What Undertow Pulls at Paul Krugman?

Perhaps you are like me and have found, over the Bush-ravaged years of 2001 to the present, consolation in the wise and steady analysis of Paul Krugman, resident economics columnist on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. He was among the first to suggest that the Iraq fiasco would be ruinously expensive and that the financial course BushCo had charted for the country was unsustainable. He has been right far more than he has ever been wrong. When it seemed that Bush's power was invincible, Krugman was confident that, in fact, Bush and his administration did not know what they were doing and that a helluva mess was being created that would require "adults," at some later point, to clean up. If anything, the conjoined crises of financial meltdown, oil shortage and unaffordability, and runaway federal budget and trade balance deficits are worse than Krugman predicted. I think the question now is not whether serious remedial action is required of "adults" who succeed Bush, but whether even such wiser heads are going to have the resources to deal with what may become a chronic, structural recession.

At some point, however, around the time that Ben Bernanke was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Krugman began pulling his punches. I thought perhaps it had something to do with collegial courtesy; Bernanke, like Krugman, is on the economics faculty at Princeton, and maybe Krugman realized that his "wilder" utterances might come in for enhanced scrutiny by readers who in fact are the ones setting the policies that he criticizes. He wrote a column a while back in which he lauded Bernanke's bailout of Bear Stearns and suggested that the American economy had "dodged a bullet," holding out the hope that all of our problems with a deflating housing market, $130+ barrels of oil, rising unemployment, runaway real inflation, growing unemployment, dwindling consumer spending, collapse of the commercial airlines sector (as their very "business model" has been called into question by the cost of jet fuel), the struggling independent trucking industry -- all this could be handled with a little interest rate jiggering and other legerdemain by his Princeton colleague.

Krugman has also in not very subtle ways indicated his ardent support for Hillary Clinton. This became noticeable in a series of crushingly boring dissections of the two health care plans of Obama and Clinton. Krugman couched his criticism in terms of what is apparently to him a self-evident truth: that the content of the platform of a candidate is a reliable guide to his later style of governing. This strikes me as nuts; George W. Bush ran on a platform of a "humble foreign policy" in which "nation-building" was anathema to the interests of the USA. Since taking office, Bush has done little else except meddle in Middle Eastern and Afghan affairs.

My own take is that Krugman simply used his analysis of these boilerplate formalisms from the two candidates as a means to signal his support for Hillary Clinton in an "objective" fashion. Lately, however, he has been less subtle. For example, from the column of May 26:

"So what should Mr. Obama and his supporters do? Most immediately, they should realize that the continuing demonization of Mrs. Clinton serves nobody except Mr. McCain. One more trumped-up scandal won’t persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along. But it might incline a few more of them to stay home in November."

This was Krugman's handling of Clinton's "RFK assassination" gaffe. What's strange about the solution Krugman prescribes is that he places the onus on Obama's supporters to remedy the problem of Hillary Clinton's habit of extraordinarily divisive and, at times, borderline crazy public statements. She's the one who made up, out of whole cloth, the lie about being shot at in Bosnia. In what sense is that "trumped up?" It's not a scandal; it's a strong indication of a reality deficit. Ditto her miraculous intercession in the Irish peace talks. Her "phone call at 3 am ad" was a home invasion scenario. The literal-minded can play games with the imagery all they want, and simply treat the story line of a lone mother at home with children, including her vulnerable, pretty teenage daughter, as coincidentally suggestive of a crime scene but really a stand-in for the general fear of "terrorist" attacks, even though this tableau makes absolutely no sense in terms of terrorist threats. And if you want to buy into Krugman's analysis, go ahead and agree with him that the "RFK assassination" reference was just to help us remember that campaigns sometimes last into June.

So: maybe Krugman received an indication at some point, like other liberal academics (Robert Reich, for prominent example), that the Clinton Dynasty might find a place for him in their new Administration. I don't know; that's speculation. He might welcome the change. For he's a terrible writer. It's painful to read an entire column in which 95% of all sentences begin with conjunctions or prepositions. I've thought of writing an entire blog piece as a parody of his style. And maybe I will someday. If I feel like it. Because that's what you can do with a blog. And no one will stop you. But then no one is likely to hire you in their administration. Because you're a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Yet maintaining your integrity. And not suggesting to people that their problems with Hillary Clinton are just something they made up.

Clinton Campaign Takes a Turn For the Creepy

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out. Hillary Clinton, in a recent interview with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader.

While it's always unsettling to watch a personality fragment into a million shards right out in public view, I admit that I've become fascinated about Hillary's future possibilities. Not about winning the nomination, which I don't think can happen. No - fascinated by the prospect of what she might say next. This one was a lulu, the best yet. She was warming up with her description of her backers as "ordinary working voters, white voters." And the one about Barack not being a Muslim "as far as she knew." Those were good, and by good, I mean sick.

But this was completely deranged. She apologized within a couple of hours (to the Kennedys, actually), but her apology didn't make any sense. How could it?
Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee says she was only referring to her husband and Kennedy “as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer.” Well, sure. In fact, if you wanted to find examples of the nominating process going well into the third or fourth round of voting at the convention, a little superficial historical research will do the trick. But look at what Hillary actually said and you'll see that's not what she had in mind.

In June, 1968, Bobby Kennedy, another charismatic political superstar, had just won the California primary and was poised to win the Democratic nomination as its presidential candidate. He had beaten back the insurgent campaign of Eugene McCarthy. He would take on the wily Nixon in the general election and restore Camelot to the White House, all within five years of losing the first Kennedy to an assassin's bullet. And then in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian gunman, blows the dream away.

It's astounding that all these years after Sigmund Freud did his groundbreaking work in the field of the unconscious, we are still so slavishly literal in our interpretation of what people say and mean. Dick Durbin, for example, Barack's Senate colleague and backer, defended Hillary by saying she and Barack are "good friends" and she would never wish him any harm. Umm-hmm. Never, huh? If you want to understand what Hillary meant, break her statement down into two categories:

1. Bill had not clinched the nomination until June, 1992, in the California primary.
2. Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, but not the nomination in June, 1968. The political thinking was that he had knocked McCarthy out of the race, setting up a one-on-one against Hubert Humphrey (whom he defeated in California) at the convention.

Hillary is talking about what's behind Door Number 2. Barack's got the momentum, the magic, the flow of history moving his way. He's young, he's talented and he's charismatic. He's a lot like Bobby Kennedy, in other words (Barack is actually older than Bobby was in 1968). People like believing in Barack for the same reason they liked the Kennedys: because he makes them feel like there are fresh possibilities in this tired, oppressed land, however nebulous and inchoate those "ideas" are (and they're very nebulous and inchoate). How do you beat that? Hillary has the racists and the white women over 50 as her key demographics; that's it. Obama has everything else. She needs a miracle.

Hillary's quest for this nomination borders on (hell, is) obsession. Where it came from is anyone's guess, but my thinking is that she feels victimized by talented, charming smoothies who get what they want because people (including young women) fall all over themselves to give it to them. She's endured this marriage to a womanizer who humiliated her at every turn by lavishing his attention on women who never approached her own levels of educational, professional and intellectual accomplishment. She endures it all, lives the lie, even moves to New York so she can be a Senator so she can be the President. And she won't be a weak, compromising, whimpering Mama's boy President like Bubba. She'll be a ball-buster and vindicate suppressed women everywhere. She's smarter than he is, more resourceful, tougher in the clinches. Afraid of nothing. It's all lined up. The payoff at last.

And then this...this...black guy from Illinois, with his "pretty speeches" and tall, lean body strolls to center stage, wins a long string of early primaries trading on his charms, and she's back in the shadow again. How can this keep happening to me? I'm so much better! So, you know...under stress and anxiety, and the mounting millions in personal debt, the fatigue of nonstop campaigning -- things slip out, like a memory of sniper fire in Bosnia that never happened, or conscious expression of an unconscious wish. She's just reminding us that anything can happen. She's counting on that.

Hillary' s Meta-Racism, Obama and Schrödinger's Cat

Now hold on a minute, I might have something here.

Hillary Clinton's latest gambit might be called "meta-racism." The virtual world of electronic media eventually gets around to creating a meta-everything, and this may be its latest artifact. It works this way. Hillary claims that she does not encourage her supporters to vote for her because, ipso facto, she's white, even though she cites (and even lauds) her popularity among "ordinary working Americans, white Americans." Rather, she urges these ordinary white working Americans, and "progressive"-minded Americans everywhere, to simply face the facts. Racist Americans (real racists) are not going to elect Barack Obama in November; sad but true, she laments. So when choosing between candidates in the Democratic primaries, everyone who wants a Democrat to win should vote for her in a very race-conscious way which is not, paradoxically, racism, but simply a form of meta-racism necessary in order to achieve ultimate victory.

Now I harbor a sneaking suspicion that among Hillary's throngs of supporters in such states as West Virginia and Kentucky, and in "rural" Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, and in many other places, are quite a few people who aren't so much meta-racists as they are the gen-yoo-wine article. And while I'm being cynical, I might as well admit my other suspicion, which is that Hillary sure as hell knows this. So I'm saying that Hillary is deliberately courting a white racist vote, by being "their" candidate, under the guise of simply doing what's right for the party, which is making sure she's the nominee come November, the one who can win.

The meta-racist argument proceeds on the assumption that America in 2008, almost four hundred years after the first importation of African slaves to North America, is just not quite ready, not just yet, to elect a black person President, and that's what Hillary means when she whispers to party bigwigs that "Obama can't win!"

Yet we don't really know that, do we? Presidential campaigns are often full of surprises. The most unlikely people sometimes succeed. George W. Bush in 2004, with Iraq erupting into nonstop violence, no WMDs found, every rationale for the invasion exposed as a blatant lie - and he does better in 2004 than in 2000? Many people now talk of a younger, post-racial electorate coming of age, of a galvanized African-American voting bloc, of Southern states now in play for the Democrats, all of these changes in the electoral scene taking place against a background of great economic and geopolitical uncertainty, and against huge disenchantment with Bush in particular and Republicans in general.

It seems to me that the state of electoral politics in this country calls to mind the conjecture of Schrödinger's Cat, that clever thought problem dreamt up by
the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. It was his subtle criticism of the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics with all its wave/particle dualities, its indeterminacies, its dependence upon observation to fix the state of things. If you're a cat lover, as I am, it's a little unsettling that Erwin used a cat as the example, but I suppose "Schrödinger's rhino" lacks the same bemusing quality. So the experimental arrangement involves a cat sealed in a box with an element which may or may not emit an alpha particle as radiation, but if it does, the particle will be detected by a Geiger counter, which will trip a hammer breaking a vial of hydrocyanic acid, which will kill the cat. The paradox lies in the clever coupling of quantum and classical domains. Before the observer opens the box, the cat's fate is tied to the wave function of the atom, which is itself in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. Thus, said Schrödinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, observes the cat, and "collapses'' its "wave function."

Lots of people, including Einstein (who thought it was brilliant), have weighed in on this paradox. While the box is closed, the Copenhagen Interpretation forces us to conclude that the cat is both alive and dead, with its "superposition" undetermined. It is not until the "wave-collapse" moment of opening the box that the cat's status is determined. But surely, argued Schrödinger, the cat was alive or dead before the box was opened. Simply because subatomic particles exhibit the "superposition" quality of wave/particle duality until the moment that observation "fixes" their position doesn't mean that macroscopic entities like cats behave the same way. It was a head-scratcher for Niels Bohr and the rest of the Copenhagen gang, that's for sure. Schrödinger himself said later in life that he wished he had never thought of that cat.

It seems to me that Hillary Clinton is suggesting that we never open the box and find out. Is Barack's campaign alive or dead? Is the country so racist it cannot elect an African-American or not, is something new happening in this country or not? I'd like to know; I'd like us to perform the act of observation. And beyond that (and I don't know how Schrödinger would fit this into his analysis): if the Democratic Party really is completely incapable of winning in this country unless it runs candidates who appeal to Appalachian racists, and racists everywhere else; if that's still where we are almost four hundred years after slavery began, and after the 1868 ratification of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause, which was supposed to have "freed" the slaves once and for all; if those Constitutional guarantees are still meaningless because of the relentless and ineradicable bigotry of this country, then I'm not sure I even care anymore. Because it's pretty obvious that at such a point we will have looked inside and seen something dead, and an old, querulous white coot like John McCain, a guy who voted against Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday, and who casually hooks himself up to religious, ethnic, and social bigots, is good enough for this place.

So give up that line of argument, Hillary. Get out of the way. Let's open the box and take a peek.

John McCain's Pastor Problem, Revisited: Was Hitler an Agent of God?

In Sunday school, Revelations was always my favorite book of the Bible. The church I attended was pretty square, and too much time was given over to dreary stuff about sin and redemption, all the things you weren't supposed to do (anything fun), and of course that macabre crucifixion story, forever and ever, amen. But Revelations -- as close as a Fundamentalist church ever got to the psychedelic, this side of glossolalia anyway. I liked the theories I heard later (not in Sunday school) that John of Patmos was tripping when he wrote it, maybe stoned on righteous (or Righteous) hash, or smoking some of the opium crop growing there around the Seven Churches in Asia Minor.

The Book of Revelations is full of beasts, dragons, pale horses, war, lakes of fire, bottomless pits, Satan, thousand-year reigns, Gog and Magog, and Chapter 20 is the main action sequence. It reads like a screen treatment for a Biblical "Star Wars." 1:"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. 2: And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years." While the bust of the Devil is going down, the righteous are raised up and live and reign with Jesus for a thousand years. The rest of humankind, quick and dead, sleep through it, little suspecting what's going to happen at the end of that first Millenium. Hint: you don't wanna know.

When the thousand years are up, Satan's let loose again. You might ask why. It's like asking why the girl in the deserted house always walks down the dark hall when she hears a strange noise. I guess God just has a good feel for narrative flow. Sure, he could wrap things up right there, but that would leave the Faithful feeling cheated out of a big finish. Glenn Close needs to come up out of the bath tub one more time. So the Devil (staying in character and having learned nothing from a thousand years chained up in a bottomless pit) immediately hoofs it (heh heh) and starts deceiving the nations in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, and to gather them to the battle of Armageddon, which may refer to Har Megiddo in present-day Israel. Once Old Scratch has them in position, surrounding the camp of the Saints, fire comes down out of heaven and devours the Devil's Irregulars. Satan is then cast into the lake of fire and brimstone (which makes the Bottomless Pit seem like the Ritz Carlton), alongside the beast and false prophet, and is tormented day and night forever. The Final Judgment follows soon thereafter.

That's only the Cliff Notes version of the End Times, of course. I'm leaving out some other great stuff, like Chapter 13's description of the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. (As a kid, I wondered: did each head have ten horns, meaning seventy horns and seven hundred crowns? If some of the heads didn't have horns, that would be one spooky beast. Well, either way, actually.) Also, I would be remiss not to mention the seven angels with seven vials with the seven plagues, because that is some wild, wild stuff. Quick recap on the Plagues: #1: sores on those engaged in Beast-worship. #2: turning the sea into the blood of a dead man. #3: turning rivers into blood (kinda derivative, Angel No. 3). #4: vial poured on sun, angel acquires scorch-power vs. men. #5: vial pouring on seat of the Beast, which turns out the lights and causes the Beast to gnaw his tongue for pain. It is when Angel Numero Seis opens the Sixth Vial (have they made a movie called "The Sixth Vial" and if not, why not?) and pours it out on the Euphrates that things go freaky-deaky. The river dries up and three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon (guess who? He-e-e-e-e-e-re's Johnnnny!) and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. "Rev. 16:14: For they are the spirits of the devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty." So Angel No. 6 has the vial that's really vile, because it brings on the final battle. Angel No. 7, batting clean up, pours his vial on the air and a voice comes out of Heaven saying, "Th-th-th-at's all folks!" Actually the voice says "It is done," and I'm accurate here because I'm not going to run the same risk as someone else I could name, as you'll soon see.

I'll have some of whatever John of Patmos is having. And speaking of amphibious creatures, John Hagee, John McCain's Go-To Pastor, looks a lot like a mutant bull frog with a learning disability. The latest bad news on Hagee is that he gave a speech, or sermon, or was simply ranting and raving about Hitler's role as an agent of God who acted as a "hunter" driving the Jews back to Israel so the Final Act could get underway. You know, let the End Times roll.

Now I recounted a lot of Revelations to (a) have fun and (b) make a point. Isn't it strange, after reading through that delirious account of angels with killer vials, frogs as Army recruiters, Devils-in-Chains, and goats (or whatever) with seven heads and ten horns, that the part everyone would find weird is calling Hitler an agent of God? That's so... tame. You're going to compare that little squirt from Austria with a seven-headed animal with seventy horns and seven hundred crowns? The Third Reich with Gog and Magog? You're messing with me, right? Hitler was just a man, a shitty little man to be sure, but just a man. The Devil-Dragon, the Beast with the Number 666, the False Prophet, all with their frog-filled mouths, these are spirit world creatures of immense power, of unimaginable evil. And they're completely mythological, the fabulisms of a guy who sounds like he was trying to shake off the DT's after a four month bender on ouzo.

So if I've got this right, millions and millions of Americans have absolutely no trouble if John Hagee believes literally in the End Times story I just summed up. That's why the Evangelicals are such fervent supporters of Israel, because the Jews need to be there when Vial No. 6 kicks things into high gear. So no problem with all of that; and if John McCain seeks support from a man who really, really believes that's how it will all play out, it's a sign not of clinical schizophrenia but of sound religious faith. It's a plus for McCain's campaign. The only thing pulling Hagee down is he got a little creative with this Hitler stuff. If he had kept to the story and said that God got the Devil-Dragon to do it, everything would have been all right.

Well, I've got a word or two for John Hagee, because I paid attention in Sunday school. Seems to me his exegesis runs afoul of the very last chapter of the Bible, Revelations 22: 18: ..."If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book." Vials Nos. 1 through 7, inclusive, John-Boy. I'll see ya; wouldn't want to be ya.

Teachings from Chairman Kahn

I mentioned a while back that I was reading On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn, polymath, RAND Corporation fellow and model for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." Herman Kahn didn't look much like Peter Sellers's caricature, actually; indeed, not at all. He died fairly young, probably for reasons associated with a lifelong problem of obesity, which again is nothing like his movie version.

The brilliance, however, and the blood-chilling willingness to look at any existential situation which humans can create, no matter how horrible, with a steady, penetrating eye are the same. That implacable fixity of purpose allowed him to "think the unthinkable," and it's evident throughout his long book that he delighted in exploring ideas all the way to their inevitable, awful conclusions, wherever they led. I suppose that's what prompted his occasional vilification, along with his Cold Warrior conservatism.

Society needs thinkers like Herman Kahn as a kind of reality check, so we don't get carried away with idealistic notions about ourselves. That self-glorification, I believe, has been a major impediment to American innovation in the face of global challenges. Kahn was a physicist first and foremost and looked at any problem from a rigorous and detached perspective. Writing about the revulsion that most Americans felt in pondering the value of life after a thermonuclear war, Herman pointed out a simple and homely analogy, our tolerance for traffic fatalities, as an example that we are perhaps far more callous about the suffering of others than we like to think. After even a catclysmic war, the survivors would go on, seeking meaning and even happiness to the extent possible. It's simply part of our genetic disposition, however much we like to believe in heroic traits of empathy that would make us "envy the dead."

In modern times, under the heavy influence of conventional political correctness (where idealization of homo sapiens is de rigeur), we're inclined to characterize such sang-froid as "sociopathy," a term often hurled in the general direction of the Presidential incumbent. This criticism (in his case) has to do, largely, with deaths in Iraq, American and indigenous. The sad truth is that if the president is "sociopathic" about such deaths, so are most Americans. I think the true grieving for the fallen American soldiers in Iraq is largely confined to the families and comrades-in-arms of the dead and wounded. Most Americans don't think about the Iraqis at all. Most Americans have compartmentalized the Iraq war as useless and futile and so don't see the outcome as affecting their daily lives in any meaningful sense, except as a waste of money. So we go about our business, as news of the war retreats from the front pages and becomes a kind of dull buzz in the background.

One could even trot out Herman's car wreck analogy on the subject of sociopathic indifference. As relevant today as ever. When he was writing, in 1960, the U.S. had a population of about 180 million with about 40,000 traffic-related fatalities per year. Today the numbers are about 42,000 fatalities and a population of about 300 million. The improved statistics no doubt reflect major advances in safety design, such as air bags and inertial seat belts. The term "traffic fatality" includes pedestrian deaths caused by cars and motorcycle deaths, along with a few other categories which are motor vehicle related. Kahn pointed out that if you lowered the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, you could probably eliminate most deaths. In our era, it seems reasonable to say that most deaths could be eliminated by a reduction in speed to 35 mph, given the improvements in car safety. There would still be deaths caused by bad weather, driving over cliffs or into water, etc., but it isn't difficult to imagine a drastic reduction in mortality, maybe by 90% or more.

And as I write this, the price for oil is topping $130 per barrel. Since the power necessary to overcome air resistance increases by the cube of increasing speed, lower speeds mean improved gas mileage. Indeed, at 35 mph (enforced by governors placed on car engines), it isn't difficult to imagine all our personal transportation needs being met by electric cars, eliminating gasoline altogether. So: virtually no deaths and no oil importation. It seems likely as well that since it might take 12 or 14 hours to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles at such a tortoise-like pace, the demand for high speed rail would increase dramatically. Finally, imagine that all cars were equipped with breathalyzer interlock systems that did not permit operation of the slow moving electric car by a driver with a BAL in excess of .02 (the standard in such countries as Sweden, where the designated driver is a social institution). The roads would be about as safe as we could make them.

So why don't we do all of that? Because it's inconvenient and because we've set the economy up to run at a faster pace. We tolerate all that blood and gore on the highways, all those tragic deaths, all that wasted gasoline, the growing problem with the balance of trade, our funding of autocratic regimes in the deserts of the Middle East, because it's just easier to own a car of any size we want and drive it as fast as we can to get where we're going, and because we perceive that more money can be made living that way. All the deaths caused by driving too fast for safety are a tolerable and necessary side effect of those simple values, or so the evidence of our behavior indicates. So even though the total deaths per year exceed the total soldier fatalities in Iraq by a factor of 10, we don't care, even though we could obviously do something about it immediately.

As I say, that guy Kahn was a smart dude. Makes you think, doesn't he?

And the same society that thinks that way is supposed to worry about soldiers they never met? Just remember, young men & women, as you enlist in the Army: saving your own ass is Job One.

Golub versus the Rubber Chicken

Shirley Golub has managed to go viral with her "rubber chicken" ad aimed at La Diva, Nancy Pelosi, the present Speaker of the House and U.S. Representative from San Francisco. It's a YouTube hit. I saw the actual ad on network TV and it caught my eye. So there really was a genuine challenger from within the Democratic Party for Nancy's seat in the House.

Shirley's originally from New Jersey, with degrees from Boston University in speech therapy and education. She worked in Hayward, California in that field, then bought an auto tune-up franchise at Pacific & Polk in San Francisco. She operated that shop for 20 years, then transitioned into real estate (according to her website) because "her lease was up." I guess I follow. Maybe she got tired of running a tune-up shop and longed for the corridors of power in the Capitol Building. Obviously a woman of parts, as the Brits say, and sometimes auto parts.

The political ad features a yellow rubber chicken talking into a microphone next to a name plate with "Nancy Pelosi" written in block letters. It takes La Diva to task for supporting the Iraq war, torture and for refusing to initiate impeachment, which Nancy famously took "off the table" as soon as she succeeded to the Speakership. The ad says that Pelosi is "spineless" and a "coward."

I don't vote in Pelosi's district, but a challenge such as Golub's does focus my attention on the way things are run in Washington. The "insider's game," which Pelosi plays to the hilt, is based on strategies of incremental gain; consolidating Democratic power; and huge compromises. Her confederates Rahm Emmanuel and Steny Hoyer play the game the same way. I think Pelosi's strategy from the start was probably shrewder than we give her credit for. She had been in the District of Columbia a lot longer than Bush when W came to town in 2001. I think the Democratic leadership had L'il George marked for a rube who was in over his head from the beginning; once the Dems took over the House and gained a marginal advantage in the Senate, they settled on a ploy of giving Bush the rope he needed to hang himself. Pelosi said as much; Iraq was "Bush's war," and the funding would be there, but the execution of the war was up to him.

Along the way the Democrats placated their base with occasional tokens of resistance. Doling out the money in small increments at times, so that Bush had to make a public display of demanding funds more often, imposing "nonbinding" time lines so that Bush would veto the bill (confirming that Iraq was a war without end), placing veterans' benefits in the funding bills so that Bush's hypocrisy in "supporting the troops" without supporting the troops became patent.

Drip, drip, drip. Along the way, the Democratic-led Congress became, in opinion polls, at least as unpopular as Bush. But the Democrats also knew that the American populace did not identify itself with Republicans anymore, and more than anything else, the borderline destruction of the Republican Party has been accomplished by one man, George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States, a politician so radioactive that when he sent his VP to Mississippi to rescue a Republican candidate in deep trouble, it sealed the deal for the Democrats.

I have a hard time arguing with anything in Shirley Golub's platform. It's just what you'd expect in a progressive agenda: single payer health care, out of Iraq in 90 days, aggressive approach to global warming, abolishing the electoral college, no telecom immunity. The sort of issues that liberal-minded people of my generation throw around the dinner table and solve so easily in their heads.

And which never seem to happen in real life, not in this country. Meanwhile, I think at least in the House the Democrats will go on to their super majority. Talk has it they will own 250 seats out of 435, a 57% majority. I don't think they'll need to overcome Presidential vetoes after January, 2009, so the remaining bottleneck will happen because of that strange "60-vote" rule the Senate uses without any Constitutional authority. Something else Shirley would no doubt change if she had the chance.

I don't think Ms. Golub will defeat Nancy Pelosi, of course. San Franciscans aren't going to turn the big-eyed Diva out of the Speakership and replace her with a tune-up shop owner. Nancy has real power. She's made her bones in D.C. playing against the Big Boys. It may be true, of course, that her power is mainly used in order to consolidate more power for her party, and that the "issues" are mainly game pieces toward that purpose. The war's okay as long as it sinks Bush and his party, which it certainly has. Whether any of this is good for the country is, in the final analysis, quite beside the point.

Memo to AG Sheldon Whitehouse on Law Revision Commission

To: Sheldon Whitehouse, Attorney General
From: Henry D. Waldenswimmer, Esq.
Date: January 22, 2009
Subject: Law Revision Commission for United States Code Annotated

Dear Shel:

You've asked my ideas on restoring the U.S. Code to some semblance of order after the havoc worked on it during the Bush Presidency/Republican Congress years. I could not agree more that major work needs to be done. Here are some of my ideas on how to proceed after the Commission completes its initial survey of the principal areas of damage:

1. Repeal any and all post facto exonerations: What a mess those clowns made of the criminal code with their paranoid escape hatches for various war crimes and violations of the Federal Anti-Torture Statute. If they all need to flee to Paraguay like their role models from another era, then let them, but don't disgrace the country with excuses for violating Geneva. Look mainly at the Detainee Treatment Act and the incorporated provision in the Military Commissions Act, with that baloney about torture being okay if done "with the advice of counsel." Now that we know all that "advice" was requested specifically so the Bushies and the Pentagon could ignore federal law and international standards of humane treatment, it isn't worth a plug nickel. (Nota bene: if an act, like waterboarding, was a crime when the act was committed, then repeal of the exoneration clause should restore it to a prosecutable offense without violating the ex post facto clause of the Constitution. You're going to be busy.) And restore habeas corpus for anyone arrested or detained by the United States other than in a declared war.

2. Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: What next, are we going to call America "Vaterland?" Teach the "Horst Wessel" song in our grade schools? Restore FEMA, the Immigration & Naturalization Service and the Coast Guard to their previous places in the table of operations. Believe it or not, a bloated bureaucracy with new titles is not always the way to improve things. And never refer to this country as the "Homeland" again. It's the United States of America. If that was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it's good enough for us.

3. Repeal the Patriot Act: Allow the CIA and FBI to share information on domestic surveillance concerning foreign operatives and terrorist plots, as they did not before 9/11. The attacks weren't caused because Americans enjoy civil liberties or check books out of the library; they happened because the Bush Administration was disorganized, negligent and obsessed with attacking Iraq.

4. Repeal the Bankruptcy Code revision: Just put Title 11 back where it was before the Republicans hired banking and credit card lobbyists to rewrite it.

5. Repeal No Child Left Behind: I mean, do I need to say more?

Some things are self-executing, such as allowing all of Bush's tax cuts to expire under their own terms. I guess Tom DeLay and Bush outsmarted themselves after all, passing tax cuts which they could call "permanent" when they wanted to look like champions of small government and "temporary" when they wanted favorable forecasts of future deficits. Who's got the last laugh now, with a Democratic majority of 350-85 in the House and 65-35 in the Senate? All these things are a start, anyway. Tons of deferred maintenance in restoring good governance. It's like moving back into a house and discovering that crack addicts have been using it as a shooting gallery for the last eight years.

Oh, and if you want to lighten your own docket, why doesn't the United States just sign on with International Criminal Court in the Hague? Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when they get news of that?

Bush's Knesset Speech

Just when you think perhaps George W. Bush has absolutely scraped bottom, he gets his dredge out and digs down another hundred feet, as he did in Jerusalem a couple of days ago. This is getting completely embarrassing. And scary as hell.

I was thinking recently about the late great Molly Ivins and her book about Bush, Shrub, which I read in 1999 or so where she concluded, somewhat surprisingly but hopefully, that we would find W "sort of adequate" if he were elected President. Writing as she was before the 2000 election and basing her opinion on Bush's largely ceremonial job as Governor of Texas (the chief executive operations are mostly left to the Lt. Gov in the Lone Star State), Molly extrapolated into a forecast of benign mediocrity for the Midland Miscreant. What I wonder now is how someone of Molly's brilliance and penetrating insight could be so far off.

I would surmise that what she probably left out of account was the effect the job of President would have on Bush. Since he had never previously had access to the kind of power which would be his as President, there was no reliable means of foreseeing that the office itself would serve as a toxic environment or incubator for his strange and grandiose ideas about himself. As time has gone on, as we saw at the Knesset, Bush has gotten progressively crazier and more removed from reality. This mental state, combined with such meager intellectual resources, is a truly frightening combination to contemplate, because in the event of a real national emergency, this would be the guy in charge. We saw what happened on 9/11 and in the aftermath of Katrina. Once a real problem confronted Bush and his overblown image of himself, Bush folded like a lawn chair. What if there were a nuclear attack? Oy vey iz mir.

Bush likes to think of himself as Winston Churchill. This is how far out of hand his schizo-paranoid break from reality has progressed. Comparing Bush to Churchill is like comparing Sergeant Bilko to General Omar Bradley. Apparently there's a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, and if so, Winston must have developed an expression of nauseous despair by now. Elaborating his delusion, Bush likens the proposal of talking to the Iranians as analogous to Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" of Hitler in Munich in 1938. In the first place, I can't think of anything more calculated to give offense to a room full of people who probably to a person number a close relative among those murdered in the Holocaust. You don't throw around analogies to "Hitler" when you're referring to a country which presently lacks any means of projecting decisive military power against either Israel or the United States. Iran does not have nuclear weapons, the National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007 stated they are not currently trying to develop them, and an even more recent intelligence report concluded that the Iranian "interference" in Iraq has been greatly overstated.

But in the second place, Chamberlain's "appeasement" had nothing to do with talking to the the Nazis. The Conservative Government in 1938 encouraged the effort. What tarnishes Chamberlain's memory is his conclusion of a non-aggression agreement (the Munich Agreement) with Hitler which acquiesced in Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. At that point, Hitler's military parity with France and Great Britain was obvious and giving him the signal that his ambitions to the East would go unopposed set the stage for the later invasion of Poland. That's appeasement. That's whistling past the graveyard.

On the other hand, engaging in negotiations or talks with a Middle Eastern country that does not yet possess a nuclear weapon in an effort to avoid its development is not appeasement, it's smart. I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon; I don't want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons. I like what South Africa and Libya did, and what some of the former Soviet Socialist States did -- get rid of the things. Each time another country develops nuclear weapons, the danger is not enhanced by simply the percentage increase over the countries which previously were in the "nuclear club." You have also complicated the confrontational permutations among them to a much greater degree than the addition of one country. And when nuclear winter and ozone destruction in the mid-latitudes (as detailed in a recent Univ. of Colorado study) are now imminent dangers from even a small-scale nuclear exchange (50 Hiroshima-sized bombs, prox. 500-750 kilotons, according to that study), we have to pull back from the brink. Everything possible must be done to avoid a nuclear war. If, as Hillary Clinton recently suggested, we "obliterate Iran," it is likely (if we use surface blasts against urban areas) we will obliterate somewhere between 25 and 40% of the ozone in the mid-latitudes worldwide in the Northern Hemisphere for a period of at least five years. In other words, we may obliterate ourselves in the process.

If we don't talk to Iran, Russia and China will. We will simply lose control of the situation and what will happen, will happen. The mindless, adolescent idiocy of Bush in congratulating himself on giving Iran the Silent Treatment, and inflating it into national policy, can't end a minute too soon. We have to endure another 247 days or so of this guy. Keep your fingers crossed.

Bush gives up golf

In a silly interview with Mike Allen of Politico, President Bush explained, apparently for the first time, why he had not played golf since August, 2003. He can remember the precise day, in fact, because his decision was prompted by news that U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Sergio Vieira de Mello had been killed by a truck bomb in Baghdad. This induced a spasm of introspection in our beloved leader:

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

The usual fly-speckers in the blogosphere and cynical press pointed out some discrepancies in this heart-warming story. First, Bush did not give up playing golf on August 19, 2003. He played on October 13, 2003, again sending the wrong signal to grieving American moms and calling into question the depth of his commitment to solidarity. Between these two events (Bush's epiphany about inappropriate frivolity and his round of golf in October), in September, 2003, Bush announced that he had a torn meniscus in his knee, which the buzzkill press is now suggesting might have been the more proximate and efficient cause of Bush's retirement from the golf course.

It's almost like the sucker lied to us. He didn't give up golf because of America's grieving moms; he gave it up because his knee ached. That's disappointing. I thought it was a pretty good story.

The mainstream media are usually all over this kind of trivia, but I haven't seen anything specifically addressing an important historical sidebar: how have other Presidents handled the problem of playing golf during war time? The Korean War, for example, lasted until the ceasefire agreement of July, 1953, which means for about six months Ike, an enthusiastic golfer, was President. I don't know if Truman played golf and I'm too lazy to look it up. Nixon played golf, sort of, although he looked very klutzy (he also looked very klutzy walking, talking or sitting still). Since the Vietnam War was in progress, at varying levels of intensity during the entire Nixon presidency, he must have played golf concurrently. Why didn't Nixon care about showing solidarity with America's grieving moms? Ike gets a pass because he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, which means his solidarity was a given.

Clinton was a golfer, but I don't care about him because he was faking the whole Commander-in-Chief thing from the get-go. No one took him seriously as a war president, and he wasn't too involved in war anyway, except for occasional Monica-timed bombing runs over Iraq, blowing up pharmaceutical factories in the Sudan, and Kosovo, and no one could ever figure out Kosovo because Americans weren't dying, only people whom Bush would describe, speaking English "as best as he could," as Kosovasarians.

Anyway, I think Bush, in his usual modest way, is encouraging us to think of him in Christ-like terms. He's taking it all upon himself. While the war drags on and Americans and Iraqis keep dying, and moms here at home and over there keep grieving, we can all shop with our stimulus checks and let him pay the price for us. That he so loved the grieving moms of America that he gave up his misbegotten game of golf so that they might know they weren't alone.

Torture? How unthinkable...

I remember the time well because I watched Bush's speech on television in the breakfast room of a hotel in Lyon, France. So Bush was talking in September, 2006. He was agitated and forceful, hitting the podium with the flat of his hand as he often does when his innate paranoia is in overdrive. Congress, you see, was running out of time to pass the Military Commissions Act; "high value prisoners" were on their way to Guantanamo from CIA dungeons in (probably) Eastern Europe, and it was essential to have procedures in place which would allow trials to proceed immediately. And incidentally, included in that statute was another blanket pardon for anybody roughing up Arabs in the mistaken belief it was okay to work them over because they were, after all, Arabs, and not some higher form of combatant entitled to the full panoply of protections under the Geneva Conventions like, for example, members of Hitler's SS.

Bush went on to explain how valuable all the "tough procedures" had been in interrupting myriad evil designs against America, and how absolutely wrong it would be to prosecute a dedicated U.S. employee (like the President of the United States, as one example) for doing something in good faith which the Supreme Court sort of implied in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld he couldn't do without...well, committing a war crime under international law and the United States Code Annotated. Time was of the essence, and certainly Bush might face the argument by cynics that what made time so essential was that the Democrats were coming, the Democrats were coming, all as a result of the colossal mind-fuck to which L'il George himself had subjected the country during the previous six years or so. No problem; George can handle that kind of static. He can handle anything as long as his retirement plans don't get messed up.

So George got his pardon and America got its Military Tribunals in Guantanamo, and the years passed and we never actually tried anyone. The high value detainees settled in there at the far eastern end of Cuba, still valuable as propaganda trophies from the Great War on Terror, if nothing else. But eventually, after building a new court house and employing all that staff and making all that political noise, and with even people like Robert Gates and Condi Rice saying we ought to close the frigging place, you have to do something. So they put on trial one of the many Arabs who have been called the "20th hijacker." And here's what happened:

"The US has dropped charges against one of the six al-Qaida suspects charged with the 9/11 attacks, bolstering critics of the controversial military tribunal system set up to try the detainees.

"The Pentagon official in charge of military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay dropped the death penalty case against Mohammed al-Qahtani without explanation. Lawyers for al-Qahtani attributed the move to clear evidence that the detainee was tortured while in US custody.

"Mr al-Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture," the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represented al-Qahtani, said."

Thus reported the Guardian (UK) on May 14, 2008. Naturally, you're as confused as I am, because if there is one thing Mr. Bush has been clear about it's that "the United States does not torcher." If he's said it once (and he has), he's said it a hundred times (and he has).

Now I understand that terrorist suspects are not going to get the red carpet treatment we associate in our minds with an American citizen (other than Jose Padilla) who is accorded the whole drill of Miranda rights, the access to counsel, the advice that he does not need to make any statement at all, and the rest of that Warren Court coddling we've all seen a million times, from Joe Friday to CSI: Miami. But here's what I'm also thinking: this whole procedure is happening down in Cuba, a place chosen for its difficulty of access, a place where the prying eyes of the media never intrude, where the lawyers for the detainees (I was about to say "accused," but that doesn't apply to the vast majority) routinely report, in torrents of affidavits and blogging, that the prisoners are subjected to absolutely horrendous denials of due process; where there are insane rules which prohibit an accused from describing torture to his own lawyer because it's a "state secret;" where a lot of the evidence is anonymous hearsay which the lawyer cannot challenge because the attorney doesn't know who said it and under what circumstances (like torture) the statement was made. And that's if the lawyer and accused are even allowed to know about the evidence.

So if that's the context (and it is, in the main), what kind of brutality must have gone on with al-Qahtani to cause an American military commission to throw out a case against a "9/11 co-conspirator"? To conclude that the whole case was so tainted with coercion and violations of fair judicial process that they couldn't try an Arab in Cuba in front of the military brass? Despite Mr. Bush's assurances, is it just barely possible that the United States does, in fact, commit torcher?

Bush and the Neocontractors

"Now, you’ve heard the nonsense which is out there which suggests that Israel or the Jewish community or the Israel lobby pushed this war on the administration. And I can tell you it is nonsense, because there was not one Israeli official and not one Israeli academic who suggested that this war was going to end well. They all warned against exactly the problems we have experienced since this war started…" Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, commenting on Bush's "reengagement" with the Mideast peace process.

Suppose our bold, let-History-be-my-judge President bought a building site adjacent to a steep upslope, a mountain really, and was advised that he ought to do something about the drainage problem he'll encounter when the rainy season comes. One simple idea is to build a culvert which will catch the runoff and divert it to a downslope canal. Bush considers the problem, listens to the solutions proposed by his father, who once dealt with a similar issue, then rejects all such ideas in favor of his own master stroke. Working with a construction outfit called the Neocontractors, who believe in taking preemptive action against a drainage problem which lurks, Bush decides he will simply level the entire mountain. While it's true that neither solution was going to be cheap, the culvert would have cost about $1 billion while the mountain-removal solution will eventually cost $3 trillion, plus thousands of lives lost in the dangerous operation.

In essence this is what our visionary President has done in the Middle East. Try to recall, in the dim recesses of the past, the Road Map. This was something begun so long ago that Secretary of State Colin Powell, he of the phantom poison gas double-wides, worked on it. Waaaaaaaay back. Everyone from Osama bin Laden to William Kristol thinks that peace between Israel and Palestine is the key, the linchpin, to stability in the region. It was so obvious that even Bush saw it. For a little while. Then, like a cat diverted by another shiny, swinging object, Bush decided to invade Iraq instead.

Counseled by a group of complete fools like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, within the Administration, and urged on by a coterie of journalist-cheerleaders like Judith Miller, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman, Bush decided to level the mountain. Using the U.S. military as his backhoe, Bush would invade every single Middle Eastern trouble-making country and force them to become pro-U.S., pro-Israel democracies. Bush was appalled that the rest of us could not see the simple beauty of his plan.

I have a theory about the Neocon journalist-cheerleaders like Kristol and Friedman, and it runs this way. It's a form of survivor guilt. It seems so much more sensible to embroil the Middle East in a war, or a bunch of wars, to ensure Israel's safety if you are promoting those wars from the safety of your Manhattan East Side brownstone, or your Maryland mansion, than it does if you are living in Tel Aviv. They're "concerned" about Israel but they sure as hell don't want to live there. They've got it made here. If you live in Israel, then you must contemplate another effect of an unprovoked invasion, as Ambassador Kurtzer, and many other Israeli commentators (such as Gershom Gorenberg & Haim Watzman in their valuable "South Jerusalem" blog) have pointed out. Neighboring Jordan, once relatively stable, is now overflowing with Iraqi refugees from Bush's stupid war. In effect Bush has created another Gaza Strip, this time to the east, and it was Bush's gross incompetence which led to the installation of Hamas as the Gaza leadership. Lebanon has descended once again into a hell of ethnic and religious factionalism, and Iran, which everyone considers Israel's ultimate arch-nemesis, now exercises hegemonic influence over the entire region, including the "democratically elected" government in Iraq. When Bush screws up, man - the guy simply has no peer.

For all these reasons and others, Kurtzer has become a supporter and adviser to Barack Obama, the one candidate who stops with the war shtick already and proposes that diplomacy become the dominant approach to the region. Let Gorenberg and Watzman take it on out:

"The one candidate who speaks in clear terms of taking a new approach to the Mideast is Obama. This is what scares the small coterie of American Jewish rightists who would eagerly fight to the last Israeli. If you care about Israel, you should hit 'delete' when you get their emails.

"Obama is the one candidate who had the sense to oppose the war in Iraq. He’s the one candidate whose statement on Israel expresses support for a two-state solution, which is the country’s path to peaceful future and is today the consensus position in Israel. He’s the one proposing a clear break from the disastrous Bush policies, and a turn to trying diplomacy."

Hillary Clinton's Plausible End Game

Today I would imagine we will be witness to the demoralizing spectacle of a racist uprising in West Virginia orchestrated by the former First Lady and wife of America's "first black president." So be it. If for no other reason (and I have other good reasons), I favor the nomination of Barack Obama because it will hold a mirror up to American society and force it to confront the issue of racism in an inescapable way. Win or lose, the analysis of his run for the Presidency will tell us a lot about who we are, how far we have actually come from the era of slavery, how much we really believe in this concept of equal protection under the law. If Americans are voting against Barack Obama because and only because his father was African-American, then let's get that out in the open so it will be visible from orbiting satellites. Let's just frigging face it. No more crap about Reverend Wright and other irrelevancies, this idea of "guilt by association" which has been applied in a systematic way for the first and and only time in American electoral history. It is racist McCarthyism and we know it.

Apologists for a racist vote will talk about Barack's "inexperience," which is a neat and ironic dodge under the circumstances. Everyone seems to recognize that the longer a politician spends in Washington, the more corrupt and compromised, the more estranged from the concerns of ordinary Americans, that politician becomes. John McCain and Hillary Clinton are two absolutely prime examples of this degenerative process. They have been so pretzeled by their years in D.C. that they can't tell if they really believe in anything at all anymore, so that, for example, they can simultaneously bemoan the lack of responsiveness of the federal government to global warming and yet propose a gas tax holiday to promote greater CO2 emissions.

"Saturday Night Live" did a completely hilarious send-up of Hillary Clinton's campaign a few nights ago. Amy Poehler's impersonation hit every essential point: her base is racist and she appeals directly to the racism of "white working class voters" (formerly known as the Nixon Southern Strategy); she'll do and say anything; and she has no ethical standards.

When the Clintons left the White House, they took a lot of property with them which had been donated to the National Park Service as part of its refurbishing of the White House in 1993. Eventually, they reimbursed the government about $86,000 (the Georgetown- and Yale-educated lawyers mistakenly thought all this stuff represented "personal gifts" and not donations to the national treasury) and returned the government's furnishings -- lamps, sofas, area rugs, chairs, dining table, all of which had been shipped to their new home in New York, where Hillary was setting up camp in order to become an authentic New Yorker. In a sense, they were lucky it was handled this way -- as a civil matter, I mean. Since we all own the White House, another way of looking at the situation would be to say that tenants to whom we leased the place took all our stuff when they left. You know, -- burglary. This is an insight into the essential venality of these two. It didn't surprise me at all that Bill Clinton made as much money as he did in those years after the White House, nor that he was always strangely accommodating of George W. Bush's systematic destruction of the U.S. Constitution. When did you ever hear Bill go into one of his red-faced tirades about any of that? Quite the contrary, he became George Sr. and Jr.'s new best friend, because that's where the power was, and whither the power goeth, the money followeth.

So here's the deal. Sec. 441, subsection (j) of the Federal Election Laws, as amended in 2002. "Limitation on Repayment of Personal Loans. Any candidate who incurs personal loans after the effective date of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 in connection with the candidate's campaign for election shall not repay (directly or indirectly), to the extent such loans exceed $250,000, such loans from any contributions made to such candidate or any authorized committee of such candidate after the date of such election."

You can see Hillary's delicate dance here. She's got $11 million in the pot. If she folds her hand now, that's it. Her campaign is already $20 million down; I don't know exactly what the rules are on preferential payments to Hillary versus vendor/creditors (if she can pay herself first, she will, of course), but this is a very dicey situation. She's unlikely to get any of that $11 mil back. However, if she gives the appearance of campaigning all the way to the convention (the "election," in the above subsection), she might be able to raise more than she spends. She could buy some token ads, cut her staff to the bone, stay at the Holiday Inn instead of the Four Seasons, and build a surplus she can use to repay herself from the campaign. I think she counted on a big win in Indiana and maybe a surprise in North Carolina to resuscitate her run, but that didn't happen and she doubled down on an already bad bet.

Ah, if only those goodhearted Appalachian folks in West Virginia could surprise us today. Confound the prognosticators. Drive a stake through this invidious Clinton campaign. It would be, I don't know -- Almost Heaven.

Paul Krugman Joins Peak Oil Cult

It's interesting to see that Paul Krugman, ace economist of the New York Times opinion pages, has lent his stately name to the Peak Oil Theorists. For those not already intimately familiar with this concept, "peak oil" (or Peak Oil) is that theory that holds that a moment comes when the practically accessible supply of crude oil is 50% depleted. It can happen in a country, as it did in the United States in about 1971. Or-- and here's the Big Oily Enchilada --it can happen in the world. After peak, the world's supply becomes progressively more difficult to recover. Maybe it happened in 2006; maybe this year; maybe 2011, but soon, and for the rest of your life. Peak Oil guys should be forgiven their current delirium at their new-found credibility; after all, they have often been treated with the same disdain as those claiming to have been proctologically examined in an alien saucer.

No, with oil currently cresting at $125/barrel, up from $20/barrel only seven years ago (coinciding with the start of the Bush years), their heyday has arrived. They even have a society for true believers, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO - although I think they should take two letters for Association (As) and add "Theory" to the acronym, so you get ASSPOT - more colorful). ASPO meets on a regular basis and wallows joyfully in the bad news - we're running out of oil! Their arch-nemeses are the Cornucopian nut jobs, like the late Julian Simon, who advance such ideas as the "creamy nougat" center of the Earth, that we sit atop a vast ocean of oil just beneath - well, way beneath - the surface. If I remember my geometry right, Earth ought to have a diameter of about 8,000 miles, so if we can learn to drill down on a radius of 4,000 miles we can reach any interior point beneath the surface. I've never quite understood how Cornucopians could logically posit the infinite supply of anything on what is, after all, a finite planet. It seems to violate one of those Basic Laws. The Basic Law of Reason, perhaps.

I don't have any geological reports lying about my house, so I lack an independent basis for judging. Peak Oil Theorists (POT Smokers?) and conservatives, as Krugman points out, are at loggerheads over the issue. Conservatives want to argue that their beloved free market system is being gamed by speculators, who ordinarily would be among their Robber Baron heroes. The whole idea of being a modern Conservative is that you get to cheat while receiving the adulation of a meretricious society. As long as you wear a flag lapel pin, as I've said before, you can bet against the dollar, hope homeowners are thrown out on the street so your short-play on the subprime market works, and still be considered more patriotic than a guy like Barack Obama, who, after all, is named Barack Obama. That's because this country is really, really stupid and superficial.

I think I'm digressing. So the conservatives want, nay need, to believe there's plenty of oil and it's just those guys with the goatees and head scarves who are incomprehensibly refusing to pump it out of their "elephant" fields (another swell ASPO term), along with the aforementioned greed-heads who are buying commodities futures on NYMEX. The ingratitude! We sold the Arabs fancy radar planes, we let them buy our banks -- where's the frigging oil, Abdullah? But is the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia still an elephant? Is it more rhino size now? ASSPOTS have wet dreams in which they see the Ghawar sputtering, crashing (their preferred term), as the Saudis furiously (and clandestinely) pump vast amounts of seawater into the wells to force the remaining dregs out. Bush, siding of course with the Conservatives, as always, as he is congenitally programmed, does what he can to importune the Saudis to pump more oil - hugging them, kissing them, holding hands with eighty year old men wearing bath robes -- begging them. Still, they won't pump more.

Because they can't pump more? ASSPOTS, you see, have a vested interest in the total failure and breakdown of a car-glutted society, with its mindless salients of suburban cracker box houses, its mini-malls, its chain motels, its fast food joints. You know -- America. For the ASSPOTS, oil shortages represent the tool, the wedge with which they'll pry this mess apart. It is why an ASSPOT such as the Clusterfuck Man, Jim Kunstler, impatiently dismisses any talk of a substitute form of independent travel, such as an electric car, even though the Israelis are in the process of building an electric grid based on renewable energy to power just such a system. The whole thing needs to fall apart.

And for the Conservatives: the whole thing needs to hold together, because they are making so much money. The super wealthy financial manipulators want oil to be expensive, because it's another place to make money; but not so expensive that the system begins to break down. They can't believe that members of their own tribe would be so selfish as to subject ordinary Americans to an unsustainable burden, just to get rich faster. The Conservatives think just like the Saudis -- the American consumer needs to have the life squeezed out of him slowly, gradually, occasionally allowing him to breathe through a price reprieve. Sort of like a boa constrictor working on his evening's supper.

America's Lousy Greendex

More good news from James Hansen, America's foremost climatologist:

"Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm. "

Thus, from an upcoming issue of Science magazine. I think Mr. Hansen, that valiant scientist who has managed to sound the alarm despite all the helpful editing from Bush Administration lawyers like Philip Cooney who, while lacking any scientific training, have learned enough from dealing in unrelated fields like securities law to blur the impact of any otherwise clear communication. We keep getting reminded that we've blown eight years, and in the years to come names like George W. Bush, Cooney and Senator James Inhofe, that Tulsa business school-educated climatologist, will live in infamy because of their obstruction.

But I believe James Hansen has found just the right formulation of the problem to reach all sectors of society with the essential issue we face. It's not really a matter of whether human beings, as a tribe or species, will survive at all if CO2 concentrations keep climbing beyond the present 385 ppm. The point is that civilization in its present configuration depends on a certain set of favorable conditions, including fairly predictable air temperatures, rainfall patterns, an ocean capable of absorbing excess CO2 (not acid saturated as it is now), a functional Gulf Stream and other features of the not-too-distant past. We're now moving past the various tipping points, such as Arctic melting which exposes dark seawater to solar radiation, massive marine die-off, the thawing of trapped methane in tundra areas, and other unhealthy trends. If we want to avoid the worst effects and restore a semblance of the previous favorable mise-en-scene (no accent grave available; je suis desole - no accent agout either; oops, no circumflex accent either; what's up with Microsoft Word, anyway?), we need to reverse the pattern of CO2 increase and move back down to 350 ppm. This level is already 70 ppm over pre-Industrial levels, but 'tis good enough, 'twill serve.

National Geographic has conducted a "Greendex" survey among industrialized countries to determine which of the peoples of the Earth practice the most eco-friendly behavior patterns and leave the smallest carbon footprint. You can take the test individually, too, at http://event.nationalgeographic.com/greendex/. America scored dead last among the 14 countries surveyed, with a score in the 44 range, versus countries like Brazil which are very environmentally conscious. Naturally, it's one of our psychological displacement strategies to go on and on about rain forests in Brazil and pride ourselves on not building an entire house out of Brazilian rosewood, for example, while ignoring simpler issues like not eating so damn much meat. Brazil scores upwards of 55 on the test, but we also lag behind China and India because of our wastrel ways. I scored 57 and I'm really doing a lot of things wrong. In general, all this country would need to do is to get serious about train transportation, place-specific photovoltaics, plug-in electric cars, the cessation of all discretionary airplane travel, and mass development of renewable energy (wind power and photovoltaic desert arrays) and we'd be the best in the world. I mean, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Meanwhile, I pass along the noble effort of Bill McKibben to raise public consciousness of James Hansen's warning with his 350.org.

Triangulating Financial Armageddon

"Cross your fingers, knock on wood: it’s possible, though by no means certain, that the worst of the financial crisis is over. That’s the good news...[however] if we don’t fix the system now, there’s every reason to believe that the next crisis will be bigger still — and that the Fed won’t have enough duct tape to hold things together." Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times, May 5, 2008.

"The U.S. economy is in an intensifying inflationary recession that eventually will evolve into a hyperinflationary great depression. Hyperinflation could be experienced as early as 2010, if not before, and likely no more than a decade down the road. The U.S. government and Federal Reserve already have committed the system to this course through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, and gross mismanagement...The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover their obligations. The alternative would be for the U.S. to renege on its existing debt and obligations, a solution for modern sovereign states rarely seen outside of governments overthrown in revolution, and a solution with no happier ending than simply printing the needed money. With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat (not backed by gold) dollars will come the eventual complete collapse of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets." John Williams writing in his "Shadow Statistics" newsletter.

Maybe the reason that such disparate statements of essentially the same problem can exist side by side, one in the highly-modulated, business-as-usual language of an Establishment economist, Paul Krugman; and the other in the inflammatory, sky-is-falling style of a maverick outsider (Williams), owes to the hallucinatory nature of the subject in question. That is, to the unreal basis of the American monetary system. This seems to be Williams's underlying thesis; once the United States abandoned the gold standard under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the fiat system provided an open invitation to the federal government to monetize its way out of all difficulties. As the national debt exploded; as foreign sovereign wealth funds acquired huge stakes in debt instruments such as T-bills; as the trade deficits incurred through mass importations of oil and foreign-manufactured goods ranged out of control, the United States has been left only with the option of default on its internal (Social Security & Medicare) and external (obligations to domestic and foreign bond holders) debts, or running the printing presses full time to create the cash to handle its finances. It is Williams's contention, of course, that the second option leads inexorably to Weimar-style runaway inflation where the dollar becomes essentially worthless.

A precipitating event for financial meltdown could be the decision by a critical mass of foreign governments to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. In essence, this would break the trance of the dollar's dominance, and the U.S. would experience the collapse presaged by Germany in the 1920's and Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Certainly it's difficult to argue that the preconditions are not already here. The government publishes an artificially low inflation rate in order to keep Social Security CPI increases within the realm of plausibility, but this masks the reality that the inflation-adjusted GNP is already in recession and has been for about two years. It stopped publishing the M-3 money supply figures in 2006 to hide the 17% annual increase in newly-printed cash, a figure which far exceeds any increase rationally based on growth in the GNP. Basic expenses, such as fuel, are becoming unaffordable in large part because the pricing of oil is in a currency (the dollar) which is rapidly losing its value. Airlines are going out of business because fuel is too expensive. Independent truckers can't afford long-haul routes. Residential foreclosures are at an all-time high rate. We lose sight, often, of how extraordinary all these changes are, and attribute them to a "cyclical" problem that will simply resolve as all recessions have before it. I can't tell if Krugman is saying that needed "reforms" in U.S. financial regulation could right the ship and avoid a catastrophe. It may be that he is, but he isn't very insistent. His reluctance reminds me of an old cartoon I saw long ago which stands in for a lot of things that would take too much time. Two archaeologists are standing by the exposed tip of a pyramid, shovels in hand. One says to the other: "What do you say we cover the whole thing up and just forget about it?"

Yet Krugman's approach dominates in discussions of the problem because it is "reasonable." The preference is for worldwide collusion in the faith that all is actually okay with the doughty greenback. To undermine the dollar is seen as some sort of global financial Jonestown; why would the Chinese, and the Russians, and the Saudis want to bring the house down around their own ears by destroying the American economy and its workhorse consumers?

I think that's probably how it always works. It accounts for the reluctance of many Jews in Germany to leave even after passage of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht. For the French and Russian aristocrats to await their fate in 1789 and 1917. The psychology of inertia lulls us into a complacent belief that even if obvious calculations show no way out, we will cling to an irrational belief in the survivability of the status quo, and, as part of our unconscious defense of that very irrationality, will shout down those who refuse to express fealty to the same delusion.

As Other Options Close, Hillary Seeks Elimination of Basic Laws of Mathematics

Indianapolis (AP) - Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) admitted to some concern today about her deteriorating chances for overtaking Barack Obama, although her face appeared calm and relaxed as she announced her latest initiative (insiders, speaking on condition of anonymity because Hillary would kill them if she found out, indicated that she is no longer able to move any muscle group above her neck). Mrs. Clinton indicated that in light of the uselessness of even the "nuclear option" (her previously preferred route of cheating by including the votes of Michigan and Florida, despite an explicit agreement to forgo their inclusion), she would seek the repeal of the basic laws of mathematics.

"Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division need to go first," she said, referring to the four basic math operations. "I represent the American people, not a bunch of egghead professors or elitists who use 'theories' and 'concepts.' My campaign is about kitchen table issues that affect real folks, and if that means championing them instead of a bunch of dead Greeks and Arabs, then so be it."

Academics in the mathematical fields were stunned. "We need math," said Dr. Samuel Linworth, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Pasadena's Cal Tech. "Without it, it's really hard to do something like count or keep track of anything. I don't think we could have gotten to the moon without calculating stuff."

Other professionals who rely on math concurred. "I think it's a bad idea," said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. "If we can't count, then we don't even know how much money we have or whether we need more."

Senator Clinton was unmoved by these criticisms, which she deemed "the usual sniping from the groves of academe." "I'm not in this thing to make life nicer for those who already have so much, who have money they have the luxury of counting. The people counting on me to take this thing all the way to the White House aren't concerned with stuff like 'sums' or 'difference' or, God knows, 'subtrahends.'"

Even Bill Clinton seemed perplexed by his wife's sudden decision to eliminate arithmetic, but he quickly recovered and rallied to her defense. "What the folks in the media just don't get is how much my wife wants to serve this country, and how determined she is to win this thing for the people. If that means doing away with counting delegates, or counting anything else, for that matter, then so be it. It's just a good ol' fashioned fight to the finish."

Political observers said that Clinton's novel approach to winning the nomination would leave the Democrats at the convention in August unable to tell who won. Hillary had a quick rejoinder to this criticism: "Then I win," she said. It also promised to alleviate her campaign's mounting financial difficulties.

"No one can say I owe them money," she crowed. "Let 'em try. I'll just say, 'how much?'."

Hillary, Leader of the Know-Nothing Wing of Her Party

It's distressing to see Hillary Clinton, as part of her maniacal quest to seize the nomination at any cost, descend to the level of anti-intellectualism. She's a very bright woman, yet when confronted with the true consensus that practically no reputable economist in America thinks her gas-tax holiday scheme makes any sense, she retreated into a dumb vs. smart routine, deciding to cast her lot with dumb people. All the economists in the country, including Paul Krugman (who obviously was trying to develop a crush on her), were suddenly "elitists" who just didn't care about the plight of the ordinary American the way she does. Anyway, her plan was not like that stupid, identical idea of John McCain. She was going to tax the oil companies to make up for the lost tax revenue because of their "windfall" profits.

Ah yes, the windfall profits. The windfall, of course, refers to the astonishing profits companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron have posted over the last few years. While my own populist sympathies would like to buy into this idea, I'm not sure it's correct to do so. Now I'm sure there have been price gouging, manipulated supply and other ploys from the monopolistic bag of tricks which have marginally boosted Big Oil's profits; yet the larger picture suggests that American oil companies, the remaining cohort of the once majestic Seven Sisters, are kind of hanging on for dear life and making hay while the sun shines and the oil flows. American oil companies now control about 7% of the world's known reserves. Far, far larger and more powerful than ExxonMobil & Co. are the state-owned oil companies like Gazprom in Russia, Saudi Arabia's Aramco and Mexico's Pemex. The day of the great American "concessions" in the Middle East and elsewhere are over, that halcyon period when Standard Oil and British Petroleum carved up the stupendous fields in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf States and paid the owners of the sand dunes a stipend to take away the petroleum underneath.

The big American oil companies are just buyers on the market, and they're paying a ton for the raw product. If they hold their profits at a steady 8-9%, of course the numbers swell simply because of the high price of gasoline, which in turn is attributable to the $120+ price they are now paying for light sweet crude. If you sell a billion dollars worth of gasoline at 8% profit, you make $80 million. If you sell the same quantity of gasoline at a higher price and gross $2 billion, your profit goes to $160 million. But the underlying price is set by a different group of gouging monopolists, OPEC and other national oil companies, who are concerned that peak oil has arrived and that from here on out, they are going to be selling dwindling amounts of their "patrimony," as GWB calls it, probably without knowing what the word actually means. So is Hillary suggesting that Exxon lower its profit margin because it doesn't need all that money? What is she, a Communist who happened to make $109 million over the last 7 years? Whye doesn't Bill cut his hourly rate on his speeches to the Colombia free trade people?

Trying to get our mitts on Iraq's patrimony, in fact, is why Bush won't commit, now or ever, to leaving Iraq, and probably explains the otherwise unexplained reluctance of the Democratically-controlled Congress to stop funding the war (indeed, they're about to shovel out another $200 billion or so to keep it going well into the next presidency). What is always going behind the scenes in Iraq, behind the exploding buildings and the heads rolling in the gutters of Sadr City, behind the rockets landing in the Green Zone and the firefights between militias, is that simple, immutable fact of commerce: America's oil companies are trying to work out the terms of extracting all that precious Iraqi oil from those virgin fields. It's our one oily ace in the hole. What a bonanza! And all those oppressed Democratic voters in Indiana, worrying how to fill up that 8,000 lb. Yukon Denali to get the kids to the soccer game in Terre Haute at an affordable price: help could be on the way! If we don't cut and run from Iraq, that is, before we check the last box on Freedom's Agenda, that freedom being ours to fill the 20-gal. tank in the Escalade for less than a C note.

After all we've been through in Iraq, we kind of owe it to ourselves. You think that little orangutan in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is going to cut us any slack on selling his stuff to us? Iran won't even deal with us; their new best friends are China and Russia. Mexico's Cantarell field is sputtering out. We've got to have Iraqi oil, the second known largest reserves in the world, and mostly untouched. Our whole lifestyle depends on it! And we've earned it, dammit, we've blown a whole country apart, turned Iraq over to Iranian sympathizers, destroyed our reputation in the eyes of the world, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and a lot of Americans too, but like a crazed junkie with an empty needle and pupils swelling wide, we see that oil and we know we've just got to have it.

That's all I'm saying, Hillary. Step back and let Exxon and Chevron feed the monkey. Don't start messing with the pusher-man, and keep the street price up where it belongs.

Hillary's obliteration of Iran

"The Lord's my shepherd
says the Psalm,
but just in case...
we better get a bomb."
-- Tom Lehrer, "Who's Next?"

The new rules of sound-bite campaigning require a candidate to answer all questions which pertain to war with responses that meet two criteria: (1) They must sound decisive when replayed, and (2) they must be blood-drenched and Neanderthal. Anything else just doesn't sound American enough.

By this standard Hillary Clinton's promise to obliterate Iran if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel was clearly appropriate. A few muted bleats were heard from Iranians, who objected to a suggestion that 75 million people should be vaporized without at least a more nuanced discussion of the point. This is a silly cavil; the whole point of campaigning is that it doesn't allow any kind of nuanced discussion. Barack Obama tried that with his "we would respond appropriately" stuff. Barry, Barry. You just don't get it.

There are, to be sure, nuances to the subject. For example, I would be willing to bet, and have so wagered in saloons and other gaming establishments, that Israel would not need our help. Israel has on hair-trigger alert "The Samson Option," which has been described at great length by Seymour Hersh in his book of the same name and by Israeli historian Avner Cohen. (Samson, rather than endure humiliation at the hands of his Philistine captors, yanked on his chains and pulled the whole temple down on himself and thousands of his tormentors.) Some estimates of Israel's nuclear arsenal run as high as 400 nuclear weapons, which can be delivered by bomber, submarine and Jericho missile. No country with a rudimentary nuclear capacity could possibly disable an Israeli retaliatory strike, meaning: Israel would obliterate Iran. And could they do this with thermonuclear weapons? One must tread delicately here to avoid cultural stereotyping, but what do you think? Hint: of the Nobel Prizes for Physics, 47 have been received by scientists of Jewish ancestry, including Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Richard Feynman, and Emilio Segre, and this does not include non-Prize winners Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the Manhattan Project, and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb.

Further, while I'm plunking down good money on the bar, I would bet the following: the Israeli government's arsenal of nuclear weapons is superior to that of the United States, in terms of accuracy and speed of deployment. Why do I surmise this? Because they have to be. Let's face it, for all its vaunted power and self-adulation, the USA has an amazing capacity for building things that don't work. Recall the performance of the Patriot missile during Gulf War I. These missiles constituted our "fail-safe" umbrella over Israel and Saudi Arabia against Saddam's rickety old Scud missiles. The Pentagon claimed at the time that the Patriots were "94% successful." This was successively scaled down until the General Accounting Office admitted the "success rate" was probably 9%. The Israeli Defense Force estimated the rate at 2%; indeed, in one incident in Tel Aviv, 3 Patriots misfired, fell back to earth and destroyed 4,156 apartments, killing one Israeli and injuring 44. The IDF tactfully suggested that less damage would have been done to Israel if the Scuds had simply been allowed to land where they would, but thanks, you meant well, and mazeltov on your missile system.

Thus, if you were an Israeli strategic planner, how much would you rely on the USA as your main line of deterrence? For all its fulminating, the USA remains a country whose president made a paper airplane out of a specific, written threat of a terrorist attack a month before it happened. I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have done a much better job than that, but Israel is not counting on America to dissuade Iran from nuclear attack. And as for Iran, one must wonder what suicidal notion would have to seize the leadership before it patched together an A-bomb and wheeled it over to Israel to explode.

"Nuclear opacity" is the official name for deniability in Israel. Hillary is following their lead in assuming a maternal role in deterring Iran. The ayatollah, meanwhile, knows what the real score is.

Time to start holding our breath...

It's May now, and January, 2009, seems to be coming slowly into view around that far bend. It's a nervous time. I can think of historical antecedents -- concentration camp prisoners in Eastern Europe in March, 1945, waiting for the arrival of the Allies. Will they get here before the SS turn their guns on us? Dare we hope?

I think we've been very lucky since January, 2001, that an authentic crisis never faced the United States during W's shaky tenure as head of state. I'm aware of what happened on September 11, 2001, of course; it's not as if the President would ever let anyone forget. I'm thinking of a truly dangerous situation, one involving nuclear weapons, the kind of Cold War scenario depicted in "Dr. Strangelove." My mind recoils from picturing George W. Bush presiding over such a crisis. There is no doubt that he fell completely apart in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; he froze up, panicked, fled the scene aboard Air Force One. He didn't know what to do.

He didn't know what to do before it happened, either. Americans should be proud of the job their intelligence agencies did before the jets were hijacked and crashed into buildings. The CIA was on to al-Qaeda; its plot was part of the CIA's daily briefing to the new president in August, 2001, when Bush had already been on the job for about seven months. The FBI was piecing together the basic plot lines by observing what was going on with young Arabs taking strangely abbreviated courses in piloting jumbo jets in midflight. A smart, diligent, coherent president would have used that month's lead time to coordinate his intelligence services. Reading a headline like "Al-Qaeda Determined to Strike Within U.S.," Bush would have wanted to know every last piece of evidence and data supporting this conclusion; that is, he would have followed it up if he had been serious about his job.

Bush choked; it's that simple. Both before and after 9/11. I was thinking about that while leafing through Herman Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" recently. One of the pleasures of living near a University of California library, and paying that yearly alumni fee, is that I can delve into the enormous repository of information in those endless stacks of books. Kahn, of course, was the prototype for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," brought to life in Peter Sellers's masterful portrayal of the crazy genius of the apocalypse. Kahn, in reality, wasn't crazy or bloodthirsty; he was simply thinking about things other people didn't want to think about: what happens after a thermonuclear war? Is that it? Will the living envy the dead? Kahn did in fact (as George C. Scott, in a another unforgettable performance as General Buck Turgidson, recreates) present a chart showing "regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, post-war environments, one in which you've got 20 million people killed and another in which you've got 150 million people killed." Kahn was mordantly witty about some of the heat he took; in a later preface to the original 1960 book, he wrote that his critics almost made it sound as if a nuclear war was something Kahn found "desirable." Reportedly, he asked Stanley Kubrick for royalties from the wildly successful movie ("that's not the way it works, Herman," is what Kubrick allegedly answered). In his chart, actually called "Tragic But Distinguishable Postwar States," Kahn estimated that full economic recovery from a thermonuclear attack in which 2 million Americans were killed would take about one year. Compare this to 9/11, in which about 3,000 Americans were killed without any radioactive fallout, and the mediocre American economy wobbled back to its pre-attack state in relatively short order. Very, very sad, if you were one of those killed, or if you loved one of those who died. The attack has no other significance. The World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, and with nothing special done for the next eight years, it didn't happen again until Bush decided to ignore the threat, which is what he accused Clinton of doing with respect to the 1993 attack and the bombing of the Cole. Then the same building was attacked again, and Bush, with way, way too much enthusiasm, proclaimed that America had found "its mission and its moment." Well, he did, anway. He would ride that hobby horse all the way to Kabul and Baghdad, without making the slightest dent in the "existential" threat of terrorism. The great irony is that terrorism, by its very nature, is so random and unpredictable that a free society will never eradicate it; but Bush was presented with an incipient plot which was so gaudy and elaborate that it could have been predicted and stopped. He was just absolutely the wrong guy to do it.

Herman Kahn wrote about a very serious problem, the most serious problem humans have yet devised for themselves. Then the Cold War ended and for awhile, at least, we have breathed a little more easily, thinking that at least the two behemoths of nuclear holocaust, the U.S. and Russia, are not going to do anything suicidal. Terrorism, meanwhile, will continue as the byproduct of economic disparity, religious intolerance and the general cussedness in the human heart. George W. Bush can play in his Arab sand boxes all he wants and it won't change that. He's been doing it for nearly two terms in office. Spending vast amounts of money, getting more Americans killed to pile on top of the dead from 9/11, of course, but not engaged in any sort of serious endeavor. The war on terror is a hoax. Something like 8 months to go, and then perhaps an adult can take charge. We've really been pressing our luck.