A funny thing happened after getting to the Forum 2,051 years ago today

I wonder if the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 B.C., would have been viewed differently were it not for the plays of William Shakespeare. Not to mention Dick and Liz. After all, Marc Antony's "friends, Romans and countrymen" speech is difficult to counter. The delicious irony of the refrain, "but Brutus is an honorable man," outclasses any prosaic recitation of Caesar's self-aggrandizing moves to consolidate power after he crossed the Rubicon. It's worth bearing in mind, however, that Brutus, Cassius & Co. viewed themselves as the ancient Roman equivalent of the German generals who tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb; that is, as engaged in tyrannicide, not a coup.

It's 2,051 years later and the imperial pretender who walks all over the American Constitution and violates statutes (or signs "statements" vitiating the effect of new ones which inconvenience his autocratic designs) is in no similar danger from his own Senate. For one thing the Star System of the old Hollywood studios is gone; who would play Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid) and La Diva (Nancy Pelosi)? Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston? I don't think so either. The modern American Senate is full of the Boy Emperor's (in Chalmers Johnson's descriptive term) enablers who are aware of Bush's numerous outlandish high crimes and misdemeanors but consider it impolitic to do anything about it. I have thought since November 2006 that the importance of impeaching George W. Bush is less about the immediate benefits of removing a dangerously incompetent leader with totalitarian instincts from office than it is about the cleansing and expiatory effect of reaffirming the Constitutional rule of law. If we tolerate, for example, the wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law by Bush and his cronies, and allow them to cloak the true extent of their invasions in secrecy; if we permit Bush to maintain a vast gulag of CIA prisons in foreign countries where "terrorist suspects" are routinely tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions; if we buy into the patent nonsense that "enemy combatants" can be jailed indefinitely without judicial recourse by a specious analogy to the treatment of Japanese and German soldiers during a conventional war with a finite duration; if we aid and abet the continuation of a war started on false pretenses under the color of an "authorization" that is clearly no longer even putatively applicable; if we do all this, and considerably more, then we are saying that from now on we will tolerate the concept that Presidents can act illegally without any consequences other than pointless "criticism" or the occasional demand that some subservient official be symbolically canned by the Administration.

I do not understand why Nancy Pelosi believes that impeachment must be "off the table." The clearest case ever presented for impeachment now exists. The House Judiciary Committee would probably need five or six months to air out all the misprision and illegality in which Bush & Co. have engaged during their first six sordid years.

Yet I suppose the Democrats are going to let it ride. They are so enmeshed in Beltway politics and personal careerism that they have lost sight (with a few blessed exceptions, such as Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold) of the big picture. If this neglect persists, I am concerned a terrible price will be paid down the road. The original idea that no President is above the law will be lost as the "precedents" established during the Bush Administration cohere into fixed tradition. Exceptions to Constitutional principles for "national emergencies" and "dire threats" will be seen as routine and tolerable, and Americans will get used to the idea of police state tactics and "necessary" curtailment of liberties. A terrible mistake, anticipated many times in history. Brutus and Cassius saw it coming in their own day. They just needed someone writing better lines to vindicate their legacy.

Godless Liberal(s) Invade(s) Congress

"Secular groups Monday applauded a public acknowledgment by Rep. Pete Stark that he does not believe in a supreme being, making the Fremont Democrat the first member of Congress — and the highest-ranking elected official in the U.S. — to publicly acknowledge not believing in God." Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2007.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. Also, my own cover story for not running for office. In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, he makes the point that a higher percentage of Americans voice their unqualified opposition to an atheistic candidate for President than for any other defining characteristic in a standard survey. Americans who have no qualms about voting for a woman or a minority for President draw the line at voting in a heathen. In Dawkins's view, in other words, a substantial majority of Americans demand that the President, first and foremost, be delusional. Certainly no one promoting deism in politics could have much to complain about in the last 7 years.

If Pete Stark is the "highest-ranking elected official" in the U.S. to renounce belief in God, then I suppose that none of the other 434 Representatives and none of the 100 Senators has ever done likewise. Thus, we're at the point where either (1) not one of the other nonbelieving 534 members of Congress has the courage to proclaim his/her apostasy, seeing it as political suicide; or (2) there is no such person; they all believe in God.

I was recently in a conversation about such beliefs where I was described as an agnostic, and I found myself saying, "beyond that." "Atheist?" she asked. "Beyond that too," I responded immediately. I wonder what I meant. Maybe something along these lines: If you tell me that thunderclaps are caused by Thor throwing his hammer while being carted around in the sky in a chariot drawn by his two goats, I will, of course, honor your belief and nod gravely in the way that my politically correct, respectful generation tends to respond to declarations of arrant nonsense. We're so-o-o nice and afraid of giving offense. If, however, you ask me whether I share this "belief," I will think (though probably not say) that the question is simply not meaningful. There aren't "two sides" to this "question." You believe something nuts and I don't think about it.

I liked Steven Weinberg's response to a religious group who asked him to participate in a "constructive dialogue" with religious thinkers. He declined, saying he maybe believed in a dialogue, but not a "constructive dialogue." Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist probably best known for uncovering the cause of Reality (barely an exaggeration), has the right idea, if you ask me. What can science learn from religion, other than the importance of science as an escape from obscurantism? I don't see much difference between positing the idea of a god creating the Universe with lightning bolt-like conjurations and Thor throwing his Mjolnir and making the dogs run under the bed. The Biblical God is an update of the Nordic Thor; modern religion simply retreats before the advance of science by making God murkier and more ethereal, and doing away with the vaudeville routines of burning bushes and parting seas.

I suppose, if I'm running for President, I can finesse the point by telling the truth and saying I find the question of belief meaningless, along the lines of the above meandering explanation. I doubt it will work. Americans are intolerant of vacillation on matters of belief. They much prefer a straightforward declaration of lunacy.

Unapologetic Cassandra-ism; or, Foreseeing the End of the American Republic

Cassandra was a good-looking gal, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was so alluring to men that Apollo himself came on to her and granted her the power of prophecy. Cassie, however, could not dig the Greek God's action (he wasn't Yanni, after all). So her power, in effect, became a curse. It did not stop her from predicting the fall of Troy, however, and she added yet another cliche to our always-burgeoning trove with her "beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

My old prof at Berkeley, Chalmers Johnson, has now completed his Cassandra-ish "Blowback" trilogy. The last volume, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" warns us that the military-industrial complex sitting at the very center of American life acts as a kind of Trojan Horse full of devastating potentialities that threaten the Constitutional basis of our democracy. If we're lucky in a society, we find among ourselves a few brilliant polymaths with that rare capacity to take it all in, to contextualize recent history, to describe the interplay of the moving parts of our governmental and social apparatus. Noam Chomsky, for all his unquestioned brilliance, seems (to me) simply too stridently "off" to offer much help this way. It's as if he never much liked the United States in the first place. His rants have no capacity to redeem because they are nihilistically devoted to complaining as an end in itself. When someone is absolutely insistent on never placing one's country in a broader context of mistake-prone polities, but attacks unmercifully every failure and peccadillo, I think of motivations such as "Daddy" issues as the root of the emotional antipathy.

If, on the other hand, you essentially like America, once served it as a Naval officer and CIA analyst (like Prof. Johnson), and are just disappointed in how screwed up it's gotten, then Chalmers may be the sort of Cassandra for you. I think there's a reason so many of us are nostalgically drawn to tales of World War II. Say what you will about America's questionable decisions during the War (internment of Japanese, the firebombing of civilians in Germany and Japan, the use of atomic bombs at the end), one could at least say that if these were mistakes, they were errors made under tremendous threats to our survival, and there is no doubting the overall moral righteousness of our cause, especially when compared to the evil intentions of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini and even of our "ally" Stalin.

Chalmers Johnson writes about the problems engendered by never leaving the wartime economy of World War II, the "Keynesian militarism" of the military-industrial complex. He lays it out so it is plain to see. The United States has become a New Sparta, or in his formulation, the New Roman Empire, the republican nature of which foundered after 44 B.C. when Rome sank into a series of military dictatorships. We're dominated by our military institutions, and they are threatening the Constitutional basis of our country. The same thing happened to Rome. There are many facts and figures in "Nemesis" to support the thesis. The United States has at least 737 military installations, many of them large bases and airfields, worldwide. Adding up all the money spent through all agencies (e.g., the nuclear bomb budget of the Department of Energy, and the budgest of the many intelligence agencies), the United States spends 3/4 of a trillion dollars a year on the military and on defense of the country. This is 50% of the discretionary spending of the federal government (outside of entitlements) and more than 25% of the total federal budget. Using this figure, it can be said that the United States spends more money on defense and intelligence (and "homeland security") than the rest of the world put together.

Of course, we can't afford this. We're giving up all kinds of social programs (universal health care, for example, or useful mass transit) that other civilized nations take for granted. We borrow the money at a reckless pace to keep it all going while our manufacturing base for everything except weapons and munitions is shipped overseas (3 million jobs lost since 2001). Everyone agrees that the trade deficit, the national debt, the looming bankruptcy of the entitlement programs are "unsustainable," but we keep trying to sustain them anyway. In one of many lapidary moments, Chalmers Johnson explains that Keynesian economics has been short-circuited in America's militaristic world. The idea was that the government could stimulate short-term development to avoid recessions by taking on deficits to finance, e.g., public works programs which increased employment and the free flow of money; and then, in prosperous times, to retract such programs and to use tax revenues to pay down the deficits created.

The foxes, however, have completely taken over the hen house. There is no brake on spending on the military because militarism is now what the United States does. Congress does not "oversee" the process except to enable it. (Note that the planned response of the Democrat-controlled House Appropriations Committee to Bush's request for "supplementals" for Iraq and Afghanistan is to give him more than he asked for.) It's why we're always at war. It's why we spend more and more on defense even when it's completely irrational, for example, to keep beefing up the standard military when we see our main enemy as disparate groups of Islamic militants engaged in "asymmetric warfare," where a large standing army and lots of overkill bombs are inappropriate and probably useless. Yet when you have all these hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

One effect of reading the book is to understand that George W. Bush is at the extreme end of a gradual process of evolution toward a militaristic, anti-Constitutional movement which has gained momentum over the last 50 years. He did not come out of nothing; the ground was prepared by all the Presidents since World War II. His Manichean, apocalyptic tendencies (and limited comprehension, which makes him susceptible to easy manipulation) have simply quantumly pushed things in a direction they were already going. He's made clear the central thesis of "Nemesis," that a militaristic nation intent on foreign adventurism and domination cannot also maintain a free democracy at home. Not in Ancient Rome, and not now.

Bush's Libby Problem, Continued

"[W]e've had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I've spoken out consistently against them, and I want to know who the leakers are." —George W. Bush, Chicago, Sept. 30, 2003.

Of course, in some ways it would be helpful if Bush could adopt some simplified lingua franca, like Swahili or Esperanto, to express himself while a seasoned translator stood by to put the gobbledegook back into English. As it is, we have to deal with the raw feed, and it's not easy. It can give you a severe headache. For example, Exhibit A above, in which Bush reveals his apparent ignorance that the "administrative" and executive branch refer to his own Executive Branch or "the Bush Administration," and are one and the same, and that it's not necessary to mention the legislative branch twice to make the point about leaks. This quote is from the same Q&A in which Bush made the careful comments quoted yesterday about his determination to do the "appropriate" thing for anyone found to have leaked "classified information." The contrast between the prefab phrasing and Bush's usual hopeless confusion is telling. When he's coached to thread the needle (to avoid jail time, for example) he can nail his lines.

What is also striking is Bush's professed ignorance, on September 30, 2003, of "who the leakers are." If he hadn't learned the identities of the leakers long before September 30, 2003, how could Bush's ignorance have continued past October 1, 2003? Karl Rove, who certainly monitors every word his balky student utters, knew who the leakers were on September 30, 2003, because he was one of them. Ari Fleischer was also one of the leakers and he met with Bush at least daily. And Dick Cheney, who confers with Bush constantly, could have told him about Scooter Libby, because it was Dick Cheney's idea for Scooter to leak like a water bed after a porcupine pot party.

The grounds for impeachment are there, if diligently developed. It seems apparent that the Democratically controlled Congress, led by faint hearts like La Diva and Mr. Mumbles, are too timorous to impeach Bush on the really big high crimes and misdemeanors, like torturing prisoners of war, denying due process to American citizens, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law, spending money authorized for Afghanistan on illegal preparations for war in Iraq --all of this overwhelms them. Too big and scary to debate in the open, except for a few valiant souls like Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders. But delving into this mystery, smacking as it does of a whodunnit, of a who knew what when -- this seems always to be the kind of simplistic coverup which undoes the incumbent. Nixon might have attempted to subvert the Constitution by playing off the CIA against the FBI, but it was something much simpler, the tape-recorded proof that he knew about the break-in at the Watergate almost immediately after it happened, that drove him from office.

Pull on one end of this skein of deceit and misdirection and it will unravel. Fitzgerald has "finished his investigation." Congress can take it from here. Maybe the able John Conyers will pick up the twine and begin yanking on it. For one thing is certain: Bush knew that members of his own office and Dick Cheney's office were in on the ground floor of these ruinous leaks. He knew it either before it happened (as part of the planning for retaliation against Joseph Wilson), or he knew almost immediately after. And he certainly knew well before September 30, 2003. Squeeze the right people, make some deals, and the story will come out, and the unfinished narrative, in which the active participants detail the ways in which Bush was informed of the leaks as they happened will emerge, and that story can be compared to all of Bush's clumsy obfuscations before the mantra of "ongoing investigation" shushed him up.

Scooter Libby was a sacrificial lamb, given to the mob in expiation for greater misprision behind the scenes. The thinking was that the liberal media could be placated by conviction on a few minor felony counts for which Libby will never spend a day in prison. Unfortunately, as almost always, the conniving Cheney read his critics right. Cheney is almost never right in the real world, but in the realm of Washington politics, where he only has to intimidate the amazingly fainthearted Democrats, his calculations usually carry the day. There is only a slight chance the co-opted wusses of the Democratic centrist wing will rise to the challenge, but if they do, a means for removing both Bush and Cheney will emerge.

Bush's Current Libby Dilemma

George Bush has enormous problems with verb-noun agreement, as you may have noticed. Given that there's usually a 50% probability of getting it right, it's astounding how often he comes up with ungrammatical clunkers like "Is our children learning?" So it would not surprise me if his version of Bill Clinton's famous evasion, "It depends on what the meaning of is, is," were to come out, under Bush's brutal ministrations, "It depends on what the meaning of is, are."

We may soon see how adept GWB is at artful dodging. Take this quote:
"I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action." [Bush Remarks: Chicago, Illinois, 9/30/03]

From my own review, this is probably Bush's most definitive pronouncement on the Valerie Plame matter. There are others to choose from, and we could throw in the categorical denials from Scott McLellan that Libby or Rove was involved in talking to reporters about Valerie Plame. But McLellan is a serial, compulsive, unapologetic liar himself, and one step removed from Bush. Further, to avoid ratifying his mendacity, the Bushies retired McLellan from his job; he was useless at that point anyway, because he was fully depreciated during his handling of l'affaire Plame.

I've been a lawyer for a long time, and I've observed hundreds of witnesses in depositions and trials deal with critical, "jugular" issues in litigation. By that I mean the fulcrum point in a case. It might concern liability; it might concern state of mind; it might concern when someone first kenw some crucial fact. When opposing counsel is saddled with a witness or client who has a tendency to wander, to ad lib in disastrous ways, who's maybe not all that bright to begin with, he coaches his client to recite carefully prefabricated sentences to cover this critical ground. Bush certainly fits the description of such a client-control problem. Bush himself once inadvertently disclosed the exact content of one of his coaching sessions. As he finally, at long last, admitted that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, he stated, with evident pride, that he "was always careful to say that Saddam did not order the attacks on 9/11." On that one point, you can take him at his word.

With this as primer, review the quoted statement above. Notice anything peculiar about it?

Good for you. You either are, or would have made, a good lawyer. It's all in that phrase "leak classified information," isn't it? I used to be a State Bar grader, and for spotting that issue, I can almost assure you of a bar card. In this coached phrase, Bush does not actually talk about Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover agent for the CIA. This is not surprising, because it was critical, at the end of September, 2003, a full 2-1/2 months after Robert Novak's exposure of Valerie Plame to the general public, to leave Bush some wiggle room. Let us be realistic: does anyone actually believe that in late September, 2003, George Bush did not know that Karl Rove, his chief political apparatchik; Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff and also Assistant to the President; and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's Man Friday in the State Department, had been singing like Heckel & Jeckel to anyone in the press who would listen?

Of course Bush knew. What we learned during the course of Patrick Fitzgerald's curiously circumscribed case was that the Bushies, in a hysterical rush to counter Wilson's damning disclosures in the New York Times, went so far as to declassify important intelligence information on the order of the President. That's the first clue. The second clue is the noise made by the Right Wing echo chamber attempting to establish that Valerie Plame was never covert or undercover at all, that her "classified" status was either nonexistent or had been rendered de facto nugatory.

Bush's handlers foresaw the day when Bush's denials could become severely problematic. So they created an out for him. Compare his first statements about Valerie Plame, in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure, with this lawyerly script. To avoid being tarred with an accusation (perhaps as an unindicted co-conspirator) of obstruction of justice with his misleading, and dishonest, characterizations of Administrative intent, Bush engaged in a parsing of words that created a loophole. We will see that loophole exploited in the coming weeks.

Scooter Libby's Tragedy

Even in the liberal euphoria over the conviction of I. Lewis Libby, I remain somewhat contrarian, because I am still of the opinion that he was, indeed, a sacrificial lamb. And a sacrificial lamb who was not nearly so culpable as the people higher up whose positions Libby decided to protect.

I'm sorry his lawyer didn't follow up on his good instincts; in his opening statement, he told the truth when he described Libby as a "fall guy," the one set up to take the rap for the misprisions of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. According to the account of the loquacious juror who has described the deliberations of the jury, Ted Wells's claim resonated with the jurors. That's the way they saw it too. They were waiting for evidence they could sink their teeth into. But in the final analysis, Wells blinked, or his client (following his inclinations toward omerta to the end) would not allow him to prove the claim. I don't know which it was. Clearly, the decision to portray Libby as a flunkie sent to do a dirty job and then abandoned when his journalist sources blew his cover story -- that's a major fork in the road. If you go down that road, if you take the Vice President, maybe the President, directly on, your life will never be the same. Wells knew that. I think that's why he sat, immobile, his face in his hands, while Fitzgerald tore his defense to pieces. The jury wasn't going to buy this "faulty memory" routine and Wells knew it.

He had a better case to make. His pitch was the time-honored strategem of jury nullification. Give the jury the red meat they want and they'll overlook the law. There was no doubt that Libby lied, several times. Yet it is also true, no matter how strenuously Fitzgerald argued to the contrary in his own press conference (he doth, in fact, protest too much), that the lies did not amount to a legal hill of beans. Who on God's green Earth cares whether Libby learned about Valerie Plame's job at the CIA on June 12 or on July 13? Fitzgerald again today would not answer one fundamental question: did anyone do anything wrong by disclosing classified information or the identity of an undercover agent in the summer of 2003? If so, why didn't you charge them? And if they didn't do anything wrong, if it was perfectly legal to tell anyone and everyone who our undercover agents working on weapons of mass destruction are -- if that's your position, Mr. Fitzgerald (and you won't tell us it isn't) then WHO CARES when one of the guys in the Bush Administration who's doing the blabbing also makes up a story about when he first heard about it? And this sanctimonious stuff about the integrity of the "system" and the search for justice, how it all depends on truth-telling, and the rest of it- please. A couple of hundred million 1040's will be signed under oath in the next six months or so. What's the over/under on instances of perjury in that pile of paperwork, Mr. Fitzgerald? Fifty million? One hundred million?

I don't think Scooter Libby is a bad guy. It's just my sense. I think he's a good and ethical man who was working for a bad and unethical man, and he threw his life away burning the trail which would have led back to Cheney's manipulations. Yet even in that misguided act of loyalty he failed completely. It all came out anyway. One thing that speaks well for Scooter Libby is that he's such a lousy liar. Under the oppressive heat of a federal investigation, all he could come up with was "I forgot." The thing he forgot was himself, who he once was, and for that he'll pay a terrible price.

Libby Jury Begins Second Year of Deliberations

from Washington Post, February 26, 2008
by Dana Priest, Post Senior Reporter

Jurors in the Scooter Libby trial began their second year of deliberations today, apparently still unable to reach a unanimous decision in the case. Court room observers indicated that the eleven remaining jurors are still in good spirits and remain confident they will be able to reach a verdict soon. Judge Reggie Walton again expressed his reluctance to declare a hung jury, given the hard work of the jurors over a time period now about twelve times longer than the trial itself; although, as often in the past few months, he displayed a note of asperity about the continuing requests for "clarifications" and "deliberation materials" which have become a distinctive feature of this jury's approach to the case. Judge Walton, who sequestered the jury in a local three-star hotel about six months ago to shield them from the continuing problem of exposure to media reports, indicated that the mounting expense of housing and feeding the jurors, as well as devoting his entire docket to this one case, was beginning to try his patience. While he applauded the meticulous attention to detail which has characterized this jury from the start, he sighed audibly and drummed his fingers at the latest list of questions, which included (according to a court room source) a question whether the "ment" at the end of "statement" (a reference to the false statement count, apparently) was significant in assessing guilt, and whether it was Louis the XIV or Louis the XVI who was King of France at the time of the Reign of Terror. This second question was apparently to settle a bar bet between two jurors.

The "materials" listed in the last requisition of the jury included a Nikon digital camera, four rolls of duct tape, an overhead projector, eleven leather ottomans, a 42" plasma television, a case of 2002 Pouilly-Fuisse, a box of Dove Bars, four calling birds and three French hens, and the complete works of Daniel Defoe. Judge Walton, in consultation with lead prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Libby's counsel, Ted Wells, took the request under advisement.

Scooter Libby, meanwhile, who voluntarily submitted himself to confinement ten months ago ("to make better use of the time") is nearing the probable end, on the basis of credit for time served, of any sentence likely imposed following an unfavorable verdict.

In other news, the U.S. Congress passed a nonbinding resolution demanding that the President declare which of the four wars now raging, against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, was his favorite.

The Springer Green Room and the Reelection of George W. Bush

"America is the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in between." Oscar Wilde

I confess that I am sometimes transfixed by fleeting glimpses of the "Jerry Springer Show." There I am, surfing through, when suddenly I see Jerry's industrial-chic set, the dull green colors, the propellers turning slowly in their cages behind the "guests" -- and some obese woman with long blonde hair, wearing a bad-idea short dress with a plunging neckline, is boo-hooing to Jerry about her no-good boyfriend who she strongly suspects has been sleeping with her aunt. For some reason the fat blonde with her blurred features and uncertain dentition has taken off her shoes, and her fat feet are flat on the floor, up there on the raised platform before the howling mob which is Jerry's studio audience. And of course next up is the aunt, who is an older version of the first slob, stringier hair maybe, and a bad dye-job at that -- she charges on to the stage, also wearing a short skirt, and then immediately shucks her shoes, and without preliminaries she charges the first gal, her niece, I guess the story line has it -- and they wrestle and throw each other to the floor while the body guards halfheartedly pull them apart, and black-out squares keep us from seeing the exposed tits and ass which the audience - now chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" --can see plainly, in all their immense immediacy. Every other screamed word from the brawling aunt and niece is bleeped, as they spit epithets at each other, call each other whores and sluts, all the while throwing wild punches and pulling the other's hair. And then, of course, the boyfriend himself, with his burr haircut and tattoos and a forehead two inches high, and his dentition only a distant memory -- he walks out to screams of excoriation from the crowd, who've gotten the word on this slimebag. The aunt hugs him nonetheless, says she loves him, and the betrayed niece, her face a ruin of tears and smeared mascara, starts screaming at him, why, why, why?

Why indeed? Often, in these stories, we hear there are one or two children involved, maybe the first tub o' lard and the boyfriend were blessed with issue, or maybe it was the aunt all along, and the first blonde has been, unwittingly, raising her own cousin, somehow mistaken about her own pregnancy and delivery.

In the Chronicle today, I read that the American nuclear family, for the first time in our history, has fallen below the 25% mark. People living as husband and wife with children in one home now number about 23% of the American populace. Increasingly, this kind of family life is the exclusive province of the well-educated and well-off. Marriage and children are luxuries which most young Americans simply can't afford, if they were inclined to consider the lifestyle in the first place. Children might happen willy-nilly, from any kind of union at all, long-term or in passing, maybe incognito. Maybe the first reunion of the family would happen in the Jerry Springer Green Room.

It's not all a waste of time, to spend ten minutes with Jerry & the trailer park folks. I'm convinced that more and more of us, those of us who consider ourselves educated, aware, well-read, walk around with a vision in our heads of a fantasy America which either never existed, or has been so transmuted by the last forty years that it may as well never have existed. The columnists in the few major newspapers left (the New York and Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post), the ever-shrinking major weeklies, like Time and Newsweek, pitch their stories to this fantasy America, one peopled by a vast population of well-educated, well-adjusted Moms and Dads in good-paying jobs, their children at sleek, high-functioning schools, with money in the bank and their finances under control, the car paid for, the lawn mowed, the house clean, their lives tidy. And then, lumbering to stage center, upsetting this idyllic reverie, is the 230 lb., 5 foot 2 inch harridan with the maroon tank top and jeans skirt hiked up over her thong, her dirty blonde hair flying as she throws her sister-in-law to the ground for sleeping with her toothless husband while the two of them were working the night shift at Wal-Mart and thought she wouldn't never hear about it -- well, now she knows, you whore, you skank, you slut, you god****, m************ b****, and you can have his scraggly ass 'cause I done changed the locks on the double-wide anyway!

When I gaze upon such things, I think: even if they don't exist quite that way, even if some of it is done for effect, these people are still so absolutely devoid of self-esteem, so clueless, so obtuse, they are willing to allow themselves to be portrayed as hopeless losers in front of a national audience for what probably isn't much money, even to them. And a calm tranquility descends upon my perfervid soul. For in such moments of Trailer Park Satori, I see it. I see my own delusions, the sociological maya of my imagining, why I beat myself up asking the same question as the skanky blonde fatso: why, why, why?

Bush was appointed in 2000, as we all know; he didn't win the popular vote, and his brother cheated down in Florida to put Bush in position to allow two members of the Supreme Court with serious conflict of interest problems to stop the recount before Gore could win the electoral count outright. We know that. But 2004 - Bush got millions of votes more than Kerry, and 53% of the total. And this happened after Bush had been in office for four years, and his incompetence, his clownish bungling, his intellectual and emotional ineptitude were obvious for all to see. He started a war on completely false information before the campaign for reelection was even underway. Well, all those residents of that fantasy America we conjure, that we pull out of the clear blue sky -- they surely could have seen it. And there is only one problem, the dilemma definitively, irrefutably, crushingly presented by November 2004 -- that America, if it ever was, could not possibly exist anymore. The great majority who returned Bush to office in 2004 believed that Saddam Hussein was the principal cause of 9/11. They thought the guy who allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place was the best guy to protect us from the terrors, which he described in his fractured English, still to come. They were enthusiastic about voting for a candidate, here in the 21st Century, who maintains "the jury is out" on whether evolution theory is accurate or not, who does everything he can to retard America's scientific progress, who has made the U.S.A. a worldwide pariah with his bestial approach to prisoners of war, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for America's benighted "response" to the looming catastrophe of climate change.

Oh yes, the Green Room has its cognates, its counterparts out there in the Real World of Modern America. Epidemic obesity and diabetes, plummeting literacy, a huge cohort who use America's emergency rooms as their primary care physician. People completely wrapped up in the business of scraping by with crap jobs and crappier living conditions. And the response of the Bushies, as always, is PR: to hide the steady growth of the underclass with misleading statistics which conceal the growing disparity between the Haves and the Havenothings.

America goes on changing nonetheless. There's a new show on now, and the Americans on the program inhabit the United States from sea to shining sea. The people who play are taking one last drag before stamping the butt on the Green Room floor, knocking back one more Red Bull to juice up for the combat ahead, fluffing the mullet before charging out the door to the arena. They're getting ready to kick off those shoes and have at it.

Thinking about the Beats

The first time I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road was at the suggestion of some guy I hung out with in Honolulu during one of those summers, way back when, when I used to spend the breaks between Berkeley school terms in the Islands. A family thing, and not really part of the story. This guy was over there doing the same kind of thing, killing time between semesters in the most dissolute way he could find, with a buddy from San Francisco State. They were self-styled intellectuals of a sort, and had the kind of buddy chemistry which necessitated that both of them act like pretentious assholes most of the time. I was a sucker in those days for that kind of thing, or maybe it was just homesickness for conversation different from the simplified talk, often in pidgin, that went on between me and the locals, who probably resented (justifiably) my presence in the Islands in the first place. Anyway, one of these guys was working his way through Kerouac's classic novel, also a kind of buddy story. He talked about it a lot while I was driving them around Oahu. It occurred to me after a while that the car I had access to was the whole point of the "friendship" from their perspective. He (the shorter and more self-consciously intellectual of the two) talked mainly about the hipster language in the book, the "gone chicks," everything being "way cool," everyone needing to "split" all the time. In some ways he was making fun of the style, I suppose, the way he made fun of everything. One dull Sunday they finagled me into driving them to a polo match on the windward side of Oahu, which I grudgingly did, but then when they began getting drunk and snotty, as always happened, I excused myself by saying I needed to use the outhouse, then got in the car and drove back to Honolulu. They must have had a hell of a time trying to get back to Honolulu themselves, which they tried to tell me about not long after in an angry telephone call. I just laughed and hung up. I wasn't actually afraid of two fake intellectuals from San Francisco State. The locals? Sure, often. But not those two guys.

But I've found, as you have, that even out of disappointing liaisons in life you learn things, you pick up things of value. And so after a few years I bought a copy of Kerouac's book myself. That was my introduction to the Beats. Unconsciously if unwillingly influenced by the wise guy of a few years back, I focused at first on the colloquial and disheveled style of Kerouac's writing, which led me away from the point. I was a little too formalistic and doctrinaire in my approach to art in those days. My cousin, the ace novelist from Santa Cruz (via common ancestors from the Cumberland Gap), straightened me out on the significance of the Beats. My cousin was about the same age in 1955 as I attained in 1970, so while my reference points were Hippie, his were Beat. He explained his admiration for Kerouac (and he really would not brook my trivial carping about writing style) by talking about what it meant to hear dissenting voices during the Eisenhower Era, how all of society talked about the perfection of modern (increasingly suburban) American life, when just under the surface, a sensitive soul (like Kerouac) could plainly see that things were going terribly, terribly wrong. He wasn't the only one. Lewis Mumford, writing in The City in History in 1961, described an America where post World War II development left an "end product [as] an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set." So deranging was this forming lifestyle, in fact, that Mumford blamed it for the insanity which led to the nuclear arms race. Nuclear annihilation, indeed, could be seen as a suicidal escape from the oppressions of Modern America.

As is my habit when encountering something new and interesting, I read lots of the Beats after that. My first run-through of Tropic of Cancer impressed me as the best novel I'd ever read. It was almost miraculous in its evocation of time and place. And then Miller's dark counterpart to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, Henry's own book about touring America called The Air Conditioned Nightmare. For one thing, the title could simply not be improved upon. I realized my cousin had been influenced by these writers in his satirical vignettes about modern America, in his Charlie Bates stories. "Gas Mask" concerns Charlie's encounter with the Ultimate Traffic Jam on an unnamed Los Angeles freeway, a gridlock so final, so finished, that he eventually abandons his car, lowers himself by rope from the freeway, rents an apartment in a nearby high-rise, and watches his immobile car through binoculars. A new life, a love interest, also come about while he lives in this state of deracinated anomie. Indeed, how can you better describe the rootless nature of American life than through such a brilliant parody?

In My Dinner with Andre there is a riveting moment in the long conversation when Andre talks about the Sixties as the final convulsion of a society rebelling against the forces of standardization and commercialization, the reduction of the landscape to a tacky "crapscape" (Jim Kunstler's matchless epithet) of chain stores, fast food joints, big box outlets, the whole American Trail of Sorrows. The rebellion failed, as Andre noted, and eventually Americans "became the keepers of their own prisons." We became collaborators in our captivity, a kind of cultural Stockholm Syndrome. Almost all of us do it now: consume too much, pay too much attention to celebrity, fill the seas, the skies, our minds with garbage (as Pete Seeger sang), encourage our kids, above all, to "make it" in American society. We live in a country which is dominated completely by Big Business which owes its primary (only) loyalty to the global network of trade. The sense of a commons is so attenuated that we sit complacently by as more and more Americans fall into poverty and out of the medical system. A mercenary army fights endless wars, and their deaths are significant only as political footballs for parties competing for the plum jobs available at the public trough. Calls to patriotism have turned to ashes in the mouths of hypocritical legislators who are simply looking for manipulative angles.

One might say that it is those who stand at the cusp, at the interface, between eras who see things most clearly. There is a moment, a twinkling, when the horror can be appreciated because the culture being abandoned is still visible, still around, as its evil successor begins to materialize. Such were the Beats. Eisenhower himself, now a kind of patron saint of America's conformist age, became something of a Beat in his final warning about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex. It is here now, in force and in all its menacing glory. A charter member of the corporate ruling class received 53% of the popular vote in the last presidential election. The government is now in the full-time business of spying on its own citizens, compiling dossiers, subjecting them to "mathematical algorithms" by an elite and secret class of apparatchiks with no accountability. No amount of money spent on defense or in ongoing wars seems too great for Congress, even if Social Security, Medicare and the federal government itself are headed toward bankruptcy. Instead of making decisions (the nominal reason for their election), the legislative freeloaders idle away their hours passing nonbinding resolutions.

The Beats, in fact, were on to something. But now there is really no one left to Howl, to go On the Road, to point out the Nightmarish tenuousness of our decadent life. No one, at least, who can influence matters decisively. I suggested to my able cousin at one point that Charlie Bates make a comeback, that he turn his satirical gifts to the vexations of the Bush Era. Plausible, it might have seemed, as a suggestion. But not really possible. The broad audience is gone; it exists only as an illusion in the minds of those who remember that golden era of American dissent. Change in these United States will not come about through peaceful evolution or through hortatory satire. The body politic will fall apart through degenerative processes already well underway. "A throe, an eschatological heave," said another quasi-Beat, Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night.

Copy + paste = blog

Sometimes a blog can write itself:

"The European Union and the United States were at similar greenhouse-gas emission levels in 1990, but between 1990 and 2004, the EU economy grew by 32 percent and the greenhouse gas emissions went down by almost 1 percent compared to 1990 levels. By contrast, the U.S. economy grew by 52.6 percent between 1990 and 2004, but its emissions grew by 15.8 percent and are projected to increase to 32.4 percent above 1990 levels by 2010."

John Bruton, European Union Ambassador to the United States, February 28, 2007, special to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Researchers say [narcissism] scores have risen steadily since 1982 when the first of some 16,475 college students across the United States completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). The survey asks for responses to such statements as 'If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,' 'I think I am a special person,'and 'I can live my life any way I want.'"

"Twenge said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favour self-promotion over helping others. In addition, the study says narcissists 'are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviours.'"

"Researchers cite the 'self-esteem movement' of the 1980s, saying self-confidence building has gone too far."

Associated Press, February 27, 2007.

Any questions?

Das Leben des Anderes

"The Lives of Others" deserved to win Best Foreign Picture, if you ask me (and you didn't). Set mainly in the pre-Glasnost days of East Germany, the movie tells the chilling story of Stasi (State Security) instrusion into the lives of a group of talented artists and intellectuals in an unnamed East German city before the fall of the Wall, and of the destructive effect of surveillance on sanity and human happiness. A fascinating character study, and a timely reminder of the dangers of trading freedom of speech and association for an illusory "state security."

Which brings me, as so often, to the question of America's move to the Right. Joe Conason is out with a book called "It Can Happen Here," a play on the title of Sinclair Lewis's (unreadable) old novel "It Can't Happen Here," (meaning also that It Can Happen Here), which is about the slide toward Fascism under Bush. I think we're at the point, actually, where we can say with some confidence that American liberal democracy will outlast Bush, and the "photo finish" I talked about the other day (liberal democracy versus January 2009) comes out of my own despair over the unnecessary destruction of American institutions that Bush introduced as part of a disorganized and hapless approach to seizing power for the "Unitary Executive."

Conason organizes familiar material using a Sinclair Lewis outline, trotting out the Lewis line about "Fascism coming to America wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross." I think books like his are part of a vital and healthy dissent, and essential to preserving the ideas of the Founding Fathers so that when Bush at long last leaves town, we can remember what we used to be about. It's interesting, however, to contrast what a finished totalitarian state, as depicted in "Das Leben," looks like compared to Bush's fumbling attempt to undermine American liberty. In the GDR (East Germany) an astonishing 200,000 citizens were offical informants for the Stasi, out of a population of about 15 million. That's penetration; that's serious intrusion. People were routinely arrested and imprisoned for saying things that sounded anti-state. The East German apparatus grew, naturally, out of Nazi practices as supplemented and made more "humane" by Soviet security techniques. These people were deadly serious about repression.

Bush is sometimes compared to Fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini, and this is of course the most immediate historical parallel that comes to mind. The situations are distinguishable, however. Hitler came to power out of an intense, personal and monomaniacal desire to rule supreme. He had unquestionable gifts of organization and motivation, and he was animated by a malignant ideology of hate and violence. He had been imprisoned; he had been debased and made a political pariah after the Beer Hall Putsch; he had fought and been wounded in World War I; he had come out of a difficult Austrian background of failure and marginalization, and was attempting to seize power on the big stage of German resurgence.

Bush, on the other hand (and it's our saving grace), is not really like that at all. Instead of a fire-breathing, highly ambitious ideologue armed with ruthless motivation, he's a homegrown product of America's decadent period. He came out of privilege and limitless money. He had no ambition for 40 years except to get drunk and deranged on booze and coke. By the time Hitler was 43, he was Chancellor of Germany and head of the Nazi Party, and he achieved this lofty pinnacle beginning from rural poverty and without political connections. Bush's father had been, among other things, President of the United States. Bush is not talented, except as a content-free vehicle in the service of corporate interests. He has no idea what he's doing. He's not charismatic and he doesn't motivate anybody. Unlike Hitler's Germany, America under Bush continues to lose ground economically and in its relative standing in the world. If he's a Fascist, he's the laziest and most disorganized Fascist in the history of the movement. But as I say, we are fortunate that it is so.

I recall after 9/11 that British citizens, in particular, sometimes sounded skeptical about America's over-the-top reaction to this single event of invasion. They were, of course, prudent and circumspect in their grumbling, but the idea was simple: America needed to get over itself. Britain had been bombed nonstop by the Luftwaffe from 1940 until Hitler finally turned his attention to the East. Night after night, all the major British cities took a pounding, thousands and thousands of civilians died. Day and night, the whole country was engulfed in flames for nearly a year. And when the Russian invasion failed, Hitler experimented with his V-2 rockets on those same British Isles with devastating lethality.

A group of Saudi and Egyptian nut cases flew commerical airliners into office buildings in New York and into the Pentagon. We had clear warnings that it was coming, but the federal government was too lazy and incompetent to react. Bush, seeing a political opportunity for reelection, seized on the attacks and immediately divided American history into "before" and "after" 9/11. "Everything changed." The American electorate, ignoring the inconvenient observation that this inarticulate faker was the one who failed to react to the warnings in the first place, bought into the story line. This is typical of American hysteria. In a similar way, the changes wrought by the "Mayberry Machiavellis" are hyped and exaggerated. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales - they love pushing people around for political effect, such as Guantanamo detainees and Abu Ghraib prisoners, but with occasional notable exceptions early in their reign, such as Jose Padilla, they lay off American citizens. East Germany, as a police state, was the real deal, run with characteristic German efficiency. Its purpose was to perpetuate power. Bush, Cheney and the gang piss all over America's noble traditions without anything, really, to show for it. All the violations of due process, the intrusion of NSA spying, the squalor of the signing statements, invading Iraq, the elimination of habeas corpus for the helpless, the torture -- all of it, it's for nothing. Bush & Cheney's sole agenda is to redistribute tax dollars of ordinary Americans to big business with military connections, and they do this through exaggerating nonexistent threats from irrelevant countries.

In some ways, our overreaction to this, the comparison to great Fascist regimes of recent history, parallels the hysterical overreaction to 9/11. We take ourselves, our precious selves, oh so seriously. America does face serious external threats, such as the danger of a terrorist nuke, but about those threats we do almost nothing. It's boring, unglamorous work. Who cares about port security, or X-ray machines for cargo holds, or enforcement of Nunn-Lugar? How can that thrive on the front page? When Bush leaves office, the blogosphere will contract by 50% and we'll be left with all those niggling, real problems that were neglected during our orgy of Fascism Envy. A spoiled, indolent and seriously overweight populace will have to look then for the Next Big Thing to distract them.

Apocalypse How?

"These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States ... and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves." -- Michael Scheuer, former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, February 19, 2007.

That isn't really news; it's sensational and au courant, but not really news. The Nunn-Lugar Act was passed years ago to deal with the very real threat of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorists, and many experts, such as Graham Allison at the Kennedy School at Harvard, have offered in Senate testimony the probability estimates of an actual detonation. In late 2004, the guess was that the chance of a nuclear explosion somewhere in the world was 70% over the coming decade.

It's difficult to be more precise, of course, or even to know what to do with a probability estimate such as that. We could usefully contrast it with survival statistics in cancer research, for example. If we say that the five-year survival rate for a given type of cancer is 70%, then we can test the estimate by seeing how many survivors are around five years later. With sufficient numbers in the sample and standard scientific controls, the guesstimate can be affirmed or refuted. With a single, discrete event like a terrorist nuke, it's difficult to quantify, refute or affirm in the same way. Logically, any probability greater than zero during a given 10-year period would be affirmed by the actual event. Only if the prognosticator said the chances were, on one hand, zero; or at the other extreme, 100%, could we definitively say whether the guess was right or wrong.

So the purpose of such a probability estimate is to give us a general feeling. Should we be scared shitless, or is it just a Hollywood scenario pitch? If scientists with lots of data at their disposal start throwing around numbers like 70%, what do you think? In terms of my own street cred, I was, a long time ago, lead counsel for the intervenor in the Diablo Canyon licensing proceedings, through which Pacific Gas & Electric sought from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a green light to operate twin megawatt reactors built on an active earthquake fault in Avila Beach, California. Part of the proceedings required me to execute an Affidavit of Nondisclosure forbidding me to divulge any information acquired through my review of classified information in the clean rooms maintained on site at PG&E. That's been easy, and the silly nature of hyped-up classification was one of the two lessons I learned from the litigation. The other was that the NRC provides no real oversight of the nuclear industry because the appointees to the Commission are all industry hacks calling in political favors. As it was then, so it is now; the difference is that the blogosphere now extensively covers Bush's continuation of these corrupt practices, so that we have, for example, coal industry lobbyists in charge of America's "fight" against global warming.

Those are valuable lessons to learn at the callow age of 32. The federal government is (a) thoroughly, utterly corrupt, and hides many of its mistakes through (b) abuse of the classification process. For purposes of thematic continuity: these sad factoids relate to the existential danger posed by terrorist nukes. How bad is the danger? The information is all classified. And who's in charge of protecting us? Hacks, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who don't know their ass from a hot rock.

Those who are privy to the information necessary to blow us to kingdom come include Islamic extremists, even if you, loyal American citizen, are not among the favored, in-the-know cohort. The basic information relevant to building a nuke is available now on the Internet or in public libraries, although the generalized diagrams or details are insufficient for a workable device. A terrorist would need either (1) an actual, assembled bomb, or (2) the materials to build one with, assisted by a bomb-making physicist.

If I were devising a Hollywood scenario, I would go for Door #2. One thing I learned (but not from classified sources) back in those glory days of within-the-system radicalism is that a standard commerical light-water reactor (such as those at Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, or dotting the landscape all over France) produces about 500 pounds of plutonium per year. About 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of plutonium is all you need for a good, solid, serviceable 10-kiloton bomb (in the Trinity shot ball park). In all the controversy over Iran's "nuclear program," we keep reading about Condi Rice's insistence that Iran "stop its uranium enrichment" as a condition of bilateral talks. Sometimes I actually wonder to myself: are Condi, Bush & Cheney so stupid they actually don't know? Uranium enrichment is the long way home. The United States undertook uranium enrichment as part of the Manhattan Project for one very simple reason: there were no nuclear reactors around to produce plutonium. But they undertook this extraordinarily complicated process because they had to. You can't find plutonium in a mine (except in infinitesimal quantities as the result of "natural reactor piles" sometimes found in uranium deposits). You make it in a reactor. A light water reactor uses U-238 (the plentiful kind) enriched to 3% (or more) U-235 (the highly radioactive isotope), all of it packed into long, cylindrical fuel rods. In the course of producing heat, through the neutron flux in the reactor core, the U-238 is altered (through a couple of chemical intervening steps) to Pu-239 - Plutonium. This silvery metal from Pluto's dark realm must be extracted from the spent fuel rods in a reprocessing plant by chemical means. The United States doesn't do this anymore, but France, England and (ahem) Russia do.

There's your weak link: Russia and all the former Soviet republics, particularly those with significant Muslim populations. This is where we're paying a terrible price for George Bush's anti-social personality disorder. His inability to get along with people has transmogrified into a global, existential crisis. Hate to say it, but it's true, folks. Bush's weird personal problems have succeeded in alienating Russia, which has strong connections to Iran, and the "crusade" bullshit he uses to galvanize America into unnecessary wars has polarized Muslim sentiment against us. His abrogation of the ABM treaty without bringing Russia along on a joint venture to develop a "missile shield" against rogue nation nukes; his enlisting of former Soviet Republics into NATO, and stationing new missile sites on Russia's border; and his adamant refusal to "talk" to Iran unless they cease doing something they don't need to do in order to become a nuclear threat - all this stupidity has added immeasurably to the danger.

We need the assistance of every advanced civilized nation on Earth to help us counter the threat of a terrorist nuke. We can't afford to be at odds with a country (Russia) which poses no threat to America's safety, yet which possesses not only finished nuclear weapons but tons of raw plutonium. We have to talk to everybody, all the time. There is no upside to this silly posturing, this Axis of Evil crap. It is the ultimate zero-sum game: one mushroom cloud here in the "homeland," and our days as a viable polity are over. We need to pull for that 30% chance it won't happen, and we need January 2009 to happen as soon as it can.

Hypoxic Dick Heads to his next Asian Port-of-Call

As the jury deliberates in United States vs. Libby, Dick heads to Bangkok, maybe, or Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a place he never ventured near when he was draft age in the late Sixties. Dick, head of a U.S. delegation sowing vitriol and discord among vital allies in the Far East, wants to be somewhere far, far away when his trusted aide and former bagman Scooter ("The Amnesiac") Libby learns his fate from the jury in D.C. Unrepentant, defiant and wrong as ever, Dick heads off criticism of his key role in creating the Iraq fiasco by attacking his Congressional critics. While he wouldn't question the patriotism of Democratic Quislings who are in league with Osama bin Laden, he doesn't hide his scorn for their cut-and-run attitude which validates the al-Qaeda strategy of waiting till the West caves in.

In Australia, Dick wads it all together with one summary statement: "Al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home," Cheney added. "And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al Qaeda. I said it and I meant it." Dick, head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (ex officio), Project for A New American Century, and Grand Imperial Dragon of Herpetological Monsters of Darkness, as well as the Dick who has Bush's ear, always means it when he's wrong. Will Dick head to Switzerland next, or some jurisdiction such as France which eschews extradition? Still, the Hypoxic One appeared to whiff on a few gopher balls with the quote:

1. Al-Qaeda isn't the big problem in Iraq. Liberated native Iraqis are.
2. If al-Qaeda's fundamental underlying strategy is to kill enough Americans and cause enough havoc, then keeping enough Americans in Iraq for al-Qaeda to kill also validates al-Qaeda's strategy. Leaving Iraq will make it more difficult for al-Qaeda to kill Americans and create havoc because the Americans won't be in the Arabic regions of Asia anymore.
3. What's breaking America's will is fighting a stupid goddam unnecessary war that Dick Cheney dreamed up.

Dick heads off criticism like this by his appeals to history. Historians will see that the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, by Saudis and Egyptians was definitively refuted by invading another country run by some other Arabs, which drew in other Arabic jihadis like Woodstock-on-the-Tigris. Among the groupies were al-Qaeda Arabs, who must have thought that they'd died and gone to Paradise before blowing themselves up, dying and going to Paradise, but then they probably think they're just the lucky recipients of the worst foreign policy judgment in American history. Nevertheless, Dick faces the judgment of his legacy unafraid.

The Years After Bush

It's a nice job in some ways, being President. $400,000 yearly salary, $12 million yearly budget for the White House residence, unlimited access to Camp David, a private 747, worldwide travel opportunities, access to virtually any celebrity, artist, or great thinker your heart might desire. Job security is such that only one President has been actually removed from office by impeachment (Andrew Johnson), and one other hightailed it before a posse could form (Richard Nixon). A few Presidents, of course, have been shot (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) and one other wounded (Reagan), and one other shot at (Ford, twice). Others died of cholera (Zachary Taylor) stroke (Harding), pleurisy (Harrison) and cerebral bleeding (FDR). Add it all up and you've got 4 assassinations, four deaths by natural causes and 2 Presidents removed from office, which means that 10 Presidents out of 43 didn't make it to the end of their elected terms, a figure approaching 25% (23.25%; I'm doing my part to improve American numeracy).

Still, a lot of people certainly show interest in achieving the Ultimate American Dream. For the next President who ascends to the soiled and battered throne of George W. Bush, I say, good luck, sir or madam. I have a feeling the passage from 2009 to about 2020 is going to be a parlous time indeed. Bush's lab-concocted roosters (two-headed, purple and black, oozing pus, 4 feet high, fizzing with infection) currently fluttering into America's barnyard will roost there throughout his successor's tenure, whether one term or two, and I think it will be one. For a different bird and slightly different metaphor, think of Poe's Raven, perched outside the Oval Office Door. Nevermore, the easygoing dominance of America in the world. Nevermore the free ride.

Finances. The successor's term will be about finances. How dull and dreary for, say, Obama, to work upon a midnight, weary, trying to find some way out of the morass. I commend Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, published a few years ago, for a fuller account. (A personal note: Chalmers was a prof of mine at Berkeley, decades ago, when he was conservative and optimistic instead of one of Bush's most lacerating critics.) America is broke. Considering all of Bush's moronic ineptitude, nothing is going to be as immediate and terrifying as the money problems he will leave behind. It's sad that America never figured it out. We elected a spoiled scion who had never succeeded in any financial enterprise, who in fact wrecked the companies he directly controlled, and on whom a Harvard Business education was a joke, an excuse to get drunk and fuck around. A man with no judgment, no business acumen, no sense of budgetary priorities, who was always bailed out by paternalistic figures when he bottomed out - this is the clown we made President. Why didn't people see that his life-long habits would operate in precisely the same way once he became Chief Executive, that the approach would carry over and cause a financial meltdown on the biggest stage the world has ever seen?

The next President will inherit a country more than $9 trillion in debt, probably $10 trillion by the time Bush leaves, half of it "external;" that is, owed to real people or countries. Of the external debt of $5 trillion (by the time Shrub is done), $2.5 trillion will be owed to foreign countries, most of it on short-term obligations. $2.5 trillion is nearly as large as the current operating budget of the United States government. Since only about 70% of the current budget is funded by actual revenues (the rest is borrowed), it's obvious the United States doesn't have that kind of cash lying around. Virtually all of the sales of Treasury securities to external buyers, since Bush took office, have been to foreign central banks. It amounts to an immense Ponzi scheme; America borrows money to float its economy (and to finance Bush's wars), and then borrows the money necessary to service the debt on all the money it's borrowed in the past. A rather laughably transparent aspect of this practice has been the Fed's steady ratcheting of interest rates to "control inflation." Yes, we must keep this red hot American economy under control. Everyone is doing so well. A much more reassuring excuse than admitting that China, Japan and Saudi Arabia are losing interest in the paltry return on their reinvested dollars, especially with the dollar dropping through the floor, and are already diversifying in Euros and Asian currencies. The next President may have to deal with those blood-curdling words we've been dreading: Pay up.

And, around 2017 or so, the "surplus" in FICA taxes will plunge toward the X axis, and the Social Security Administration will lack the money necessary to pay the burgeoning numbers of Baby Boomers who are retiring, and will have to resort to the "trust fund" to make up the difference. There is, of course, no trust fund. All of the surpluses since about 1982 or so have been used by the federal government as "general revenue," and the markers for the pilfered cash, the paper instruments placed in that file cabinet in West Virginia (which Bush derided), will do no good. It is money the United States owes itself, and America isn't good for it. As bad as that situation is, it is nothing compared to Medicare. The exploding costs of medical care will combine with exploding numbers of Medicare recipients, and the system will simply crash. While Social Security is dire, the Medicare crisis is terminal, so that by the year 2019, 24% of all federal tax revenues will be spent propping up Medicare and Social Security, over and above the dedicated taxes (such as FICA) which already support the system. Indeed, the projected unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems greatly exceed the total net worth of the United States of America. And all of this, of course, is in addition to the national debt, and the escalating cost of servicing that huge yearly nut.

And how to deal with global warming? And a massive, dislocating shortage of oil to run the transportation system in the United States, which in most parts of the country amounts to the wherewithal to run the economy?

Bush decided to use his time in office to kick back, fuck around, and fight unnecessary wars. He thought that was his best chance for reelection, which was his only goal. The American people, in their mindless complacency, gave it to him. He didn't know the first thing about how to run a business, and he has left a financial catastrophe for his successor to clean up. When 2015 rolls around (or much sooner), Americans are not going to be talking about which humanitarian mission is a deserving recipient of their tax dollars, which nation we ought to "build" next, which planet to explore. Things are going to be far more basic than that. America is going to feel like a couple, no longer quite young, who went off on an eight-year drunk, a binge full of parties and high-def TVs and SUVs too big for the driveway, who came home to find the car had been repossessed, the power shut off, and the house foreclosed. And, naturally, since they're Americans, they'll look around for someone to blame, which might be a reason for any politician identified with the first decade of the 21st Century to go permanently to an undisclosed location.

Back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.A.

I think it will be a photo finish: which will arrive first, the end of the national nightmare known as the Bush Presidency, or the last day of the American Republic as a constitutional democracy? Bush, certainly, is doing his part to outlast our civil liberties. Even as the media focus exclusive attention on the 2008 campaign, the monster babies spawned by earlier Bushian misprision continue their grotesque maturation. Thus, we have Boumediene vs. Bush (yes, that Bush), the case recently decided by the D.C. Court of Appeals, in which the court upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act. That brilliant coup by which Bush & Rumsfeld conspired to confine terrorists (loosely defined) caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan at the far end of Cuba, so as to deprive American courts of jurisdiction -- well, it worked. If you're an Afghan heroin farmer who happened to be near Kandahar near the end of 2001, and someone ratted you out in order to cut a deal with the U.S. military to go free; and if this train of events eventually carried you to Bagram prison, where you were interrogated and probably tortured; and if your pleas of innocence were ignored so that eventually you found yourself chained to the belly of a military transport that carried you to a rabbit warren at the dusty east end of Cuba, at Guantanamo-- well, here's some more bad news. The federal courts cannot hear your case by means of habeas corpus. The MCA says so, and the federal panel agrees.

Perhaps this terrorist was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several hundred similar "terrorists" have been discharged from Guantanamo for this very reason, after years of unnecessary imprisonment. Maybe the terrorist has a family who depends on him, children whom he has not seen in years, perhaps he was never any kind of threat to the United States at all. All of these things could be tested by habeas corpus, that salutary Latin phrase meaning "you have the body," an ancient writ under the common law which allows one detained by the government to challenge, immediately, the basis of his incarceration. But you, the terrorist, have no such rights. You're a foreigner, Rumsfeld or Bush has said you're an "enemy combatant," and thus you'll have to make your case to a Military Status Review board down there in Cuba, and if they don't like your argument, or you -- well, settle back for a few more years, or forever, in your cage. No court is ever going to listen to you.

The good and decent Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, is working to repair this abomination, one of many such gaping holes blasted in the Constitution by the Bush Administration, often with the unctuous, hypocritical help of that sniveling rat Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina. I think of Leahy as sort of Bush's night soil engineer, the guy who's making his nocturnal rounds emptying all the pots of shit filled up during the dark period when Bush had a compliant Republican Congress to help with his dirty work. If he can get past the 60 vote requirement, and over Bush's probable veto, maybe the foreigners will have a chance to demonstrate their innocence in court someday. It's worth at least starting the process; more likely, many innocent detainees in Guantanamo will have to wait until at least late 2009 before a real chance at freedom appears. By then, probably several hundred men will have spent 8 years in a kind of legal purgatory, casual victims of Bush's destructive approach to due process. For what, after all, is so terrible about allowing anyone, even an alleged terrorist, to make an argument that he's done nothing wrong? Why do we close the doors to the court house to a man who simply wants to say, "I'm innocent"?

As I've said before, Bush's weird small-mindedness pervades his thinking about legal process as it does about every other intellectual discipline, from science to economics. It is proof by declaration: I say this, so it's true. And as a complacent Congress and electorate look on, the grand structure of Constitutional rights falls like a sand castle overwhelmed by a dark tide.

Supporting the troops

I've been trying to understand why the Republicans have been successful, so far, in advancing an argument as specious and idiotic as the charge that failing to fund any budget request Bush pulls out of his ass to keep his various wars going amounts to abandoning the U.S. military (currently "in harm's way") to their fate. It simply doesn't make any sense. No one who thinks about it for even a few moments could escape the conclusion that it's complete bullshit. Suppose Bush sends some gargantuan "supplemental" up to the Hill, say for another $100 billion, as in fact he does on a regular basis. Congress, now under Democratic control, says no. You can't have any of the money you just requested. Nada, zero, zilch, bupkes. Fuggedaboutit.

What happens? The Army runs out of ammunition, fuel, food, e-mail service? No, those things don't happen. The Pentagon instead uses the humongous budget already under its control to begin an orderly and safe withdrawal of the troops from Iraq. What could be more obvious? If they need more money for that, Bush can ask for it. But as the Commander-in-Chief, it becomes his responsibility to extract the troops safely.

Yet La Diva and Mr. Mumbles seem as determined as The Decider himself that the troops will be supported by always granting Bush whatever obscene funding request he makes, while retaining the right to pass nonbinding resolutions expressing their distate for what they just did.

It is my experience in life that whenever something makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, it's the result of looking at it the wrong way. The Dimocrats do not really think that approving funding requests amounts to supporting the troops. Actually, the troops in Iraq are dropping like flies these days (another 9 since Saturday), and it's because of all that money Congress keeps giving Bush to make sure they can't come home. Congress is, in reality, killing the troops, as surely as the Sunni insurgents and the rest of the jihadis. Congress is keeping the American military in harm's way when it could easily save them.

So what is really going on? There would appear to be one possible interpretation which fits the facts. The Dimocrats want to fund the war so that the outcome remains Bush's responsibility. Once again, the Imaginary Focus Group which controls the decisions made by Congressional "leaders" dictates that any further unraveling of Iraq (if such a devolution would even be discernible) will be solely Bush's fault; thus, if he asks for money, they will give it to him. Looked at in another way, these supposedly mature adults, Dimocrats and Republicans alike, are more concerned with a generalized, fallacious impression of a hypothesized public audience than they are with the actual deaths and traumatic amputations suffered by real people in the course of riding around in vehicles in Iraq, waiting to get blown up. Through such conduct, they confirm the controlling hypothesis of C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite. Those in power will, whenever possible, make those decisions which tend to perpetuate their power, at the expense of any other consideration. In the political calculus of La Diva and Mr. Mumbles, therefore, the consequences of allowing the Iraq War to go to Hell in a handbasket while American soldiers die meaninglessly are positive so long as Bush can be blamed exclusively for the debacle. Looking ahead to 2008, they see their grip on power enhanced, with the prospects of Dimocratic succession to the White House improved. And the purpose of retaining power, of course, is to retain power.

That's where we are. There are exceptions, the "radicals" in Congress, that I will write about later. But I would contend that the analysis above holds for 95% of the Congress and all of the Executive Branch, who are embraced in a kind of Tango of Death. It is a definitive measurement of the breach between living reality and the bizarre world of illusion and imagery in which the pampered ruling class in Washington, D.C. pass their days.

The Defense of Marriage Alliance, producers of Initiative 957

I confess my hat is off to Washington's "Defense of Marriage Alliance" for an inspired piece of political theatre. The "same-sex" marriage debate suffers from an excessive seriouness, as do most cultural controversies which afford the Christian Right a chance to stand on a soap box and proclaim their unique insights into the Natural Order of Things. It is so very tiresome. In truth, the patterns of human relation evolve constantly as petty bigotries wax and wane; ultimately, I have always thought, the essential relationship is between a human being and the Planet Earth, which is, oddly, one that gets talked about very little. I think this strange human preoccupation with pronouncing normative standards for everyone else's approach to life lies at the root of our present existential crisis, which is to say, the danger that we're creating a world uninhabitable for homo sapiens. There is such a nutty emphasis on living on this Earth in ways that guarantee entrance to the next world that we fail to cooperate on the one essential enterprise that might make life better in the here and now. If we define insanity as an essential failure to adapt to life-enhancing strategies for existence, then it's fair to say that America is one of the craziest societies to arise in the history of the species.

Along comes the "Defense of Marriage Alliance," tongues thrust deeply into cheeks:
(1) All couples married in this state shall have three years from the date of solemnization of the marriage, or eighteen months from the effective date of this act, whichever is later, to have filed with the state registrar of vital statistics or designated deputy registrar at least one certificate of marital procreation as described in section 11 of this act.

"A certificate of marital procreation." That's good right there. A married couple proves they had a kid by producing a birth certificate before the deadline. Initiative 957, accepted by Washington's Secretary of State, reads just like a real statute; indeed, 957 simply amends Washington's form of the "defense of marriage" act, which states as the premise of confining marriage to one man and one woman the unassailable reality that this is where the babies come from. The Washington state Supreme Court recently enshrined this principle in the decision in Andersen v. King County, which DOMA sententiously quotes in the language of the Initiative. DOMA, like the rest of us clear thinkers, knows that the Washington Supreme Court and the Religious Right use the ability to "procreate" as a distinction precisely because it's something homosexuals can't do inter sese. Gay men need to adopt; gay women need a turkey baster or a male friend.

So, in a satirical move worthy of Bertold Brecht, DOMA calls their bluff. Straight couples have three years to produce the goods, to file a "certificate of procreation," or their marriage loses its legal cover. Simply ingenious. Ingenious because it makes everyone, straight and gay alike, a potential victim of an unthinking prejudice, and nothing focuses one's attention on a prejudice like becoming one of its victims. If heterosexuals object to 957 because it "forces" procreation on people who just want to be married and enjoy the rights of married life without having children, then they must confront an uncomfortable truth. They are denying exactly this "lifestyle" to gay people who want to do the same thing. Yet once the "certificate of procreation" requirement is removed, what is the basis for granting straight couples a right denied to gay couples? If straight couples can enjoy the legal sanctity of marriage without coming across with a kid, then why did the Washington Supreme Court rule the way it did in Andersen? Why should straight couples own the exclusive right to marriage on the basis of a potential which they do nothing with?

The Washington Supreme Court and the Religous Right have to state it plainly. They're against gay marriage because they think it's icky. That should be in their next high-sounding opinion. "We hold today, as we must, that the state sanction of marriage must be confined to those instances in which one man and one woman, having undergone solemnization of their union pursuant to lawful statute, choose to live as husband and wife, because other arrangements, like gays wanting to do it, would be too icky."

Personally, I'm beginning to think that marriages should operate under the same system as driver's licenses. Every five years or so, your marriage expires, and you have to take affirmative steps to renew it. No more coasting for anybody. Think of the legal fees it would save, the hassle of filing a court action for divorce. You simply choose not to renew. And by the way, I think I know something the Religious Right doesn't: my vision has a much greater chance of realization than that life they're counting on in the Hereafter.

When Bush is less than clear about dangerous things

The daily atrocities which Bush inflicts upon the English language should probably be the subject of an Amnesty International probe. He smiles idiotically while he's doing it, but I've never found it all that funny that the President of the United States has so much trouble with his native tongue. In his press conference today, Bush again reiterated our goal of removing nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula. I double-checked just to make sure, but the American Heritage Dictionary lists two acceptable pronunciations, peninsula and (sort of) peninsyula, but no peninchula. I've never heard anyone say peninchula besides Bush. We were always going to be stuck with nukular, but peninchula now also looks like a permanent fixture. It's unfortunate, therefore, not only that North Korea has nukular aspirations but that it's located on a peninchula. A double whammy which we don't encounter with landlocked Iran.

Whenever Bush can be the least bit technical, he's apt to reiterate the point over and over in a self-satisfied attempt to impress. He did that today with "Chapter VII resolutions" from the UN. I don't know how many times he said that, but it was a lot. Chapter VII resolutions are issued out of the Security Council in cases where a threat to world peace exists, as by an act of international aggression. Bush did not explain the reference to the assembled stenographers of the Fourth Estate; I think he enjoyed keeping them in the dark while he showcased his peerless mastery of the arcana of foreign relations. He got going once on "casus belli" in the same way; everything, for a while, was a casus belli. An impertinent question from the docile press corps might have been a casus belli in the dark days before the Iraq invasion.

Anyway, he preens when he can use this kind of insider lingo. Sometimes, however, I think he and Rove make something up just before Bush takes the podium and then the effects are less felicitous. To wit, “And I’d like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what’s worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?” I'm not sure how a question which he doesn't answer can qualify as a "point," especially since it doesn't make any sense. I do know why he and Rove cooked this one up; a day before, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, admitted the military had no evidence the Iranian government was involved in arming the Shiite militia with IEDs. Bush, who had been busy pounding the war drums, skipped a couple of beats with that one. He needed some kind of recovery, and back in the Oval Office, just before Bush made his irritated way to the podium, they came up with that beauty.

I wish I'd been there, because I know the answer. It's much worse if the top echelons of the Iranian government are ordering the Quds force to cooperate with Iraq's Shiite militias. Much worse, since that might indicate a coordinated, officially directed act of war against U.S. forces. Gen. Pace knows that, which is why he said what he said. If we're dealing with rogue elements in the Quds force, or just Iranian sympathizers (using, for example, all the Iraqi and American ordnance we left lying around unguarded after the mission was accomplished in May, 2003), then Bush should (though he won't) rethink the position. For such "rogue elements" in Iran might be analogized to the 15 Saudi hijackers of 9-11, and if I recall correctly, the national provenance of those anti-American terrorists was deemed immaterial in our subsequent dealings with Saudi Arabia. So that even though the Kingdom is located on a peninchula, we left them alone, even as we leave them alone now, although we're aware that Saudi financiers send money and materiel to Sunni insurgents in Iraq who attack American forces.

Bush is not big on what you might call logical consistency, however. If he were, he'd be more concerned than he is about the close ties between Maliki's government and Iran, which came about because of Bush's overthrow of Saddam. So Bush is trying to work up a casus belli against the non-peninchula and so far non-nukular country which most strongly supports the very same government in Iraq which Bush is bankrupting the United States and breaking the U.S. military to defend. Iran, actually, might be seen as more of an ally than a nemesis at this point, but then the 2002 SOTU speech named the starting roster for the Axis of Evil, and Bush just can't let that go. Once you're on The List, you're on The List. That was before, of course, Bush was aware that the Muslims in Iraq were overwhelmingly Shiite, just like the Iranians, and it was fairly predictable that Iran's hand would be strengthened in the region by bringing 15 million Shiites to power in Baghdad.

This may account for why Bush is lapsing more than ever into incoherence, and has taken to posing rhetorical questions which could only be meaningful if he answered them, but he doesn't because he doesn't know what the right answer is. It must make General Pace a little nervous about his new job. The only guy smiling, maniacally as always, there in the front row with his nimbus of baby hair and lunar countenance, is Rove himself, fascinated as Dr. Frankenstein must have been. Just how weird can my monster get?

The Obtuse American

I am indebted to James Kunstler, whose Clusterfuck website is linked on this page, for the observation that 80% of everything which has ever been built in the United States was thrown up in the last 50 years (The Geography of Nowhere, Knopf, 1993). My generation's sojourn through life is marked definitively by this transfiguration of the American landscape. It hardly needs mentioning that the vast majority of the stuff built is crud: ugly, inhuman, alienating, anti-nature, insane.

The Interstate Highway Act of 1957 began the final linkage of suburban metroplexes, followed by the explosive growth of chain restaurants, motels, gas stations, and shopping malls, which finally reached its apotheosis in the development of big box stores driving all local commerce to extinction. We have, during this period, become a kind of Trailer Park Sparta, a nation with a huge military establishment but without national health care or much of a social safety net for its dwindling middle class. The God-obsessed citizenry is haunted by obscurantist ideas about the value of modern science and education. The destruction of the American Bill of Rights by the current neo-Fascist government goes largely unremarked. Things have gotten so bad that in the last two national elections for President, half the voting populace, (sick, obese, poorly educated), hung their chads for George W. Bush, the dimmest bulb in the history of the American Republic.

The working class struggles to support the old and the disabled through confiscatory taxes for retirement and Medicare. What's left over is mostly given to the defense industry, so the executive branch can invade one country after another in a series of endless wars. The wars now always include a phase of "nation building," which means that we still think of ourselves as some kind of model for another country's aspiration. Either that, or we might best analogize our foreign policy to Dadaist art: Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal and called it "Fountain." We build a Taco Bell in the middle of Iraq and call it "America."

The Problem with Hillary

In January, 2003, I boarded a Golden Gate ferry and sailed across the Bay to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I joined about 100,000 other demonstrators (the Chronicle, still under the sway of the general warmongering spirit of the times, estimated the crowd at about 732). Elaine, mother of my daughter's best childhood friends, went with me, and we marched all the way to Civic Center, where a diverse group of speakers on a variety of topics, both germane and irrelevant to the Iraq War, spoke to the crowd. On the way back, Elaine, understandably exhilarated by the show of solidarity, asked me if I thought the invasion would happen anyway.

"Of course," I said. "Nothing can stop it."

My confident prediction was based on little more than my opinion of George W. Bush. He had already demonstrated his penchant for pathological lying, and I didn't believe a word he said. He had begun his systematic shredding of the Bill of Rights with his jailing of Jose Padilla and establishment of his concentration camp on Cuba. Many experts had expressed their opinion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including Scott Ritter (a former weapons inspector), William Arkin (a defense analyst) and, most notably, Hans Blix, who had been driving around Iraq for months without finding anything. The idea of a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was ridiculous on its face.

The war, therefore, was a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton, Senator from New York, voted in October, 2002, to authorize President Bush to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. This was prior to the invasion. Also prior to the invasion, I voted with my feet to oppose the invasion. Thus, our relative positions were clear and marked by overt indicators. There is no going back.

I was right and Hillary Clinton was wrong. How could I possibly vote for a politician, who is briefed by insiders all day long, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who knows less than I do? Her subsequent attempts to explain her way out of her cowardly vote have contorted her into positions that would be the envy of a Chinese acrobat troupe. She cannot say she was "wrong," although the milling throngs in New Hampshire have asked her to say just that. "Knowing what I know now," she says, "I certainly would not have authorized Bush to conduct his war." Not so fast, Hillary. A little glib. Under the War Powers Act, the Iraq War is YOUR war. You told Bush to go ahead. And as far as knowing then what you know now? You see, I knew then what you say you didn't know then.

So what the hell were you doing? You were caving in, that's all. And because it seems to you that a good offense is the best defense, you're attacking the "simplicity" of Barack Obama's get the hell out approach. "Anyone can say, 'just leave'," you sneer. But you see, Hill: Obama was against the damn thing to begin with. He doesn't think we should ever have been there.

I just love the way your handlers describe your highly nuanced position on phased withdrawal. They say your position more closely "reflects the political mainstream." So that's why you say what you do now? You looked around the Senate chamber, read the editorials in the Washington Post and New York Times, and figured out what was good to believe? Is that the same thing as the right thing to believe?

Here's a clue. The political mainstream is not the same as the opinion of the American people. That's why you're getting all those tough questions. Those rock-ribbed people in New Hampshire are on to you. They don't ask questions like Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert ask. They know you voted the way you did because your political calculations favored a "safe" approach of belligerence, and if the war was a success, whether it was the right thing to do or not, you would look like you made a smart call. When it went south, when it turned out there was no reason for the invasion at all, you started crabbing about Bush's incompetence in conducting this fiasco.

Nope, you still don't get it. You're going to have to admit you chickened out. You can't even say, "I made a mistake." When there are two boxes to check, and you know the right answer but check the other one because of your vaulting ambition, you didn't make a "mistake." You took the easy way out. That's what you have to say. You have to forgo your triangulating, calculating, outside-in approach to moral choosing. Or that vaulting ambition will not fall upon another, as the Bard said. It will fall on you.