The institutionalization of the military-industrial complex

I am indebted to Ben Cohen of Ben&Jerry's for their important work on budget priorities. I would encourage everyone to (a) go to www.benjerry.com, and analyze their "American pie" demonstration, and (b) eat Ben&Jerry's ice cream. Remember, both can be done at the same time.

George W. Bush's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2008 is a disgrace. It allocates 51% of the discretionary budget (exclusive of the cash-in/cash-out system of the entitlement programs) to the Pentagon. Bush asks for an 11% increase in the military budget exclusive of the horrendous costs of our crazy occupation of Iraq. If you wanted to see what chastening effect the 2006 elections would have on the psychology of an infantile man with a narcissistic personality disorder, there's your answer. Bush's response to his massive defeat at the polls, to his subterranean approval ratings, to his diminution in the American mind to the status of an imbecile, is to say go to Hell. In your face. Up yours.

Bush is determined to use his remaining tenure in office to enrich certain sectors of the American business community. There's really nothing else for him to do. He was never interested in governing the country as part of a disciplined effort to improve the lives of the American people as a whole. His dumb war bogged down and became an embarrassment, but also a self-renewing feeding trough for the fattest pigs in the American plutocracy. Bush's natural constituency. Bush loves doing favors for the fat cats, and it was a pretty nifty plan, he thinks, to use the American military to execute the business plan of corporate America. How many countries can do that? Probably only a country that spends more on "defense" (from...?) than the next 14 countries combined, and over half of all money spent on defense...on...the...planet Earth.

I think we can say two things for sure. Defense spending in the United States is unrelated to the "existential" threats that America faces. While we have, through the stupidity of abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, rekindled a nuclear arms race with Russia, it is also true that the Iraq War has demonstrated that a huge military apparatus, with all the latest electronic doodads, doesn't work very well against the episodic and ad hoc character of "terrorist" threats. Would anything this 11% increase will buy have stopped 9/11? No, that simply required smart people doing their jobs, and on that score, this Administration is bankrupt.

Dwight Eisenhower warned us a long time ago this would happen. He was right. Bush and his (still) compliant Congress are utterly shameless about funneling American taxpayer bucks to their friends, the merchants of death. Maybe Congress will strike back and cut the Pentagon budget in half! Maybe they'll conclude spending only 25 cents of every dollar spent on the world's militaries is enough to defend one country. Maybe Ben&Jerry's ice cream will be dispensed from the assholes of all those corporate pigs!

Don Fitz Quixote almost done tilting at windmills

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is almost done with the riveting spectacle of his public flailing of Scooter Libby in a Washington D.C. court room. Libby's excuses look ridiculous; his selective "learning," "forgetting," and "learning again" go beyond straining credulity. They make no sense whatsoever. Fitz has firmly established that Libby knew all about Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA undercover agent weeks before he claimed, under oath before a grand jury, that he first learned about it from Tim Russert on or about July 10, 2003. He was briefed on it in June, he talked about it with Cheney, with Cheney's press mouthpiece, with the President's press secretary, with several other reporters before he talked to Tim Russert. As pointed out before, his lying doesn't seem very creative. It seems desperate, and perhaps torqued by a determination to keep Dick Cheney's key role in the outing of Valerie Plame from public view.

One huge question remains. Paragraph 25 of the Libby indictment reads as follows: "On or about September 26, 2003, the Department of Justice authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") to commence a criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's affiliation with the CIA in the spring of 2003." So that was Fitz's mission too, I presume. The lying, perjury and obstruction of justice he discovered along the way were in the course of investigating what one might call the "substantive" crime of unauthorized leaking of classified information and the protected identity of a CIA undercover agent. Valerie Plame, it has been disclosed, was engaged in what is probably the most important of all clandestine activity, espionage into proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including the nuclear ambitions of that charter member of the Axis of Evil, Iran.

The question then is this: what the hell happened to that investigation? The real one? Fitzgerald's meticulous work appears to have revealed a conspiracy originating in Cheney's office and in the Oval Office itself; that is to say, on at least a prima facie basis, Bush's casual declassification of a National Intelligence Estimate to counter Joseph Wilson's claims is an overt act in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act (leaking classified information) and the Identities Act (blowing the cover of an undercover agent). As has been suggested by prosecutors with a broader view of the investigation's potential, Cheney at the least should be an unindicted co-conspirator. And Bush? The man who promised that anyone working in his Administration would be terminated if found to have participated in the leaking of classified information to the press? Why isn't that the basis of a similar charge for obstruction of justice?

The clowns hanging around the White House at public expense, obsessed with being revealed as the liars they are about the phony justification for the war in Iraq -- they undermined the meticulous work of an American spy who was working in the very field these jerks claim is the key to avoiding Armageddon. They did it knowingly, secretively, traitorously. And the Libby case is what we get at the end of the process?

I hope Fitzgerald loses. I hope the jury figures out what a dodge, what a cop-out Fitzgerald's case is. Maybe they'll think along these lines. Maybe they'll say to themselves, how can you obstruct an investigation into something where the prosecutor says, at the end, no crime was committed? How can lies about perfectly legal activity be material and consequential? Why should we care? Fitzgerald, in his zeal for a meticulous and airtight case, sliced off a tiny piece of a huge and rancid pie. A case of transparent lying where he felt certain he could not miss with a conviction. The Big Case, the one where Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby, Armitage all worked together to undermine a hardworking American spy, and in so doing gave aid and comfort to America's "existential" enemies--for such a case, Fitzgerald had no appetite. He might, after all, have lost that untried case because of its order-of-magnitude greater legal difficulties and technicalities. And in losing, he might actually have accomplished something for the United States.

Alice Encounters the Steely Resolve of the Dimocrats

The dusty yellow lane wound its way through a dark overhanging forest. Alice was a little lost, but at least she had the comfort of knowing she must surely, at last, have chosen a path that would carry her as far away from the Mad Hatter and his sidekick The Troll as possible. Up ahead and out of sight, she thought she heard loud voices clamoring, but all she could see were dust motes dancing in bright shafts of sunlight angling through the trees.

In a little while, however, Alice knew she must still be in Wonderland (for over 6 years now!). Standing at the edge of yet another clearing, Alice saw a gazebo surrounded by a milling throng of expostulating Solons, harrumphing, yelling, thrusting their fists in the air and, in general, carrying on in an excited manner. There must have been at least 50 of them, although, with a closer look, Alice thought there might be only 49-1/2. What a curious number of Solons, she thought. Up on the raised platform of the gazebo was a woman with dark hair arranged in an elaborate 'do, with startlingly large eyes, attempting to gain control of the shouting crowd.

"Come to order!" mumbled a diminutive fellow in a morning coat, standing on the first step of the gazebo. "La Diva wishes to speak."

"Fellow Dimocrats," she began. "I have come all the way from my House to speak to you about a matter of urgent importance. The Mad Hatter is expanding his war against the Eastern Spades even as we meet. We must stop him! We must! We must!"

Alice made her way closer and found herself next to a man of medium height, dark hair and a sour demeanor. "Then stop him," he muttered.

"Excuse me, but what is La Diva talking about?" she asked.

He turned to her. "The Hatter's war," he said. "He's determined to corner the market in felt."

"And who are you?" Alice asked demurely.

"Who are you?" he replied abruptly. "Are you a page? If you are, you should leave now. This is no place for little girls."

"I'm Alice, and I'm lost," she said.

"You're in the right place then," he said, returning his gaze to the platform. He looked down again. "But to answer your question, I'm Rust Goldfine, and I'm a Solon. We're meeting here to stop the Hatter's war."

"I vote that we vote!" someone in the crowd shouted. "Vote now! Vote now! Let's express our disagreement with the Mad Hatter in no uncertain terms! Let's make it clear that we disagree with him. That will show him!"

"What is he talking about?" Alice asked Rust.

"Nothing," said Rust.

"The Mad Hatter will be held accountable for his war!" La Diva attempted to shout, but it came out in a kind of refined sing-song. "We really, really disagree, and we're going to tell him so!"

"Will that stop the Hatter's war?" asked Alice hopefully. She thought wars were dreadful, in the silly way of little girls everywhere.

"Not for a moment," said Rust.

"Then why is she saying that?" asked Alice.

"She's the new head of the Caucus of Dimocrats, who represent most of the Queen's subjects. They hate the war, and want her to end it no matter what."

"But the vote won't do that?" asked Alice, beginning to experience that disorienting sense of confusion which overtook so many of her afternoons in Wonderland.

"No. Only taking away the Hatter's money could do that," said Rust.

"And she can't do that," said Alice dismally.

"Oh no. She could at once." Rust pointed to the large burlap bags grouped around a stout oak at the edge of the clearing. "Those are full of gold coins, which the Mad Hatter & The Troll must have to keep fighting the Eastern Spades."

"And La Diva can deny that to the Hatter?" Alice said, allowing herself, against her better judgment, a moment of cautious hope.

"She could," said Rust. "But then she's afraid the Dimocrats will look as if they don't care about the Hatter's troops, who will die in the field without the gold. Or so they all say."

"So the gold protects them," Alice murmured.

"Oh no," said Rust. "The Hatter's soldiers keep dying, killed by Eastern Spades in the Hatter's war."

"Which La Diva could end by keeping the gold here," said Alice glumly.

"Smart little girl," said Rust. "Are you sure you're not a page?"

"So La Diva will show she cares about the Hatter's troops by sending them the gold they need to stay in the Land of the Eastern Spades where the Spades will kill them."

"Bingo, kid. Welcome to the Realm of the Dimocrats."

"One consolation, at least," muttered Alice.

"What's that?" asked Rust.

"At least now I know the Tea Party wasn't such an aberration. Until I get out of Wonderland, nothing's ever going to make sense."

Manufacturing consent on Iraq

There are many things I disagree with Noam Chomsky about. I'll say that by way of prelude. Yet it's beyond me to devise easy ripostes to questions posed by a mind so labyrinthine, so brilliant, so retentive. I think he may be one of those geniuses who lose all sense of context when they're talking about the everyday world. In his war against hypocrisy, in his determination to apply absolutely uniform rules to any nation or people under consideration, he reaches jarring conclusions that don't seem to jibe with common sense. "The United States is the world's greatest sponsor of state-supported terrorism." That kind of thing. In the terms he discusses, accepting his definitions and the intellectually arid conditions of his analysis, you can see how he gets there. His unflinching radicalism (reminiscent of Trotsky) permits no other conclusion.

Yet his analysis suggests the creation of a world that actual humans could never sustain. He seems terribly impatient with human foibles, and rejects reality, which is that we're always accepting one evil in the hope of avoiding a greater one. Unquestionably, the United States does bad things, and shares this proclivity with other powerful nations in world history. Yet overall, it's probably true that the USA commits evil-doing in the pursuit of living standards that the world community, in general, considers desirable and good, which is why world opinion (until Bush) cut us so much slack. Much more than Noam Chomsky cuts us.

I don't know if his view is Utopian, precisely, because I've never been able to descry what he really proposes as a way people should organize themselves politically and socially. He seems to say everything is bad, all polities are flawed, but that certain places (East Timor, Nicaragua, etc.) achieve a kind of temporary virtue on their way from subjugation toward social maturity. I think what he's really saying (whether he ever says it or not) is that human beings are bad news, and in this (ultimately trivial) observation he has a great deal of philosophical company. We know that, Noam; how many more books do you need to write reminding us?

Yet on his way to describing the corrupt senescence of an old body politic like the United States, he sometimes illuminates our predicament with lightning bolt brilliance. I think it's fair to say that it was Chomsky who first pointed out the illusion of believing that the mass media were "value neutral." The mass media, which shape political discourse and set the parameters of "acceptable alternatives," are owned by large corporate organizations with a vested interest in a certain kind of pro-business status quo. There is only so much time and space to discuss the political landscape, and stories are chosen, edited and presented based on such factors as entertainment value and the ways in which they fit into a narrative which serves the business interests of the medium presenting them. Information is owned by a relative handful of large business organizations in the United States. They don't broadcast just anything. They are not dedicated in some idealistic way to the dissemination of any and all opinions, as if free speech were their first and only priority. Not at all.

The limitations of the narrative, thus defined, Chomsky called "manufacturing consent." These limitations establish the bandwidth of acceptable discourse. "Responsible" opinion-makers cannot venture outside these boundaries. In the case of Iraq, we have a playing field which has a right hand boundary defined by Bush's determination to keep pouring men and money into the middle of Iraq's disintegrating Hell. The left hand boundary is marked by Congress, which by a certain majority prefers to express its "disagreement" with Bush's ideas through "nonbinding resolutions," which is a way to do absolutely nothing while appearing to be powerful.

That's it. There's your government in action, and it makes you, really, somewhat more sympathetic to Chomsky, when you're done thinking about it, than when you began. You share his frustration and rage. Within this manufactured debate are certain "truths" which are considered self-evident, but which are not only not self-evident but are not true at all. These include the following illusions:

1. Iraq's "failure" would result from an American withdrawal.
2. The suspension of funding for the war would leave American troops helplessly trapped in Baghdad.
3. America's enemies would be emboldened by America's "defeat."

These statements are all unequivocally false. They are used by both sides of the "debate" in order to avoid discussing reality. America's presence in Iraq at this point is solely to ensure disproportionate access to Iraq's huge oil reserves, and to satisy the insatiable desire of American business for the spoils of war. This, however, cannot be openly discussed, for it is the hidden agenda of the business conglomerations who control Congress, the President and the mass media.

The truth is that the disintegration of Iraq followed immediately from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It was a tripartite schism waiting to happen, and when Bush declared "Mission Accomplished!" he was almost right. Full accomplishment had to await the capture of Saddam, at which point the deal was done. Iraq as a coherent state was finished. It had "failed." This was not foreseen by the Bush Administration because they don't read books or understand history.

Cutting off funding for the war, which is Congress's clear and immediate responsibility, would not result in U.S. casualties. It would at first reduce them, then eliminate them altogether. The oft-repeated misrepresentation to the contrary, by the likes of La Diva, Mr. Mumbles and now Dianne Feinstein, is to create the impression that their pro-war proclivities (which serve, in Feinstein's case, her military contracting constituency in California) are in some way inevitable or the result of statesmanship. For the next two years, Bush has asked for $245 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, above and beyond the basic Pentagon budget, for which he also asks an 11% increase. Say no to these supplements, Congress. Tell Bush he can use the Pentagon budget to extract the troops.

Finally, the Muslim world understands much better than the typical American viewer of "Survivor" or "American Idol" why Iraq disintegrated, because the Muslim world knows why sectarian violence exists in Iraq. The USA's persistence in believing that Iraq's factions can be held together by an army simply demonstrates that America is stupid, willfully ignorant, or completely corrupted by its lust for oil. Leaving Iraq would offer evidence that we learned something, and would tend to quell anti-American hostility caused by the presence of an occupying force.

A few Senators and Representatives who operate outside the boundaries of manufactured consent will point these things out (Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold). They will not carry the day. Bush will escalate, the Congress will "disagree," and the war will go on, while the cash registers ring and the latest abduction in Aruba occupies center stage.

Why Scooter Lied

Lawyers are trained to think in matrices, a discipline that is enforced by the actual practice of law. Facts are sorted and grouped into patterns. Indeed, what the normal public might call an "event" a practicing litigator tends to call a "fact pattern." Are the elements of a crime, a tort, a breach of contract present? It depends on how all the facts fit together. This habit of mind eventually becomes instinctual, a preconception that shapes the apprehension of reality. (It can drive you crazy, in fact; it might be a good reason to quit practicing law.)

The instinct might be most acute when the lawyer suspects, in an ass-puckering moment, that he himself might actually be in legal jeopardy. For an ethical violation, or an error or omission, or even the commission of a crime. Given that lawyers are often operating right out there at the fringe of legal permissibility (it's why they're hired, to take on a legally fraught situation where the client is in dire straits and needs a risk-taker), such moments are not as rare as the lay public might think. Every litigating lawyer, as a wise senior attorney once told me long ago, lives in his own private hell.

At such a moment, the lawyer's mind seeks frantically for the escape route, the exception within the statute, the bulletproof defense. If none seems immediately available, the legal instinct is to examine what has already happened to see if the tweaking of reality might improve things. The invention of a "new" fact, one that never happened, just might take the pressure off. A substitute matrix, a better reality than the bitter one that keeps the lawyer awake at night.

Scooter Libby is now on trial in Washington, D.C. for perjury, lying and obstruction of justice, but all the counts relate to the same central dilemma. Libby told Patrick Fitzgerald and the grand jury that he learned about Valerie Plame's CIA connection from reporters, and not the other way around. It wasn't true. At trial, Scooter now must sell the argument that he was so busy he can't remember how he first found out. This is isn't true either, and Fitzgerald knows it. Fitzgerald knows it because of Title 50, Section 421, United States Code Annotated, the Protection of Certain National Security Information, or the "Identities Act."

Here are the elements, the matrix. The perpetrator must:

1. Have authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent; and
2. Intentionally disclose information identifying such agent to an individual without classified clearance; and
3. Know that the information disclosed identifies such covert agent; and
4. Know that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States.

Those are a lot of semicolons and ands. Yet Scooter, looking down that list (after David Addington, one hears, informed him about its nasty applicability), could find little solace within it. (1) is all too easy: Scooter had high security clearance as the Vice President's chief of staff, and his knowledge of Valerie Plame's name and role were the result of a classified CIA briefing. (2) Well, he told a bunch of reporters about Valerie Plame's connection to Joe Wilson's trip, and threw in that she worked for the Agency. The reporters did not have clearance. (3) Not too tough there: he gave the reporters her name, the best kind of information for identifying a covert agent. And (4) Oops. The CIA immediately demanded an investigation after Novak's column "outed" Valerie Plame, contending it was a violation of this very Section 421 --highly suggestive of a previous intent to keep her name secret.

So Scooter, simply doing a piece of typical hatchet work for Dick Cheney, trying to please the old Side-Smiler, suddenly found himself the point man for a heavy fine and a possible ten-year stretch in the federal pen. When questioned by Fitzgerald, and while testifying before the grand jury, Scooter didn't know whether anyone was going to be charged under the Identities Act. So he came up with something. Something a little desperate and frankly unworthy of a published novelist. He decided to finesse matters by short-circuiting the very first requirement up there. Element #1. He would say that he didn't learn Valerie's name from his access to classified information. Scooter would say that the reporters told him. The bear trap of Section 421 could remain unsprung.

There were two problems with this neat evasion. First, it wasn't true. Second, it was transparent as hell, and a prosecutor as smart as Fitzgerald would immediately recognize it for the pathetic dodge it was.

But, to be fair, I have a question: so what? Patrick Fitzgerald never indicted anyone for the real crime, the real, serious damage, which was the intentional disclosure of a covert agent's name. A covert agent who worked undercover in anti-proliferation issues through the "brass plate" cover of Brewster Jennings Co., who may have run foreign agents whose lives were placed in jeopardy by the sudden disclosure of their cover by the Executive Branch of the United States of America. Fitzgerald passed on that. So if Scooter obstructed an investigation underlying a prosecution that Fitzgerald never intended to pursue, what does an incidental lie about disclosure have to do with...well, anything? Is Fitzgerald's righteous zeal about protecting the "integrity of the system?" Not worth the candle, in my opinion. Fitzgerald knew why Scooter lied, Scooter knew, and now you do if you didn't before.

Fitzgerald's case is makeweight, an excuse for pulling back from the real issue, an alibi for not pursuing Rove and Cheney, a reason to hang around the power center of Washington D.C. for a couple of years. Scooter's life is wrecked, but he never seemed like the baddest of the bad. He was doing a dirty job, as lawyers often do. And, as lawyers often do, he got too creative at the wrong moment and found there was hell to pay.

Amateur hour in Washington, D.C.

"Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense." Dr. Johnson, about 200 years ago.

I'm not so sure in W's case, although this may simply result from Bush's position outside the bell curve of normal human stupid-variation. He's always talked nonsense about Iraq. "It's the central front in the war on terror," "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," and so on. Always, always I get the sense that Bush, confined as he is to the emotional age he achieved before descending to the bottom of countless whiskey bottles, thinks like a 9 year old, and not like a precocious 9 year old. More precisely, like a 9 year old cribbing a social studies paper on Iraq from the I-J volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, circa 1955. What distinguishes the truly simple mind from the discerning mind is the inability of the former to think in terms of simultaneous complex variables, and the tendency of the simpleton to use "concepts" instead of "facts." Facts are hard to deal with, because you have to read, think and synthesize them into a pattern with other facts you have learned the same way. This is what really smart people instinctively know, and always do. They know there are never any shortcuts to understanding anything. Bush doesn't do things like that. He grabs at the broadest generalities he can find and settles there, permanently.

Bush began his Iraq war on the simple proposition that everyone in Iraq was an "Iraqi" who was a "person" just like every other person in the world, and all people like Western-style democracy because it's the best system. That's it. He started there, and he's still there. If you listen to anything he says about Iraq, that reductive nullity lies at the very root. Thus, he identifies the "enemy" in Iraq (as he did in the SOTU address) as a non-specific, freedom-hating killer. Period. The "government" in Iraq is not an Iranian-influenced coalition of Shiite parties in an opportunistic alliance with Kurdish leaders (the Kurds cooperating in order to assure their eventual complete independence in Kurdistan, with the inclusion of Kirkuk), but the "democratically elected government of Iraq." Thus, anyone not cooperating with this central government holed up in a six-mile fortress in Baghdad is the "enemy" who should be hunted down and killed, with the assistance of as many American soldiers as we can scrounge up.

I read other blogs, of course, including the big collating blogs like the Huffington Post, and where I probably part company with a lot of dissident commentary is in the ascription of cupidity to Bush, or the tendency to place him at the center of a vast criminal conspiracy with other Bushian malfeasors. I can probably be quoted to my own contradiction on this point, but I don't see Bush's awful incompetence, secrecy, and (in effect) evil-doing as primarily the result of bad intentions. Cheney, I see otherwise. There the charges of malice aforethought make sense. Cheney is an undermining force in American life with huge destructive tendencies. While not half as smart as he thinks he is, he's clever enough to engineer war-profiteering on an enormous scale and to play Bush like a badly-tuned violin.

Bush is not now, nor is he likely to become, Big Rich by Texas standards. He doesn't even have $100 million, the minimum "Unit" necessary to hang with J.R. Ewing and the boys at the Oil Barons Club. Cheney, on the other hand, has gotten very, very rich, and while he'll never live long enough to enjoy the bonanza he could have reaped after this Administration sinks beneath the oil slick of history (so many grateful CEO's would have crowded round), he loves that game of making rich people even richer, of basking in the reflected glow of other Insiders who love war and all the money it can make.

Bush is just a natural born screw-up, a guy who could never become a pro at anything. A permanent amateur, and not a talented one. I continue to think, as I have said before, that his presence in the Oval Office says something profoundly disturbing about the state of the union, and maybe what it says most of all is that the abandonment of the political arena by all the talented Americans who decided to make money instead left behind only two classes of people to run the country and take our money in taxes for their own use: fools and liars, and they're both in ascendance in Washington now.

The Pondman Wrote Us about the POTUS Giving his SOTUS

I still don't quite believe it. It's a bad dream, isn't it? George W. Bush must be the strangest political occurrence in the history of the American republic. Whenever I see him behind the podium, his thin lips pursed in that simian pout, struggling to explain how he will clear all nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula, half of me wants to believe this is all some sort of collective hallucination. This man cannot be the President of the United States of America. The system cannot be so basically flawed that it could come to this, a genuine mental defective ruling over the mightiest nation on Earth. It would be only slightly less startling if Lonny, the inbred boy banjo player in "Deliverance," were to mount the dais and deliver the same speech. Although Lonny would be a genuinely sympathetic character, and one with actual talent.

No, we've got George. It must be true, because he was on TV last night. By a fortuitous juxtaposition, I picked up Peter Galbraith's essential "The End of Iraq" the other evening at Borders, and I was halfway through it when the speech began. The book had impressed upon me the deep complexity of the political situation in Iraq. It also described the context (an Oval Office meeting between Bush and leaders of the Kurds) in which Bush betrayed, two months before the invasion he ordered, his complete ignorance about the two Muslim sects vying for power in Iraq. Yet there was Bush, struggling to pronounce words, fumbling through the text of a speech written by someone else, reducing the entire world to a Manichean duality of "us" and the "enemy," and reiterating that the "enemy" in Iraq must be defeated to complete the "mission." Willfully or haphazardly, Bush conflated the 9/11 attackers with this same "enemy," lumping them all together as terrorists who must be defeated in the "defining struggle of our age." The Congressional house went stone quiet as Bush described the dark world of his fearful imagining, one haunted every moment by an unseen, mononlithic enemy comprised of "killers" and "freedom haters."

He's so deeply weird. Taken to its logical extreme (as one must with Bush's "analysis"), Bush simply proposes to keep killing until no one is left to challenge us. We'll never be safe, no victory will ever be final, not in Iraq, not anywhere. On whose side are we fighting in Iraq? The good guys, presumably. A fussbudget like Galbraith unhelpfully points out that the "good guys" in Iraq are members of parties with names like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), spawned and supported by Shiites in Iran, or the Dawa Party of Nouri al-Maliki, organized and strengthened during the days of exile in Syria. Presumably, the "good guys" are to be propped up and supported only by Iraqi regular army and police, Sunnis and Shiites who have risen above their sectarian identification (or who desperately need a job), cooperating with the Americans. The task of this mythical alliance is to defeat all the "bad guys," who must be Sunni insurgents, Shiite death squads, Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Syrian and Iranian infiltrators, freelance Arab mercenaries and anyone else who causes trouble, such as the Kurdish separatists in the north, who have a de facto separate country already in operation. Victory will be complete when none of these groups causes any trouble anymore, and the coalition government elected by the purple-fingered masses, those who have not already fled Iraq (as 40% of the former middle class have already done) rules a serene, prosperous, democratic country.

That's the plan. It doesn't matter how long it will take. At some point, al-Maliki or some other prime minister will actually venture outside the Green Zone and take control of a united country where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds live in tranquil harmony. Would you ever grasp the slightest hint of the complexity of the undertaking from Bush's speech last night? Looked at in all its daunting ramifications, why on Earth would 20,000 more American troops (which Bush allocated to specific zones of Iraq in his speech, I suppose to save the "enemy" time in figuring out the deployment) make any difference?

Still, he must really be up there, behind the podium, his simple, vacuous mind struggling with huge, complex problems involving many layers and many moving parts which interact, one with the other to produce a kaleidoscopic mess. Congress looks on, horrified, yet politically too timid to do what they really ought to do: Use the Constitution to move Bush and Cheney out. Stop pretending anything about this is normal. Seize control before it's too late.

FAQ About Tonight's State of the Union

As a public service, the Blogmeister at the Pond addresses some of the common questions about Bush's speech:

Q: Does Bush have any idea what in the hell he's doing anymore?
A: None whatsoever, but thanks for asking.

Q: Why is he dumber than a sack full of lug nuts?
A: Theories abound, but the most common idea is that (a) he's pretty stupid to begin with, and (b) he's systematically eliminated everyone around him who tells him anything he doesn't want to hear, no matter how good their ideas are. Thus, Richard Clarke, Colin Powell, Gen. Shinseki, etc. are all gone, and we're left with the Spelling Bee Champ as Sec. of State and Richard Hadley, whose pallor and effete demeanor strongly suggest he was brought back to life with a shot of green potion from the Reanimator.

Q: Can we get our money back from the Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group?
A: I see what you mean, but probably not.

Q: What new initiatives can we expect in tonight's speech?
A: Bush can only propose things that no one else thought of first, such as his unique idea of increasing American troop strength in Iraq by about 14%, thus increasing the ratio of U.S. troops from 140,000/25,000,000 to 160,000/25,000,000, or a net increase from .0056 of the population all the way up to .0064 of the Iraqi population.

Q: That sounds really dumb.
A.: It wasn't my idea.

Q: What about the environment? Anything new there?
A: Bush will propose a greatly enhanced use of ethanol to deal with global warming.

Q: So he's into the whole biofuel thing now? That seems like progress.
A: It's a breakthrough in the sense that Bush is acknowledging climate change. However, his idea is that Americans drink it as a way of dealing with the coming catastrophe.

Q: Is he like the worst President ever?
A: Probably, and I hedge my answer only because Bush probably has set the stage for tremendous problems in the future, and his hapless successors may look worse just because of what they're dealing with.

Q: How did it come to this?
A: A lot of people ask that. One clue is that Grand Canyon federal employees are now discouraged from talking about how old the Canyon is so they won't offend religious tourists.

Q: So who still supports him? Who are these 30% or whatever?
A: The glib answer is people just like him. Pay attention to his single veto, of stem cell research, and his position on abortion recently announced, which is that it should be limited to Carmelite nuns raped by HIV-positive psychopaths, provided the Sister seeks the procedure during the first trimester.

Q: Just how messed up is this country?
A: I'm sorry, we're out of time now. The speech is about to begin.

The Iraq Obsession

As we near George W. Bush's next-to-last State of the Union address (yes! that's an accurate statement), I have to wonder about a curious phenomenon of contemporary American life. Namely, do you ever consider just how weird it is that this country's fate appears symbiotically connected to...Iraq? Do you ever ponder how something so strange ever came about? We devote an enormous part of the American "disposable" treasury (exclusive of entitlement spending) to the project. The national debate seems to be about nothing but Iraq. The last election was decided because of Iraq, and nothing but Iraq. The front pages are all about Iraq. The Sunday talk shows talk about Iraq. Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. All Iraq, all the time.

What is Iraq? Before we invaded, it was an artificial country stitched together out of 3 disparate parts by Winston Churchill in 1921, who later called it the "biggest mistake of my political life." In 2002, it was held together, as it had been for about 23 years, by the iron, despotic rule of Saddam Hussein. Sometimes the United States liked Saddam so much we helped him target the Iranian army for poison gas bombardment (this set a precedent for our casual dismissal of Geneva Conventions, such as the protocol against poison gas of 1925). Sometimes we didn't like him, such as when we needed to sell military spare parts to the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 to raise illegal money for the Contras.

We always liked the oil under the sands and and under the northern hills, the second largest reserves in the world. Without the oil, and without the perceived threat to Israel, Iraq is simply a Middle Eastern version of Darfur. Bad things happened there, but who gave a shit? Enter the Neo-conservatives, with their wistful theory of social engineering. At heart they were hawkish liberals armed with a reverse domino theory; if Iraq could be transformed, the rest of the Middle East would follow suit. Huh? you might say. No, that was actually the theory. They recognized it might seem implausible, so it was necessary to sell the Iraq invasion as a war of defense. The authorization for use of military force against Iraq in the fall of 2002 was easily passed by a compliant and lazy Congress, a Pass-Go card given to Bush by some of his current vociferous critics, such as Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, all those Democratic Senators running for President on an anti-war platform.

Saddam was no threat. At the time of the invasion 4 years ago, it had been 13 years since he had raised a belligerent paw against anyone. He had settled into a kind of senescent self-indulgence, building palaces and monuments to himself instead of offensive weapons. He still had all that oil, which he sold for cash to fund his own aggrandizement. He starved his people. He was an evil, rotten despot, but as evil, rotten despots go, he was relatively harmless.

Iraq has 25 million people, about one-third the size of Iran, about one-fourth the size of Egypt. The Kurds don't want to be part of Iraq, the Shiites want to establish an Islamic theocracy in alliance with Iran, and the Sunnis don't want to be ruled by the Shia. Our occupation simply delays the day when such centrifugal forces will split Iraq asunder.

Meanwhile, this weird monomania paralyzes the United States. Our politics, our budget, the national attention is held hostage to Iraq. There are so many interesting, helpful, fun things we could have been doing with all that time and money. We could have built a national railroad. We could have developed alternative fuels to make the oil of the Middle East irrelevant. We could have instituted universal health care. We could have used that last critical window of opportunity to deal with global warming. The opportunity cost of the Iraq War is staggeringly incalculable. It is not too much to say that it may be difficult for the United States to recover from this blunder. We have borrowed so much money from potentially hostile countries in order to keep the game afloat. That foreign debt casts a long shadow over the future, and right at a time when all serious bureaucratic adults recognize that the Medicare and Social Security funding crises are right around the corner. We could run out of money. We might default on our debt.

By acting as if Bush had some vague idea what he was doing, in refusing to challenge him and to shut this stupid war down, Congress and a large percentage of the American people have taken us to the brink of catastrophe. We forget, sometimes, that Bush is entirely capable of massive failure; his resume is a categorization of such failures, over and over. His private enterprise efforts were case studies in fiscal exsanguination. He's taken the national debt to 9 trillion dollars, and still he keeps borrowing to finance this war. He "balances" the budget by the simple expedient of not counting the money the nation actually spends, such as when it raids the Social Security "trust fund" and "supplements" the defense budget with more money for Iraq.

Where will it all end? Why won't Congress impeach him and stop the Iraq War? What strange gods are they serving?

A Civics Lesson for the McLuhan Age

"With that vote, our hope, really our prayer, is that the president will finally listen, listen to the generals, listen to the Iraq Study Group, listen to the American people and listen to a bipartisan Congress,'' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday, bristling when a reporter asked whether the vote would be substantive or symbolic.

"I don't really know what you mean by 'symbolic.' I believe that a bipartisan resolution saying we don't want the escalation of the war in Iraq is the beginning of the end of the present policy in Iraq,'' Reid said. San Francisco Chronicle, January 21, 2007, Marc Sandalow reporting (a very good reporter, btw).

Mumbles, methinks thou doth protest too much. Nevertheless, I think I can help here, Harry. A "symbolic" vote is one which the President can legally and Constitutionally ignore, and then do whatever the hell he feels like doing. Let us apply this definition to your "bipartisan resolution." Okay, the answer's in already: your resolution is symbolic, and it is not the beginning of the end of anything, unless it is the beginning of the end of the American citizenry, who want this goddam war over, taking you seriously about anything at all. Let me give you a case in point: how successful was the bipartisan bill in the last Congress which restored federal spending to embryonic stem cell research? How well did the President listen?

I do think the idea of "praying" is a nice touch. That's your best shot if you want Bush to come around. What you don't seem to get, Mr. Mumbles (and it's a cluelessness shared by your counterpart in the House, La Diva Pelosi), is that you do not understand Bush by means of "policy analysis." If you want to figure out Bush, you need to begin reading books on Abnormal Psychology, with special attention to personality disorders, and then burrow down further to "histrionic personalities." It's all there, Mr. Majority Leader. If you want to know why absolutely everything you do in a precatory, placating manner fails to yield the desired result, you will find the answers therein (to use Bugs Bunny's favorite preposition). Bugs Bunny, by the way, could teach you a lot about how to deal with bad guys. He didn't mollify, plead or beg. He outsmarted them or used fiendishly clever force. I would encourage you to obtain a DVD of the Best of Bugs, especially one that contains "Racketeer Rabbit," where Bugs, bunking down one rainy night in an abandoned house, finds it taken over by gangsters Rocky & Hugo. Rocky is a lot like Edward G. Robinson, of course, and Bugs, beginning at a point of complete helplessness, uses guile and cunning to turn the tables on Rocky, and finally sends the gangster running panic-stricken down the road to escape another of the Rabbit's clever tricks. Bugs did not bother with "symbolic resolutions" to appeal to Rocky's better side, because Rocky didn't have one. Neither does Bush. Whatever label you choose to use after leafing through the DSM psychological tables (narcissist, anti-social personality) does not matter so much. The important thing is for you to recognize what you're dealing with.

Put Kurt Vonnegut on your reading list too, including his sort-of memoir A Man Without A Country. Despite the title, Vonnegut is a World War II vet who loves the United States and laments its hostile takeover by people he calls "PPs," short for Psychopathic Personalities. "PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts...They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive...Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next."

Kurt is describing people who lack a conscience. I suspect the Democratic leadership already knows the Bush High Command fits the diagnosis, and they don't need my reading and viewing list. So who are the Dems trying to fool with their "symbolic resolution?" The answer is simple: Us. By doing something that won't work, which appeals only to the Imaginary Focus Group which operates as a wind sock for each of Hillary Clinton's "evolving positions," the Dems can appear to do something without risking responsibility. It's not impressive. Their out, their excuse, is that they must "support the troops" (as La Diva so recently reiterated) by sending money to Iraq to keep the grunts riding around in their Humvees until they're blown sky high over Baghdad.

What a load of crap. They have the power; they just won't use what Lee Hamilton, at Indiana University's Center for Congress, calls their main leverage: "The power of the purse is the most important power of Congress. James Madison in the Federalist papers called it 'the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people'. It checks the power of the President and gives Congress vast influence over American society, because federal spending reaches into the life of every citizen." Refuse to approve any more spending requests from Bush in the form of his Iraq "supplementals." Tell him the money he now has is for the purpose of getting the troops home safely; after that, there will be no more money. As the Commander-in-Chief, that becomes his new and only duty, where the Iraq war is concerned: to oversee the withdrawal of a military force which no longer has Congressional funding to prosecute the "war." You figure it out, George; you put them there. Now get them home.

Our Man in Baghdad

I think the popular myth is that Nouri al-Maliki is an American puppet installed by the Bush Administration because of Nouri's amenable, toadyist nature, and that he is simply no match for George W. Bush's artful manipulations. I wondered about this, since I am immediately suspicious of any argument that proceeds from the premise that Bush is outsmarting anyone. One would have to concede that the U.S.A. certainly has much more in the way of resources, beginning with our incomparable military ("the world's finest") which, while it has fallen into a sad state of depletion thanks to the reckless ministrations of the current Commander-in-Chief, still is the finest fighting force on earth, as its main public relations arm, the United States Congress, never fails to remind us. But men and materiel aren't everything, nor is our good credit rating, which allows us to finance our wars by borrowing from the Chinese, Japanese and Saudis.

An earlier brain-belch here at the Pond suggested that Nouri was a kind of "lunch pail" working stiff, glad to have a job and willing to play ball to keep it. But this was before I adopted the practice of actually looking stuff up before writing this thing. This has made a world of difference, I think. In the first place, I hadn't actually figured out whether Iraqis even use lunch pails. I did, as a kid, so maybe my assumption was a matter of projection. My favorite contained a picture of Kit Carson on the lid. On a gentle slope in the foreground, Kit sat on a pinto horse, and in the distance was a tableau of frontier mayhem, Indians riding around Conestoga wagons, a few saguaro cacti, mesas looming up into a blue sky. Inside the pail was a chrome rack with two semi-circular hoops which could be snapped into place to hold a thermos. The whole thing was cheap and light, and maybe cost a buck. Could Nouri have had such a pail, growing up in a small village between Najaf and Hilla in southern Iraq? I don't think so. I doubt that Kit Carson was part of Shiite iconography. Simply beyond the pail.

So maybe W was Nouri's first cowboy. My sense is that al-Maliki, far from quaking in fear at the sound of Bush's name, probably sees W as one of the simplest problems he's ever had to solve. When he sees Bush getting off Air Force One out there at Baghdad Int'l, he thinks, "Here comes easy money."

Compare Bush to some of the other hurdles in Nouri's life. He was born in 1950, was educated in local schools in the south, then left for Baghdad, where he obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees, the latter from Baghdad University in Arabic literature. I suspect this was a more demanding course of study than Bush's Harvard Biz School goofoffathon. Nouri's grandfather was a cleric and nationally recognized poet, so Nouri was following in the family trade. No doubt Maliki can write fluent prose, another point of departure from his American counterpart. After graduating, Nouri did some teaching, but his main preoccupation was in Shiite politics, with the Dawa Party. One thing led to another, and this man of letters became, as did Camus in France during World War II, a principal leader in Dawa's armed resistance to the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein. While I'm certain that running oil companies into the ground using money from Daddy's friends (Bush's career track during the same relevant time period) requires a lot of nerve, Nouri was in real, mortal danger. So much so that Hussein put out a death warrant, or fatwa, on Maliki in 1980.

Maliki hit the road, looking for a new sanctuary from which to operate. His path took him initially to Iran, then to Syria, where he carried on his organizational work of supplying guerrillas and militias with arms and materiel to take the fight to the Baathist regime in Baghdad. He stayed in Damascus, as far as we know, until 2003, and was instrumental in forming the Iraqi National Congress, the government-in-exile which stood ready to take over once Saddam was deposed. When that was accomplished (the Mission!), Nouri returned to Iraq, and found his first work with the Provisional Authority in the De-Baathification project, which he must have attacked with relish. One thing led to another, and Nouri, at 56, is the Prime Minister of Iraq. Under the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Saddam's dispatch to Paradise was both quick and remorseless. Maliki couldn't wait to get rid of him; he showed admirable restraint in granting Hussein a trial at all, let alone one that consumed months. Had Maliki been brought to "trial" in 1980, the execution might have preceded the admission of evidence.

So that's a helluva resume. It would seem that Maliki is a man of parts, including the balls of a burglar and the aesthetics of Omar Khyyam. How easy to handle must Bush seem to Maliki, after living underground in Iraq in a police state riddled with spies and informers, after leaving his homeland and starting all over in a field removed from his educational background. If you haven't seen "Army of Shadows," the recently re-issued movie about the French Resistance, go see it if you want some sense of the harrowing world of underground resistance to tyranny. Maliki, no doubt, knew that deception and cunning were essential to survival, and sometimes dirty deeds must be done to save your own life and those in your cadre. This was powerful, street-level training in survival in a merciless world. Hazing at Skull&Bones would seem tame in comparison.

The results seem to prove it. While our Spelling Bee Champ, Condi Rice, talks tough to Congressional committees about Maliki living on "borrowed time," the other mouthpieces in the Bush Administration are always quick to assure Maliki that no deadlines will ever be set, no consequences will ever follow the failure to meet the deadlines that are never set, and that America will keep sending its military and all the money we don't have as long he needs it, because he's just that important. Forget the 70+ virgins; Maliki must think he's already died and gone to Paradise. And all he has to do is make a few noises now and then about how he'll be even-handed in "going after" Shiite militias, or that he will "crack down" on Syrians and Iranians, who gave him sanctuary for over twenty years. But our ace diplomats and strategists, Condi, Stephen Hadley, Darth Cheney and L'il Georgie himself -- in their clueless arrogance believe they've got Nouri right where they want him, and if Maliki says he'll pursue the militias of his co-religionists with the same zeal he uses to fight the Sunnis who tried to kill him -- well, that's good enough for our team, who understand absolutely nothing about the real situation they're dealing with. Sure, Maliki will "crack down" on the Shia militias of the exact kind he used to finance, arm and train, and the Bush Administration will cooperate in Nouri's real goal, which is to drive a stake through the heart of the Sunni insurgency once and for all, so there's never a danger the "democracy" will fall victim again to a Sunni despotism.

Once again, Bush is in way over his head. Our Team can't see that Nouri's quietly uttered suggestion that he doesn't really need all those troops -- just send me a lot of those hot helicopter gunships, some of the cherry Humvees with the up-armor, and leave it to me to clean house -- outflanks their "thinking" about the inevitable outcome in Iraq. Nouri is four Parcheesi moves down the board. At some point, Maliki will charm Bush even out of the oil. Another oil deal gone bad. Someone's a puppet, alright, but I don't think it's Our Man in Baghdad.

Trying to watch next Tuesday's State of the Union: a guide to controlling the gag reflex

George W. Bush presents a challenge I do not associate with any previous President. In droves, American citizens report that they can't stand to watch him on television. In very funny blogs (see Bob Cesca on Huffington Post, e.g.), in comments by friends, I hear this over and over. People just can't stand looking at the guy. Cesca refers to Bush's "pointy face" as a reason his relatives abjure the citizen's responsibility of paying heed to the press conferences and speeches of their Chief Executive. Others refer to his many nervous tics, his averted gaze, his artificial gestures of emphasis, his garbled syntax, his habit of laughing and snickering while talking about matters of macabre horror, like his dumb war in Iraq and his dumber plans for expanding it.

Surely we can rise above such ad hominem cavils and pay attention to the what the President says; he is, after all, the Decider, and what he says used to go. Or, more fun, you can read what I think is the real reason he makes his subjects nauseous when they look at him. I think this may be an original insight, and it is based on superficial research, even, beginning with my transient interest in the notion that Bush's facial characteristics may be indicative of fetal alcohol syndrome. I don't know if there's anything to that. Armchair neurologists have suggested that Bar may have hit the hooch pretty good during her first pregnancy while G.H.W. Bush was off on biz trips, trailing an oil stain behind him. Pure speculation, and the only evidence consists of anecdotal observations of how weird Bush is. Anyway, it's a cruel slur against people who genuinely do suffer from the sad affliction of FAS.

Nevertheless, FAS sufferers often lack a philtrum, "which is the vertical groove in the upper lip, formed where the nasomedial and maxillary processes meet during embryonic development. The philtrum exists to allow a dynamic range of lip motions necessary for human vocal and non-verbal communication". (Wikipedia entry for "philtrum." I told you I had researched this blog piece.) I will say, without boasting, that I have a robust philtrum. I owe this feature, as I owe so much, to my late, beloved mother, who touched nary a drop during my gestation. It is not, of course, in the class of Angelina Jolie or John F. Kennedy, Jr., apotheoses of the well-developed philtrum. But 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Bush, by contrast, seems to lack that vertical groove. It is too much to say that the space above his upper lip is entirely ungrooved, but I think his nasomedial and maxillary processes failed to get it completely together during Bar's Scotch-soaked, Poppy-deprived pregnancy.

Until I undertook the exhaustive research for this piece (the results of which you've already read), I didn't know the philtrum was involved in vocal dynamics, but its near-total absence, in W's case, may explain an anomalous feature of Bush's speaking style. You will notice that the opening and closing of his mouth proceed not in the fluid, flexible style of normal vocalization, but resemble more the movement of a hatch. Imagine Howdy Doody for a moment. Remember? It is as if Bush's entire upper lip is stuck to his front teeth. This effect is accentuated when Bush is scared spitless, as during press conferences where he's confronted with his latest batch of lies, or (significantly) during his annual exercise in mendacity, the State of the Union Address. At such moments, Bush's upper lip probably is stuck to his front teeth, which is why you never see his teeth when he speaks (another reason, also characteristic of FAS, is that they're unusually small).

The Howdy Doody Effect, when coupled with the clumsy phrasing, neologistic solecism, and stupid logic of his actual words, combine, in total effect, to produce someone who simply can't be watched. If we think about it thus, feelings of compassion may arise. We might be able to reclassify Bush as someone philtrum-challenged. He might be eligible, retroactively, to gain admission to some of those schools he got into by dint of his name, this time as a special needs case.

A solution, of course, is at hand. A mustache. It would not need to be a full-on walrus job. Just a vertical bar, about an inch wide, covering the area where the philtrum should be. Combined with one of his trademark gestures, the right arm held high, palm facing the audience, brought down with a thump on the rostrum -- all this might be enough to make us forget our ridicule and bring us back to the fear more appropriate to his reign.

Marshall vs. Gonzales

"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"

John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Marbury vs. Madison, 1803.

"WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales rapped federal judges yesterday for ruling on cases that affect national security policy. Judges, he contended, are unqualified to decide terrorism issues that he said are best settled by Congress or the president."

Admittedly, it's a tough call, a little like pitting the 1958 Baltimore Colts against the 1984 San Francisco 49ers in a Fantasty Football League game. On one side we have John Marshall, the originator of the concept of judicial review, who in one lapidary moment of legal insight deduced that the courts must have the right to decide the constitutionality of laws promulgated or enforced by other branches of government. On the other, we have Alberto "The Torque" Gonzales, chief apologist and general manager of the Torture Division of Bush's War on Civilized Standards. A tough call, and rife with the danger of subjective over-reaction. Marshall...or Gonzales? Let us examine some of the crucial data in an effort to divine a wise conclusion.

The Torque notes, with stupendous irrelevance (I try to be objective, but the bilge rises anyway), that federal judges, such as Justice Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit who ruled that Bush has been committing felonies and violating the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures more or less on a daily basis since 2001, do not have access to embassy communications and other "security" data. Bush does. Who better, then, to decide what's good for the USA? If Bush decides that an end-run (returning to the football analogy) around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and flipping the bird at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) helps in his all-out pursuit of al-Qaeda (other than, of course, the two head men at a-Q), who the hell are the courts to tell him he's off base?

There are two possible reactions to The Torque's denunciation of the courts:

1. He's a complete idiot (charitable interpretation).
2. He's a fully paid-up member in Satan's Kiwanis Club (realpolitik analysis).

I lean toward the second conclusion, perhaps telegraphed by (a) the limited nature of the listed options, and (b) my persistent use of the pejorative "The Torque." How can we put this in terms even Torkie might grasp?

Let us analyze by reductio ad absurdum, always apt when talking about the Bushies, since almost everything they do is tainted with the absurd. Suppose that Bush simply said that all mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service will now be routed through the office of the USPS's Inspector General, who will open and read all mail and decide what will be redacted, what will be confiscated, and what will be sent on. Admittedly, this will have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights and involve a wholesale invasion of privacy. Still, Bush (squinting at the camera from some heretofore unused sound stage in the White House) will point out that the military employs such censorship routinely in a time of war; the whole country is now at war; ergo, the whole country's mail will now be opened and read. Got it? Let's break for lunch.

Some troublemaking judge rules unfavorably under the First (speech), Fourth (search) and Ninth (privacy) provisions of the Bill of Rights. But really - how many embassy cables has this black-robed meddler read today? The country is safer from foreign (and domestic!) threats under the Domestic Espionage Surveillance Total Review of Your mail (DESTROY mail) program. Isn't it? Of course it is. We're at war, dammit, and always will be. Constitutions are for sissies without the stomach to do what's necessary to take on The Enemy.

There is no difference in principle whatsoever between the reductio example and Gonzales's latest mash note to the "unitary Presidency," by which he means: let's simply put all power in a new monarch and stop this silly "check & balance" bullshit. I think, however, that John Marshall is the better bet. He was deciding a simple, seemingly trivial issue involving John Adams's right to appoint Justice Marbury as justice of the peace for Washington D.C., even at the 11th hour of his term, and Thomas Jefferson's obstruction in seeking to block his appointment immediately after his oath of office. In other words, like Justice Anna Taylor Diggs, Marshall was a judge who was willing to stare down some major heavyweights, even his political patron, to make certain a Constitution, and not regal whimsy, would prevail. By 1803, the United States of America had had enough of that. Why on earth would we want it now, and from this guy in particular?

The Libby Trial

I don't exactly understand what the Libby trial is about. A long time ago, somewhere in 2005, I heard Patrick Fitzgerald explain it, at a press conference, and I had a hard time following it then, and he was taking pains to make clear why it was so important and how unambiguous the evidence was against Libby, which seems unlikely, since if it is difficult to follow the indictment even when it is explicated in meticulous detail, everything about the case is likely to be vague and ambiguous. To use legal terms. I know, from watching Fitzgerald, that the Libby indictment has something to do with Libby having originated some of the disclosures about Valerie Plame, rather than being on the receiving end of such disclosures from reporters, and that this misrepresentation on Scooter's part obstructed the investigation. Threw sand in the umpire's eyes, to use Fitz's metaphor.

It doesn't matter. At least Scooter Libby is going to trial, and at least that Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney will have to testify in court. That's more than a little something. I would pay a lot of money, more money than I would pay to hear Bruce Springsteen or Evgeny Kissin (just to name 2 hot tickets) to sit in the court room and watch Patrick Fitzgerald cross-examine Dick Cheney. Dick, as we all know, makes his way in the world by feigning a kind of imperious mastery over all matters great and small. He sits, the lump of his head joined to the larger lump of his torso by no discernible neck region, and growls out of the side of his mouth in an unflappable monotone meant to intimidate anyone within earshot. I think it's all an act, and he doesn't feel nearly as invulnerable or omniscient as he leads us to believe. For one thing, no one can match his record for being wrong about everything he talks about, particularly when it comes to the Iraq War. He's in a class by himself. He sets the standard by which all other stupidity must be measured. From "no doubt about Saddam's nuclear program" to "welcomed as liberators" to "the death throes of the insurgency," Cheney has confounded the laws of probability with his uncanny knack for being wrong. He is wrong, and then after a brief passage of time, he is wrong again. In Column 1, we can list Cheney's prognostications/analyses, and then in Column 2, we can assess accuracy. The entries in Column 2 are all the same: Wrong. Flipping a coin would yield much better results. Cheney can't admit being wrong, or course, for the simple reason that his insecurities won't let him, and his insecurities derive from his inner recognition of an evident truth: Cheney isn't all that bright.

Thus, the showdown. Fitzgerald is all that bright. He's just timid, in my opinion, in ways that Eliot Spitzer, for example, isn't. Fitgerald appears to need absolute assurance that he can prove every last element of every crime he indicts, beyond all reasonable doubt, before he will even commit himself to seeking the grand jury's affirmation. Thus, the unbelievable number of times he called key witnesses to the grand jury. Over and over, covering the same ground. Fitzgerald, to say the least, could not make it in private practice. His costs of representation, in any but the largest cases, would always exceed the amount in controversy. He is, therefore, ideal as a public sector advocate, since titanic waste is standard operating procedure.

He avoided seeking a substantive indictment on the Identities Act (disclosing an undercover operative's name) for very technical reasons which he never ventured to explain. There has even been speculation that Fitzgerald was chosen by figures in the Administration because of these hyper-cautious, Old-Lady-Like tendencies.

It may not help Cheney, however. Having come this far, I imagine that Fitzgerald is absolutely determined to win, and he has winnowed the issues down to this tiny focal point on which he can concentrate all of his energy. Nevertheless, the surrounding "context," the ways in which the Bush Administration sought to control the mounting public outcry when their lies and obfuscations about WMD in Iraq stood nakedly in the light of day, is very much in play; and if Cheney is in his way, I think he will throw caution to the wind. The momentum of a trial, the tension between prosecution and defense, ratchets steadily up as the trial progresses, so that counsel begin to lose all sense of that other "context," the "externalities" of the trial, such as whether Fitzgerald is being impolitic in pursuing Cheney doggedly till he forces him into the open.

And flushed from behind that patina of insufferable superiority (like a domesticated quail, or a lawyer hunting buddy), Cheney will have a lot to answer for. It will become apparent that Cheney was the one who fingered Joseph Wilson (that famous circled newspaper item). Cheney will become Scooter's motivation to lie: to protect his boss from the revelation that the Wilson "hit" originated in the VP's office. It is possible that Cheney will dissolve on the stand, will perjure himself, will contradict earlier testimony and statements made to Fitzgerald's investigators.

Oh yeah. It's all there. Let the games begin. Cross-examination is different from a press conference. A prosecutor is experienced in the art of boxing in his quarry. He's not only permitted follow-ups; he's got a judge who will see to it that Cheney, at long last, answers a question directly and honestly. And who knows where that might lead?

Whither the statesmen of yesteryear

It now seems established as an article of faith that the Democrats will make no serious effort to rein in Bush's war. The rationale is a study in cynicism. Although their ineffective posturing will result in many more American deaths and horrendous wounds, cutting off Bush's allowance and grounding him will transfer "ownership" of the Iraq War to the Democrats and make them responsible for losing. For as certain as CO2 concentrations will be higher in the troposphere next year than they are today, Bush will claim he was this close to winning when Congress betrayed his noble cause. The Democrats (particularly in the Senate, where nearly every Democratic Senator is running for President) do believe Bush when he says losing would be catastrophic. A "failed state" in the heart of the Arab world, a breeding ground for terrorism and all kinds of mischief. Can't have that, and can't be responsible for it.

So I'm wondering: what is the difference between this Congress and the last one, where the war is concerned? It was obvious in Bush's speech Wednesday night that he intends to strike inside Iraq and Syria. His response to the change in Congress, in other words, is to set the entire Persian Gulf ablaze. Joe Biden, as always, has made some disapproving noises about this idea, informing Condi Rice that Bush's existing authority does not allow him to cross Iraq's international borders to carry the battle to the Iranians, in particular. But why else would Bush announce his deployment of Patriot missiles in the region, and the dispatch of another carrier group to the Gulf? We don't need aircraft carriers to fight the Baghdad insurgency, and the Iraqi factions don't use intermediate range missiles. He's going to destroy the Syrian and Iranian networks involved in training and supplying Iraqi insurgents, Bush says. Could they really be doing all that right out in the open in Iraq? It seems far more likely Bush is talking about activities within the territorial borders of Syria and Iran.

Despite what Joe Biden, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska (who compares the cross-border escalation to the Nixon/Kissinger secret war in Cambodia) may say in rejoinder, Bush will not be deterred in the final 24 months of his presidency from attacking Iran if he feels like it. And he clearly feels like it. Bush thinks that war is the answer, that a surgical strike against Iran's nuclear facilities will elevate him to the lofty plane enjoyed by Israel after the destruction of Iraq's Osirak in 1981. Georgie Boy has never been terribly original. Anyway, he's running out of time; there's room for just one more war, he thinks, and this is the big one, the defeat of America's great thorn-in-the-side.

What will La Diva & Mr. Mumbles do about this one? Maybe they'll at last wake up to the idea you have to take Bush on directly, but I doubt it. It might constitute a brand new ground for impeachment, a violation of the War Powers Act, but Bush's artful dodgers will read those earlier authorizations (2001's authorization for war in general against bad people, 2002's for war against Iraq) as implying a license to engage in "cross-border incursions" (like nuclear strikes against the Bushehr reactor in Iran), and the Dems will fret and worry he might be right, and then, once again, they could wind up owning the defeat.

Nope, they'll cluck, and fume, and pass a nonbinding resolution condemning Bush's unilateral act, and then sit back and see if it works before saying anything else. I was always most worried about Bush if he was put in the position of having nothing to lose, which is just about where he is now. Many consider him the worst President ever. He's not going to do anything really positive, like getting behind alternative energy (although I know his State of the Union will go ga-ga for switch grass - just wait), or solving the medical crisis. Too candy-ass, too caring, for Bush. War's his thing. You can do it fast, you can do it now, you can see the results later this afternoon. Unfortunately, we'll all be witnesses to the same thing at the same time.

La Diva & Mr. Mumbles

I do think Bush leads a charmed life in many ways. In 2004, as just one example, the Democrats ran a candidate against him who was maybe the only prominent national politician who was as big a yutz as he was. The Bush camp contended at one point that their guy had scored higher on military aptitude tests than Kerry had, and Kerry simply conceded the point. After watching Kerry try to windsurf his way to victory, I came to believe it, unbelievable as it was. I remember from basketball coaching days that you do not attack a 1-3-1 zone defense by lining up your offense in a 1-3-1 configuration, but the Democrats thought they should take on a pampered prep school Yalie Skull&Bones blueblood who had not earned his great wealth with a pampered prep school Yalie Skull&Bones blueblood who had not earned his great wealth. Well, Kerry windsurfed instead of riding a mountain bike; that was an important distinction.

Now 6 years on in the unfurling nightmare known as the Bush Presidency, the American people finally caught on to, and got fed up with, Bush and his smirking screwingupness. About 15% of the American populace think the flaming centerpiece of the Bush years, the Iraq War, is a good idea, and they said so in November, 2006. What could be clearer? The Democratic Leadership, however, that Dynamic Duo of La Diva (Pelosi) and Harry Reid (Mr. Mumbles) do not respond to the surprisingly clever discernments of the American electorate. Instead, they are in thrall to the Imaginary Focus Group of Their Minds (the IFGTM). This mythical construct dictates the narrow confines of their available options. The IFGTM does not countenance impeachment, although Bush has done everything but run the Constitution through the Oval Office shredder. It permits the Demos only to say tsk, tsk, when Bush proposes to escalate his disastrous project in the Middle East. Their thundering retort is to propose a nonbinding resolution objecting to Bush's plan, although they hope Bush won't be offended since he is, after all, the Commander-in-Chief and one should be careful about criticizing the C-I-C in a time of "war."

Nope, La Diva and Mr. Mumbles think the American people are all lathered up about (drum roll, please)...the minimum wage. What an achievement, and it will only take 2 years to phase in, provided it contains the Treasury-wrecking tax cuts Bush insists upon as a condition of not throwing a veto at it. Bush is lucky, so lucky, to have such "opponents." Diva & Mumbles appear unaware that the Constitution provides that impeachment is available through a simple majority vote of the House of Representatives. Never mind, for the moment, that a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate would be necessary to remove Bush from office. An impeachment would force Bush to spend the rest of his miserable term in office in a desperate battle to save his political life. Republicans impeached Clinton because of his susceptibility to artfully displayed thongs (what guy who likes girls can't relate to that?). Do Diva & Mumbles think it's a bad thing if Bush is distracted from things he could accomplish if he weren't under indictment? What things is he going to accomplish? What has he ever accomplished? Isn't it a positive good if he is sidelined from accomplishing anything else, since he accomplishes nothing but bad stuff?

I just don't get these two. Diva & Mumbles carry on as if they were the Permanent Minority Party, boxed in at every turn by the Focus Group of their minds which disapproves of anything "bold" or "strong." They could put Bush on the permanent defensive simply by dropping articles of impeachment in the House in-basket. They might save the Republic. Instead, they prefer to incrementalize their way to irrelevance.

It's not a Pacific Heights cocktail party, Nancy

Like most lawyers who spend a career in litigation, I found myself many times in the chambers of a Superior Court judge negotiating with opposing counsel in 11th hour efforts to avoid trial. It's a big part of the job. They tell us that 90% of all cases end this way, and that if they didn't the whole system would be quickly overwhelmed. Over and over again you play your part in this Kabuki theatre. Your main bargaining chip is simple; if the other side doesn't compromise to your satisfaction, you tell everyone (with as much conviction as you can muster) that you'll let a jury decide.

Nancy Pelosi seems to favor a different approach. She begins her "negotiations" by giving away all of her leverage in the naive hope President Bush will like her for her accommodating nature and will "cooperate." Although (to resume the analogy) she is negotiating with people who are willing to bribe the jury, blackmail the judge and blow up the court house, she says, for example, that impeachment is "off the table." When Bush wants to escalate the war in Iraq, Nancy says, in that fine measured diction that must sound swell up on Russian Hill, "we are not going to withdraw funding, because we must support the troops," although in so doing she gives away Congress's main Constitutional weapon for controlling the conduct of war. She will lead a noble charge instead to pass a non-binding, symbolic resolution expressing her distaste for the "surge."

Joe Biden, in similar feckless fashion, tells us that there's nothing anyone can do to stop the Commander-in-Chief from doing anything he wants in this stupid war. I think he knows better. But who are these people? What's wrong with them? What overwhelming majority of the American people would have to express their utter contempt and hatred of this debacle before the Democrats would "risk" doing something effective?

How about this for an argument? Bush went to war on the basis of a resolution passed by the House and Senate, apparently under the War Powers Act, which was itself probably an unconstitutional abridgment of Congress's right to declare war under Article I. Congress is apparently afraid to declare war, which it has not done since December, 1941, so it passes resolutions saying to the President, "you decide." Nevertheless, the War Powers Act does act to constrain the President in his conduct of war, and the resolution for Iraq reads as follows.

SEC. 1. SHORT TITLE.

This joint resolution may be cited as the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq".

SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS

The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to--

(a) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and

(b) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions.

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION. The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.

So that's it. That's Bush's authority to conduct this insane war. Suppose, for the sake of precision, we say that Iraq may be chronologically considered as Saddam's Iraq (Iraq1) and the present, post-Saddam fiasco (Iraq2). It seems very clear that Sec. 3 of the Authorization was aimed only at Iraq1. The current, "sovereign" Iraq which we installed is not a "continuing threat" to the USA; indeed, they're now our friends and allies in the Middle East, which was the whole idea behind their installation. A "bastion of democracy" in the "heart of the Arab world." And this Iraq (Iraq2) can't be held responsible for any breach of UN Resolutions, such as those pertaining to weapons of mass destruction or incursions into Kuwait. Indeed, what all the Shiites presently in power have in common is their status as victims of Iraq1.

It is true that Iraq2 is having a hard time running the country in an orderly way, on account of the civil war that has gained force in the power vacuum created by Saddam's removal and American bungling. But that does not in itself constitute any authority to continue the war, which is now devoted to "nation building." Bush said the mission was "accomplished" way back in May, 2003. Under the Resolution, his only authority for commanding troops in Iraq at all, he was right. As the War Powers Act of 1973 itself states,

SEC. 2. (c)

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

The specific statutory authorization is no longer applicable. Nancy, put down the G&T and play some hardball with this clown. Bravely lead or get the hell out of the way.

Why we have no idea what's going on

Sometime in the early 1980's, I went with my scientist brother to hear Jerry Mander speak at San Francisco State. It was an informal lecture, sparsely attended, in a classroom somewhere on campus. Mander had just published Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. He was serious about his thesis; a guy with a video camera from the school TV station showed up to tape the lecture and Mander dismissed him quickly and without humor. At one time Mander had been a founding partner in the brilliant advertising firm of Gossage & Mander, based in San Francisco, and introduced a style and format that forever changed the look of TV ads. For example, in the seminal Volkswagen series of ads, G&M simply extolled the ability of the VW to go forward and backward, concluding with the tag line: "Isn't that wonderful?" Thus was born the notion of irony in advertising, a style which has been emulated ever since. All TV advertising now strives to be funny, with varying degrees of success.

So Jerry Mander is actually a funny guy, but he wasn't amused by the effects of television. Maybe he got religion, in a sense; maybe he became appalled at the effects of his own work, his ability to manipulate the general public with images and minimal text. Maybe he got worried. The essence of his four arguments was as follows:

"The first argument is theoretical and environmental. It attempts to set the framework by which we can understand television's place in modern society. Yet, this argument is not about television itself. In fact, television will be mentioned only occasionally. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane, and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.

"The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers.

"The third argument concerns the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium.

"The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable.

"What is revealed in the end is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as "neutral" and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."

Maybe Jerry Mander was following in the large footsteps of Marshall McCluhan, and others who have worked in a field one might call "technological epistemology." It's very difficult to get your mind around, because it requires us to simply give up the notion that we can trust the mass media information that lies at the core of our roof-brain chatter, our dinner table conversations, our blogging, our confidence that we have any idea about what's going on in the world at large. Our picture of reality is "mediated," in Mander's word, through television; it is not direct; it is not based upon unfiltered sensory inputs; it is edited; it is systematically biased by the demands of the medium itself.

The election of George W. Bush, a phenomenon of modern history which always vexes my understanding, can perhaps best be understood as yet another unholy manifestation of the dark truth at the center of Mander's work. We do not elect national leaders on the basis of first-hand perceptions. We elect them on the basis of manufactured images which are packaged and sold to privately owned television stations. The successful leaders are those who have become most adept at the manipulation of the imagery, who know how to avoid the "sound bite" error of ever saying anything blunt which would look bad out of context, who know how to impersonate the qualities which appeal to some "real" value in the American voter. Thus, George W. Bush was sold as a folksy, honest, down-to-earth cowboy. Over the long, painful years, most Americans have realized that they were sold a bill of goods, as their unconscious minds have gradually assimilated all the dissonant clues that undercut this false image. But look at all the damage that was done through the power of television's fake and mediated reality in the interim. Had George W. Bush been running for mayor of a town of say 1,000 people, no such mistake could ever have been made. The citizens would have known him for an idiot to begin with. His smug and immature personality would have rubbed everyone the wrong way. He could have remained the town drunk he was always meant to be. But his handlers knew he had the last name, the malleability, and the complete lack of personal convictions which made him ideal for their mass marketing purposes. These are not, alas, the same qualities necessary for a president to deal with actual, immutable reality in the world.

The Iraq War might be seen as a kind of black box, in this epistemological analysis. It is generally conceded that the environment around Baghdad is simply too dangerous to permit thorough reporting. All of the statistics concerning attacks, deaths, injuries, refugees, etc., are systematically distorted by those with a political agenda, without fear of decisive refutation, because no better numbers are available. Those of us watching cable news receive our information in a mediated way, through TV. If television decided to show us, for three solid weeks, images of children walking untroubled toward their school in some Iraqi small town, the American public would gradually change its view. But such images (of the kind Donald Rumsfeld mourned the lack of) are not newsworthy. A car bomb sending an orange-black cloud four stories high in the central part of Baghdad, with a tableau of dismembered bodies and burning vehicles in the foreground, makes good news. People will watch the news and sit through the ads to see such mayhem. And these mediated images, confined to the tight focus of a TV screen which eliminates all context, gradually become our picture of Iraqi reality. I think the American public has turned against the war for a couple of reasons. One, the images of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirk and garbled syntax, sicken most people to the point where they oppose anything he's for. And second, the anti-war imagery, with pictures of gore, explosions, death, is more arresting than anything positive that might be put on the screen. TV doesn't care what's right as long as you watch. It's really that simple.

I don't think Jerry Mander expected TV to go away, and it never will, of course. It's an unthinkable world without the electronic hearth blazing. We derive our false, frustrating, distorted view of life on Earth by looking at it and absorbing its images. Where it will ultimately lead is scary to contemplate.

The Surge

I guess that George Bush's new impersonation is that of a "reflective man" who considers all options, really listens, and consults all available sources before pronouncing a decision. The underlying reality is that he's still the careless, none-too-bright goof-off who shoots from the hip and has an amazingly clueless grasp of the facts.

We'll hear soon about how another $100 billion and 20,000 troops will accomplish in Iraq what the previous $300 billion, 140,000 troops and 4 years could not accomplish. The situation will continue to deteriorate, of course. A different sort of battle is now raging in Iraq, for control of the country, and the United States is simply caught in the cross-fire. 20,000 troops will simply enrich the target environment.

I wonder sometimes where George got his original ideas about Iraq. I firmly believe the accounts that he did not know there were Shia and Sunni factions in the country before he launched the attack. He reportedly said, on being so informed, that he "thought they were all Muslims." It is a trenchant comment on the state of the Union that such a numbskull could have been elected President. All by itself, such a revelation should frighten thoughtful Americans to their core. His ideas seem transmuted from Dick & Jane books to the world of international relations. Everyone loves freedom, he thought; democracy is the best system; get rid of the tyrant, and the rival factions will put aside their 1,400 year old prejudices and work together to be just like America.

I think that's it, sum total, no refinements or embellishments needed. Syllogistically, it went like this:

All people love freedom and democracy, given a chance.
The Iraqis are people.
Therefore, the Iraqis will become freedom-loving democrats after we give them a chance.

I can see Bush in the Oval Office writing this out in block letters with a No. 2 pencil on a yellow legal tablet Harriet Miers placed there for him. He writes slowly, pressing hard on the pencil. The time is late fall, 2002, and the light coming through the big windows is dimming. It's almost time to quit (4 pm) and go have a diet Coke and pretzels in the residence. George's clever deduction will be filed for him by his secretary in the Presidential papers. A good day's work for George. He's figured out why his plan is right, and he did it in a way that did not involve a lot of egghead, think-tank, overly-detailed baloney, all that talk about "culture" and "theocratic tendencies." The problem was simple. It is obvious to George that someone screwed up his perfectly reasonable plan, because the analysis was flawless.

That's actually what happened. That's what our leadership in Washington is now like. This guy was elected not just once (well, maybe just once), but twice. By Americans. You think maybe something is wrong somewhere?