My Fact Finding Mission to Buenos Aires

Recently, I suggested that Governor Mark Sanford should be our next President. To say the least, this is not the majority view in the United States. Maureen Dowd in her column in the New York Times today, for example, wrote a whole number accusing Sanford of a Mark/Marco duality ("he was in love with her, and in love with the image of himself in her eyes," etc.) consistent with her usual pop psychological approach. I use Freudian references in my own amateur psychology; if you're going to use uninformed generalizations, be sure to borrow from the best - the classics.

The South Carolina Democrats are now calling, of course, for an "investigation" into the state money spent on Sanford's trysts. This was all too predictable. The fun part of these scandals always gets ground to dust under the relentless assault of the scolds and bluenoses. We move from tan lines and magnificent parts to special prosecutors and audits. I still maintain that Americans do not know how to really mount, so to speak, a sex scandal, and I return to my own gold standard on the subject, Silvio Berlusconi, the 72 year old Prime Minister of Italy. Prosecutors there are interviewing 30 young women in connection with Silvio's habit of throwing parties where the guest list includes a lot of prostitutes, although Berlusconi has grandly dismissed the idea he's ever paid for it.

Does anyone ever ask why someone's sex life has anything to do with serving in office? In Eliot Spitzer's case, it was at least obvious that the Bush Administration's Justice Department tapped Spitzer's phone at the behest of the big investment banks on Wall Street which Spitzer had prosecuted in connection with their illegal laddering and insider trading frauds, arising from their IPO and mutual fund scams. Spitzer made them pay fines which were tiny in comparison to the bonanzas they'd stolen in violation of the securities laws, but still...it was the principle of the thing. It was as if Spitzer had taken the regulatory laws seriously or something. So he had to be run out of office by a compliant Bush Administration and media industry. Thus, the public lost one of its last remaining firewalls against systematic cheating, but gained a minor scandal for a couple of weeks. The tableau with the distraught wife, the giggles about knee socks, pictures of the whore. Tee-hee. We're such a mature people.

As for Wide Stance Larry Craig, Diaper-Clad David Vitter, and the rest of the gang, the usual explanation for their persecution is that they persecuted Bill Clinton when he was impeached. This explanation now extends to Mark Sanford, since he was a congressman at the time of the impeachment. This is one of those explanations that explains nothing. Yes, they're hypocritical about sex, but what, again, does that have to do with their fitness for office? It's as if the press, in digging up quotes from more than a decade ago, says "See? Tah-dah!" And we're supposed to instantly get that these guys have got to go.

See tah-dah what? What two ideas have been connected in the mind? I was reading a book by Pascal Boyer called Religion Explained not long ago, and he was discussing some of the recent thinking in evolutionary psychology, and the inference systems which we use to acquire knowledge and build on our existing database. For an example of such an inference, if I say that an ooglarp is an animal, you know a little - it's not a mineral or a plant. But in evolutionary terms, you're not much farther along than when we started. Should I be afraid of it? Can I eat it? That kind of essential hunter-gatherer knowledge. If I say that the ooglarp is the main predator of the zebra, you suddenly know an awful lot. It's probably a feline or canine creature, it's carniverous, it's probably fast and powerful, it has four legs and sharp teeth, and it lives in Africa. If it's feline, you would probably encounter one or two hunting together; if canine, it probably hunts in packs.

How did you know all that? With one clue, you inferred all the rest. The evolutionary psychologists think this is how our brains work. It's the most efficient way to learn; you don't start from scratch every time you learn some new piece of data. You extrapolate from what you already know. Thus, when ancient man looked around him, he naturally inferred, from the existence of creation, that someone created it. This was natural because he knew, from his own rudimentary tool-making and use, that you can build things. He naturally assumed, because of the way his brain worked, that the world was made by someone, and he inferred that it was someone of great power (the ancient cave-dweller couldn't build something like this). Thus, an omnipotent, anthropomorphic God was created by man to explain the world, using his natural, adaptive inferential technique.

Since humans were also very social animals (they evolved in that direction since cooperation was essential to survival, given their relative weakness in the animal world), they transmitted their belief systems in myths. A key requirement of such transmission is reproducibility; not just any story will work. The essential details have to hang together so they can be passed as a complete myth, without too many weird, extraneous features. Thus, an anthropomorphic God who is omnipotent, possessed of human emotions and exists only on Wednesdays just won't work. That last detail messes up the transmission. Similarly, the Virgin Mary is in every way a normal human except she gives birth immaculately. That's easy to remember and gives the story the mythic character it needs to go along with omnipotence, etc. Normal woman, Mother of God. Perfect. By the same token, the New Age approach of reducing God to a sort of inchoate force just doesn't catch on - where are the humanoid details, the story line that makes a myth a myth? So New Agers are actually the stealth atheists of the religious world, and I pass this on to my Fundamentalist friends who might be tempted otherwise to lend a New Age spiritualist their car keys.

It follows then, and ironically enough, that evolutionary psychology strongly suggests that belief in God is the natural tendency of humans, which is why religion and belief in the supernatural are found everywhere in human civilization, and always have been. By contrast, scientific thinking is highly unnatural and foreign to our innate brain processes. It takes a great deal of mental discipline to inculcate a truly scientific approach to reality. It gives the advantage of allowing tremendous predictive ability and control over outcomes, but it is not the normal, default way of thinking. If a plane crashes today and you're scheduled to fly tomorrow (on a different airline, on a different route, in different weather), your first instinct is probably not to reflect on the fact that the probabilities have not really changed at all. You infer, on the basis of atavistic tendencies, that you're in greater danger today than you would have been two days ago.

A scientific approach to the question of God would suggest that any anthropomorphic God could not have pulled this off. If God's brain is given over to emotional attributes like anger, jealousy, wrath, love, etc., it's unlikely that this human-like brain (supposedly we're made in his "image") could also undertake the enormous complexities, and the computational speed, required to make the universe. And if God could do all that, it seems unlikely that such a being would have even the faintest sort of commonality with man. As noted, the Cosmic Force version of God, endowed with the power to do all these things, doesn't sell down at the local cathedral because He's just too foreign to human experience.

So it seems likely, particularly given the conditioning of our specific culture, that a politician who errs sexually is subject to a set of inferences by the general public. These inferences include the presumption that a philandering man (and men in particular) are not trustworthy and fail in their public "father" role as a leader of humans. Is this scientifically reasonable? I don't see how it could be. Traits such as intelligence, creativity, organization and force of personality (which might make a leader more vulnerable to straying, after all) surely count for more than marital fidelity, since the governor or president or whoever is not married to the people he governs. The only question is whether he's effective at his job. Eliot Spitzer was very effective; that he had a thing for call girls is absolutely, completely beside the point.

As I've said, Europe seems, in general, to do much better with sex scandals and politicians than we do. I think this may reflect a higher-level mental functioning than is found in the United States. Not that the Europeans are innately more intelligent, but that their inference systems operate at a higher level of integration with scientific, rigorous thinking. Americans are primitive in the inferences they draw, conjoining factors which have no reality-based connection. America, of course, is far more religious than the secular Europeans, and the ready acceptance in the U.S. of all kinds of myths and literalist religion is probably indicative of lower, less evolved mental functioning.

But as an example of my own faulty inferential system: I assumed that Buenos Aires was farther south than it really is. It's in the north of Argentina across the water from Montevideo. Because it was located in South America, and I knew Argentina was the southernmost country, I inferred in a faulty manner that its capital would be in the extreme south. Yet scientifically this makes little sense. Why put your capital in the coldest location in the country? This becomes clear once you reflect on the role of latitude, which applies as logically in the Southern Hemisphere as in the Northern. What else have I assumed? Have I jumped to the faulty inference that because Sanford's mistress appears to be a tamale caliente, that all women in BA are such? And if her boyfriend down there leaked Mark's emails to the press, should I infer that all their boyfriends are treacherous and hot-blooded, and that one's hotel room door must be kept securely locked?

An old friend of mine, who has seen the whole world in the course of his work, writes that I should go to Buenos Aires myself, forgetting about the prudish sermons from the likes of Keith Olbermann and Maureen Dowd, indeed, forgetting about the blog - maybe, tal vez, forgetting about everything. And returning a new man. Does the cause of science demand any less?

Matt Taiibi & the trompe l'oeil of American politics

I just finished reading Matt Taiibi's latest "screed" on America's economic meltdown (his brilliant writing is always called a "screed" by writers with fewer guts than Matt has) in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. RS doesn't like giving away its magazine on the Internet, but I tracked Matt's piece down through a pdf uploaded by Barry Ritholtz on his Big Picture blog. Barry's obviously another fan. No one writes like Matt, not even Hunter S. Thompson, said by some to be Matt's inspiration. I think Hunter was too booze-and drug-addled to handle the depth of Taiibi's analyses, for while Taiibi's writing is hilariously profane and vicious (he uses the term "asshole" to describe people who are obviously greedy, lying assholes, for example), it strikes me as extremely well-informed and meticulous.

"The Great American Bubble Machine" is about the specific role of Goldman Sachs in a series of Wall Street scams dating back to the Depression, although the focus is on more recent times: the dot.com bust and the subprime mortgage crisis, which has finally blown the American economy to smithereens. Because of the focus on Goldman Sachs, some readers of this piece have derided it as "anti-Semitic," but that's way, way too easy. That's not what it's about at all--it's not an attack on the "money lenders" or the "Elders of Zion." It's about the systemic rot at the base of the American economic and political worlds, about the absolutely corrupting influence of the huge concentration of wealth in a few hands and how the holders of this wealth have managed to rig the political and economic system so it does what they want, which is to keep funneling all the money to them. Or as Taiibi puts it, if the American economy is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs is that drain. I thnk the tight focus on one investment bank (the most powerful in the world) makes for a good narrative line, but in reality the corruption extends far outward into all the major financial players who gleefully pocketed bilions while pension funds, old folks and all the little American people watched ther life savings go up in smoke. Or down the Drain.

Goldman Sachs bundled together crappy mortgages, paid Moody's and Standard & Poor big fees to imprint them with their Triple A gold seal, and then made money by simultaneously taking short positions by means of huge credit default swap positions with AIG, Insurer-Croupier to the World of High Finance. When it all went bust-o, Hank Paulson, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, arranged to bail out GS and all the other major players (except major competitor Lehman Brothers) and also pulled off the neat trick of bailing out AIG, so that Goldman's CDS bets could be made good. That's a pretty neat double play, and all with your money! How can there be any risk when GS sells shit at the price of gold and is reimbursed by the Fed for its systemic fraud (how can you, while being honest, sell a bundle of mortgages where the borrowers are meth-addicted ex-cons in Riverside County with no jobs, no income and a sub-zero FICO score to a Norwegian teachers fund, representing that the investment is rock solid, and then at the same time brag, as GS did, that their REAL money was being made on the short side of the same investment?). And then Paulson & Bernanke make sure that the insurer, AIG, has the wherewithal to pay off your CDS bets just to make it all a very good year.

So how do Goldman and the rest of the thieves on Wall Street get away with this grand larceny in broad daylight? Easy. Regulatory capture. They own the agencies in the federal govenment which are supposed to be keeping an eye on them. Most of the regulators, in the recent past, just walk in and out of their jobs with Goldman Sachs, like Paulson and Robert Rubin, Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, who was instrumental in getting the Commodities Futures Modernization Act passed, that is, in getting rid of any oversight whatsoever over CDS bets. Goldman was the single largest contributor to Obama's campaign, and they spend a lot of money on key Senate members. So if you're wondering how all the Wall Street firms could blow a $13 triilion dollar hole in the American economy and nary a perp faces any kind of legal jeopardy (can you imagine how grateful they all are to Bernie Madoff for drawing the public's fire?), that's why. "It's all in the past," as Barack would say, which, oddly enough, is where most criminal acts happened. But there will be no enforcement whatsoever for criminal securities fraud which occurred on a truly massive scale, because that's not how the Mafiosi punish each other. They get together, they talk, they divide up the territory, maybe somebody (Lehman) has to get rubbed out.

Like the famous ambiguous drawing above, at a certain point the picture snaps into place and you can see the vase as clearly as the faces. It's right there in front of you. The high finance crooks of Wall Street are gangsters who have managed to infiltrate law "enforcement" to such a degree that they can operate with impunity. The only check on their ability to make money is the gullibility of the investors - nothing else. And they are "too big to fail," so that there is no chance of real loss - if they overextend themselves, the very people they defrauded will be forced to pay to bail them out, because they're so "essential" to the economy. Neat, huh?

So as to Obama - what am I saying? That he's the Capo di Tutti Capi, the Chicago Gangster now in charge of the whole racket? That cap-and-trade sets up a Climate Exchange in Chicago where carbon credits can be traded because a "private" solution allows the hucksters on Wall Street to game that system too? That Obama's a fake who himself fleeced the general public into millions of private donations (mine included), enough to get himself elected the first time, and will fill his war chest with the usual Gangster Tributes for the second run since the ordinary citizens will realize in 2012 they've been conned? That people will start looking at the stuff about Tony Rezko in Chicago with a slightly more, shall we say, suspicious attitude?

I'm not sure. That's the problem with this creepy kind of conspiracy thinking, of the sort that Taiibi induces with his brilliantly incisive writing. Because he's not really wrong when he says we have a gangster economy and a ganster political system, just as Russia did between the fall of Communism and the collapse of its economy in the late Nineties, during the era of the Oligarchs.

Yeah, partly it's that Gulfstream jet ride to New York. His wishy-washy approach to health care reform. His preventive detention bullshit. Now his "signing statement" crap. His hands-off approach to the corruption and crimes of the Bush Administration. Who is this guy, and how does this whole system work now?

Maybe Barack hired the wrong brother

There was a pretty good line in Paul Krugman's column today about Barack's audacity deficiency, to the effect that Obama seems to spend a lot of time "negotiating with himself." Images of public figures slowly crystallize, and the one that appears to be taking shape around Prez O is that he tends to pull his punches before he needs to. Krugman was writing specifically about the public option in the health care legislation currently Topic A in Congress, and Obama's tendency to waffle about whether he will or will not approve of a bill that does not have such a central feature. I think most people probably realize that without a public option, the "reform" legislation is simply more deck chair arranging with no purpose other than to convince the substantial majority of Americans who want universal coverage (about 75%) that something was done even though it wasn't.

Anyway, Krugman's line is apt. In the law game, it's known as "bidding against yourself;" if you've staked out a reasonable position, as Obama has with the public plan option, you do not back off that position until you absolutely must (if then), and you certainly do not signal that your position is in some sense negotiable even before the other side responds. They already know it's negotiable; telling them they can have what they want simply by asking for it telegraphs to your opposition that you don't really believe in your position. Thus, the Republican and Democratic employees of the health insurance industry (which is to say, all Republican and "moderate" Democrats in the Senate) already assume they have won that fight, and the only question is how much more can they eviscerate health care reform before Obama just flicks the whole thing in and says, "Well, I tried."

Well, no you didn't, and that's the whole problem. Unless Obama also wants to engage in a Kabuki exercise in which he pretends to go to bat for the millions and millions of Americans who are getting hammered by high insurance premiums, insane deductibles, spotty coverage, retroactive disqualification for preexisting conditions and the rest of it, he needs to draw that famous line in the sand. No public option, no health care reform, and then paint a huge red target around the Senators who blocked the advance of the bill, particularly those who are up for reelection in 2010.

What I mean by the title of this note is that Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, is supposed to be "The Hammer." How could Obama possibly negotiate in such a weak and ineffective style if this guy's in his office every day pumping him up for battle? I can't imagine that Ari Emanuel (pictured above), said to be the model for super-agent Ari Gold in "Entourage," would ever play the game this way. He would assess his bargaining points in terms of the leverage he has for every one of them. Such as, Obama's got three-fourths of the American people behind him. You can do an awful lot of damage to your political opponents in the electoral process by playing that card.

If he proceeds the way Ari would play it, I don't see how Obama can lose. If he gets a public option, he's a hero. If he draws a line in the sand and is stymied by a lot of corrupt Senators, he's still a hero and he can get rid of a few more Republicans next year. The only way he can actually lose is if he plays this wussy "bipartisan" game where the Senate rolls him and then reaches the conclusion that in all future battles, all they have to do is wait for Obama to cave. And then in 2012, Barack will have his own date with destiny.

Mark Sanford for President

Look, he was 49. Hemmed in by family and a job he found suffocating. Was his response simply to play the stoic, stifle his feelings of frustration, the sense that life was passing, or had already passed, him by? No, he found a girlfriend in Argentina named Maria. A woman who moved him to write like this:

"Two, mutual feelings . . . You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details ..."

Good stuff.

The liberal pundits are looking for ways to talk about this so it sounds like a serious matter, instead of an excuse to talk about a married American man with a hot Argentine girlfriend, because if they don't dress it up, it will be too obvious they're just jealous. Keith Olbermann last night was particularly disgusting. A simpering, puerile narrative interwoven with Governor Sanford's press conference confession, as if there were some sort of "drama" in a guy coming clean about su novia. Did Sanford go to Buenos Aires to say "goodbye," to end it all, to clear the decks for a fresh start? No, he went to Argentina because he was hot to see Maria and her magnificent parts.

Ed Schultz, roughly the size, shape and timbre of a beer barrel, used his TV time to discuss the serious disservice Sanford has done to the noble citizens of South Carolina. He called South Carolinians "stupid" if they allow a guy to stay on the payroll who left the state without telling anyone where he was. What if something had happened to South Carolina? Well, in the first place, Mark Sanford would have known about it. Heard of the Internet? Cell phones? Plus, Sanford's wife knew where he was. So if Kim Jong-Il's army had come ashore in Charleston, Mark could have torn himself away from one of those magnificent gentle kisses, or averted his gaze from Maria's tan lines long enough to tell his Lt. Governor to call Washington. Unless Barack was on a Gulfstream jet on date night, I'm sure he would have handled it. That's what a "team" is for.

Freud explained all this a long time ago with his "projection/introjection" analysis. Naturally, we attack the perceived "weaknesses" in others that we feel most strongly in ourselves, and if you're normal, sex is a vulnerability. Anyway, it should be. So what if Sanford attacked Clinton for Monica's under-the-desk visits in the Oval Office? Maybe he disapproved of the way Slick Willie trashed Monica with his "that woman" stuff, where Bill did his best impersonation of an honest guy. Note that the Governor did not have a bad word to say about Maria -- indeed, he felt for her. That's class. Take note Keith and Ed, in case you guys each lose two hundred pounds and find yourselves in the same predicament.

No doubt Mark would like to feel for Maria again, preferably in the faded glow of the night's light. As the stars dance in the dark flowing water of the Rio de la Plata, with a warm brisa blowing in from the Pampas, as Maria turns from the balcony rail and walks toward you, the outline of her broad hips caught for a moment in the phosphorescence of reflection...

Go ahead and use it, Mark. You're doing great so far.

Needle Hits "E"

Seriously, it is often hard to find anything new to say. This is bound to happen from time to time. Frequently, the most fun is just thinking up titles. E.g., I see where John Yoo was named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by Jose Padilla (and his mother) arising from his torture and incarceration without due process, on the basis of Yoo's role in providing legal cover for violations of the Bill of Rights (I mean, what's a law professor for if not that?), and it survived a motion to dismiss under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. By an opinion written by a conservative federal judge in San Francisco (not an oxymoron - I'm familiar with the jurist in question). So I thought of a blog title: "Fairy Tales Can Come True, It Can Happen to Yoo," and then I went blank. I mean, what's the point? So a private litigant can bring one lawsuit against one minor player in the Bush War Crime Spree while the entire Justice Department sits with its collective thumb up its collective ass - is this actually a victory or a measure of how rotten things are?

Congress can't write a meaningful health care reform bill; can't regulate systemic fraud; can't deal with global warming; can't get out of Afghanistan and will take forever to get out of Iraq; can't ensure healthy food; can't do squat except give money it doesn't have to Wall Street. The government's bankrupt. California is bankrupt. The world's fisheries are 90% dead. Species are dropping like flies, except flies are thriving because species are dropping like....even your logic gets circular after a while.

Obama's a major disappointment. I'm tired of his war of adjectives against the Iranian government already. I know he's outraged, aghast, shocked, dismayed, incensed, concerned, heartbroken, bummed out and nonplussed by the violence in the streets. I know he's watching along with the world. I know we're bearing witness. We'll probably bear witness to Kim Jong-Il's missile attack on Kauai too, and be outraged, aghast, shocked, dismayed, incensed, concerned and probably irradiated.

I feel like Paul Simon must have felt when he wrote his Simple Desultory Philippic:

I been Norman Mailered,

Maxwell Taylored.

I been John O'Hara'd,

McNamara'd.

I been Rolling Stoned and

Beatled till I'm blind.

I been Ayn Randed,

nearly branded Communist,

'cause I'm left-handed.

That's the hand I use, well,

never mind.

The best writer I know on the general subject of systemic breakdown in Washington is Glenn Greenwald, who writes a blog for Salon (it's linked to the right). To summarize his central thesis, the "elites" of the Beltway (which the blogger Digby calls The Village - a nice touch, reminiscent of the old Patrick McGoohan surreality) operate within a reality bubble (as in The Village of "The Prisoner"). The Bubble Elites conform their opinions and behavior to certain conventional views shared among themselves. The Elites include not only Congress members but also the Mainstream Media - the writers for the Washington Post and New York Times (George Will, Krauthammer, David Broder, Tom Friedman, David Brooks et alia) and the cable and network newsies - Blitzer, Matthews, and the rest. Obama has obviously been sucked into that vortex, and he now talks and acts like one of them.

The Elites maintain "access" to each other (Biden on Matthews' "Hardball," Newt Gingrich on everyone's show, even though, as far as I can tell, he doesn't actually hold office), they return each other's phone calls, and they all make a very nice living with all their worldly cares taken care of and with immense power at their disposal. As C. Wright Mills taught us in The Power Elite, it is the natural inclination of those with power to take those actions which perpetuate their power. In The Village, this takes the form of "go along to get along." Thus, the Washington Post will not use the word "torture" to describe the Bush Administration's program of torture; it is always "enhanced interrogation techniques." Calling something "torture" in The Village is rude and unseemly; Obama, a quick learner, picked up on this point and decided that no one in the Bush Administration would ever pay a price for torturing human beings, because the maintenance of a prim, polite veneer of "bipartisanship" was more important to the general conspiracy against the American People which is our representative government. Patrick Buchanan, clearly an anti-Semite and a racist, is permitted easy access to all the big talk shows, as is Ann Coulter, whose stock in trade is a kind of depraved cruelty and adolescent name-calling. Such people have "visibility," and thus are Certified Villagers. Respect must be paid, because mutual regard keeps the game going, and why would someone allow ethics or humanity to interfere with such a profitable enterprise?

Glenn points out that national polls demonstrate over and over again that the American people are considerably more progressive than their elected representatives. In general, about 60% of the American populace is ready for all kinds of salutary changes which their elected "representatives" will not permit. A reduction in military spending in favor of domestic needs; reduction of the huge deficits; a move toward renewable energy; single payer health care; the legalization of gay marriage; legalization of marijuana and a cessation of the war on drugs; ending the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. These are facts, or at least as factual as rigorously designed opinion polls can prove. Thus, when Mitch McConnell stands up in the Old White Men's Club (the Senate) and drones on about what "the American people want," his mental referent is a whites-only country club in suburban Kentucky circa 1955, with 95% Protestants, three Catholics and no Jews. He is not actually talking about "America."

When speaking to each other, the Village Elites reassure themselves that the American People want us to remain for years and years in Iraq & Afghanistan, to "support the troops," so that when Nancy Pelosi (recruiting remote skull muscularity to overcome chemically-induced facial paralysis) tells us the American People expect "us" (Villagers) to "support the troops" by voting another hundred bil to last through September, she is really saying that the Democrats are in charge now, the wars belong to them, and the Dems need the money. On virtually every issue the Village Elites talk the same way: things cannot be done because the American People won't stand for it, etc., even though this is blatantly, demonstrably false.

Glenn makes these points cogently and, I think, irrefutably. The question is: how could things have come to such a pass? This is more complicated, and is the result of a bias in favor of the status quo resulting from (a) the sheer cost of unseating an existing Villager in Congress, (b) in the McLuhanesque Age, the enormous advantages one's simple celebrity and familiarity convey, and (c) the complexity of the issues involved, which makes it difficult for a member of the American populace to follow the bouncing ball and determine, on a precise issue, whether their elected solon is actually representing his/her interests. These three factors make longevity in Congress a pretty simple matter: don't screw up, don't draw negative attention to yourself, vote like everybody else (unless your shtick is being a Certified Maverick: Ron Paul, e.g.). The fact that you're there practically guarantees that you'll stay there because people see you, hear about you, and when they go in the voting booth they see your name and punch the ballot next to it. To overcome this huge advantage of incumbency, a challenger has to go broke to raise his visibility to that of a Villager. And the Villager can match whatever sums the challenger can put up by the Villager's built-in advantage: he's in Congress and is already on the take from his true constituency: Big Business.

Thus, Joe Biden is celebrated as a champion of the little guy, even though he was a champion of one of the most oppressively anti-little-guy pieces of legislation in recent years, the bankruptcy reform bill, which was written by credit card companies (many based in Biden's home state of Delaware, the low-tax "Reno" for corporations), who contribute a lot of money to Biden's war chest. Or did, until this faux "populist" became the VP of the faux-populist Obama. Chuck Schumer does not want to disturb the absurd loophole in the tax code which allows hedge fund managers to pay capital gains rates on their billions in income, instead of ordinary income rates the way their secretaries must. As long as Schumer plays ball with the New York-based hedge funds, his coffers will always be full. This loophole costs the federal government enormous sums of money every year. But Chuckie's "fun" and "liberal," so no problem.

On and on. Defense contracting. Big Pharma. They've all got their designated Errand Boys & Girls in Congress. Do these people want campaign finance reform? Hell, no. They're there, and they intend to stay forever. Arlen Specter switched parties to ensure his reelection, brazenly admitting that was the only reason. The Democrats (particularly Obama) welcomed him with open arms. And really, what the hell is the difference? Wasn't Obama saying to Specter, "We know your 'positions' were just stuff you had to say to get elected as a Republican from Pennsylvania, but that state is so much in the crapper now there are a lot of Democrats so you'll say stuff now to get elected as a Democrat. Hey - it's all good."

How did the Obama - Clinton two-person race happen in the first place? The Big Media selected them. They were the best story line. I didn't want either one of them at the outset. Obama plainly lacked sufficient experience; Hillary was a quintessential Triangulating Villager. But at the "debates," Barack and Hillary got 15 questions each, to one for each of the others (who were also far from exhilarating, truth be told). The visibility of the two media-selected candidates rose to the point that the selection of one of them was inevitable. The Republicans decided to let McCain run once in a year they knew they were going to lose, and that was it. "The Electoral Process in America." But let's lecture Iran on how it's done, or send our own Ayatollah, Justice Antonin Scalia, to Tehran to act as an observer for the recount.

Can the inertia of such a decadent system be overcome by the populace? No. There is no way. In 6 years, using the 535 Plan for Complete Congressional Replacement, we could break the bonds between every legislator, lobbyist and media pundit. But we're not going to do that; it violates the rules of the McLuhanesque Trance. That flow of history called Reality, however, will bring about its own changes, and those will be profound. Vandals & Visigoths for one empire, bankruptcy for another.

I've been Ann Coultered, cold shouldered

John Boltoned, it's revoltin

George Bushed, Cheneyed too

Condoleezaed, Moon Face Yoo,

Mississippied, Alabamaed

Orange Boehnered, Barack Obamaed,

Mumbles Reided, Max Baucased

Republican National Party caucused,

Sean Hannityed, lost my sanity,

Druggie Limbaugh high on vanity,

George Willed, Brooks the shill,

Lindsey Graham take a pill.

Arlen Spectered, resurrected,

As a Dem and who expected

Any difference?

Why not criminalize AGW Denial?

Anyone who reads the report from the Copenhagen conference on global warming, which concluded a few months ago, and is not absolutely terrified by the impending disaster of global warming - is (a) not paying attention or (b) has a death wish. It can be linked to the right through RealClimate.org. 2500 of the best climate scientists (and other academics and researchers working on the problem) from Berkeley, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Beijing and Japan, to name a few, met to review the current state of climate science. 1400 papers were presented and a synthesis report was issued. The bottom line can be stated thusly: things are considerably worse than they looked two years ago when the IPCC report was issued, and if we are not to slip irreversibly over the 2 degree Centigrade "guardrail" (beyond which serious questions arise as to human viability on Planet Earth), then immediate and drastic reductions in CO2 emissions must begin.

I've been following RealClimate for several years now and I have detected a change in tone. In the early days, under assault from Right Wing blowhards such as James Inhofe in the Senate and Joe Barton in Congress, and amid the general indifference of the Bush Administration, scientists at RealClimate and elsewhere (such as the U.S.-China conference I visited at Berkeley a few years ago) were shrill and frustrated in their attempts to "defend" their "case," trying mightily to get people to take the problem seriously. The case has now been made so thoroughly, so irrefutably, that a different problem has arisen: how to avoid the complete demoralization of the public concerning remedial action. That is, there is no guarantee at this point, no matter what we do including the immediate cessation of all CO2 emissions (which is not likely - I just saw a car drive by my office window - oops, there's another one), that the threshold will not be crossed.

Still, if we're going to try to deal with any problem in our society and in our world, we should try to do this - deal with the catastrophe of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). It is more important than health care, more important than Nutcase Kim in N. Korea, more important than Iran, more important than the Saudi terrorist cells plotting to blow up another American building. Yet dealing with it seems to run up against an innate human resistance to confronting any problem which does not present tangible and immediate problems for daily life. In evolutionary terms, we're just not wired to react to "theoretical" dangers that gradually overtake us.

In my own small way, I was trying to think of something that would give this issue greater visibility, and I think I may have hit on something. It arises from my adversarial training and experience, you could say; I'm not really much into "bipartisanship" like Barack. I don't think you can necessarily cajole and sweet talk cretins like James Inhofe and Joe Barton into seeing things reasonably. I watch George Stephanopoulos some Sunday mornings, and there's George Will, given a national forum on "This Week." He's an AGW Denier. Maybe he writes belletristically, maybe he enunciates his opaque sentences with gravitas, but let me ask a question: if George Will appeared on "This Week" one Sunday and told us he had devised a cure for late stage lung cancer in his kitchen over the weekend, the viewers would regard him as a lunatic. Yet when he weighs in on a scientific subject more complicated than cancer research, he is treated seriously.

AGW is about as "controversial" a theory among actual scientists at this point as evolution and the Copernican solar system. Given its multifactorial, positive feedback loop nature, it is extraordinarily complicated. But the general trend is becoming clearer and clearer. The air and seas are getting hotter, the oceans are acidifying and dying, and we're in for a world of hurt. If we carry on as we have since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we will endure a kind of self-inflicted genocide. So it occurred to me: why not follow the lead of those European civil law countries which have criminalized denial of the Holocaust? For example,

§ 3h. As an amendment to § 3 g., whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.^[11]

is an operative and relevant part of Austria's Anti-Denier statute. Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic and numerous other countries have similar laws. It is true that these "civil law" countries have never regarded free speech with quite the same reverence that we say we do in common law countries such as Great Britain and the USA, although I have noticed in the last few years that the Bill of Rights is increasingly regarded as optional by our political class. But even in days of yore, when we believed in civil liberties, one could not yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater without violating the criminal law. And we've always had laws against defamation, which restrict free speech as well.

You can do as much as a ten-year stretch in Austria for the violation described above. Penalties and fines vary from country to country, but the offense is taken seriously wherever it's on the books. So if Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma wants to announce to the world that global warming is the greatest hoax in the history of mankind, and does so on the Senate floor while the C-Span cameras are rolling, charge him with AGW Denial. He can defend himself - all he has to do is to convince the jury that he's right. Same for George Will - let's see what that opinion is made of, George! Lay it all out for us, because surely you're not contributing to the likelihood of human extinction on the basis of your Right Wing, pro-business attitudes, right? And thinking of Patrick Buchanan, who on MSNBC from time to time "grossly plays down" global warming and also has a disturbing tendency to lionize the Third Reich, and gave us the benefit of his opinion in a 1990 piece that it would have been impossible for Jews to die in the gas chambers of Treblinka - maybe we could get a twofer: try him here for AGW Denial and then extradite him to Austria, where, after doing his stretch, he could make daily pilgrimages to Der Fuhrer's Geburtshaus.

Don't be a shankapottamus, Barack

It occurred to me the other day, as I remarked to a contemporary of mine, that this is the first time in my life that I am older than the President. Came close a couple of times - Bill and George - but they had me by a couple of years. A bunch of you reading this, I know, can say the same. Feels a little weird, doesn't it? It might be more important than it appears at first glance, too.

I'm beginning to think that Barack's basic problem is a lack of experience. While all those jaded solons over at Congress give him his props as a talented wunderkind, they're not in the least afraid of him. The stuff they're pulling is really outrageous now, on both sides of the aisle. Completely out of control. 75% of the American people want a public option as part of an overall health insurance reform act. The outline coming out of the Senate committees working on the matter simply omits the public option, in favor of a lot of health-industry-written nonsense about "savings" through things like standardization of claim forms. Yeah, that'll do it.

They're telling him what to do on defense, too. The defense budget is increasing again. How many times can we recite the same statistics that, for one example, the U.S. defense budget is ten times larger than the country in second place, China, or that American spending accounts for over half of all defense spending in the world? Are we afraid of a superior military force attacking us from another solar system?

The regulatory reform Geithner is proposing is a sick joke. When banks, investment banks, hedge funds, your Uncle Carl decide to go into the mortgage securitization business and create a bunch of Triple A bonds out of tranched and smooshed garbage loans, and then sell them to the Norwegian Teachers Pension Fund or something, they now have to hold on to 5% of the loans. They can only sell 95% of the derivatives into the secondary market. Yep, that 5% equity stake will keep 'em honest!

And Barry, your Justice Department is still carrying all that Bush Administration water. Why are you and Eric Holder so committed to the coverup of Bush & Cheney's crimes and misprisions of office? Huh? The latest is your opposition to the release of the FBI's notes of the Cheney interview regarding Valerie Plame, the 67 pages which CREW (the Washington watchdog agency) is seeking through a FOIA action. (And why must every disclosure be the result of a long, painful, expensive FOIA action where your administration fights tooth and nail to prevent the public from seeing public documents paid for by public money? Where's this frigging transparency you were talking about?)

Dude, you gotta do what the E-Trade Baby would tell you to do. Rise up! Grab the reins! They're rolling you, I really believe it. Unless, of course, despite my seniority it is I who is being naive. It is very easy to see what is going on in the Senate. The corruption is so patent, so palpable, so self-admitted (Durbin: "The banks frankly own the place.") that it's no longer possible to give them any benefit of any doubt about their motives. It is now so obvious that it is becoming ridiculous. Tom Daschle, a healthcare industry mouthpiece that you tried to install as your Health & Human Services Secretary (but couldn't because his corruption was too brazen even for Senate confirmation), comes out and urges you to "drop" the public option because it's "unworkable." It's unworkable for his clients, is what he means.

So whose side are you on? Was that stuff during the campaign about working for the people a bunch of happy horseshit? Now that you're in Washington, D.C., it's just more fun to ride in the Gulfstream and be with the other big players and not mess the game up that serves the insiders so well?

We're going to find out over the next couple of months. If you roll over for this neutered healthcare bill, written and purchased by the health insurance industry, and you don't raise ever lovin' Hell on behalf of the 75% of Americans who are demanding a real change in the most basic of human needs, health, you're done. Even if you don't necessarily win this battle, you better try really hard to do the people's work. Can you get angry? Can you read the riot act to these crooks, then leave the room slamming the door behind you so they start to realize you mean it? You think they're going to give up the millions contributed to their campaign funds because you call them up and sweetly ask for their "help?"

Your acquiescence in a sell-out will deprive you of your real constituency, average American citizens. And from then on, you'll be utterly powerless.

What would Niccolo say about Obama?

It's been a lot of years since I read Il Principe, Machiavelli's masterwork on political science (incorrectly translated as "The Prince"). Nick's basic thesis is that wielding power is not for the faint of heart; if you go about it timidly, you're certain to be deposed. Thus, an effective and durable leader must be ruthless from the beginning. Especially at the beginning, in fact, because that's when the leader is most vulnerable to overthrow. Machiavelli espoused a lot of actions which don't really fly in modern democracies with functioning judicial systems; he advocated, for example, that the New Prince, if he's interested in fundamental change, should act immediately to neutralize not only his political opponents but also his political allies who might rise up as rivals. And when he said "neutralize," you know, he didn't mean reduce their salaries. Stalin was said to be a great student of Machiavelli's work, which is why his inner circle came to appreciate that it was only a matter of time before Joe turned on them too.

Well, we don't do things that way anymore. Still, the underlying idea is still sound. A new leader needs to move decisively and boldly at the outset before his political opponents have a chance to organize their resistance. You can't actually kill them anymore, but you can still neutralize them in legal and institutional ways. Obama did campaign on promises of Big Change, so he does not have the argument that his adherence to Bushian policies, for example, or his Full Employment Act for Clintonista Wall Street gorgons like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, are what he said he was going to do. In fact, a lot of what he has done is exactly what he said he was not going to do; a prime example is his principle of "preventive detention" for Guanatanamo inmates (and elsewhere) who can't be tried and can't be released (according to him), or his denial of habeas corpus for prisoners in places like Bagram in Afghanistan on the specious theory that the Supreme Court's ruling in Boumeddiene didn't specifically say it applied to inmates in places other than Guantanamo. Even if the circumstances of their capture and detention were exactly the same. Even if they wound up in Bagram because they were transferred from Guantanamo. Well, Boumeddiene didn't say specifically that it applied to inmates born on Wednesday, either.

The positions Obama's Administration has taken on state secrets, illegal wiretapping, telecom immunity and investigations of war crimes have been godawful. His Justice Department keeps shocking even conservative federal trial and appellate judges. Obama promised transparency but he never, ever delivers. Where the hell did all that money go that Congress doled out under the TARP? Well, it's better if you don't know, he says. There are just a lot of things the American people shouldn't be told, and it's for their own good.

On more substantive, crucial issues, like global warming and healthcare reform, his positions have been tepid, seemingly more designed to placate the "Left" than to lead. Bill Maher, who's a pretty good weathervane for moderate, liberal sentiment, took Obama to task last Friday night on "Real Time," and I thought rightfully so. Obama's defense spending is the same as Bush's (and Reagan's, in constant dollars). He's talking Social Security "reform" instead of blowing the whistle on the thievery from the "trust fund" which put us in this mess.

Look, the economy's not going anywhere anyway. The last 30 years were built on the unsustainable accumulation of debt. There are no bubbles left to inflate. As Nouriel Roubini says, the economy might stop bottoming out by the end of the year, but it's not going to grow because there are no engines to drive it. It's going to wallow in dangerous high seas, while the international community (such as those Brats at BRIC), start organizing an alternative currency system to replace the fiat dollar. Man, Barry, you think you got problems now...

Reading The Fifties by David Halberstam (and to repeat: what a shame this great man is gone), I was struck by this historical fact. Before 1949, the United States derived 2/3 of its energy from coal. Between 1949 and 1972 a basic shift occurred in which the U.S. derived 2/3 of its energy from petroleum. What made the United States great, along with its creativity and huge advantage in being the only intact manufacturing country to emerge from World War II, was that its economy became dominant during the Age of Oil, a resource which the USA had in abundance for a long time and which was amazingly cheap. Cars, freeways, suburbia, chain motels, fast food, the "Green Revolution" in food production-- all either invented here or brought to their highest expression, and all related to cheap oil. The energy regime built on oil has become a massive liability, both in terms of carbon emissions and balance of payments. Without a fundamental shift in energy paradigms, we're toast, literally and figuratively.

So, Barack -- stop screwing around with Gulfstream flights to New York and trips to the burger joints. This is not a public relations job you were hired to fill. The technology for a new energy regime, solar, wind, geothermal, is here. Read Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia - by 2030, zero emissions. It's doable and it's the only way out. You can't run an economy without energy or without jobs, and jobs depend on energy. Focus here. Tell Afghanistan and Iraq to go to hell. Stop promising aid every time Air Force One touches down in some foreign airport. Stop talking about how you're going to fix every country's problems but our own.

Niccolo would tell you that you've only got a brief window to establish your dominance. After that, your main constituency, the People, will begin to lose interest in you, and then your political opponents at Fox News and in the Republican Party will realize you can be rolled and contained. And then you're going to become like Clinton, looking for other things to do to pass the days in the Oval Office.

My lonely quest to revisit the rationale for the Afghan invasion

So now Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has stated in a "court" document (in a kangaroo forum, no doubt delivered by diplomatic "pouch") that he lied while under torture about a lot of things, including his knowledge as to the exact whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. This one should probably go in the "Duh" file, but while we're thinking about it: didn't we just find out that the Bush Administration was waterboarding detainees in order to establish a link between 9-11 and Iraq? Thus, how major a leap of deduction is it to wonder whether the Bush Administration, having already invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, was looking for additional support for its contention that Afghanistan was essential to the planning and training of the 9-11 hijackers, and tortured KSM and others to get it?

Probably no leap at all. Someone, someday is going to sift through the Report of the 9-11 Commission and note again all that evidence that was derived from KSM, the Gurgling Confessor, about bin Laden's role in the plot, such as those riveting passages where the "muscle hijackers" (the 15 non-pilots who were almost all from Saudi Arabia) trained on the high-tech jungle gyms of Kandahar and were personally selected by Osama bin Laden as he watched them go hand-over-hand on the bars and dive cunningly through the barrels. Osama sounds a little like Rosa Klebb from "From Russia With Love." Can't you just see her (to help, that's her up above) walking up to a hijacker, slipping on her brass knuckles and giving the ol' abs a wallop? KSM could picture it, even while the water filled his lungs, and he told the interrogators so. Yep, all that Kandahar training was certainly critical to overpowering unarmed female flight attendants on commercial aircraft and opening an unlocked cockpit door.

So KSM now says he's not sure where Osama was at the time he was "testifying." It's a little unclear, because the Obama Administration is being very difficult (as is becoming always the case) about releasing documents, and when they do release them, they've had the hell redacted out of them. But suppose that Dore Gold, in writing "Hatred's Kingdom" (about the essential role of Saudi Arabia in international Wahhabist terrorism), was right when he claimed that no credible evidence existed that any of the 19 hijackers had ever been to Afghanistan. If this is actually the case, then the argument for invading Afghanistan is reduced to the presence of Osama bin Laden in that country on or about 9-11, and the "harboring" of OBL by the Taliban. Yet if OBL's role was essentially logistical and financial, and the training camps were not involved in the plot, what is the actual rationale for the military invasion of this specific country? Couldn't these planning/paymaster roles be conducted from any country with enough caves?

I kinda wonder what's in the redacted parts of the KSM affidavit - how far he went in recanting his testimony, how much he claimed to know that he didn't, how much he said just to please the guys with the towels and hoses. And I wonder why the Obama Administration, which has become so zealous about focusing us now on this war as the war of "necessity," is being so secretive about the redactions. KSM's original testimony was cited at great length in the 9-11 Report. Why would his recantation suddenly become a matter of national security?

It takes two parties to tango

Having become semi-addicted to reading David Halberstam's histories of the recent American past, I'm now deep into his fascinating The Fifties, which just happens to be the decade that my consciousness was formed. It's still early in the decade, as far as my bookmark is concerned, because those years between 1950 and 1954 were chockablock with tidal changes in the American political landscape as the United States assumed its role as the only real economic superpower in the world, and, for a while at least, the only nation with the H-Bomb. The Republicans were able at last to throw off about 20 years or so of complete electoral frustration, the two decades between the first election of FDR in 1932 and Ike's election in 1952.

What's striking are the historical parallels between our present time and the early Fifties. I think the French do have it right when they say the more things change, the more they remain the same. The early Fifties, between 1950 and 1954, were marked by McCarthyism, a symptom of the extreme anti-Communist feelings of the era. Anyone and everyone could be labeled a traitor, even native American scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer who ran what was probably the single-most successful technological enterprise in American history, the Manhattan Project. He was sold out by the rabid anti-Communist Edward Teller, a Hungarian refugee with personal axes to grind against the Soviets, because of Oppenheimer's misgivings about building the "Super," or hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer's attitude was shared by many scientists and politicians, most of whom could hardly be called "fellow travelers." But it made no difference in those hopped-up times of loyalty oaths, blacklisting and paranoia. Richard Nixon made his reputation by his tireless work in persecuting Alger Hiss and his smear campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, all on the basis of alleged Communist ties.

McCarthy was an irresponsible alcoholic whose ideas were championed by the owner of the Chicago Tribune; in much the same way, Rush Limbaugh, a confessed prescription narcotic addict who probably long ago burned out his synaptic wiring, is the current voice of the Far Right, combining both mouthpiece and media sponsor. The players have changed but the basic tactics have not. In the Fifties we had the Commies, and the invective of the Right against the Democrats was directed at their "appeasement" of the Soviets, or of themselves adopting "socialist" policies from the New Deal. In our time, the Right attacks the Democrats because they are "soft" on terrorism or Muslim nuclear proliferation, and are imposing a "Socialist" order of public medicine and government ownership. In both historical epochs, the reaction of the Democrats has been the same: to move to the right into their own brand of anti-Communism and latter-day anti-terrorism to avoid the charge of being soft on defense.

The net effect is to homogenize the two parties when it comes to national defense issues and national defense spending. Truman had no choice but to react to the North Korean invasion of the South in the summer of 1950 (which many American isolationists, including Republicans, opposed) because any other approach would have played into the hands of his Congressional political foes. The monolithic view of Communism and the Soviet Union, in which the Cold War was seen as a battle for dominance over the Third World, was applied indiscriminately to every situation by both parties, so that no distinction was made between actual Soviet aggression (as in Hungary in 1956) and regional, nationalistic revolutions as in Vietnam and Yugoslavia. It was all just "Communism."

Thinkers who took a more particularist, nuanced view, such as the great Kremlinologist George Kennan, were of course shouted down in the general frenzy. The question always remained whether the Soviets ever had any intention of extending their hegemony beyond the Eastern bloc of satellite countries which they conquered at the end of World War II. They "earned" these countries by dint of their staggering losses in opposing the full brunt of the Wehrmacht, over 20 million dead, which dwarf the casualties sustained by the United States. Josef Stalin could not be dislodged without yet another global war, and no one wanted that in 1945.

Islamic terrorism has picked up where Communism left off. The important thing is always to have an enemy which poses an existential threat so the American populace is held in a constant state of dread. As a kid in the Fifties, we periodically crawled under our desks and clasped our hands behind our necks. As long as we weren't too near the windows, I guess that would do the trick for a 10-megaton H-bomb exploding over San Francisco 18 miles away. Or probably not.

I think it's realistic to worry about Islamic terrorists acquiring an operable nuclear bomb. I guess in that sense I agree with Dick Cheney. (Write a blog, amaze yourself with what you say.) I don't see how fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in any sense lessen the odds of such a thing happening. International protocols on the security and protection of all fissile material and nuclear bombs, rigorously enforced, are probably the only real defense. No matter how long we go on fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fact remains that we will never reach the point where we can say that every single terrorist capable of wreaking destruction on the U.S. with a weapon of mass destruction has been killed, captured or neutralized. Such common sense, however, runs counter to the natural inclination to use our huge military resources to deal with any situation which arises, because (a) those are what we have, and (b) nothing looks tougher than aircraft carriers and smart bombs, no matter how inappropriate to the problem at hand.

I guess that's why the Obama Administration's approach to the Great War on Terror seems roughly comparable to the Bush/Cheney years. You simply can't afford to make too much sense in the American political arena, not with the other party always ready to leap onto any show of "rationality" as a fatal sign of weakness in the face of the Enemy. So Obama fires up the war in Afghanistan, decelerates in Iraq, and the band plays on.

Keeping bad company

Naturally, one problem with trying to be "objective" about President Obama is that you realize, over time, that you're in league with some truly awful people: racists, lunatics, Right Wing "patriots" verging on a form of Fascism. Increasingly, this "objective center" in American life is a mirage - no one really lives there. Charles Krauthammer, one of the Washington Post's big name columnists, writes this today:

"Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see."

That's how Krauthammer responds to Obama's Cairo speech, and in particular to the President's reference to the CIA coup in Iran in 1953. This piece of historical honesty enraged Krauthammer, predictably enough, and it sent him into a tirade about "false equivalencies" in the Obama speech. Everything which has ever occurred in the Muslim world has been horrific whereas any mistakes ever made by the United States have been trivial and the result of good intentions with unfortunate outcomes. In essence, that's his argument, proof that the Right's ideas of American Exceptionalism have not changed at all since the days of Mario Savio. We're good, they're bad.

Krauthammer goes so far as to suggest that Obama's speech raises a question about Obama's "ambivalence" about his own country. You see, you can't be an effective leader unless you're as jingoist as Charles Krauthammer. But even more, look at the language in the quote: isn't this simply the fancy-pants (and sort of indirect) way of calling Barack Obama an uppity Negro?

Of course it is. And this is the problem with objectivity in America. Barack tried it in Cairo and this is the reception he gets. If I had one moment of Barack's time, I think what I would tell him to do is to simply and absolutely forget any kind of overture toward the Right. Don't even try it anymore.

More than any other writer I know, Glenn Greenwald has demonstrated over and over again that the American public is more "progressive" and liberal than the Beltway conventional wisdom. The Washington insiders repeated over and over again, for example, that the public would never stand still for defunding the war in Iraq, even while rigorous poll after poll demonstrated the exact opposite to be the case - the American people were way ahead of the Washinton establishment on this issue. I think sometimes that Barack's focus on the equally absurd war in Afghanistan results from a similar Beltway calculation, that the "American people" favor this endless overreaction to 9-11, and even if it's been going on for 8 years and shows no sign of abating, nor shows any sign of progress, the American people just won't abide a cessation of this battle. And it makes Barack look like a "war President."

I actually think what goes on is that Obama and Rahm and the other White House thinkers believe that they won't be able to withstand the withering attacks from the Right, from Fox News and the Washington Times, et cetera ad nauseum, if they were to take the commonsense measure of ceasing hostilities that do us no good. Yet what is the relevance of the "Right" or of Republicans generally if they have lapsed, as they have, into inchoherent lunacy and extremism? Who cares? Why is Obama kowtowing to people who cannot be reasoned with and who consider him "messianic" for trying?

Obama won a HUGE victory in November, and he won it because he seemed so different from what the American people had grown sick of. I wish he would take the obvious lesson from that message. It literally doesn't matter what Krauthammer, or Bill Kristol or Rush Limabaugh or Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin or Bill O'Reilly or any of these people think - not at all. The only relevance they have is a gift from the "center:" the extent to which rational people pay any attention to them or make any effort to placate them.

Those Kodak Moments from the Bush Era

Although I was asked recently for my opinion on this Big Question of whether the most recent batch of torture photos should be released, or suppressed along the lines demanded by Senators Joe Losingit,man (Idiopathic, CT) and Lindsey Ismybutttoobig Graham (R, Deep Closet), I have demurred from so opining. Until now, I guess. Barack is with the two stalwart Defenders of the Troops on this one, whereas the ACLU is the other way.  The ACLU won their FOIA case so the proposed Congressional intervention, actually, amounts to a kind of bill of attainder of the sort used in the Terry Schiavo case, a special statutory enactment to reverse a result in a specific lawsuit.  What the hell - it's not as if the Constitution matters anymore.

The court ruled that the FOIA exceptions for national security had not been demonstrated by the Department of Defense.  Obama, Losingit,man and Graham, on the other side, contend that the photos amount to cumulative evidence of things we already know about, and if the photos are released, the troops in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan

 will be endangered more than they're endangered already by fighting completely pointless, inflammatory wars in very hostile territory.  

Obama's position represents a reversal of his earlier decision in favor of disclosure.  That's okay with me.  Changing his mind, I mean.  His predecessor prided himself on often being in error but always resolute.  Bush never changed his mind simply because all of the facts and the rationale for his earlier decision had vanished.  W just wasn't that wishy-washy.  But Barack says, on further review, that we don't really need to disclose another photo album full of naked Arabs being humiliated, led around on leashes, piled up in pyramids, and probably much worse.  If these photos get out, then we can expect more roadside explosions, more random attacks on U.S. soldiers, and increased overall murder & mayhem.

I think that's probably right.  I doubt that we'd learn anything materially new.  The sado-homoerotic excesses of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld years have been well documented already. They messed with these Arabs not to "break" them or to elicit valuable information, but because they got off on it.  Of course, that's the whole problem.  It's why these photos would be so inflammatory - those subjected to this sort of humiliation and their countrymen are going to explode if this documentary evidence sees the light of day because they know how pointless, gratuitous and frigging sick all of that stuff was, and they're under no illusions it was the work of a few bad apples.

The White House, in league with Senators Losingit,man and Graham, have the advantage of arguing now that these photographs are of historical interest only because the Obama Administration doesn't do that sort of thing.  They abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual in handling detainees, with the small possible glitch of detaining people for life without charges and without even necessarily believing that any case could be proved. Nobody's perfect.  Still, point for their side.  The ACLU's argument is simpler: we won our FOIA case and the Administration is stonewalling.

The morality of the situation is somewhat ambiguous.  The Administration's argument amounts to a claim that these photographs are the best proof of abuse and provide clear, graphic evidence of what we did to detainees.  Providing this clear proof to the Arab world will make them angry about things we actually did, as demonstrated by the photos.  So we must not provide this evidence to the world at large, because then all U.S. soldiers, even that great majority who have had no part in the abuse, will be at greater risk.

I guess where I come out on this is that there just doesn't seem to be a heroic stand to take.  I think both wars are pointless in the first place, and the invasions have been accompanied by hideous, flagrant and unnecessary human rights violations, which we would like to cover up to the extent still possible.  That's our moral position.  It seems like a long way from Nuremburg. Still, what good does it do to get more U.S. soldiers killed in an effort to make a "clean breast" of something which cannot be exorcised?  More guys come home in coffins, more Arabs die in the gunfights and explosions which follow, and all to prove what we already know.  

I suppose that's the intellectual and emotional journey that Barack Obama followed in arriving where he did.  Nothing very uplifting about it.  Interference with the processes of law, a coverup and suppressed evidence.  Yippee.

Single Payer for the Single Citizenship Citizen

A college buddy of mine just left for an extended visit to Europe, including a stay in his new country of citizenship, Ireland.  He's become a dual, courtesy of the ancestor-based invitations from such countries as Ireland, Italy and Greece, which recognize lineage as a basis for naturalization. Probably part of a family feel in those places, plus Italy and Ireland, at least, suffer from chronic depopulation problems and brain drains, so recruitment of those nostalgic about the Old Sod (and who might have some money to spend during their legally-unlimited stays) is not a bad investment. The dual citizen gets an EU passport, recognized in 27 countries as a basis for residence and employment.  So maybe the new Irishman will stay indefinitely if he finds work. The odds over there can't be a lot worse than here.

Meanwhile, back on the New Sod, I was listening yesterday to the Big Ed Shultz Show on "progressive" radio.  Big Eddie's been whipping his listeners into a frenzy about the Single Payer issue that may or not be on the table for discussion by Congress.  Ed used to host a fishing and hunting TV show in the Midwest somewhere, sort of a Marlin Perkins in a motor boat thing, I guess, with lots of closeups of Ed netting a bass.  I don't really know.  Big Eddie doesn't know much about health insurance, or national politics for that matter, but he has very strong opinions.  He's one of those guys whose career in opinion-flogging was given a huge boost by George W. Bush.  That, at least, must be said for W - he was so outrageously bad and incompetent, so disgraceful, that millions of Americans had their consciousnesses raised politically, and half-assed bloviators like Big Ed rushed in to fill the vacuum.

Yesterday Ed let a guy rant and rave for about ten minutes on the failure of Congress ever, ever to do anything for the "little guy," by which I think he meant (in the midst of his hyperventilating) a middle class American, that vanishing species.  This is true, of course.  If you're in your prime working years, earn any kind of living, are not a government employee or in the military, you will essentially receive nothing from the government other than the basic services (roads, infrastructure, public education) received by everyone else.  I am personally a piece of evidence for this truth.  I'll receive Social Security someday (a vestige of the Roosevelt Administration) and qualify for Medicare (from Johnson's Great Society), and that's it.

My medical insurance premiums are $718 per month with a $5,000 deductible.  The premiums have doubled in the last two years, although I have never submitted a claim for medical treatment at any point during the last twenty years or so, and I use twenty because I can't remember back any further than that.  To receive an insurance "benefit" I would have to go out-of-pocket $13,000 during a calendar year.  This is my biggest monthly expense.  

It's the way we do things here in our Darwinist Sparta.  The caller was right, of course, that Congress does not do any thing for the little guy, but it never has. If you're poor or disabled, you can receive benefits under some circumstances.  If you're middle class and get sick, you may go bankrupt whether you have medical insurance or not.  Medical bills are the cause of 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the United States, yet in 75% of those situations, the bankrupt is insured.  I'll do the math for you, since other blogs don't necessarily do so: that means that in about 46.5% of all bankruptcies, medical bills incurred by an insured person cause the b/k.

Thus the clamor for Single Payer, or Socialized Medicine, to call it by its real name.  Naturally, such a program cannot arrive on the scene full-blown; it must be introduced by stealth, in the form of the "public option" which Cigna/Aetna/Blue Cross and Senator Max Boughtman (I hope you're reading this every day) are desperately trying to ward off.  Obviously, a public option could probably match what amounts to a yearly $13,000 deductible, and since most people hate their medical insurers (I know I do - just reading their nauseating, shameless, cloying, disingenuous, dishonest letter explaining the latest rate hike was almost enough to send me to the emergency room, which may actually be covered despite the deductible), insureds would abandon Blue Shield and Aetna in droves at the first opportunity.  Thus, the $20 million annual salary of some of the CEO's at these big companies would endure a kind of "stress test."

The stakes are high and corruption is likely to kick into even higher gear.  I don't think Prez O will succeed in any kind of meaningful reform this time around, and his presidency will begin to fade some time later this year because of this failure.  It's just too easy for the Senate, in particular, to block him, loaded up as it is with pro-insurer Republicans and corrupt Democrats. Johnson was able to get his monumental Great Society through Congress because he played the hardest kind of hardball - famous for saying that a solon's "pecker was in his pocket." That's the only way to get a corrupt politician to move - scare the hell out of him.  This is not Obama's way, and since he actually only spent two years in the Senate (unlike Johnson, who had been the Majority Leader), I don't think he knows how to play the right games or knows enough about where the bodies are buried.

We'll get something, a "public option" that no one, unfortunately, qualifies for, in much the same way that "foreclosure" relief was unavailable to any "little guy" who actually needed the help - that is, if you were behind on your payments, you couldn't get government help, which is to say, you could only get foreclosure relief if you weren't in foreclosure.  This public option will have some devilishly clever small-print detail, rather like the "donut" in the Plan D Medicare benefit, which makes it functionally useless and defangs it as a threat to for-profit medicine.

But at least we're "safe," sort of, or at least we're led to think so. If you die because you can't afford treatment, at least you'll do so behind fortress walls, and not in some place like Ireland or Italy, where they would take care of you but can't protect you from the jihadi.

Washington as a company town

Well, O knocked 'em dead over in Egypt and France, so much so that I've been thinking I should go through the archives here at the Pond and purge any negative reference to The One, the better to increase the favorable receipt of my resume at the White House in case I want a job in the West Wing.  I've been thinking maybe I could be Special Assistant to the President in Charge of Funny Names.  I've got a new one, by the way, a moniker for Max Baucus, the Senator from Aetna/Cigna/Blue Cross -  Max Boughtman.  Not bad, huh?  To go with Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid), La Diva (Nancy Pelosi), Lindsey "Is-My-Butt-Too-Big?" Graham, et alia.  

Barack's only serious failing is that he arrived kind of late in history.  I think he means well, and he's a classy guy.  It was good that America finally elected a minority, especially an African-American, to the nation's highest office, even if we waited until what may prove to be the waning days of the Empire.  Naturally, a black man capable of election by the general population in this country is not going to be Street; you know, like Stokeley Carmichael, one of my favorites from the Civil Rights Movement.  Man, that guy could bring it.  Barack reminds me more of Leopold Senghor (pictured above), the poet, academic, and political leader of Senegalese liberation from colonialism.  Cool, sophisticated, kinda French (where he was educated and where one of his wives was from - Normandy, in fact).  Stokeley, on the other hand, was with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ("Snick"), got involved with the Black Panthers, and was altogether too hot for general acceptance.

It's probably true that Barack did not actually spend enough time in Washington's milieu before he became President.  Realistically, maybe 4 years, and then he started running for President full-time.  He had his eye on the prize.  I think what he's coming up against is the basic reality of Washington, D.C.  The business of the federal government, when you get right down to it, is the care and feeding of the military establishment, or in Eisenhower's phrase, the military-industrial complex.  Here he is now submitting his own "supplemental" for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the tune of maybe $100 billion when all is said and done.  The Republicans, faithful rubber-stampers when Bush was in office, will fight him on the bill because they've discovered a new, deep belief in fiscal prudence, so the ridiculous spectacle of the "anti-war" Nancy Pelosi marshalling her Demo charges to get "Barack's war budget" through the House will now entertain us.

If this sounds insane, it's because it is.  The Republicans, of course, are not against the war, are not for fiscal prudence, and actually want to do everything they can to keep the money flowing to the Pentagon, to defense contractors and to their lobbyist friends.  But they can safely fight Obama's war budget because the Democrats can't afford to have Barack defeated on the funding necessary to "wind down" the war in Iraq and rev up the war in Afghanistan, which he calls a war of necessity.  Or did in Cairo, anyway.  So the Democrats now have their war, but the main thing, probably, is that whichever party is in power, some war or other is going to be "necessary."

Wars are good for a major American industry, that industry being war itself.  The United States is on a permanent war footing, and the MIC spending necessary to support it sops up most of what the federal government calls its discretionary budget.  About half the money Congress "spends" each year, after all, is simply the in-and-out of the entitlement programs, which have their own dedicated tax systems and have been self-supporting.  These programs are of no real interest to Congress.  The discretionary half is where the action is, and about 64% of this goes to the MIC.  So peacenik Senators like Barbara Boxer are nevertheless thrilled that the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to build a redundant aircraft like the C-17, which is built, coincidentally, in California, and the equally useless and unnecessary B-22 is built in Georgia, so Saxby Chambliss will champion that one.

Useful programs like socialized medicine for the public at large do not have a constituency large enough to change this inertial force, so they're doomed to failure.  This is the essential difference between the U.S. and countries such as France and Germany, which have broad social safety nets but without the concomitant burden of a huge military establishment.  Trying to "Europeanize" the U.S. is doubtless beyond even the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama, and even Leopold or Stokeley would struggle with that one.  Wars R Us.  Constant war keeps all that military spending credible (it flagged under Clinton because he just didn't have anyone he could rationally engage in a large land war), it keeps army recruitments up in a time of general unemployment, it enables lots of medal ceremonies and promotions, gives a raison d'etre to West Point and Annapolis, to use a phrase Monsieur Senghor might have employed. Selling weapons remains one of our better export businesses, after all, and it doesn't have much company.  So that in the same sense that New York is the financial capital of the U.S., and Los Angeles the movie industry's center, Washington is war headquarters central.  It's what they do there, one way or another.  We've been fighting wars so long no one can even remember why we're doing it anymore.

My guess is we'll keep it up till it breaks us, which, actually, might not be that far off.