taken shape over the years as the result of a native preference for logical analysis as reinforced by professional experience. I guess I'm saying I just like things to make sense. As one example, it seems absolutely clear to me that Article 1 of the United States Constitution confers upon Congress, and only Congress, the power to declare war. The Constitution was drafted by men who were far more wise and educated, both practically and classically, than any of the blow-dried, teeth-bleached, Botoxed specimens currently infesting the Capitol Building. The last time Congress declared a war was in December, 1941, and I suppose they did so then because there was no avoiding it. You can't just let the Japanese sink your navy and do nothing; had there been a way to skip the vote, I'm sure they would have. Nevertheless, despite any Congressional declaration of war, since 1945 it doesn't seem there have ever been two months together when the U.S. hasn't been involved in some international armed conflict. Congress, just to institutionalize its buck-passing, finally passed in 1970s the War Powers Act, which gives them a "supervisory" power over the President's war-making. If he's fighting a war, he has to sort of clear it with them, you know, if it looks like it might take awhile. This is only a mild exaggeration.

So instead of simply declaring war, which is just too scary, Congress "authorizes" war. It's okay with us, they're saying, if you think that's what you really need to do. They did so most recently and famously in October, 2002 with the "Authorization for Use of Military Force" against Iraq. This little exercise in casuistry contains something like 21 preamble "whereas" clauses, which is suspicious right there. Generally, if you have a valid and sufficient reason for doing something, a couple of sentences ought to do it. "Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. To defend ourselves, we declare war on Japan." You don't need a lot of shit like "Whereas, Japan looks like they really mean it;" and "whereas, Japan's a pretty scary country right now;" and "whereas, they really shouldn't be doing stuff like that." Everybody gets it. Japan bombed us. We're at war.

Of course, Iraq was nothing like that. George W. Bush wanted the war so badly, but really there was no compelling reason at all. Iraq had not bombed us, and they didn't really look scary. The weapons inspectors couldn't find anything. So on and on the Resolution went, clearing its throat, trying to work itself into a lather about Iraq. The U.N. Resolutions Saddam had ignored! Their possession of weapons of mass destruction! The oppression of their own people! Playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors! The threats they pose to the "stability" [sic] of the Persian Gulf! The presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq! My favorite was a reference to the 1998 "regime change" resolution of Congress, making it the "policy" of the U.S. to get rid of Saddam (also making it Bill Clinton's policy to get everyone to think about something other than Monica Lewinsky). In other words, Congress was referring to its own "decision" to get rid of Saddam as evidence that we needed to get rid of Saddam. It's a neat circularity of the kind Congress engages in routinely without thinking how, um, stupid it looks. "We must get rid of Saddam because as we stated in 1998, it's our policy to get rid of Saddam! Harruummmmppphhhh!"

But after all the endless whereas clauses, Congress zeroed in on why L'il George was given this permission slip:

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

At this point, does "Iraq" pose any continuing threat to the United States? And are there any "relevant" UN resolutions which haven't been enforced? The answer to both questions is no. I would assume that "Iraq" must mean the duly elected government of Iraq. We can't mean just anyone who happens to be in Iraq -- that would put us at odds with any country where there are anti-U.S. sentiments, and in the Bush era especially, that means the whole world. The governing coalition of Iraq led by Maliki doesn't pose any continuing threat, does he? If he does, why do we fight alongside Nouri? When we said "Iraq" before, we meant Saddam; by a parity of reasoning, we must now mean "Maliki & Co." Are Maliki and his government violating any UN Resolutions? Which ones?

Bush has admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 (it was probably his single biggest slip-up in terms of inadvertently telling the truth). So he's admitted that whatever we call "al-Qaeda" in Iraq is not the al-Qaeda who attacked us. Everyone who has studied the issue objectively (other than Dick Cheney, in other words) has concluded that Iraq had nothing to do with the planning or execution of 9-11.

So what the hell are we still doing there, from a legal, logical and Constitutional standpoint? What part of the Authorization said anything about a perpetual, open-ended commitment of the military to aid in nation building? Okay, Congress has wimped out under Article 1 and refuses to take charge of war declarations. But if it's going to use "authorizations," shouldn't Congress at least insist that the President is operating under such authority? Is that too much to ask?

Congress and the Brinks Job on Social Security

I confess that, as weird and wonky as it might seem, I have always been fascinated by the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and all of the moral and actuarial drama which surrounds it. There is something deliciously insightful about this tale -- the ideas of institutional irresponsibility, of blame aimed at a moving target, of the essential and ineradicable short-sightedness of human behavior. If you pay enough attention to it, you can learn everything you need to know about the political process.

Social Security began under FDR. It is, to its core, a socialist program. The idea, spawned during the Great Depression, was that Social Security would provide an old-age benefit to ensure the dignified retirement of America's citizens - not really a luxurious stipend, of course, but a means to avoid living under a bridge and eating food from discarded cat food tins. That it has survived all these years owes to the genius of its money-in, money-out format. Current workers pay in, retired workers are paid out. While we have a Social Security number, this "account" is solely for computing our eventual benefit; the SS Administration does not actually maintain bank accounts for individual citizens.

Conservatives have always hated Social Security, of course, because of its aura of European Socialist decadence. The government should not help people. The government should run the prison system and wage war. Nevertheless, the plutocrats tolerated Social Security because (a) they had to, because of its popularity, and (b) because its funding was a stand-alone system powered by the FICA tax. This tax, a regressive, off-the-top levy which hits the lower classes much harder than the rich, allowed the government simply to act as a paymaster. Money in, money out, and all of the precious revenues not attributable to FICA could be spent for the wet-dream fantasies of the military-industrial complex.

Actually, it was better than that. The Baby Boom generation, which accounts for so much in the history of the United States over the last 60 years, foresaw a problem with their own retirement beginning...around...now. This foresight motivated Congress in the early 1980's to "fix" Social Security by increasing the FICA tax to create a surplus for the years between 1983 and 2008 so that the system would remain solvent. The Baby Boom Bolus, pushed by pythonesque peristalsis down the alimentary canal of snake-time (don't try this language at home), would one day reach the asshole of retirement. Plans must be laid or that turd would stink to high heaven.

It was curious, in a way, that the increase would occur during the first Reagan term, when the federal government was developing its hate-itself self-image and doing everything it could to reduce taxes. What made it palatable was that the surplus (which was supposed to be saved) could be swiped by Congress and invested in the military-industrial complex. More money for lobbyists! We like this FICA increase! The stolen money was replaced by an IOU, a special intra-governmental Treasury note with an interest rate and everything.

As an analogy, suppose you were funding your own retirement by putting money in a bank. Each year you put away $1,000. However, you like shiny cars and flat-screen TVs so you "borrow" the money each year, spend it and replace it with a promissory note to yourself plus 5% interest. At the end of forty years, you have $40,000 in notes, plus all that accrued and compounded interest, and you take your notes down to the bank so you can retire. The bank says that's fine, but the payor of the notes will have to pay up before the withdrawal can be honored. The payor of the notes is you. In order to honor your promise to yourself, you get a job. After a few months at your new job, you realize something was wrong with your retirement plan.

This is, without any serious difference, the current situation with Congress. Congress currently has about $80 billion in yearly surplus it can steal from Social Security, an amount which will decline precipitously between now and 2017, when the fund will "go negative." At that point, Congress will look exactly like the shlub with his clutch of promissory notes. We call that pile of worthless stationery the "Social Security Trust Fund." As David Walker of the GAO says, it is "without accounting significance."

Conservatives (such as W) attempted to "reform" Social Security a few years ago by "privatizing" the system. They needed to do so to avoid a fate worse than death; if Social Security isn't abolished, the "general fund" is going to have to "pay back" the money it stole. To do that, those precious non-FICA revenue sources will have to be tapped and misdirected from God's intended beneficiaries, the fat cats of the Military-Industrial Complex. America will become simply another Socialist Republic.

Whom does one blame for this fiasco? A sleepwalking American electorate? All those Congresspeople who have come and gone in the last generation? At what object does one focus his impotent rage? That's what makes the situation so subtle and insidious. So ripe for self-laceration. Lying deep within the mystery of the Social Security crisis are the very clues to the untenability of mass, impersonal democracy. The human frailities of cupidity and irresponsibility play out in a system of such complexity and unaccountability that while the whole system crashes, we cannot find a single person on whom to vent our wrath.

The Iraq Folly, Reexamined

In the latest decisive moment in the never-ending saga, "Iraq: Birth of a Democracy," the United States is providing guns, blood and money to assist the ruling coalition of Iraq, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (renamed from the previous, market-unfriendly "Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)" because it sounded, you know, too much like the Islamic Revolution in Iran circa 1979). The Supreme Council is in league with the Dawa ("The Call") Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, former anti-Saddam resistance organizer who spent much of Saddam's last decades in power in Tehran and Damascus, two countries which we consider so evil that we punish them by denying them conversations with George W. Bush. Second prize on the punishment list is a world cruise aboard Princess Lines.

President Bush, naturally, prefers to call the coalition government simply that, "the government," so as to avoid the uncomfortable vibe that accompanies calling any ally the "Supreme Council for the Islamic" anything. The U.S. is flying close air support and will probably introduce ground troops, if necessary, so that the Iraqi military and the Badr Brigade, the militia of the good guys, overcomes the Basra rebellion led by Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, who are the designated bad guys. Sadr attracts a lot of support from disaffected Shiite Iraqis because of his anti-U.S. positions, referring to us invariably as the "occupying army." He also has a lot of ties to Iran and has sought and been granted asylum there during periods where Maliki or the U.S. has decided it's too risky to have him on the loose. On the other hand, it's probably also too risky to arrest and prosecute him because of his widespread popularity among Iraq's poor, which is fairly congruent with the group called "Iraqis."

Of course, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, as a predominantly Shiite organization, also has a close relationship to Iran, so that it's accurate to say that what George W. Bush calls the "Iraqi government" has close ties to Iran. Iran, of course, calls itself an "Islamic republic." The Iraq Constitution provides that our newly-hatched democracy is the same thing:

Article 2:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation: A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established...

Thus, one of the first provisions of the Iraq Constitution provides that there is not only no separation of church and state, but any attempt to pass a law inconsistent with Sharia is forbidden. Since our own Constitution proscribes in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights the establishment of a state religion (a clause which so vexed Mike Huckabee), you could say that what we've succeeded in establishing in Iraq is a pro-Iran, theocratic Bizarro-America in the "heart of the Middle East," which is not only not a bulwark against Iran (as Saddam was), but is more logically seen as an extension of Iran's influence in the Persian Gulf.

This is actually pretty obvious, of course, and even George W. Bush, who comprehended before the war only that Muslims lived in Iraq without grasping the sectarian divide, is obviously aware of the embarrassing implications of putting the American military at the disposal of an outfit called the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq. Thus, government = "good guys," Sadr = "evildoers," and let's break for lunch, shall we?

It's amazing that the Democrats in Congress don't make more of this absurdity. Another result of the general contempt of the nation's solons for the collective intelligence of the American people, I suppose. But as I wrote a long time ago, Iraq war analysis has degenerated into an empty debate about whether violence is "up or down," without considering what's left after all the violence is gone, if it ever is. Let's say it's down, for the sake of argument, although it's currently up. What has the war accomplished that is actually in American interests, or that could possibly be worth 4,000 lives, $3 trillion, mountains of foreign debt, and a squandering of resources needed at home? Even if we're cynical and lay it all off on the quest for oil -- if we're serious about dealing with global warming, and the need to reduce greenhouse emissions effectively to zero by the year 2050, the best place for Iraq's oil is in the ground.

Bush's best case is that we've midwifed the birth of a second Shiite theocracy in the Persian Gulf, the constitution of which is directly antithetical to our own secular principles. Assuming arguendo, as one says in law, that it will get quieter in Iraq -- quieter for what?

Just How Nuts Is It Out There?

It's a little disconcerting that 25% of Democrats believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, although, as Jerry Seinfeld once said on a show where he was mistaken for a gay guy, "not that there's anything wrong with that." Nevertheless, it's questionable whether a black man can be elected President of the United States; it's beyond question that a black Muslim cannot be elected President. When facts as basic as whether or not Barack Obama is a Muslim are not conclusively understood, one trembles at the prospects for positive change this fall.

At its very basic level, the recent national spasm about the Trinity United Church of Christ and its "firebrand" pastor (a word chosen by the national media to remind us of Sadr in Iraq) was a racist exercise. People have been looking for some "definitive" way to demonstrate that Obama is a "shifty" black man who holds radical beliefs similar to Huey Newton or Eldridge Cleaver and is merely trying to pass as a reasonable Ivy League lawyer who happened to be editor of the Harvard Law Review. So the imputation of Islamism, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism was a fairly easy task when the opportunity presented itself, because it was exactly what a lot of people wanted to hear in the first place. A new set of rules developed where if a man was one of ten thousand congregants in a church where the pastor said some things (among hundreds and hundreds of things, many of which were indisputably correct) that offended or were non-mainstream, that congregant was tarred with the same brush. These tactics work because Americans seem peculiarly vulnerable to what statisticians call the "emphasis error;" something is taken out of context and highlighted and the target audience is unable to retain the context and evaluate the point rationally. The scene melts away; all we have left is a vast, empty church, with a pastor yelling, "God damn America," and one lonely black man, Barack Obama in the audience. That Obama wasn't even there that day, that this was one of hundreds of sermons given by Jeremiah Wright, is all forgotten

As an example of this point, consider the case of John McCain and Pastor John Hagee. Who is John Hagee? He's a nut, that's who he is. He claims to be pro-Israel, but what he has in mind, really, is one particular Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Hagee wants to bring on Armageddon and Jesus's return by fomenting a war between Israel and Iran, nuclear if possible. Something like 80% of all Jews in Israel are going to die in the conflagration, according to Revelations, but it's all good. Has to happen, according to the Pastor, who's written a book on the subject. Some radical right wingers in Israel are okay with Hagee, even if they have to overlook a few of the more disturbing aspects of his character. Such as that he's actually an Anti-Semitic Holocaust Revisionist. Let him say it in his own words:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day….

“How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come…. it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.” [Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To War”, paperback edition, pages 92 and 93].

If Hitler were around to read this, imagine the great comfort it would bring to his conscience, if he had one. If you see a movie like "The Sorrow and the Pity" or "Night Train" or "Shoah" again, you might want to reconsider your sympathy for the Jews during the Holocaust. If Hagee's right, it was merely what they had coming. A baby huddled in her mother's arms, rumbling along in the Polish night in 1944 toward Auschwitz: the little girl's own fault, if I read Hagee right. She shouldn't have been so repulsive and insulting. Shouldn't have broken God's heart. So she became a casualty as part of God's Master Plan for his Chosen People, and Part Two, or Part Whatever, is comin' right up. (Jackie Mason may have nailed it: "Next time, choose somebody else.")

John McCain actively sought and is proud to have the endorsement of John Hagee. You can Google many quotes to that effect. What you can't find are the searching, inquisitorial interviews of Tim Russert and Chris Matthews of John McCain about why he would enthusiastically associate himself with someone like this. Isn't that odd? Hagee's taken some fire for being "anti-Catholic," but never for buying into the Biblical blood libel of Judaism. Yet many assume that Barack Obama must be an anti-Semite himself (his thousand public pronouncements in support of Israel notwithstanding) because a pastor, whose endorsement he does not seek or accept, presides over a church of ten thousand congregants in a church which gave Louis Farrakhan a lifetime achievement award.

This goes beyond a double standard and into the realm of the truly, frighteningly weird. It is one of the occasional glimpses one gets into the dark forces moving like an unseen tide in modern America. If nothing else comes of Barack's candidacy, I commend him on the sublime beauty of the speech he wrote and delivered in response to this "controversy." He asked Americans to be smart and discerning about a complex subject. I give it long odds, but it is better, as the Buddha said, to light candles than to curse the darkness.

Why we're still in Iraq

"Frontline" on PBS is running a pretty good documentary on the Iraq occupation called "Bush's War" which I tuned in to the other night. It had much in common with other recent movies done on the subject, relying extensively on the usual talking-head format using writers who have written the now-familiar canon (among current affairs freaks, like your humble blogster) of books on how Iraq went completely off the rails beginning in the spring of 2003. Books such as "Fiasco," "Assassin's Gate," "Cobra II," "The End of Iraq." I've read 'em all. Iraq is a mess, all right. That's a conclusion which Bush can't lay at the feet of a "hostile media." We won't find out until Bush leaves office just how screwed up Iraq is, and only then if a Democrat is elected. If a Democrat is elected, I suspect he or she will use the conditions in Iraq as the rationale for organizing a departure. The argument will be simple: Iraq is so catastrophically messed up that no occupation which is militarily, politically and financially feasible can stay in place long enough to make a significant difference.

Of course, that's true now. Yet we stay. However, the "Frontline" documentary makes an arresting point: that wasn't the original plan. In all my reading, I had never seen that particular point made. Public statements from field commanders and administrators, such as Tommy Franks and Jay Garner, and interviews with high ranking officials at the Defense and State Departments who are no longer in the government, made a convincing case that the plan was to invade, topple Saddam, receive the grateful thanks and adulation of the Iraqi people -- and then leave.

Whatever the larger ambitions of the Neoconservative cabal infesting the Administration and the Defense Department (Cheney, Libby, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith), Bush and Rove had simpler ideas. Indeed, Bush's ideas are always pretty simple. He isn't John Adams. He is not a passionate and deep thinker whose very soul resonates with the cry for "freedom!" for the world's oppressed. He's a goofy frat boy with significant problems of mental processing, and the sole function of his presidency is (or was) to settle certain old familial scores about his wastrel life. His view of the relevant world is confined to the perimeter of the mirror he looks into each morning. He has demonstrated his profound indifference to everything else in a thousand ways during his presidency.

So the idea of Bush's War for Bush was to imbue him with the glow of the victorious war president. Mesmerized by Rumsfeld's promise of a quick and efficient victory, and lulled into complacency by his own abysmal understanding of Muslim sectarianism, Bush undertook to finish the job his father left incomplete: overthrow Saddam Hussein. This part worked, which is why he donned the codpiece and landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln off San Diego on May 1, 2003. He meant it when he said the mission had been accomplished. Over the next few months, the idea was to withdraw the forces and then to crow about Bush's foresight and courage in transforming the Middle East with his lightning strike, thus ensuring a landslide reelection in 2004.

Then the Iraqis started killing Americans and each other in earnest. From the summer of 2003 until the day after the election in November, 2004 must have been one long nightmare for George W. Bush. That he achieved reelection despite the evaporation of all rationales for the war is a tribute to the unscrupulous genius of Karl Rove and to the pitiful state of the American electorate, who are so easily manipulated with empty slogans and posturing.

The price Bush paid for reinventing the rationale for remaining in Iraq has led him to his present predicament, where leaving Iraq is not an option. Since the flower-strewn parade greeting us as liberators failed to materialize, and no WMDs or links to al-Qaeda were found, Bush was left with the program which bored and irritated him most: building a democracy "in the heart of the Arab world." This, it turned out (according to him), was the idea all along.

If we leave today, Bush knows Iraq will descend into unmitigated hell tomorrow. He will lose any element of control over day-to-day events in Iraq and will be at the mercy of international (objective) reporting on conditions in that country. His frame of reference, that morning mirror, does not encompass such an outcome. So five years after invading we're still there. The plans he's discussing with General Petraeus do not contemplate any troop draw down. If the war costs $3 trillion, if another thousand GIs die, if the military deteriorates, so be it. A man's legacy is at stake.

An Account of My Harrowing Adventure at Gate 62B

A secretary to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton has taken issue with the Washington Post's decision to award Hillary "4 Pinocchios," its highest level of official mendacity, for her account of her trip to Tuzla, Bosnia in 1996, in which Mrs. Clinton claims that she arrived under sniper fire and ran to a waiting armored vehicle on the tarmac. Contemporaneous press videos show Mrs. Clinton calmly bending to receive a kiss from an 8-year old Bosnian girl who told the Democratic candidate that she was happy because "there is peace now." Mrs. Clinton's secretary stated in her defense:

"I was on the plane with then First Lady Hillary Clinton for the trip from Germany into Bosnia in 1996. We were put on a C17-- a plane capable of steep ascents and descents -- precisely because we were flying into what was considered a combat zone. We were issued flak jackets for the final leg because of possible sniper fire near Tuzla. As an additional precaution, the First Lady and Chelsea were moved to the armored cockpit for the descent into Tuzla. We were told that a welcoming ceremony on the tarmac might be canceled because of sniper fire in the hills surrounding the air strip. From Tuzla, Hillary flew to two outposts in Bosnia with gunships escorting her helicopter."

I find this account credible because of a remarkably similar experience I had on my return from Europe in 2004. While most of the details remain classified, I went to Europe (ironically, also in the company of my daughter, who is not named Chelsea), flying into and out of Frankfurt, Germany. I safely escorted my daughter to Ulm, Germany, and then took a long train ride to a city I can only call a "European Capital." This capital, which is located in France, became my base of operations for the next eight days. Why eight, instead of six or seven? I'm not at liberty to say. At the conclusion of my mission in this capital (code named: City of Light), I returned by train to Ulm. My daughter (not named Chelsea) and I then traveled by train to Cologne. Why Cologne? For the smell? Again, certain aspects must remain secret.

Here the similarities between Hillary's adventure and mine become eerie and striking. After a high speed trip on an express train from Cologne to Frankfurt, we also boarded a plane in Germany for the trip home to San Francisco. We were told that the United States was currently under Threat Condition Orange, an "elevated" level suggesting serious danger of imminent terrorist attack. I saw no alternative to pressing ahead; my daughter had a play-date scheduled for the day after our return. As if to emphasize the peril, the flight attendants did an elaborate presentation of safety features of the aircraft soon after takeoff. We were issued life jackets, or at least told where they were, and were instructed on use of oxygen masks in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, such as might happen if the plane was hit by sniper fire.

I knew that the jet was capable of rapid descents, especially if all four engines failed simultaneously. President Bush, in preparation for the fall elections which were then only a few months away, had declared all of the United States a "combat zone." Fortunately, we landed safely and non-Chelsea and I serpentined our way down the concourse, looking, as signs all over the airport advised us to do, for "suspicious activity." By cell phone, I learned that our welcoming ceremony had been canceled, admittedly not because of sniper fire but because of heavy traffic on the 101. We then ran for a Marin Airporter, again not so much because of danger but because we didn't want to wait another half hour for the next one. It was a near thing, but we made it. The experience certainly impressed on me and my daughter who is not named Chelsea the dangers involved in international travel. I'm only glad that we had the same luck as Hillary Clinton in surviving our perilous journey.

Obama and Trinity United Church of Christ

And, of course, there is the further irony: Obama attends an overwhelmingly black Christian church because of the historical segregation of black churches from white. This is something else I was well aware of growing up, having spent my (de)formative years under the influence of Fundamentalist Christian dogma, in a church with a name not so different from Obama's chosen denomination. My church, which was far more prevalent in the South than elsewhere, always had its white and black versions, a feature it shared with Baptists and Methodists and other good-hearted racists. Indeed, the United Church of Christ is a hybrid denomination based historically on white European sources, the Heidelberg Catechism and Lutheran influences (which underwent various Evangelical, Reformed and Congregationalist permutations once they came ashore in the U.S.). Under American practice, of course, Christian churches became as segregated as the military, schools and all public accommodations. The segregation of churches has outlasted Jim Crow and Brown vs. Board of Education, although at this point it's probably lost much of its quality of coercion. Christ's admonition to love one's neighbor was read by such Protestant denominations within the confines of the Dred Scott decision, meaning, I guess, that one should love African-Americans with about 60% of the fervor one lavished on one's white fellow congregants.

There is now a silly game being played in the media called "pin the pastor on the candidate," where Obama, Clinton and McCain are all chastised for attending churches where irrational or anti-American sentiments were expressed by the cleric-in-chief. Under the new rules of guilt by association, the failure to stand up during services and denounce the pastor, or engage him in a fist fight, and then immediately resign from the congregation is taken as proof-positive of complicity in whatever objectionable tirade is issuing from the pulpit. In my own (admittedly minority, nontheistic) view, the whole business of religion is one massive exercise in irrationality. Indeed, that is the ultimate appeal of faith, as a flight from depressing rationality and the dismal conclusions it leads to. A pastor is a kind of facilitator of group therapy where the reigning treatment protocol is the inculcation of hopeful delusions. As long as he's up there talking about things that don't exist anyway, why not throw in, as Reverend Wright did, that the U.S. government experimented with African-Americans by injecting them with syphilis? Or, in the case of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, by blaming the 9-11 attacks on homosexual activity in the United States? Who would even notice? You've got people dying and rising from the dead, water turning to wine, burning bushes holding conversations, and a guy surviving a three-day confinement in the belly of a big fish.

Chris Kelly, who may be the funniest man currently writing in the English language, has done a hilarious send-up of the whole thing by pointing out that Bill O'Reilly currently attends a church where the "head man" is a former Nazi, meaning, of course, that the Pope was in the Hitler Youth (Kelly says that he goes under the "assumed name" of Pope Benedict XVI, but that he was previously known as "Joey Rats"). Why doesn't O'Reilly, each and every mass, get up and storm out of such a blatantly anti-American situation? Didn't Hitler declare war on America in December, 1941? Damn right he did. And although he must have known that Hitler's declaration of war was about as anti-American as you can get, Pope Pius XII actively assisted (well, maybe not actively, but when we're working guilt this way, it's like a game of horse shoes) the Gestapo during the occupation of Rome in rounding up Jewish children for exportation to extermination camps. Catholics are Christians, which implicates Bill & Hillary Clinton, John McCain and George W. Bush as well, who have singularly failed to denounce Joey Rats for his association with Pius. How do they live with themselves, knee-deep in genocide? Does the conferring of a lifetime achievement award (somehow I knew it couldn't be the Irving Thalberg Award) to Louis Farrakahn by the Trinity United Church of Christ cross any lines not already crossed by Bill O'Reilly, who supports The Surge, which supports Bush, who was supported by Hillary's vote for the Iraq War Authorization, who is supported by Bill Clinton, who is supported by Arab Sheikhs, who are in a cabal with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who supported Hitler, thus closing the circle...

This has gotten so complicated. Too bad we can't judge candidates by their own convictions anymore; however, the whole process should be a boon to history teachers.

Reverend Jeremiah's Jeremiad & Barack

My grandfather, a Greek immigrant from an island so proximate to the Turkish mainland that its definitive inclusion in Greece was not decided until after he left the island in 1908, settled in the Southern United States, never to return to his homeland. He ran cafes in Texas and the Deep South for most of his long working life, and many of them were named the Oleander Cafe in honor of the flora of his abandoned island. Some of my absolutely earliest memories were of eating in one of his cafes in Athens (no doubt not coincidental), Alabama. The local crackers got along well with Milteadis and were loyal customers. They were, of course, gently condescending, given his inferior ethnicity (that is, not Scots-Irish white trash like themselves), and few of his patrons would have been impressed that he was from the land of Archimedes, Euclid, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Until the Civil Rights Movement changed things, his cafes always had a rear entrance marked with a cardboard sign that said "Colored," and a small room with a counter served his African-American customers. Once or twice, when I was about eight years old and went down to his cafe in Grand Prairie, Texas, I saw a couple of hunched-over old black men eating the same (specialty) chili I ate at the counter out front. My sense is that my grandfather, a thoroughly decent man without a trace of arrogance in his being, must have found the apartheid system both bewildering and repellent, and I would like to believe my mother's account that when no whites were out front, my grandfather invited blacks into the front room, conspiring in a lunch counter revolution years ahead of the Freedom Riders.

The oppression of African-Americans by the United States has no historical parallels in American history. Comparing blacks, who were treated as personal property and subhuman for the first two hundred years of our history, and then as untouchables for the next one hundred years, to the experience of any other immigrant group is insensate, absurd and all-too-typical of our superficial culture. Such oppression has bred hatred, irrationality and misunderstanding in a unique way.

The hagiography of America by non-minority historians differs greatly from the views expressed by Cornel West, for example, or by Reverend Wright. One would be hard put indeed to find an African-American intellectual of serious stature, from Fredrick Douglass to Cornel West (and passing through Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and many others) who does not share Wright's essential view of American history. Since we live in a sound bite culture, Wright's diatribes can be taken out of their black context and made to sound unique; when they are replayed by Fox News, or Clinton operatives, they sound "anti-American" (Bill Clinton, to his further debasement, is currently playing up this angle). It is then an easy step to conclude that Obama is "anti-American" also, because he has been "part of the congregation."

I think what the country is struggling with is that having a candidate of partly African-American descent is different from having the usual white majority candidate. People want him to hit all the same notes as a white man, but his background is radically different. He knows many, many people who don't look at America the same way as John McCain or Dick Cheney or Henry Paulson look at the country, and these people are "involved" in his campaign. Cornel West (a professor at Princeton), for example, is an enthusiastic supporter of Obama. He describes himself as a "non-Marxist" Socialist, and admired the Black Panthers and Malcolm X as a youth. He is also Co-Chair of the Tikkun Community with Michael Lerner, which puts him on a collision course with Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semite, but Fox News could also have a field day with West's background by talking about how "radical" it is.

For me, the critical issue is whether Barack himself is "anti-American" or an anti-Semite I don't believe for a moment that he is. Of course he knows lots of people who have grown up thinking about this country in ways different from the average white person; but it's not a requirement of the office to subscribe to some hypothesized "majority" view. If we're going to say that Barack Obama can't be president because Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X or MLK said things which threaten the false and comfy view Americans prefer to have about themselves, then we have to admit we haven't come very far from Grand Prairie, Texas in 1956

The President's Compromised Immune System

On this, the ignominious fifth anniversary of the Iraq Fiasco, let us consider anew the President's latest desperate struggle to escape criminal liability, this time from routine violations of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Bush has been haranguing the House of Representatives for their inexplicable reluctance to absolve the "telecommunications" companies from the consequences of playing along with Bush & Co. since...well, when? Ay, there's one rub. When did Bush start spying on Americans without the formality (and legitimacy) of a search warrant?

George W. Bush does not want you to find out, along with many other messy details. Was it before 9/11, as suggested by a Bloomberg report that made just such a claim? That would tend to undercut Bush's Argument of Last Resort, by which he claims the authority to do anything he wants by virtue of his Article II powers "in a time of war." But even that magisterial privilege has its limitations. Why couldn't a President, even in a time of war, comply with the simple, rubber-stamp requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? If he had, there would be no question of liability in the first place. And if he found the FISA law cumbersome, out-of-date and insufficient to deal with all these "enemies who lurk," why didn't he instruct his Attorney General to coordinate a legislative amendment? Hell, those doughy pushovers in Congress will let torture go by the boards, ferchrissake.

Under my standard Canons of Bush Interpretation, I always work from the assumption that whatever rationale Bush announces for anything is not the real reason. I have to say that this approach seldom fails to cover the ground. So while W may lament the tragic predicament of giant telecommunications companies, who only wanted to serve & protect, lying prostrate and at the mercy of rapacious "trial lawyers" seeking billions of dollars for invading the privacy of their customers, I think the president's motivations may lie a little closer to home. His relentless hectoring of the House (the Millionaires' Club [the U.S. Senate], of course, has already caved) is a reliable sign that Bush's inherent paranoia is redlining again. He does not want any loose ends, like a felony indictment, hanging over his blissful retirement plans for January, 2009, and if those shysters are allowed that wholesale discovery that tends to turn up everything down to fine-grained detail, there's no telling where this thing could end up.

I imagine that if some of us loyal citizens have a BushClock on our desktop, Bush has downloaded one too. He's watching the time tick by. Yet it's beginning to drag a little for W. Nine (nine!) more frigging months! In recent years, the Congress has spent a great deal of time in a hitherto unheard-of process, the passing of ex post facto exoneration legislation. Thus, Congress has let bygones-be-bygones about obvious (and felonious) violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Federal Anti-Torture Act and the U.S. War Crimes Act. Hey, they said: the guy meant well. So let's make sure the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act are loaded up with retroactive get-out-of-jail-free cards.

So I think Bush is a little flummoxed by this intransigence in da House. What gives? It's really starting to piss him off. While I don't share Bush's anger, I do share his surprise. The House may force Bush to play his hole card, which he was beginning to think would be unnecessary. The pas de deux with Cheney: pardon Dick, resign, let Dick pardon him. Just slip it in there the last week during the usual Pardonathon. Yet it's unseemly, and -- much worse for the Cowboy -- a little weak. You mean to tell me, he's thinking, Nancy Pelosi is finally going to stand up to me?

As Hobbes Almost Said, Life is Short, Nasty & Obese

It's difficult to improve on reality sometimes. Almost always, really. I mean, how do you top the finding below?

Conclusions

"Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures." PLOS Journal (open access)

America is a very fat nation. This is perceptually reinforced whenever we find ourselves in the waiting area of a foreign airport on the trip home. Americans don't look like other nationalities. It's like spending a month in the Serengeti photographing gazelles and then suddenly encountering a herd of elephants (no offense to pachyderms - their size is adaptive and useful). Americans are stupid, too - try to imagine another cogent explanation for the presidency of George W. Bush. However, you can't cover everything at once.

31% of Americans are obese (Body Mass Index >30) and 64% of Americans are overweight (BMI >25). Somehow these numbers don't do justice to what we're talking about, but they'll have to do. Still: 60 million really, really fat people.

They're the subject of discrimination, too, as reflected in the snarky tone of this blog piece. That is why I commend the study undertaken by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Centre for Prevention and Health Services Research, Bilthoven, The Netherlands, quoted above (not an American study--the Dutch must be unusually fastidious, because most of them seem to measure in at about 6' 6" and weigh 160 lbs). You can read about Americans, however, at www.obesity.org. The point of the study is simple: while they're alive, fat people are a health problem. But then they die, sooner than their svelte countrymen, and relieve the medical "system" in America of their blubberized problems right at that stage in life when medical expenses become routine and (especially in America) astronomical. The healthy people are the ones who really cause the system to groan under their weight - they just go on living, seeing doctors, replacing joints, taking drugs, checking into the hospital.

In the study, the Dutch divided the groups into three cohorts of health-freak sub-25 BMIs, slobs (BMI >30) and smokers who were otherwise "healthy" (that's what it says). Smokers are the true heroes of medical cost-containment, of course. Like the tubs, they front-load their medical problems into the first sixty years of life, and they do hog the budget disproportionately while they're around. But the health freaks just hang on. And on.

I take back what I said about Americans being stupid. Intuitively, they have seen the light and have been practicing what the Dutch can only talk about. It is credibly predicted (who would argue?) that by the year 2025, 50% of all Americans will be obese. Next time you're near a school yard, take a look and see if that seems unreasonable. That's an improvement of 20% in cost containment volunteers in only 18 years. Let's round off and say that obesity increases at the rate of 1% per year. You see where we're going with this. We'll hit that magic mark of Universal Fat Ass no later than 2078.

Frankly, I think we'll do much better than that. It's my enduring belief in Yankee ingenuity. Once a critical mass of massiveness is reached, I think the process accelerates (indeed, it's accelerating now). Fat begets fat. Meals will keep getting larger, SuperSize giving way to GargantuanSize, then to RidiculousSize. No one will notice that anyone else is fat, and with a worthless dollar, no one will travel and encounter what homo sapiens is supposed to look like.

That's why I don't believe in doomsday scenarios, like the "unaffordability" of healthcare BS you hear so much about. Nursing homes, assisted living, all of that stuff -- none will be necessary in the long run. Americans, waddling toward an early sunset, will always find a way.

A Good Man's Weakness

For those of us for whom forty-eight years old is a milepost we only see (distantly) in the rear view mirror, it must be said that Eliot Spitzer's imminent downfall is completely understandable. And forgivable, if you want my opinion. That's a difficult age for a man. Not quite young, not quite old, the vital force still completely capable of wreaking havoc on an otherwise orderly life -- if only Spitzer had been the governor of Amsterdam, for example. It looks as though Spitzer prepped for a D.C. appearance before a Congressional committee by sampling the wares of something called Emperors Club VIP, a "high class" prostitution ring.

Which brings up a point of free market economics, which Spitzer did far more than most people to enforce during his days as New York's Attorney General. The Emperors Club ladies of the night are ranked on a scale of one star to seven, and at the top end of the menu the whores rent out at $5,500 per hour. That's much more than any lawyer I know, although one must point out, in fairness, that when a lawyer screws you it's no fun at all. I think (without being sure) that in Amsterdam (or other European countries where prostitution is legal) that no prostitute commands $5,500/hour, even when servicing a Saudi prince who uses M notes to even a coffee table leg. But here in America, of course, sex (that most indispensable of all human services) is illegal when you pay for it directly, instead of through the intermediary routes of flower shops, candy stores and bartenders. Thus, as with marijuana (another human foible freely available on the open market in the Netherlands), the market price of poontang is artificially high here in God's country.

Spitzer did more than anyone I know in public life to bring some fairness to the rigged machinations of the Wall Street markets, particularly all the insider and sweetheart arrangements between big players and the mutual funds. For a long time the funds had screwed the little investor, both by denying the average guy the timing advantages of investors preferred by the big brokerages and by the shilling that went on through the "research" arms of brokerages (see for example: Enron). Spitzer, without any help from the complicit Bush Administration, leveled the playing field about as far as it's likely to get leveled.

Now he dips his wick and he's out. Soon we'll be subjected to all the sanctimonious crap from his right-wing detractors about his "hypocrisy" and the rest of the bluenose baloney. I wish he'd pull a Sarkozy on them and say he's a man who does what men sometimes do. Pay the fine, if there is one, and move on. Dare America to just forget about it. Dare America to grow up.

Although on the Other Hand: Who Would Want to be President Now?

Being a blogger myself, I read blogs. It's what I like best about the Internet: the chance to be an information junkie. I realize a lot of what one reads in this undisciplined, unregulated world is creative speculation, and practically all hard data in blog-writing is lifted, almost entirely, from reporters doing the actual work of interviewing and investigation. Although one must say that reporters are increasingly incompetent; even on the largest dailies, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, the writers seem dreadfully uninformed about the basics of economics, law and science. The politicians count on it in using Big Media to sell their patently illogical arguments. For example, Harry Reid's mush-mouthed excuse for never seriously opposing the Iraq war: "We don't have 60 votes in the Senate, and we have to have help from the Republicans to change course." Pelosi pulls the same crap in the House, using a different but equally specious argument. For every one writer who sees through the fallacy, there are five Stenographers of the Fourth Estate who will repeat it uncritically.

There are numerous exceptions. Rosa Brooks (a Yale-educated lawyer), who writes for the Los Angeles Times is a brilliant analyst and polemicist. She always gets the law right, for example. Dan Froomkin of the WashPost is similarly good; Bush never gets an even break with Dan, and it's an imbalance which W has earned and richly deserves.

Yet the mainstream writers cannot match les enfants terribles of the true Internet underground, writers like Mike Whitney on Smirkingchimp.com. Big Media have to remain mainstream and respectable; I think when the solar system nears its end, and the sun begins its final expansion at the end of its Main Sequence, burning off the Earth's atmosphere and boiling our seas before we undergo complete vaporization, the New York Times will report that "numerous experts have cautioned that data are incomplete, and that the current average global temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit may abate sufficiently to allow life to resume on the surface within the next six to eighteen months." The non-Mainstream writers are not so constrained; the coming Apocalypse has never been described more colorfully. The Clusterfuck Man his own self, James Howard Kunstler, is another brilliant Cassandra and herald of impending disaster. As an example of their style, Whitney writes about the collapsing American economy thusly:

"Roach notes that the recession of 2000 to 2001 was a collapse of business spending which only represented a 13 per cent of GDP. Compare that to the current recession which “has been set off by the simultaneous bursting of property and credit bubbles.... Those two economic sectors collectively peaked at 78 percent of gross domestic product, or fully six times the share of the sector that pushed the country into recession seven years ago.”

"Not only will the impending recession be six times more severe; it will also be the death knell for America's consumer-based society. Attitudes towards spending have already changed dramatically since prices on food and fuel have increased. That trend will only grow as hard times set in."

There is, of course, a barely disguised glee in such doomsaying. Whitney and Kunstler positively hate what America has become. Their writing wallows in all our misfortunes. Underlying their approach is the tacit argument that the only way to move from the America of Henry Miller's "Air Conditioned Nightmare" to the Ecotopia they prefer is through a wrenching, incredibly messy, radically displacing Depression.

I have read for years, of course, about the mounting toll that America's loss of its manufacturing base; its excessive borrowing; our staggering trade imbalances; our astronomical national debt; our completely insane health care costs; our dangerous dependence on unstable sources of oil -- would take on our standard of living. One way or another, I have preferred to believe in American Exceptionalism. That while cranks and misfits might describe the disaster that must inevitably follow from such a daunting set of conditions, nothing really bad could actually happen. Those really bad things are now actually happening. I think, in truth, the full extent of the problem is being actively concealed by the government, to wit, the regulators are not being candid about the shape the big banks are currently in. The dollar is pancaking, the "derivatives" and mortgage-backed securities markets have ceased to function, the largest financial houses are allowing themselves to be taken over by foreign "sovereign wealth" funds, Americans are walking out of their houses and sending the keys back to the lenders, jobs are being lost (not added), gasoline is approaching four bucks a gallon, inflation is accelerating, the Dow Jones is where it was about eight years ago. And we have George W. Bush in charge of the American system of government.

Whitney predicts the Dow will be at 7,000 at year's end, using a different "methodology" than I used in pegging it at 9,100. My algorithm had more nuance, if you ask me. He's just being dire. But this certainly doesn't feel very good. The Iraq war debate is bound to change as the ground shifts under the feet of the Presidential candidates. It's one thing to talk about spending three trillion (as Joseph Stiglitz predicted) on an unnecessary war when times are relatively good; quite another when bread lines snake around the street and homeowners hold off the sheriff's eviction squads with sawed-off shotguns. McCain may find his admission that he doesn't know much about economics serves quite well as an exit line; no one is going to want to hear about how well the Iraqis are doing with the billions we're investing in them. The remaining question is whether anyone is going to want to preside over this triage tent beginning in January, 2009.

Staying Too Long at the Fair

I tried to warn W to leave when Karl Rove did, while the getting, while not good, was at least almost tenable; it's because, beneath all the sarcasm, I feel sorry for George W. Bush. I can't help myself - I'm simply a compassionate guy. It's along the lines of Atticus Finch's admonition to the children in Harper Lee's unforgettable "To Kill A Mockingbird." He told Scout and his son not to make fun of Boo Radley, and used the simile of killing an innocent bird to block any prosecution of Boo by the sheriff. What was the point of punishing Boo for his heroic act in saving Atticus's children from their tormentor? Boo was simple, in the sense the word is used in the Deep South. Not quite right in the head, but well-meaning. Like a dumb bird.

I know that there is something psychologically amiss with George that makes him appear indifferent to all his monumental screw-ups. It's an illusion. All his striving and ambition to live up to standards he perceives as the family destiny belie this casual disregard of his epic incompetence. He knows what he's done; his bravado is in direct proportion to the agony of recognizing he can't do anything right. Every sane person in the country whose salary does not depend on being a Bush partisan knows that he has screwed up in ways that are almost unimaginable, that seem the stuff of fable or science fiction. How can anyone surrounded by so many advisors, with so many resources to help with what is essentially a figurehead job, create so much destruction and havoc? He has broken the back of the military, the national treasury and now, at long last, the American economy. It's breathtaking, really. In a little over 7 years. And every single piece of the catastrophic destruction can be traced to a single cause: his phenomenally bad personal judgment.

It is Bush's particular form of genius. Forget all talk of IQs or personality disorders for the moment, as diverting as those can be while trying to solve the riddle of this strange and simple bird who has presided over the destruction of the United States of America. It is almost impossible to be as bad at being President as George W. Bush has been. Probabilities, aleatory considerations, the laws of chance, dumb luck -- these usually mitigate the effects of the maladroit. Not in Bush's case. "Call it," said Anton Chiguir in "No Country for Old Men," as he put his victims to the test. "What am I playing for?" the old guy asked. "Everything," Anton calmly answered. Every time Bush calls it he's wrong. Every single time, about everything.

He was wrong to ignore the al-Qaeda warnings, allowing the worst terrorist attack in American history to occur during his presidency. He was wrong to invade Iraq, the most colossal foreign policy blunder in that same history. He was wrong to declare "Mission Accomplished" at a ludicrously premature point in the war. He was wrong to persist in the occupation, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, thousands of American lives (more, now, than were killed on 9/11), and literally trillions of borrowed dollars. He was wrong to cut taxes and run huge deficits, wrong to run the national debt to over $9 trillion, wrong to mortgage America's security to an increasingly hostile Chinese government, wrong to allow Greenspan to create a Potemkin housing bubble with that borrowed-and-recycled money, wrong to resist the transition to nonrenewable energy, wrong to hamstring efforts to deal with climate change, wrong to introduce torture into American foreign policy, wrong to engage in routine violations of the Fourth Amendment against American citizens, wrong to hollow out the regulatory agencies to the point where Americans now eat downer cattle and lose entire cities to weather catastrophes.

Sure, I know. You think such effects can be produced through simple neglect. Not at all. However perverse it may be, this is talent, pure and simple. The merely incompetent could not produce the skein of catastrophes listed above. They are, for better or worse, the stigmata of a rare and perhaps incomparable gift. A man so lousy at what he does that it rises, in the last analysis, into the realm of art.

Hillary's Tax Returns

First off, a little street cred. I'm not a Hillary Basher. Or in the cyber age, a HillaryBasher. Once, in a fey and whimsical mood, I betrayed my own egalitarian principles by pointing out that Hillary's substantial (massive, really) undercarriage could be used to good effect by comparing it favorably to Obama's (or, a fortiori, Kucinich's) lower body strength by mounting the debate stage a little more dramatically. To wit, Hillary would bound onto the platform, charge a blocking sled and drive, drive, drive that sucker all the way over to Tim Russert's podium, where it would up-end that blowhard and his clipboard of "gotcha!" questions. Those short, chunky legs pumping, muscles straining the seams of that burnt-orange pantsuit -- what a moment! A great visual, but, of course -- such a suggestion casts enormous discredit on me, and I'm deeply ashamed I ever thought of it, especially when it still doubles me over with helpless laughter.

Anyway, things between Barack & Hill are going to get wild enough as it is. You can feel it coming. The other night Hillary answered a question on "60 Minutes" about Barack's religion by saying he was not a Muslim "as far as I know." Oh man, this is gonna get ugly. It's good they're not debating anymore because I don't think they could stand the proximity to each other. But back to my street cred: there is no question that I would (a) vote for Hillary vs. McCain and (b) even send Hill some money to help her cause along. Whatever else happens, I don't want the Supreme Court nominations to be in the hands of the Republicans for another 4 to 8 years, because people like Stevens, Ginsburg and Kennedy are not going to last that long on the bench. So imagine Scalia, Thomas, Roberts & Alito augmented by another three legal Neanderthals for another twenty years. Bye-bye, Roe vs. Wade. Hey, Bill of Rights! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way to the dump. Hillary will be okay. Stop whining, Obamaniacs. Anyway, pull your socks up and get to work. If you can't stand up to Hillary, how do you plan to face down the Chinese Colossus when you're in the Oval Office? America's taking a good hard look to find out.

What we can't take a good, hard look at to find out concerns Hillary's tax returns, on account she ain't showin'. This is a mess. As about so many things, I have a theory about this which may be just beneath the surface of what you've heard so far about the reasons for her reluctance. She has said she would release them "if she gets the nomination." The blow-dried, room-temp IQs on cable news (nota bene, there's a blog title: The IQs of Cable News) of course think this has to do with the practical necessity of disclosure (technically, it's never required, since they're privileged documents for her and everyone), but I suspect it has to do with timing. By waiting till then, she'll release her 2007 tax return, not 2006 or earlier. I further suspicion (as my Southern ancestors usta say) that earlier years may have been joint returns with Bill the Horndog, which must be enormously complicated 1040's, and which probably have a huge number representing adjusted gross income, since the story is that Bill routinely pulls down $100,000 + every time he addresses some group like the Allied Magneto Importers of America (the manufacturers having been disbanded for failure to achieve a quorum). But a 2007 return just might be a separate 1040 of Hillary alone, because she (and Slick Willie) have anticipated this moment for a long time. I think Bill does a ton of business with people you might associate with so-called Petro States (or PetroStates; see above) and other unsavory characters, and the inference drawn even by the emaciated intellect of the American Booboisie (op.cit., Mencken) might be unfavorable.

A separate return shields Bill from unwanted publicity and makes it more difficult for forensic accountants to figure out where, for example, Hillary got that $5 mil she loaned her campaign a few weeks ago. Reverse engineering of capital gains, dividend and interest income will suggest (but not definitively reveal) her holdings of stocks, bonds, real estate and foreign investments, but not necessarily spell out the principal amounts nor the identity of income sources. And with careful money management in 2007 (i.e., avoiding liquidations or income recognition), Hillary could conceal a lot more, confining things as far as possible to her Senate salary (which for her is lunch money).

Hey, that's okay. It passes for candor and good faith in this sullied age. The main, overarching thing that Hillary didn't want all those laid-off factory workers in Ohio to find out, like the guy who can't afford to pay for his wife's multiple scelerosis palliative treatment because his job went to China and he's uninsurable, is how frigging rich she is. Because then those tears coursing down those magnificent cheek bones (a little self rehab there) would seem, well, vaguely unconvincing. Bill & Hill, remember, like summering at Martha's Vineyard and starting the New Year off right at the Renaissance Weekend with all the other glitterati (op.cit., Herb Caen). They feel your pain, all right; they just don't want any part of it.

Two birds with one stone

I think one of Hillary Clinton's major difficulties in her campaign is that, inevitably, her major strategists tend to be old farts who are way out of touch with the way America really is these days. They just don't get it. I've written about it before (and thought about it a lot more than I've written), and it runs along the lines of what the psychiatrists call our "trance of everyday living" which governs what we see and how we see it. Phenomena assault the sensory apparatus every whichaway, and a consciousness perforce orders those phenomena according to Gestalt frames of reference. In turn these frames of reference are ordered by the formative experiences of childhood. I understand Hillary's frame of reference because it's the same as mine -- the United States as a major industrial power, possessed of a mighty military and the world's fiat currency, international leader in innovation and cutting edge technology, with the world's best health care system and a highly-educated populace. Hillary's mental picture of America is a Caucasian fantasy of emerald green lawns, kids dressed neatly for school and Dads going off to their well-paid jobs at Acme Manufacturing where they've worked as white collar execs for the last 20 years, with good bennies like health insurance and stock options. Most of this stuff isn't true anymore. America, as a nation, is like a couple in their eighties who are subsisting on a reverse mortgage, flipping through old photo albums and hoping they die before the money runs out.

Although Hillary & Bill strive mightily, like all Baby Boomers, to be as hip as the kids, to dig iPods, FaceBook and text messaging, to use numbers in the place of vowel sounds so they really reson8 with Gens x,y & z, it's actually all a little pathetic. They belong to an obsolete culture in Washington D.C. where they spent their primes and which they still see as the answer to America's many ills. Hillary has no ideas. She offers bromides instead. Faced with the lamentable state of American manufacturing, the export of jobs to China and Mexico, she suggests a "time out" on NAFTA and other trade deals, like an exasperated mom trying to impose order on a group of unruly three year olds. Take all the time you want, Hillary. A much smarter take on the situation was offered to me recently by a 90 year old veteran of the war in the Pacific. He said that jobs would flow back to America when China's wages were the same as in the United States. Why don't you talk like that, Hillary? It sounds like you're going to have to take a lot of time out.

On health care she wants to subsidize private insurance. Big whoop there. Does Obama have better ideas? Hell no. The point is that a race for the White House by a serious contender entails the abandonment of empirical solutions to empirical problems. Once a candidate strays into Reality, his prospects are finished. It would take much more space, and a higher IQ than available here Pondside, to spell out definitively why this should be the case in modern America, but we all know it's true. You cannot propose something truly useful, as measured by objective criteria, and have any hope of election.

Ideas such as? Easy, really. Tell the world we're no longer Globo-Cop. You got a problem with your local despotic immam, you deal with it. Is this "isolationism?" Who cares what you call it? It's a practical recognition of our fiscal limitations. No more Garrison Earth. This approach will allow us to reduce the military budget by 75%, maybe 90%. We retain enough to protect ourselves against nuclear attack and terrorist threats. Period. We invest the difference in socialized medicine, a national rail system and mass transportation, and an energy grid which is 100% renewable, such as a 200 square mile solar electric array in the Mojave Desert. All roofing materials will incorporate integrated solar panels. The sludge problem of desalination will be solved, and the process made cost-effective. The entire country will give up beef so that feed-lot culture will disappear, and with it its devastating impact on climate change. No more "improve gas mileage by 5 mpg by the year 2020," which the stegosauruses in D.C. see as a huge breakthrough.

The ossified Democratic and Republican Parties cannot talk like this, which is why they nominate candidates without ideas responsive to the real world. But Barack has two main advantages which are decisive for me: he would be the first President not of Northern European Christian stock, AND the first President whose last name ends in a vowel. Hey, that's what we're down to in this clown country, but at least I'm voting my principles.

Barack Can Dance

You've maybe seen it by now, on YouTube or cable news: Barack dancing a little on Ellen DeGeneres's show, either in person or by video hook-up while he was at a campaign rally. It doesn't go on that long in either case. He's a little too cool for that, but here's the thing: the guy can actually dance. If it comes to pass, if the stars align correctly so that he's inaugurated next January, then the unthinkable will have happened: America will have a President who can get down.

I know it's a cliche: White Man's Disease and all that. No finer exemplar than the incumbent. If you saw any of that footage of Bush in Africa dancing to a tribal beat, you know what I mean. Even the memory of it makes me cringe. It looks as though Bush is suffering from the end stages of some horrible degenerative nerve disease. He makes a face like a blowfish, hunches his shoulders and starts waving his arms around, pointing at the tribal chief, bobbing his head. It's a horrible sight. You wonder why someone doesn't grab a tranquilizer gun. I realize the idea is that Bush is being a "good sport," and not too much should be made of it. But that's hard to keep in mind when you realize how scary it must have been for small children to see.

When I was in high school, I was fortunate to have a basketball teammate, an all-star, Af-Am athlete, who straightened me out at a young, formative age. This friend (I'll call him Fred because that was his name) watched me on a dance floor one night, shook his head and uttered four crucial words: "Don't do too much." Fred's idea was simple and immediately grasped. It has saved me from a great deal of trouble at high school dances, college parties, wedding receptions. In the modern free-form dancing that came to dominate the rock 'n roll era, a guy is supposed to just be out there. The women bust the moves, know the fancy steps, do the spins and dips. If you'll think back, you'll remember that there was nothing sexier on God's Green Earth than watching a girl who could cut up. A guy moves with the rhythm, turns a little bit side to side. And the other critical part of Fred's guidance: whatever you do, not too much with the arms. The upper body should be still.

Bush, by contrast, always looks like a man trying to wave down a passing automobile while rolling a log in a fast-moving stream. I would not want him on my basketball team or dancing next to me at the prom. The dude's an embarrassing spaz. On the other hand, Barack does just what Fred said you should do. Subtle, suggestive, cool. His arms are bent at the elbows, he turns a little side to side, he moves on the beat. That's it. A guy who can look cool on the dance floor can command respect and calm everyone down. After watching Bush's African spectacle, how can we regard him as a leader? Why would we ever think he could have a good idea about anything when he does that?

I'm not saying that at state dinners, with foreign heads of government in attendance, that they should clear the East Room floor while Barack does a Travolta number to a BeeGee beat. Or maybe I am saying that. Yeah, I'm definitely saying that. I really wish he would, as long as he doesn't do too much.

The arbitrariness of conviction

In reply to those who claim I don't really know much about Barack Obama, I answer: true. I don't really know much about Hillary Clinton, either. I didn't know much about Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Only staffers and campaign managers, who hang out with these people, know much about them. They see them in day-to-day situations, watch how they react to surprises and contingencies calling for a decision, and they gradually form realistic appraisals about them. That's what we call human beings "knowing" someone. We don't have the insiders' vantage point. I've never seen Barack or Hillary in person; they exist as pixel images on my flat screen TV; in a close-up, I'm guessing they're represented at about a 1:2 scale, but they only have two dimensions. I listen to them, but they're mostly reformulating sentences they've said hundreds of times before. They're not actually engaged in a give-and-take with me. Maybe if I hung out with each of them for thirty days or so, and we talked for a few hundred hours about just anything that occurred to us, and went to a ball game and to a bar, and played chess or Scrabble and watched Jeopardy! together, maybe shot some hoops, and I got my guitar out and we sang "Margaritaville," and then I asked each of these lawyers for help on some complicated legal issue I'm working on...well, then I'd probably actually have the basis for an opinion.

The odds of those things happening aren't very good, are they? I suppose when the Founding Fathers put their ideas of democracy together, the structure for it, the connection between candidate and electorate was much closer to what I've just described than it is now. The operation of the town hall was close to their experience; it was unlikely, in the Concord election of Selectmen in 1795 or so, that the local Yankees would put the village drunk in charge of their finances. As visionary as they might have been, there was no way for Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin to imagine the post-McLuhan Age of virtual reality. Essentially, we still use the same system they devised, but the candidates who succeed now are not necessarily the people who would do best at the level of one-to-one interaction I described above. They're the ones who are adept, under the guidance of their handlers, at manipulating the images they project to appeal to broad-based demographics. I think we all know that. When we express our preference for a candidate, however, we are not basing it on the appeal of their "image;" rather, we are using our intuitive powers of perception to imagine what this person would be like if we actually had the opportunity to get to know him/her. It's possible, if I ever had the chance at any sort of intimacy, that I would like Hillary more than Barack; she might be funnier, quicker with an insight, more reassuring in her comprehension.

I don't even understand very well what process finally produced these two as the "inevitable" candidates for the Democrats. I would surmise that it's not an accident that one is a woman and the other is African-American. Both seemed like plausible candidates. The mainstream media saw the "story line" implicit in their choice and began playing them up. Let's face it, it's a more compelling narrative than Joe Biden versus Chris Dodd. After they seemed inevitable, after their images were burned into the psyche of the American populace, it then became our job to form some kind of "commitment" to one or the other, even though we did not really have much of a role in narrowing our choices to these two.

That's how it works now in the World of Mass Media Man. Don't pretend it doesn't. You can come at me with your "arguments," and your "insights" into the candidates based on something you've read on the Web written by some special pleader; and I can counter with some obscure thing I've read somewhere else. And the truth is neither one of us will be very convincing.

The Discomfiture of the Caucasians

Now that Barack Obama appears to be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, we are beginning to see the first signs of overt racism from what you might call the White Establishment. The form such racism takes is subtle, an obeisance to the "enlightened" age in which we live, but its telltale feature is the condescension of those who have always thought they owned the system to someone they view as getting above his place in society. I thought about this while speed-reading through William Kristol's latest steaming pile in the New York Times, called "It's All About Him." Kristol's "thesis," if you want to call it that, is that Barack Obama's reasons for not wearing an American flag lapel pin are "grandiose" (I kid you not), because instead of simply saying that he chose to discontinue wearing this decal, he framed it in terms of a "more patriotic" reaction to 9/11; namely, his resolve to "speak out on the issues." This, Kristol reasons, is in some way unbearably egotistical and a clue to an underlying personality derangement.

Of course, Kristol must know that the flag pin has taken on the sinister characteristics of the Death's Head in Nazi iconography -- it's worn by all the Neoconservatives, such as himself, as a clubby reminder that they own the franchise on nationalism and power. And as the soft, squishy, preppy scion of wealthy and highly-educated parents who saw to it that Billy attended the Collegiate Preparatory School in Manhattan before his matriculation at Harvard, who did things the old-fashioned way (by having the track greased by family influence), he's naturally impatient with anyone who doesn't see what a great place America is. Even if that someone is from a background where his forebears first entered the country in 1619 as slaves, where by a 1645 court decree an African could legally be held in captivity for life, with no recourse; where he was viewed, in fact, as 3/5ths of a person for some (white) purposes and as a nonentity for all other reasons. Even if the American black constituted one-third of the population of the slave states (4 million out of a total population of 12 million in the 15 slave states in 1860), they were essentially invisible. Go back through all the names and faces of the 43 American Presidents -- all white, all Northern European. What the hell is Barack Obama doing on the verge of becoming the President?

It's got guys like William Kristol very, very worried. It threatens the established order of things, the one where people like him always win, where class and privilege (look at George W. Bush!) carry the day versus talent and brains because that's the way things are supposed to be. The system has certainly taken care of William Kristol; all he had to do was attend elite schools and then go into his dad's business of selling conservative bullshit.

So it must be especially galling when an American Negro begins dissing his preferred form of patriotism, the gaudy display of symbols and insignia, and talking all this trash about "struggling" Americans who need government help. Kristol deplores the "nanny state;" the idea is to make it on your own, just like William Kristol did, through diligence and hard work. There's a great irony there, of course; those in the comfy class actually hate the idea that someone without their advantages, from the lower classes, could become president of the United States through skill, cunning and hard work. It's what they hated, really, about Bill Clinton. He outsmarted them. And now here comes another preternaturally gifted politician, a guy who keeps getting cooler and sharper as he grows into his role, as he realizes once again that he's just one of those guys who frigging win, even on the biggest stage of all -- and William Kristol and David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and the rest of them are absolutely freaking out, because it's ten times worse this time around -- this guy's a Negro. What makes it worse is that Obama was absolutely right about the Iraq War (he called it a "dumb idea" before the invasion) and Kristol's most famous, most frequently quoted line is his howler about there "being a lot of 'pop psychology' that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni," as he assured us the Iraq War would be a cakewalk that would cost America virtually nothing.

Which means that Little Billy not only has to deal with the idea that Obama is hipper, sharper and better looking than he is - he has to come to terms with the inconvenient reality that Obama is smarter than he is, which in Kristol's pasty, dough-colored world was the only advantage he thought he had left. And now Obama won't even wear his merit badge.

I am reminded of the great line from J.D. Salinger's book "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters," in a footnote though it was, that sometimes the Universe is so bountiful in its sense of justice that one might believe "in a cosmic Santa Claus."

Nader's Run for the White House

At one level, admittedly an idealistic one, I would point out that the words "Republican Party" or "Democratic Party" are not found in the Constitution. The domination of American politics by these two parties results from a de facto monopoly, and their ownership of power in the United States makes it virtually impossible to dislodge them. They have been in power so long that they have changed the rules of the Senate, for example, with the "60 vote" rule, which is not a Constitutional feature, and it is assumed that all committee chairmanships and assignments are done on the basis of only two caucuses. The "independents," such as Lieberman and Sanders, simply choose which of the two main parties they wish to align with.

While we speak of liberals in the Democratic Party as being "left" or even "leftists," in truth the main political scene in this country does not have a Left in the sense that such a term developed in French politics (the designations "gauche et droit" dividing the Parliamentary aisle). In the way that Karl Marx or classical political thinkers would have used the term, Leftist referred to social ownership of the means of production, social services, etc., as opposed to private enterprise. The French still go through occasional spasms where industry or part of it is "socialized," e.g., reflecting the continued vitality of true Leftist thinking in that country. Neither of the two main political parties in the U.S. varies from a capitalist orthodoxy in any significant degree. The Democrats are a center-Right party, and the Republicans, increasingly, are a Far Right phenomenon.

Nothing in the Constitution, which we tend to forget about because of the long domination by only two parties (which we identify now as synonymous with "Government"), prohibits a person unaffiliated with the Republicans or Democrats from running for office. If he can satisfy the entrance requirements, Nader has the right to run. The objections, of course, arise from considerations of Realpolitik; Nader tends to draw votes which would otherwise go to the mainstream Democratic candidate. Nader's impact on the Florida vote count in 2000 was considered decisive in favor of Bush, although he disputes this conclusion with some logical arguments. Operatives in the Democratic Party resent his gate-crashing because he doesn't have a real chance to win, and because it runs the risk of giving us another Bush, this time in the form of the mentally unbalanced John McCain.

There is no way to dismiss the Democratic Party's complaint decisively; they're right, of course. In a tight race, Nader gets in the way of the Democrats. The arguments of the Democrats, of course, would be easier to take if they had used what power they had to block the excesses of the Bush Administration. For example, why didn't they use the 60 vote rule in the Senate to block Bush's tax cuts, which have been fiscally ruinous? Why didn't they use their majority ownership of the House to deny all funding for a continuation of the Iraq War? Why didn't they use the 60-vote rule in the Senate to refuse passage of the Military Commissions Act until habeas corpus was restored, and until the war crimes exonerations were removed? They had the clear, invincible power to do all these things. Their failure to do anything, to play ball with Bush when they didn't have to, validates Nader's central point.

In terms of the present race between Obama and Clinton, why does neither ever argue for a streamlined military which is commensurate with the nature of a true terrorist threat? Where are the calls, for example, for a 25% reduction in military spending? Well, as the Democrats will say, you simply can't do that. We'll look soft on defense. The American electorate isn't smart enough, they're saying with a wink, to figure out matters of detail and nuance. We have to keep spending way too much money just to keep up appearances. Then we look tough and resolved, even if it's a stupid waste of money. Same with the health care issue; it has to remain a business-for-profit in this country; hell, this isn't Denmark, they say.

It sure isn't. Nader does say all these things, of course, and the Democrats claim (correctly?) that he can say them because he can't actually get elected. So we're stuck, permanently, with two ossified parties that cannot react to reality. Is that it? Nader's idealism (not his megalomania, as Democratic operatives have it) impels him to run. He doesn't like accepting that cynical conclusion without a fight. No one has to vote for him, and few people do. But don't attack him for doing what he thinks is right.

The McCain Mutiny

Whatever else one says about it, at least the story of John McCain's reported affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman (what a great name for an Other Woman) is fun. It isn't fun to contemplate this latter-day Captain Queeg actually sitting in the Oval Office. He strikes me as yet another intellectual dilettante with narcissistic deficiencies similar to the current occupant of the White House: McCain seems unaware that we're aware that he's unaware that we're on to his whole phony game of pretending to be an honest "straight-talker." This is more or less exactly the same mistake the country made in 2000, and if we make it again...

So the press and the public are pretending to be utterly engrossed in whether Johnny Mac was "warned" in an "intervention" by his "staff" that his relationship with Ms. Iseman "appeared inappropriate." All these words are in quotes because this is the way the game is being played. McCain, who may have been warned by "associates" who were not technically "staff," is artfully engaging in etymological niceties that make Bill Clinton's meditation on the meaning of "is" seem candid and forthcoming by comparison. In his brief remarks yesterday, McCain reassured everyone that he had done nothing to "betray the country," which seems a little off the main point, yet it's hard to take all his words in their full context without reaching the conclusion that he's saying, believe it or not, "I never had sex with that woman, that Ms. Iseman."

David Brooks of the New York Times, the paper which started all this, lays the whole thing off on a rivalry among McCain staff members that led one of them to mutiny. Brooks then stated that McCain's "career will be over" if it turns out he actually had an affair. As this thing has developed, I think that's right, because McCain has decided he has to stonewall this thing and hope no one can prove he's lying.

So to review a few basic rules about men and adultery: Men are not accused of having affairs; they have affairs. McCain obviously spent too much time around Vicki Iseman and the inevitable happened. A man's sexual fidelity is like the capsizing of a sailboat; the trick is to avoid reaching that angle of critical heel, which will always occur with the right combination of familiarity and opportunity, such as traveling together on a private jet to a remote location. This is asking for it, and McCain, after all, left his first wife for his present wife as the result of an affair with his present wife, although it was his present wife at the podium yesterday assuring everyone that McCain would never do what he had obviously done with her. Remarkably, Mrs. McCain's head did not explode during her brief remarks.

The Straight Talker has now hired noted go-to mouthpiece Robert Bennett to stage manage the complexities of his forthright denial. The reasons for this can be figured out: there is the implied threat of a defamation suit if anyone takes the story to the next level and states unequivocally that McCain had an affair; and, using the attorney-client and work product privileges to keep everything discreet, Bennett can talk to all the players for McCain and help them get their stories straight. Remember that Clinton's weasel-out foundered when Monica started talking to Linda Tripp, plus Monica's decision to save a little Presidential Splooge on her blue dress as a fond keepsake of happier times under the Oval Office desk. In this sense, McCain's co-respondent is a better choice: quieter, more worldly, definitely way north of legal age. Maybe she's a "collector;" just a hunch. Iseman is maintaining a very low profile, probably confining her remarks on the matter to conversations with Robert S. Bennett, Esq.

So to sum up in a way that Bennett cannot find actionable: I think McCain was boinking Iseman, which is significant ethically only if it influenced his judgment on matters pending before Senate committees involving the two of them, but is significant electorally because it's game-over for the Express if the facts come to light. There is probably no way to prove the affair conclusively unless one of the two principals admits it, which is not going to happen. That is why the Times has confined itself to circumstantial evidence and the suspicions of staffers; however, the presence of this smoke probably indicates a major forest fire somewhere. There is always the possibility of a bombshell - an eyewitness hotel clerk, a bartender who saw the two of them nuzzling. The usual mistakes the lovestruck make. As far as Honest John is concerned, he doesn't care how he gets out of it as long as he gets out of it, and as the lone survivor of the Keating Five, he might just wriggle out again.