Primer on Social Studies in the Bush Administration

President Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley appeared on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos and repeatedly confused Nepal and Tibet.

Discussing how Bush has "no reason not to go" to this summer's Olympic games in Beijing and how boycotting them would be wrong, Hadley discussed the outcry over Tibet and the US response, only he kept saying Nepal.

"If countries are really concerned about Nepal, we shouldn't have this sort of non-issue of opening ceremonies or not. They should do the hard work of quiet diplomacy to urge the Chinese government -- in their interest -- to take advantage of this opportunity to do something," Hadley said.

Well, who am I to criticize? There have been times in my life (it's been years, I confess) when I wasn't sure about the difference between Tibet and Nepal. I knew they were somewhere in the Himalayas; when friends went trekking in the high mountains, they talked about going to Nepal, not Tibet. That was a clue. Nepal was in some sense more accessible than Tibet. Over time I realized this was because China overran Tibet a long time ago. Which is why Bob Seger, if he ever got out of here, was going to Kathmandu. He had no interest in going to Red China. The ancient Nepalese monarchy, that was the place for him.

It was probably in the 1970's, during the spirituality boom in the U.S., that I grokked the connection between Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The Dalai was a Tibetan, and the capital of Tibet was Lhasa, not Kathmandu. This is why the Dalai is the head man of "Tibetan Buddhism" (that's a good mnemonic device for Hadley -- not the head of "Nepalese Buddhism"). If he ever gets out of here, Bob Seger is not going to Lhasa. Lhasa is an "autonomous region" of the People's Republic of China, but I think you can guess just how autonomous it is (even if Stephen Hadley can't). The Dalai, for instance, can't even live there. He lives in India (but some of his best friends are Tibetans). Nepal (for Mr. Hadley's ease of reference) shares a border with Tibet but is not actually Tibet. There's a question, however, how much longer Nepal is going to remain a monarchy, because good King Gyanendra is currently under siege by Nepalese Maoists, who want to take over. "Mao" was Chinese, and Mr. Hadley may see a pattern here.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Stephen Hadley served as one of George W. Bush's "senior foreign policy advisors." This may explain why Bush had a problem naming the capital of France, for example. Not to get too personal, but Hadley looks as if he lives in a crypt most of the time and only comes out to appear on talk shows and display his mastery of Himalayan geography. It does seem amazing that Hadley, aware that a big whoop currently in the news is whether George W. will or will not attend the opening ceremonies of the Smog Games in Beijing, would not have checked Wikipedia or something to figure out the difference between Nepal and Tibet. He's the national security advisor. As I freely admitted a minute ago, I acquired my flawless command over high-elevation South Asian principalities over the course of several decades, but then again, my job wasn't really about that.

It's possible, you know, that these people in the Bush Administration are just really, really stupid. If you think the question is whether the Chinese government is oppressing the Dalai Lama in Nepal, then maybe that's a clue to other puzzling decisions the Bush team has made. On September 11, 2001, the U.S. gets attacked by 15 Saudis, a Yemeni, an Egyptian, a Lebanese, a guy from the UAE, all coordinated by a Saudi living in Afghanistan along with his Man Friday from Egypt and the Brain from Kuwait. Bush, consulting Hadley, wants to find out who attacked us. "Arabs," says Stephen. So we attack the Arabs in Arabia. It's beginning to make sense. That's what Bush meant when he said that it was intolerable to have Saddam as a troublemaker in the "same part of the world" where the 9/11 hijackers were from. ArabLand, he meant.

If I ever get out of here, I'm going to Kathmandu.

Hillary Clinton, Drunk, Shoots Up Church in Rural Pennsylvania

April 13, 2008 (AP) -- The neck-and-neck primary race between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama escalated in tension and drama last night on reports that Senator Clinton, apparently wasted on Crown Royal boilermakers slammed down in a western Pennsylvania tavern, grabbed her 12 gauge, blasted the locks off a nearby Assembly of God church, and proceeded to shoot out all the stained glass windows. A reportedly blotto Clinton was finally wrestled to the floor of the church by Pennsylvania state troopers who were called to the scene by a witness outside the church who saw shards of the Virgin Mary fly into the street.

Members of Clinton's drinking party at Shorty's Tavern said the Senator, clearly angry over Obama's elitist maundering about "desperate" and "bitter" rural Americans turning to "guns & God" to assuage their feelings of hopelessness (remarks which Obama apparently made while traveling outside the United States, at a Democratic party function in San Francisco), went over the line with whiskey and Schlitz chasers and vowed to show "that skinny-ass punk a thing or two about being an American." Bill Schuilhorn, who was with Clinton at Shorty's, said she repeated this threat "20 or 30 times" in increasingly slurred language before jamming her red plaid hunting cap (with Elmer Fudd ear flaps) down on her short 'do and staggering out of the bar. The men drinking with her (who were also drunk) said they were powerless to stop the Senator from grabbing her Remington and making good on her pledge.

Fortunately, no one else was in the church at the time of Clinton's shooting spree. Hillary was, however, booked and locked up overnight in the town jail, held on charges of aggravated vandalism and overdoing the political pandering. An obviously hung-over and abashed Clinton said this morning that while she apologized for "shooting the shit" out of the church, she would step up her tireless fight for the common people of the U.S., a group which the "elitist Senator from Illinois doesn't know zilch about."

In the latest Gallup poll, Senator Clinton lurched ahead by 25 points in advance of next week's Pennsylvania primary.

As Tax Day Approaches, Iraq's Cost by the Numbers

A little perspective: suppose you owe $5,000 in income taxes on your 1040. The Iraq war will use your contribution in 1 second. Like a drop of water hitting a red-hot skillet: pffsssst! Gone. Here's the interesting part: it did no good whatsoever. The $5,000 you just paid in will do absolutely no good. Indeed, it is a down payment on future calamity, as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz tells us in predicting the total cost of the Iraq war will be $3 trillion. Your $5,000 ante simply maintains soldiers in the field, who will be shot, blinded, blown up, traumatically amputated, massively burned, and driven insane. Those soldiers will then bring all their problems home to a country which is unequipped to handle them.

I've been writing this post now for about 180 seconds. During that time the United States spent $900,000. Half of our urban high schoolers no longer graduate from public high school, so the next question is tricky for them maybe: how long till we get to $1 million? That's right, we're there. It took 20 more seconds. We're now past $1 million, and still spending. Actually, I don't know anyone who owes $1 million in taxes personally, so a lot of us around here must be pitching in.

Well, actually we're not paying for it. We just provide the money used to pay interest on the loans used to pay for it. To finance the Iraq war, BushCo borrows the money from foreign sources. We can't actually afford to pay for the war. The Chinese, the Japanese, the British, the Gulf States, they're the ones lending us the money to pay for the war. Let's figure out how much we spend a minute so we can keep up with the cost of this blog post. 60 x $5,000 = ? $300,000 per minute. $18 million per hour. $432 million per day. $3 billion per week. $12 billion per month. $144 billion per year. Here's the other thing: the Iraq war keeps getting more expensive as we go. I suppose that's because we've worn everything out over there, and keep hiring more and more mercenaries and contractors to replace fully-depreciated soldiers, and the guns-for-higher cost a lot more than the patriotic grunts sold a bill of goods by their government. The guys at Blackwater aren't going to put their asses on the line in exchange for George W. Bush's tear-stained mumbles of gratitude.

Besides, we must have plenty of money if we can afford to spend $432 million per day on just one war. Right? No, not really. We're over $9 trillion in debt and the economy is in recession. We're becoming like everybody's drunk brother-in-law who keeps borrowing money from relatives till they pretend not to be home when he knocks on the door. "Shhhh! It's the United States at the door! Act like we're not here!"

It's going to be hard to get around in the USA anymore since all the airlines are now collapsing. They can't afford to buy jet fuel. ATA went belly up because they couldn't afford the $25,000 it takes to fly one-way from San Francisco to Honolulu. The Iraq war apparently didn't do much to control the price of oil. People think twice before driving anywhere now. Consumer confidence is in the toilet. Housing prices are slumping, depriving the US of A of its regular adrenaline fix of re-fi and line o' credit moolah to keep Target and Best Buy humming. No dough, no go.

So this is what it looks like when you put a career screw-up, a guy who took every business placed at his mercy and ran it into the ground, in charge of the United States of America. He couldn't handle relatively simple businesses, so we thought, in our collective wisdom, we would put him in charge of the most complicated economic-social organism on Earth and see how that would work. Surprised? Why? It should confirm your sense of the natural order of things. He can't prioritize; he can't adapt to changing circumstances; he can't think creatively to find another way out. He resorts always to one principle: if he said he was going to do something, he'll keep doing it even when it proves to be the wrong thing. That is his one value: to remain obstinately dedicated to the error of his ways.

Took 30 minutes here. $9 million down the tube in Baghdad. We'll soon be following it down the chute.

That's Some Catch

There was only one Catch and it was Catch-22, which stipulated that if things were okay in Iraq, then we couldn't withdraw our troops because if we did things wouldn't be okay and we would need them; and if things weren't okay, we couldn't withdraw our troops because we would need them until things were okay, at which point we couldn't withdraw them because if we did things wouldn't be okay and we would need them.

Senator Carl Levin whistled in appreciation. "That's some catch, that Catch-22."

"It's the best there is," agreed Doc Petraeus.

Our troops were there and so things were okay and we didn't need them anymore; but if we withdrew them, things wouldn't be okay, so we couldn't leave because we would need them.

"I'm still trying to understand this," said Levin.

"Take your time," said Doc Petraeus. "It's confusing for everybody at first."

"Let me ask this," said Levin. "Aren't we wearing out our troops?"

"Yes indeed," said Petraeus. "That's why we're shortening tours of duty."

"For the troops in the field?" asked Levin.

"No," said Petraeus. "Not for the troops who are there. Only for the ones who are not there."

"We're shortening tours of duty for troops who are not in Iraq?"

"Yes," grinned Doc Petraeus. "Exactly. Those troops who arrive in August will only serve one year."

"What does that do for the troops who are already there?"

"Nothing," said Petraeus amiably, "but it does everything for President Bush, because his tour of duty ends on January 20, 2009."

"So that means..."Levin began.

"That no one will really be able to leave while Bush is still President. Right, exactly. But it looks like troops will be leaving sooner while he's in office even though they aren't."

"That's why you chose August," said Levin.

"Right, Senator."

"Even though that does nothing for the troops who are already worn out," said Levin dourly.

"The idea was never to help the troops who were already worn out," said Doc Petraeus. "It was to help the troops who aren't worn out."

"Not that anyone can really leave anyway because of Catch-22," said Levin.

"Bingo," said Doc Petraeus.

"Is there any way around Catch-22?" said Levin.

"I think we've plugged most of the holes," said Petraeus. "We don't think it can be beat."

Levin slumped in his chair. "How did we get to such a crazy impasse?" he asked quietly.

"I don't make the Catches," said Petraeus, with a big smile. "I just enforce them."

Barack Exposes the Bush Fallacy in Iraq

In truth, I find it hard to work up a head of steam against General David Petraeus. I tuned in yesterday to watch a little of his testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee, and there he was in his usual formation sitting next to the other Siamese Twin of the Surge, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They both seem like decent guys. Petraeus is smart, wily, adept, and clearly very competent. I think he was given a fairly simple mission, at least in its verbal formulation if not in its execution: get the violence in Iraq under control. Despite liberal wishing that the situation were much worse, bloodier, than it currently is, it's not. That's because Petraeus is a task-oriented, can-do man in the great tradition of Yankee ingenuity. Bush told him to calm things down and Petraeus went to work. He did whatever he had to do. He arranged to put the Sunni insurgents on the U.S. payroll, and now there are well-armed "Sons of Iraq" rousting al-Qaeda remnants in Anbar province and elsewhere. He built walls between warring neighborhoods in Baghdad. He based U.S. soldiers out in the boonies, like police stations. He beefed up the Iraqi army and police. While a lot of credit for the comparative peace is often given to Muqtada al-Sadr for arranging a truce and stand-down for the Mahdi Army, who's to say Petraeus wasn't instrumental in making that happen? He works 24/7 over there; he knows what's going on.

He was honest in acknowledging that Nouri al-Maliki went off the reservation when he impetuously decided to attack Sadr's militia in Basra. Professionally, it must have appalled Petraeus; that's not how you plan a military operation. Yikes, he probably thought; right before I testify to Congress, this shmendrick pulls a stunt like this. Petraeus was also candid in admitting that Iran's influence in Shia-controlled Iraq is pervasive, exactly as one would expect when two Shia-controlled countries exist side by side, and the ruling personnel of Iraq used to hide in Iran during the Saddam years. So what?, Petraeus in effect said. All of his many three-color charts prove that the death rate, the hostile-incident rate, the general-mayhem rate is down, down, down. It isn't Petraeus's fault that the debate about Iraq has been so dumbed-down that the infusion of $12 billion a month, the expenditure of American lives (whether in a trickle or a torrent), the breaking of the once-proud U.S. military all hinge on a simple calculus: is it more or less violent in Iraq? He didn't set the terms of the political debate. If it's less violent, we have to stay to keep it that way; if it's more violent, we have to stay so it doesn't get worse.

The Democrats let it get that stupid. Instead of going deeper, asking more fundamental questions, they have often chosen to fight the facts. It is not less violent!, they thunder, even though it is. We are not safer at home because of this war!, even though no one, of course, can tell, as Petraeus smilingly admits.

There was one electrifying exception to the parade of fatuous interrogators at yesterday's session: Barack Obama. What a mind this man has. I can see why the other Senators, in a sort of paternal way, marvel at his skill. Using his brief six-minute window, he asked short, leading questions which completely knocked Petraeus off his well-rehearsed game.

It went this way. Suppose, mused Barack, the idea is to allow us to bring the troops home. Everyone agrees that's the goal. So you, General, have referred to certain "metrics" as determinant of that possibility. Violence; Iranian meddling and interference; government cohesion and reconciliation; elimination of terrorist nests. He then posed a series of easy hypotheticals. Suppose that we reach the point where violence is about like it is now, or less, and Iranian influence is no worse, the government is functional, with some corruption but generally in control, and the Iraqis are keeping the lid on al-Qaeda. Can we begin withdrawing? Petraeus didn't know. So Obama kept pushing Petraeus to refine the "parameters" of success. Do we have to reach the point of zero violence? Zero Iranian influence? Zero al-Qaeda insurgence? Zero corruption? Of course not, the General said. Then how much above zero is tolerable? He didn't know that either. He doesn't know how "fragile" things are in Iraq, what its tolerance for chaos really is. It must be less than it is now, because Petraeus thinks we need to stay and to stop withdrawing soldiers in July. How much less? Who knows? Maybe we'll just be able to tell when we get there.

There you have it: the central Bush Fallacy neatly exposed. We don't know when we can leave because there's no way to tell, at any point in time, if the situation we've created is stable enough to remain in place after our departure. We'll never know in a place as volatile, as sectarian, as inherently unstable as Iraq, with its ethnic and religious forces always exerting centrifugal forces on cohesion. This is what happens when an ambitious, competent, bright man like Petraeus goes to work for a menial intellect like Bush. He's working on a dumb project. He's doing what he's supposed to do, follow orders and get the violence under control, all to conform to the terms of a stupid political debate, but it leads nowhere. Indeed, it leads to ruin.

I think, on the whole, General David Petraeus would a helluva lot prefer to be working for Barack Obama.

Don't Worry, China!

Waldenswimmer, a blog with a Luddite name but with a progressive, hip attitude, goes with the flow. It's part of our can-do attitude here at the Pond, a recognition that with access to plug-and-play technology, you're dumb not to stay oh so au courant tech-wise. We, in other words and IMHO, can dig it. And I'm there, baby. Just as one example among many, we've got a hit counter which can map where the readers are, down to street level. Some, ahem, appear to be in Washington, D.C. Ha! ha! Although I know the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup spooks don't run software that tells where they're spying from. I'm sure they encrypt and mask...don't they? Sure they do.

But anyway, what I wanted to say was that the map shows an address in Beijing. This goes out to you, brother in China! Welcome aboard. And congratulations on your bravery, because this site is run by Google, an American company with a pretty chummy relationship with the Chinese government. Unless, of course, you are the government...Well, so much the better, because you're the one I wanted to talk to anyway.

It's about this palaver going on here Stateside about "boycotting" the opening ceremonies at the Olympics this summer. Senator Hillary Clinton, who's running for President, is all over this one. You probably read about the problems the French are having just getting the damn torch across town. Look, they tend toward hysterics in Paris. Aux barricades! and all that crap. What a load. Everybody is posturing about the ongoing Chinese crackdown in Tibet and the Chinese support for the oppressive Sudan government. Darfur, blah, blah, blah. I notice that when Hillary was living in the White House, the wholesale slaughter going on in Rwanda didn't make her lose any sleep, and I doubt that Bill Clinton paused between bone-waxings to even think about it. Hillary's just trying to grab some headlines about her "principled" stand. That, and she wants to embarrass Bush. See, George W. is chief baton twirler for the Freedom's on the March-ing Band, way out there in front high-stepping in his Coldstream Guard bearskin hat. Never mind if you don't get all those references. Because it's bullshit anyway. George's Freedom Agenda won't conflict with China's Tyranny Agenda because Tibet, so far as I know, doesn't have any more oil than Darfur does.

We don't mean any of it. It's all P.R. for domestic consumption. Look, we know where our bread is buttered, and who butters it. You guys own an absolute ton of U.S. Treasuries, and we borrow money like crazy from everybody to keep this shaky operation going. We've noticed you've already sort of slacked off with recycling the cash. There's not a big problem, is there? That's good to hear. I mean, you're not going to dump all those T-Bills and start doing business in euros, right? Whew!! Had us going there.

So don't worry about the Olympics. It's going to be fun! Especially the opening ceremonies. George'll be there. Count on it. It's not going to be like that dumbass boycott of the whole Moscow Olys back in 1980. All we did was screw up a bunch of American athletes who had devoted their whole lives to getting there -- and then it turned out that Carter's man Zbig had manipulated the Russkies into invading in the first place. So have fun in Tibet. Knock yourselves out. And Darfur, Schmarfur -- it's a judgment call, just like we made about Rwanda. Or didn't make. So oppress away, we're just messing with you! See you at the finish line.

Yours,
Waldenswimmer

Maybe Petraeus Should Count the Iraqi Dead

Here's a novel idea for a Q&A topic during General Petraeus's testimony before Congress this week: how about an estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths?

It is nothing short of astounding that this question is officially ignored by the Bush Administration. When the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study was published, indicating an estimate through 2006 of 600,000 violent deaths, Bush dismissed the estimate as the product of "flawed methodology," without, however, offering an estimate of his own. It's the official position of the Pentagon that they "don't do body counts." This does not stop other organizations from trying, such as the World Health Organization's recent effort which will be published later this month in the New England Journal of Medicine (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/index.html). Using the same cluster sampling approach as the Lancet study, but with greater access to households (interviewing 23 times as many), the WHO study estimated 151,000 violent deaths and an overall death rate from all causes (illness, etc.) twice as high as before the invasion. As with the earlier Lancet study, the mortality figures covered only the first three years of the five-year occupation, and allowed the possibility that the true figure could be as high as 223,000, citing the difficulty posed by the refugee situation in Iraq. To wit, many families may have left Iraq (there are presently two million such refugees) after a violent death without responding to any survey. Since most of 2007 was also extremely violent, a fair extrapolation of the median figure of 151,000 would produce a current death count of about 200,000.

The Iraq Body Count (IBC) places the death toll for civilians at about 90,000 to date. The methodology used does not rely on statistical extrapolation but on morgue and medical records, and other official sources, and the IBC admits this probably results in an underestimate in a fractured and disorganized country like present-day Iraq. But here's the deal: no responsible group has ever come up with a figure as low as the Bush Administration's self-serving, wild-eyed guess of 50,000 (given when they have actually been pressed to come up with something "unofficial"), a number it apparently consoles itself with. How, indeed, can the Bushies credibly cling to their lowball number in the face of a count of actual dead people by the IBC? The utter contempt for the consequences of occupation is probably among the factors that support the popularity of anti-U.S. figures like Muqtada al-Sadr. We should have the common decency to figure out how many people are dead because we're there.

So maybe some "maverick," like John McCain, should simply pose the question to General Petraeus. What do you think of these various studies that place the death toll at figures no less than twice the Pentagon's guess, and in other cases four to twelve times higher? If one of the arguments for staying is that a "blood bath" will ensue if we leave "irresponsibly," shouldn't we try to determine whether a blood bath is already underway by virtue of being there? Is it actually going to get a lot worse if we leave? And how do we know if we never bother to count? It does seem, at the very least, like a data point essential to figuring the question out.

Clinton Blather, Israeli Accomplishment

The Clintons have published their tax returns for years 2000 through 2006, and have provided the estimate for 2007's income as well. They're an American success story. Over the period in question, they've earned about $110 million. Virtually all of their income is attributable to the celebrity of Bill Clinton's charismatic presidency. $50 million for Bill's speeches, $30 million from Bill's exciting autobiography (I never read it; don't know anyone who has), another $10 mil for Hill's autobiography (ditto, re: readership), something north of $1 million for Hillary's Senate salary (she would not have been elected without Bill's presidency), and then a lot of vague income from Bill's connections to Demo high rollers like Ron Burkle and his Yucaipa Co., and its connections to Dubai, from whence (increasingly) all blessings flow. The only income item you would not connect to the fact of Bill's fame & adulation is his presidential pension, which accounted for only about $1 million during those years.

I think the Clintons always wanted to be rich. It's why, long ago, they got involved in the Whitewater investment, why Hillary dabbled in commodities trading. When Bill was President, I think the Clintons were among the least wealthy inhabitants of the White House in recent memory, just a couple of bright kids from modest backgrounds who yearned, more than anything, to be a power couple. Hillary's tolerance for Bill's sexual antics is not really that surprising. Fidelity was subservient to ambition, even, as Shakespeare said, to a "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls upon another." The Clintons had no desire to remain commoners; I think the troubles they've gotten into with matters like Whitewater and now Bill's dealings with Ron Burkle and Dubai (which will inevitably get messier as the facts are revealed) arose primarily from their naivete about sophisticated business dealings. The fatcats saw their potential and usefulness and ingratiated themselves with the callow Clintons, who have tended to be smarter than they are wise.

When the Clintons went on vacation, lacking a Western White House or Rancho Cielo or Prairie Chapel Ranch like the Republican plutocrats, they went to Martha's Vineyard and hung with the beautiful people. This is where and how they wanted to be; to be Big Rich like their increasingly rich friends, with a Texas Unit of $100 million. Bill got up from his quintuple bypass in 2004 to resume his dogged pursuit of cash. He didn't slow down at all really. In the seven years covered by the tax returns of 2001 to 2006 and the 2007 estimate, Bill made about $7 million a year, on average, from speaking. That's about $135,000 a week. I imagine that each speech is a variant on a standard template; I would surmise that whatever trade group or conference he's speaking to, his speech is full of standard Renaissance Weekend phrases. Lots of "challenges," and "integrated solutions," and doing things that "scale." Sort of like reading a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times, in other words, when Friedman dons his "geo-green" outfit. (I hereby bet myself $100 that the book Friedman is working on right now while on leave from the Times contains his pet coinage "Geo-green" in the title. He's been test-marketing the phrase in his columns for about a year now, and he's really pleased with himself.) The growing ranks of Clinton detractors muse that all these groups buying his speeches are seeking "access" to a new Clinton White House. While that might be true to a very limited extent in some cases, it's stretching things in my opinion to generalize across the board. Most people just like that feel-good Clinton blather.

As in his presidency, nothing gets solved by all this jargoneering. The period between 1992-2000 was a critical period for the United States to move toward self-sufficiency in renewable energy, securing water supplies and dealing with climate change. As Al Gore has proudly told us, he knew about these things way, way back in his Harvard undergrad days, and he was in the Administration for eight years with Clinton. The Kyoto Treaty was defeated 95-0 while Clinton was President and Gore was VP. The 1990's were also the heyday of SUV development in the U.S., probably the most retrograde environmental action we could have taken short of burning coal outdoors for no reason at all, including power production. This set the stage for the ruinous deficits of oil importing, the trade imbalances and now the runaway inflation of gasoline prices. All of this usually gets laid at the door of George W. Bush, of course, but it took a long time to get to where we are.

The state of Israel, the American Left's favorite whipping-nation, has been faced with even more intractable environmental problems. While liberal America beats up on Israel for displacing Palestinians in 1947, without, I notice, offering to cede back all of the present United States to the Native Americans, the Israelis have ambitiously undertaken real fixes to the same problems. Israel is building 500,000 recharging stations for electric cars that are being built by a Renault-Nissan consortium. The cars will have a range of 120 miles and operate with the power of a 1.6 liter gasoline engine. The recharging stations, in turn, will be powered by wind turbines and by a giant photovoltaic array being built in the Negev. The electric cars will become the basis of Israeli private transportation, and the system will be in place by 2011. And recognizing that an eventual two-state solution will increase pressure on water supplies for a growing population, Israel has become a world leader in seawater desalination using the reverse osmosis system. Desalinated water now accounts for 15% of all water use in Israel, and this water is also supplied by the Israelis to the Jordanians and Palestinians. The price has been reduced to about 60 cents per cubic yard, a price reaching competitive levels with fresh water supplies.

Israel's response to environmental problems seems to consist of three parts. 1. Figure out what the problem is. 2. Research how to deal with it. 3. Deal with it. The United States, by contrast, is almost good at step 1, does a little of step 2, but never bothers with #3. I think the Clintons (and soon George W. Bush, who wants to do a little speaking himself, to "replenish the ol' coffers" after his term ends) are prime examples of how this process of stagnation happens. We don't deal with pressing environmental problems because, increasingly, the "leaders" see their trajectory as leveraging their public careers into private wealth which will insulate them from -- well, I guess, the natural world and all its problems.

Israel's response to the same dilemmas we face stands as a rebuke to the flaccid inertia of American leadership. Maybe the difference arises from something very fundamental: Israel shares an attitude of common purpose, reinforced by its worldwide pariah status, which no longer exists in the United States. Celebrities like Bill and Hillary Clinton are very good at pandering to the sentimental fiction that such commonality of interest still exists here in America, but it's simply a marketing gimmick, as their private lives demonstrate.

Berkeley's Professor of Torture

I've never read any of the Anne Rice novels, or even much of Stephen King, but I can say I've read one horror classic cover to cover: Boalt Hall law professor John Yoo's 81 page memorandum on torture written while he was with the Office of Legal Counsel in March, 2003. I will not undertake any sort of in-depth analysis of this repugnant piece of rationalization; the legal heavyweights at Balkinization.com, linked to the right, deconstruct it brick by slimy brick. Everything about the memo is wrong. It is wrong in its most basic premises (the War Crimes Act and the Convention Against Torture do not apply to "stateless actors" such as al-Qaeda, for example). It's morally wrong. It's ethically wrong. It's disgusting. It's beneath contempt. It's a piece of shitty scholarship.

The Regents of the University of California keep this guy Yoo on the payroll. Well, I was in or near the Berkeley campus during the great controversies over Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis. In their situations, the case of academic freedom was framed in terms of the right of faculty members to espouse frankly Marxist or radical theories or tactics. So the issue is now framed the other way: shouldn't the Academic Senate go to bat for a guy who looks for ways to introduce the ideas of the Spanish Inquisition into a modern American administration? Who argues for the creation of a presidential dictatorship in a "time of war?" Who argues that in a time of (perpetual) war, the Fourth Amendment does not stop U.S. soldiers from entering American households and tossing the place? I guess they should. John Yoo's a big name now. He belongs in that starting lineup with the Four Lawyers of the Apocalypse, alongside Gonzales, Jay Bybee and David Addington. Yoo was probably the star because it was he who wrote the brief, this 81-page instruction manual on how to beat a federal rap for "maiming" by pouring acid on the correct part of the prisoner's body. That's just barely a mischaracterization. That's what the memo is about. How can the CIA and the military get around all these inconvenient laws against war crimes and torture? Where should you do it? Just how far can you push it? If you cause severe pain, if the prisoner screams and cries and begs for mercy (like al-Qahtani at Guantanamo) but he doesn't die and no "organ fails;" and even if he goes insane, what if the defense can prove that the torturer lacked "specific intent" to bring about insanity? It's all there in Yoo's memo. How to torture and get away with it.

Jack Balkin calls the memo and its conclusions "outrageous." Many other legal scholars have much stronger words for this piece of dreck. A lot of Yoo's memo went by the boards when the Supreme Court took up the issue of Geneva Convention protections for war-on-terror detainees. As a result, Congress was asked to provide (and of course complied) a pair of exonerations in the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act for U.S. personnel who thought they were torturing prisoners the way the President and his lawyer told them they could. That must have been kind of embarrassing for Yoo. Most lawyers who commit malpractice pay money damages; they don't require an Act of Congress to clean it up.

Not that such a consideration bothers anyone at Berkeley. Yoo's a celebrity; now that his March, 2003 Memo has been declassified, all American citizens (and the world community) can see his work in detail. Maybe his star has risen; maybe the Academic Senate feels constrained because they sense any action against Yoo would be seen as the result of professional envy. Wow, they think; Yoo was in on the ground floor of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and all that stuff that went on in the CIA's black sites. How cool to be that influential!

I remember a remark from George W. Bush when he was asked what he would do when he gained access to the Oval Office. "Give it a good cleaning," he said, in a prissy put-down of Bill Clinton's shenanigans. I think after Bush that won't be good enough. No amount of Comet or Lemon Pledge or carpet cleaner is going to fix what this guy has done to the office. They should declare it a toxic site under the Superfund law, tear it down and build a new one.

American Economy at the Crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the authorization for remaining in Iraq?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress and the Brinks Job on Social Security

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iraq Folly, Reexamined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just How Nuts Is It Out There?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why we're still in Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Account of My Harrowing Adventure at Gate 62B

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

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

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

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

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

Obama and Trinity United Church of Christ

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

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

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

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

Reverend Jeremiah's Jeremiad & Barack

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

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

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

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

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

The President's Compromised Immune System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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