Can Bush's Ex Post Facto Amendment to the War Crimes Act Shield Him From An Ex Post Facto Amendment of the War Crimes Act?

In law, this is what we call a "nice" problem, in the 6th sense of my American Heritage Dictionary, "showing or marked by great precision or sensitive discernment; subtle; a nice distinction." I will leave it to the legal academics, such as Jack Balkin whose excellent website is linked above, to do the heavy lifting on the question when it is joined, in another nice legalism, but to sketch out the general outlines:

President George W. Bush has been a little worried, in the wake of the Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld decision which held, lo and behold, that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to the United States of America even when it is torturing or beating the living shit out of an Arab or a sort of Arab-looking person (such as an Afghan) in some American hellhole like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. That is (get this) the U.S. military, the CIA and any mercernary hired to do the rough stuff is subject to the War Crimes Act, even though the scum or lower life form on the receiving end of the mayhem is not actually part of a regular army of a country which is signatory to the Geneva Conventions. The Supreme Court, "in other words" (in Georgie's favorite phrase), has ruled that the Arab or Arabo-human is entitled to protection just because he is a human being. Prior to this decision, on the basis of legal opinions bought and paid for by the Bush Administration (including, to my lasting shame, the opinion of John Yoo of UC Berkeley), Bush & Co. had proceeded on the assumption they could do any damn thing they wanted with complete impunity. Not so, said the Supremes. After the Hamdan decision was explained to Bush, he must have had a Jimmy Durante moment: What a revoltin' development dis is!

Indeed, it does pose a parlous situation for W. That's because the War Crimes Act is a little austere in its disapprobations:

§ 2441. War crimes.

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death. (b) Circumstances.— The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act). (c) Definition.— As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct— (1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party; (2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907; (3) which constitutes a violation of common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva, 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party and which deals with non-international armed conflict; or (4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians. Remember what a big fan George was of the death penalty when he was governor of Texas? He was practically running a human slaughterhouse. I suspect his enthusiasm for the Ultimate Punishment has been tempered in recent weeks, so much so that his staff has been working on draft legislation (which I used to think was the province of Congress) to amend the War Crimes Act. Apparently, when this amendment is unveiled, or "rolled out," it will provide immunity for U.S. military personnel and "policy makers" (who could they be?) who acted in "good faith" on the basis of a preexisting understanding that the Untermenschen were entitled to no rights whatsoever, having been born in or near a country within the Axis of Evil, being a little on the dusky side, and saying "Allah" too often. The Constitution of the United States of America, what is left of it, proscribes ex post facto laws which impugn or criminalize conduct which occurred before passage of the statute. As Tweedledum and -dee might have said it, if it had been a crime, it would be; but as it wasn't, it isn't - that's legal logic. Also, another shibboleth lawyers like to throw around is that this sort of immunity from prosecution is a "shield, not a sword," meaning it's okay to pass a law after the conduct in question which decriminalizes the act. So, for example, if one of the "policy makers" in the Oval office issued a Presidential Bull which said let's beat these ragheads to within an inch, or even just beyond an inch, of their lives, and said Arabistic person died; and if the Supreme Court then inconveniently ruled that this particular species of murder is in fact a War Crime; well then, a Republican controlled Congress could immunize such "policy maker" from prosecution, conviction and maybe lethal injection after it all happened without violating the Ex Post Facto provision. Now, with this as background, you can see that the scriveners in the offices down the hall from the Oval Office might have kicked into overdrive, seeing that November date out there when the pet Congress currently in session might be replaced by a bunch of snarling, hostile Democrats. Another Jimmy Durante moment. Currently, the White House has the sanctimonious, unctuous assistance of such Senators as Lindsay Graham, who has decried, long and hard, the awful specter of U.S. military personnel now confronted by actual consequences for what they did. We can't have that, not in this America, not now. It would be like Caesar getting exercised about Roman legions out in the provinces hanging a few dissidents on crosses. It keeps the vassals of the Empire in line. But the "nice" question: can Congress, in a later, Democratically-controlled Congress, revive the War Crimes Act as originally, sanely and humanely passed, without this preposterous and evil "amendment" allowing exactly what the Act intended to make illegal? And can everyone who violated the Act, grunts and "policy makers" alike, be called to the dock to answer for their inhumanity? My guess is that a subsequent amendment deleting the amendment, or loophole, would not violate the Ex Post Facto clause. It was a crime when the barbarity was ordered and executed; it ought to be a crime again when the nation comes to its senses.

A Word on H.D. Thoreau

Probably someone who styles his blog "Waldenswimmer" ought to say something about Henry David Thoreau once in a while, just for the sake of authenticity. I recently found my copy of "Walden," a little the worse for wear, perhaps understandably when the cover indicates I paid $1.00 for it, even though it's an edition we would now call a trade paperback. I have to read for a long time before I come to a line I don't remember word-for-word; I've read it that many times.

I suppose the thing I like most about Thoreau is his unquestionable sincerity and enthusiasm. The prose of "Walden" is a little archaic, even after considering that most of it was written in the early 1840's; nevertheless, he got his ideas across, sometimes with stunning insight. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." He wondered, mainly, whether this condition was necessary. I don't know what his answer really was. I think he may have found answers for himself but not for the mass of men, although he never had intentions of being an elitist. He was trying to find, in his noble experiment, answers of general application. The peroration of Walden dwarfs the loftiest self-help bromides of Dr. Phil or Dr. Wayne Dyer (all these "doctors.") "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." For years I kept those words taped to my bathroom mirror.

Thoreau, perhaps, was not what we would now call a "complete" man. He wasn't fully "realized" because he didn't have a wife, or family, or even a solid body of work. His writing is full of the untempered defiance of youth because he didn't outlive his youth. He was born in 1817 and died of tuberculosis in 1862, just short of his 45th birthday. The two years and two months at the Pond were spent in his late twenties. Nevertheless, his penetrating intelligence was such that he saw through to eternal verities from the start. This seems to me the defining characteristic of great genius. It seems impossible for someone to overcome the limiting prejudices and conceptions of his era and write something true not just for the moment, but for the ages. Thoreau did exactly that. Living and writing in an environment, the New England of the first half of the 19th Century, that we might now consider idyllic, he nevertheless foresaw and described the horrors of the Industrial Revolution and what it would mean for modern life as men were increasingly forced into roles as cogs in an immense social machine.

160 years after Thoreau spent his 26 months at Walden Pond, we now see what life is in a "globalized" economy and observe, in its fully realized form, the sense of pervasive helplessness that now afflicts a human species completely alienated from its natural environment. I think about problems like global warming and reflect that Thoreau, musing in 1845, noted that even then there were "professors of philosophy but no philosophers." So today, while everyone continues to drive the same cars, heat the same huge houses, fly anywhere they want in the jumbo jets that deposit CO2 right at the atmospheric level where it does the most damage, we judge the relative "virtue" of our polluting friends and neighbors by their "attitudes" about what they're doing. If they feel bad about it, and talk about the books they've read on the subject, they can do whatever they want. Someday we'll begin dealing with the problem, someday when it's not as inconvenient. A celebrity might have houses in West L.A. and in Martha's Vineyard and sear the atmosphere with a CO2 contrail of Heat Death, but if she drives a Prius and makes the right noises, she's a heroine for the modern age.

Thoreau would have laughed ruefully at all of this, then gone for his morning swim. His virtue was its own reward. He would have been more out of place in this day and age than ever, his drummer striking a cadence, measured and far away, which we simply can't hear anymore.

OBL's Favorite American Politician

The Incomparable, Quotable Dick is at it again:

"The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task."

Thus Cheney on the Lamont victory in the Connecticut primary. An ally of the Iraq war has been lost, says the VP, thus calling into question our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. Cheney finds this development "partly disturbing," in the same manner he found the prospect, in 2004, of a Kerry victory, raising as it did the odds America would be hit again, and this time in a devastating way.

I've never quite understood why Cheney doesn't believe his own administration screwed up in allowing 9-11 to happen in the first place. Are they entitled to some sort of national security mulligan? America was "hit hard in a devastating way" when Bush & Cheney were in office. The planning stages for 9-11, according to government investigations, took the better part of 5 years. While the 4 pilots (Atta, Hanjour, al-Sheihi and Jurrah) had been in the United States off and on for several years prior to 2001, almost all the 15 muscle hijackers made their first entry after Cheney's inauguration. One could almost say, in other words, that the hijackers were waiting until true incompetents were in charge of American security. Clinton had smart people in charge who had foiled the Millenium Plot, and captured, prosecuted and imprisoned the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bush & Cheney appointed a woman who didn't and doesn't know anything about national security to defend America against terrorist threats. No one in the West Wing had any real interest in terrorism before 9-11, despite clear warnings and nearly frantic messages from FBI field offices that something was dangerously imminent.

One should not forget that Osama bin Laden starred in a videotape in the fall of 2004 which had as its obvious purpose the consolidation of Bush's position as the front runner in the presidential election. Maybe that crafty and definitely deranged auteur Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, produced and directed the film, but it was clear they were quite content with America's leadership, and perhaps, most of all, with Dick Cheney. For hadn't Cheney been in on the ground floor of the stupidest, costliest, and most distracting endeavor of all, the "fiasco" of the Iraq war? Hadn't he said:

"We would be greeted as liberators."

"There is now no doubt that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear capability."

"The insurgency is in its death throes."

"Al Qaeda is glad that Lamont won the Connecticut primary."

Does Cheney ever say anything that is not 100% wrong? He's a bumbler, a pretender, and grossly incompetent. How could bin Laden ever hope for anything better than what he's got? A Vice President who apparently pulls the policy strings of the American leadership, who participates in the disclosure of American undercover operatives, who urges a bankrupting and unnecessary war against an Arab nation unrelated to any terrorist threat while we are supposedly in the middle of a life-and-death struggle elsewhere, who stumbles along with an 18% approval rating at home -- if Cheney didn't exist, wouldn't Osama have to invent him? Doesn't Osama, wherever he is, in whatever grotto or Persian condominium the night finds him, conclude his day by praying to Allah for Cheney's fragile health? That no short circuit or power failure disturbs the delicate operation of Cheney's pacemaker/defib device? That he is allowed to serve out his term, spreading propaganda in the USA that this same incompetent regime which allowed 9-11 in the first place, and then let Osama himself vanish into the Afghan mists so Cheney's harebrained idea of invading Iraq could command center stage, should continue to have undiluted Republican support for these follies?

America's adversaries, "if you will," are not reassured by changes in the American political landscape. It disturbs them, it unnerves them. America, against all odds, might be wising up. Bush's 33% rating and Cheney's life-support 18% disturb them. They miss the good old days when the stupidity of the Bush Administration, and particularly of Cheney himself, went unchallenged.

Islamo-fascists? A plea for accuracy in apocalyptic nomenclature

George W. Bush just never gets tired of bugging me. I thought he'd settled on "Islamic extremists" or "Islamic fundamentalist extremists" (admittedly a mouthful) as the scourge of the Earth. Now, in the wake of the Heathrow Airport terrorist plot, he's out there with "Islamic fascists." I don't know what else to expect from a man whose only reported reading is of children's books, from which he could not tear himself away during America's own brush with disaster.

But this is intolerably bad taxonomy. I think he picked this term up from Tom Friedman, another superficial thinker who doesn't mind ruining perfectly good, specific terms for stigmatizing heinous regimes. Friedman used "Islamo-fascist," for some reason, maybe because he was thinking of Austro-Hungary, mezzo-soprano, gingko-biloba or something and concluded, incorrectly, that an "o" at the end of a hyphenated word converted the first word to adjectival form. In any event, Friedman is the originator of some of the clumsiest, clunkiest neologisms ever coined, and it's a pity when his infelicities get picked up in general usage.

Why didn't either one of these poor students of history, for example, consult Mussolini on the subject? Who would know more? In his 1932 paper (co-written with Giuseppe Gentile), Il Duce lays it out:

"The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after... "

I ask you: does that sound like any jihadist you know? Fascism is a social and political system, and arose as a counterweight to Marxist Communism. But back to Benito, because, like another Italian, Antonin Scalia, I believe in Originalism, of deriving our definitions and meaning from seminal texts whenever possible:

"The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone...."

Get it? It's a top-down system. Authoritarian, of course, and it doesn't see any point in leaving its citizenry any "useless and possibly harmful freedoms," such as, for example, the right to privacy, or protection from unwarranted searches and seizures, or...no, we won't go there today. The point is simple: Fascism is a state system, where corporate interests and the policies of the authoritarian government are fused so that Big Money dictates the legislation and ... gee, it's so hard to stay away from, isn't it?

Anyway the whole difficulty, I thought, behind this epic Clash of Civilizations was that the jihadists were non-state actors, a "new kind of enemy." We already defeated the old kind of enemy, the true Fascist regimes of Germany, Italy and Japan, during World War II. In what sense do "Islamo-fascists" despise suicide? What corporations control their daily lives and destinies? I thought we were trying to bring corporatism to Iraq as part of conducting the Central War on Terror; if Fascism is already in Baghdad, what's the point?

I prefer "Jihadista" as the nom de slur. Admittedly, it's a little too colorful and romantic, it brings to mind Pancho Villa and other folk heroes, but I don't want to be reminded all the time of Hitler and Mussolini. I've got enough reminders of them already.

The "Defining Moment" Fallacy

The Democratic Party, and those who remain optimistic about the party, are of course jubilant about the victory of Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman in the senatorial primary in Connecticut. It is seen as proof positive that the nation has turned the corner on the Iraq war, even calling it an "insurgency" which holds grave implications for Republican incumbents everywhere. Rather than seeing it as a special case, bloggers and the mainstream media view the Lamont victory as a key momentum builder. In so arguing, the pro-Lamont crowd sounds a little like the Bush Administration in its recitation of "corner-turning" events in Iraq itself, such as writing a constitution, capturing Saddam, holding elections, killing Zarqawi, forming a government, and so on. Each of these defining moments turned out, in retrospect, to be a rest stop on the Highway to Hell that is liberated Iraq.

I think Lieberman is a special case in a special state. He went way overboard in his accommodation of Bush, even on social issues like the Schiavo case, and his war hawkishness in many ways was far more aggressive than even moderate members of the Republican Party, such as Chuck Hagel. Politics in Connecticut, as in California, are complicated by its status both as a bastion of liberal, highly educated voters, and as the headquarters of a number of America's largest defense contractors. Lieberman was a man who tried to be all things to all people and corporate interests, and this squishiness in his views, coupled with his Mr. Mumbles presentation, fell victim to a younger, more dynamic, and less sullied challenger.

Whether this translates to a massive alteration in the Senate or Congress is another question altogether. One ironical point is that this great "victory" in Connecticut was of one Democrat over another. Lamont managed a narrow win, and if he succeeds in November (with his vote possibly diluted by Lieberman's egomaniacal independent run), the Democrats in the Senate will simply have held a seat they already own. One might well remember the election in the San Diego area to replace the House seat vacated by Randy Cunningham, where the Democrats were defeated running against a Republican, which is a truer horse race.

In July the Harris Poll found that 50% of American adults believe that the U.S. military discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the March, 2003 invasion. Stated another way, half the American adults selected at random and with the the wherewithal to own and operate a telephone maintain an abiding belief in the original justification for the Iraq invasion. Depending on the week, a little over half of all Americans oppose the continuation of the war in Iraq. In 2004, a little over half of American voters decided to return The Decider to the high office he continues, against all logic and common sense, to occupy. Yet Bush remains, most of the time, between 12 and 15% below this 50/50 Golden Mean which seems to define most of American politics. I suspect, at base, his unpopularity derives mainly from the high cost of gasoline and from the increasing sense among America's lumpen proletariat that things are getting worse here as they get better in Asia. Dinner table issues, in other words, and not the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is a catastrophe of the first water, and it is breaking down the spiritual, financial and military structure of an already beleagured United States, but in the vast reaches of Red State America, the war issue will not be a decisive whisk broom propelling all the Republican officeholders out of Congress. Some Democratic gains, yes. Maybe near parity in the Senate. Not enough, constitutionally, to get rid of the Impostor in the White House. Not enough to make a big difference either way.

U.S. Foreign Policy as a Marx Brothers Movie

Maybe even George W. Bush has begun to appreciate the "emerging" paradoxes in Iraq. ("Paradox?" says Groucho, cigar held to one side. "No, but I've got three surgeons waiting in the foyer.") At his last public appearance with al-Maliki, Bush petulantly conceded that the security situation (a paradoxical term in itself) in Baghdad was "terrible." This, of course, was not a sign of growth or recognition in Bush, but simply symptomatic of Bush's style of personalizing his foreign policy. Either you're his friend or you're not his friend, and al-Maliki had committed the unpardonable and utterly predictable offense of decrying Israeli "aggression" against Lebanon. As a Shiite Muslim, it would have been surprising if Maliki felt otherwise, but Bush does not judge positions on the basis of "merits" or "facts" or anything remotely empirical. He bases his judgments of your positions on whether you agree with him or not. Maliki had gone off the reservation, and so Bush took that public opportunity to embarrass Maliki in front of the world press. Bush was saying, in effect, that while 6 weeks ago (while the security in Baghdad was terrible), he had worked out with Maliki a new strategy for stabilizing the Baghdad street, in the interim Hezbollah and Israel had gone to war, Maliki had sided with Muslims instead of Jews, and now Bush was going to say out loud that Maliki's plan sucked because Bush didn't like Maliki anymore.

At least an interpretation such as this makes sense, which you cannot say about the rest of America's Iraq policy. Maliki has also been wandering outside the fold in his support for the Mahdi Army run by the Muslim cleric (inevitably referred to as a "firebrand") Sadr, for whom an unexecuted arrest warrant has been floating around Iraq for about 2 years, ever since Sadr led an uprising against American troops in 2004. Maliki has expressed his profound disapproval of recent American attacks against the Mahdi stronghold in east Baghdad. It is the official position of the U.S., of course, since Iraq is now a sovereign nation, that its criminal system is run by Iraqis, and so it is up to the Iraqi government to decide whether to rein in Sadr, or to arrest him, or to do anything about him other than defend him from American military aggression.

Thus the leader of a kind of alt-Army, the Sadr Brigade, which has killed members of the liberating American army in an "uprising" and poses a continuing threat to any hope to stabilize Iraq, is the darling of the freely elected Shiite government made possible by America's toppling of the Sunni strongman Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure Groucho would touch this scenario; it's simply too outlandish. The freely elected government of Iraq is now on the wrong side of most issues, from the U.S. perspective. The American vision for Iraq is one in which the Sunni and Shia stop killing each other and the Kurds cease their centrifugal aspirations, to borrow a term from old political science at Cal days. Maliki, a Shiite, does not really believe that accommodation with the Sunni is possible, and probably resents the hell out of all those years he spent under the iron heel of Saddam's Sunni police state, and so does not want to hobble or enfeeble in any way the unofficial army of a key supporter, the one, the only, Mukhtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, who offers a potent counterweight to the utterly corrupt and anarchic official Iraqi army being "trained" by the Americans for a kind of nonpartisan maintenance of order. Both sides, Sunni and Shia, are waiting out the American departure and want to have their powder dry and their forces massed for that day when the real civil war can break out in earnest, after these troublemaking Americans, having made a fair fight possible by wrecking Saddam's army of oppression, give up and leave.

That would appear to sum up the "noble cause" of American involvement in Iraq. All of these developments were completely predictable, were in fact predicted, and all such predictions were completely ignored. Bush will not fundamentally change his Iraq policy, however, because he is incapable of understanding how messed up it is. He has only a passing familiarity with basic ethnic and sectarian forces at play in Iraq, and has approached the problem with the sophistication of a third grader writing an essay on democracy for his social studies class. The U.S.A. will keep spending billions, American soldiers will keep dying and killing Iraqis, and Iraq will, in time, unravel completely.

Plan C in Iraq

Scene: Oval Office, just prior to Bush's vacation departure.

Present with George W. Bush are the President's awesome Brain Trust, including V.P. Dick Cheney; Chief of Staff Josh "Hands" Bolten; Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice; Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; Richard Perle, French wine connoisseur and Emissary from the Undead; and, from the press, William Kristol, and David Brooks of The New York Times, for some reason.

Bush: Before I taken off, I was thinking we should go through thinking through the extent of the Iraqi situation and sort of revisit some of our opportunities.

Cheney: (growling amicably) Options, sir?

Bush: Right. To refigure what roads may be open now, or closed, depending on events on the ground.

Kristol: Friedman in the Times has some ideas, one is to convene a kind of Kosovo summit and invite everyone and talk about it some more, and then his second idea is to partition Iraq into three parts, Sunni, Shia and the Kurds.

Bush: Who are the Kurds?

Kristol: Up north.

Brooks: What's so special about Friedman? I've done more to support your ideas, Mr. President.(pleadingly) Dick - anything to say?

Cheney: (growling reassuringly) David has been there for you, Mr. President.

Rumsfeld: Do we have problems in Iraq? Sure. Is it a civil war? Not in a classical sense. Are the streets of Baghdad littered every morning with people whose brains have been drilled out with Black&Decker tools? Of course. Is this normal? Probably not.

Rice: My own preference is for the status quo ante.

Rumsfeld: Have we heard that before? Sure. Do we watch the talk shows? Always. Are you the teacher's pet? What do you think.

Bolten: I've been thinking along the lines of Condi's comment. We do have some developing problems in the region.

Bush: No shit, Sherlock.

Cheney: (growling dyspeptically) One place where we're taking heat is that midwifing a Shiite government in Iraq has strengthened Iran's hand in the region.

Bolten: Hand?

Rumsfeld: (ignoring Bolten) Tell me about it, Tubby. Does Iran like having a Shia theocracy next door? You bet. Are they sending troops and money into the south of Iraq? All the time. Are those Shia militias and phony police killing our soldiers? Smell the coffee. Is this situation fucked up beyond all recognition? Bingo, first try.

Rice: Iraq did act as a cordon sanitaire against Iranian aggression and expansionism in the region, a firewall to deter the Persian ambitions...

Bush: (sniggering, his mouth full of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) A sanitary what? Please, Condi, there are ladies present.

Kristol: Regrettably, this revitalization of Iran has redounded to the disadvantage of Israel, since Iran feels unimpeded in its supply of Hezbollah with missiles and funding, leading to...

Bush: (pulling a bolus of half-chewed sandwich from his mouth and placing it on the desk) Rebounds? Who ya talking about now, Chandelier, the basketball player Yo-Yo Ma?

Perle: (in sepulchral tones, the shadows beneath his eyes darkening to a deep ebony, as the light in the room fades slightly as he murmurs hypnotically) It is of the essence to remonstrate consistently with existing monarchies in the region against such revanchist aspirations, lest a Persian suzerainty arise anew in a hegemonic...

Rumsfeld: Do you talk like an Oxford don on Quaaludes? I'll say.

Cheney: (growling nostalgically) You know, there was a time when Iraq was sort of that bulwark I think you're talking about, in the middle of all those hundred dollar words.

Bush: Bull works?

Cheney: (growling obliviously ) There are ways to implement...

Rice: A kind of status quo ante...

Bolten: Because while we talked about "dead or alive" as usual, fortunately he's still alive. And Aziz is still on the scene.

Rice: We're just missing Qusay and Uday, or Quday and Usay. Whatever.

Rumsfeld: Are they a big loss? No. Glad they're not among the living? You bet.

Cheney: (growling more intensely) So we've still got Saddam as a fallback.

Kristol: He was the one Iraqi who knew how to hold that mess together. Now he could run an army!

Rumsfeld: Are you a horse's ass, Bill? Sure thing. Another civilian who thinks it's all so easy from an armchair? I'd lay a bet. Am I the guy in that picture with Saddam 20 years ago and not you? Seems to me.

Bush: (choking up milk and hocking a loogie on the carpet): This guy Maliki's a floater.

Cheney: (growling ecstatically) This has great promise, a new opening.

Rice: Historically, this kind of reversion...

Perle: (lights in Oval Office are temporarily extinguished until auxiliary power kicks in) Reversion is not technically le mot juste. You are referring actually to the concept of restoration, as occurred after the French Revolution and Napoleonic accession, followed by...

Rumsfeld: Are you a pompous ass sucking off the public tit? Slam dunk. Do we get tired of your kind of nosing in? That just might be.

Cheney: (growling ruminatively) Have we talked to Rove about this? Putting Saddam back in power will require a hell of a lot of public relations finesse. You remember, regime change, torture rooms...

Bolten: (raising own hand, photographing it, then speaking) If I could suggest something. Abu Ghraib offers another opening on that. Suppose we tell the American people that U.S. oversight will ensure that Saddam's torture of his "own people" will not exceed the kind and extent already practiced by the CIA and military in Iraq.

Kristol: We've set a new standard, in other words!

Perle: (moaning shriek is heard in the far catacombs of the White House) Death squads will operate according to American protocols.

Cheney: (growling collegially) Good addendum, Dick.

Perle: Thanks, Dick.

Bush: (snorting amber foam from his Diet Coke) If you Dicks are done congratulating each other, when do we hit the decks with this street news?

Bolten: A phased implementation would be best, immediately after breaking Saddam out of jail.

Rice: Mussolini, as you'll recall, was spirited away from a Roman prison in 1943 and installed near Lake Maggiore in the Salo Government, where he...

Rumsfeld: Was part of the Fascist Restoration? We've heard it. Another status quo ante? How many more, I wonder. Are we about done here? I think so.

Brooks: Can I assume that you won't tell Friedman or (gulping) Dowd about this till I have a chance to run it as Plan C? Can you see the look on their faces when I scoop this?

Bush: Somebody throw Brooks another Milk-Bone. I've got a copter to catch and brush to clear.

The Internalized Democracy

In the summer of 1973 I was living in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus, and working farther north on the Peninsula. It was a place-holding kind of job, clerical, a way to pay the rent and finance my tennis habit, something to do after returning from a lengthy stay in Europe. I had a fairly new RCA color television, the first I'd ever owned, probably 17" on the diagonal, but the size hardly mattered, since it sat on a coffee table a few feet in front of the sofa, and during the summer I only used one channel. There weren't many channels to choose from anyway, in those days, but I only needed Channel 9, public broadcasting's local outlet, because they were providing, in those days before C-SPAN, wall-to-wall (or gavel-to-gavel) coverage of the Watergate hearings.

To say I was engrossed in those hearings would greatly understate matters. Obsessed would be more like it. I couldn't imagine greater drama, to watch as the mighty forces of constitutional democracy clashed and struggled. At issue, I came to realize, was the attempt of one individual and his henchmen in the Oval Office to knock out of kilter the delicate, ingenious, unique balance of powers devised two centuries before by some of the Enlightenment's greatest political thinkers. And Americans all. I listened to the live feed on the radio on the way to work, sitting in the car as I wolfed down a sandwich, then hurried home through the coastal mountains of the western Peninsula to see the taped version of John Dean, H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichmann, the spooks, the rats, the true-believers play out on that small color screen. Every night I drank a couple of beers and ate a TV dinner, all through June and July, resenting the weekend recesses, thrilling at the occasional bombshell breaktrhroughs (all the Oval Office conversations were on tape!). On the concrete balcony outside the sliding glass door, a couple of lovestruck pigeons started a family in the unused hibachi, covering the floor with droppings, until the chicks hatched. I watched their clumsy progress out of the corner of one eye as Sam Dash drilled away at Erlichmann's obfuscations and contemptuous scorn for the truth, as Senator Sam, his volcanic wrath and self-righteousness swelling magnificently up within him, told the weaselly cabal just what he thought about "inoperative truths" and "modified limited hang-outs."

The Senate Select Committee, functioning on a fully bipartisan basis (Ervin, Howard Baker, Lowell Weiker), worked their way through to a just result. In truth, I had little doubt the right thing would happen. The Supreme Court, on an 8-0 vote, had squashed Nixon's last hope of escaping the noose. The Senators bore in relentlessly, uncovering layer upon layer of corruption and misprision, and all of them, Republicans and Democrats alike, put partisan politics to one side, judged harshly Tricky Dick's efforts to subvert the Constitutional processes, to play off the CIA against the FBI, to lie, to bribe, to cheat, to break the law. And when the hearings were just about over, the pigeon chicks were nudged off the high balcony and flew away to their own independent freedom.

I think I decided to become a lawyer after watching the Watergate hearings. It seemed like a magnificent calling, to be an officer of the court, to be one of those guardians of due process and a fair trial, to assure a level playing field for litigants, to learn all those complicated rules of evidence, to expose the cheats and frauds, to make sure the system worked.

What I didn't realize at the time, perhaps, was how much those lofty ideals depended on a particular mindset, on an inculcated sense of morality, on what you might call the Internalized Democracy. The tools of democracy, the Constitution, the three branches of government, the electorate, the free press -- all those still exist 33 years later. But the people who gave those things a living, breathing spirit are gone. Now the Senate and House, and of course the White House, and increasingly the Supreme Court, are infested with power-mongering careerists who simply do not care about the ideals the Senate Select Committee fought for. They care only about their petty, lifetime sinecures, with its chance to sell the influence of their office to lobbyists, and have become experts primarily at the manipulation of public opinion in the most cynical, venal and ultimately destructive ways imaginable. The Republicans refuse to rein in President Bush, despite the clear, illegal and corrupt practices of his Administration, because maintaining the power of their party is more important to them than the viability of the American democracy. The Democrats triangulate and focus-group their way to positions they think will sell, so that they can once again enjoy that majority status which is worth so much on the open market.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar,

said T.S. Eliot, speaking of another morally depleted time. So we've come full circle.

I don't know what became of that television. It was actually made in America, by the way. I guess it went the way of my tennis game. And the American Democracy. The Senate now works with the President to hide facts from the American public. They have become co-conspirators with a cabal Senator Sam would have called "a bunch o' burglars." Do not think, for a moment, that the Internalized Democracy, once lost, once squandered, is easily reinstated. Those brave souls who preserved the Union 33 years ago were the products of another moral era, one which has sunk beneath deep sedimentary layers of dishonesty and ethical rot.

Mel Gibson Decoded

The first big mistake Mel made was diverging from the clear and triumphant trail blazed by Hugh Grant years ago when he was found parked in West L.A. with a prostitute parked face-down in his lap. In essence, Hugh said, "I fucked up big time." The blow job blew over and Hugh went on to do some of his best work. In my book, Hugh set the standard against which all mea culpas must be measured. When you're caught carrying on in public like men frequently carry on in private, don't try to reinvent yourself as a misunderstood choir boy who simply lapsed, this one time, from otherwise exemplary behavior. It's, I don't know--wussy. No one buys it, and most especially the intended audience, the ticket-buying public. Elizabeth Hurley, of course, wasn't going to buy any of it anyway.

Of course - Hugh wasn't drunk, didn't resist arrest, didn't ask the arresting officer about his foreskin, and didn't blame Jews for all the wars in the world. Thus, Mel from the beginning, had a much tougher job of rehabilitation on his hands. Impossible task, in fact. He's through, and he probably knows it, despite his abject, obsequious, groveling, sickening press release, which would have made Uriah Heep blush, if he could have worked his way to the end. It included goodies such as:

''I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable,'' the actor-director said without elaborating.

Well, right away we see the problem of spending your life in make-believe. You didn't "act" out of control, Mel; you WERE out of control. Not, however (and this is quite odd), because of alcohol. Your BAC (blood alcohol concentration) was .12%, somewhat over the California standard of .08, not much over the old standard of .10, but if you really have the "disease" of alcoholism, which you cop to elsewhere in your nauseating apologia, this is really small beer.

I will confess that on festive occasions, I have, in the distant past, entered the .12 range myself. I know you shouldn't be driving, especially at 2:30 am on the Pacific Coast Highway on a weekend night when you're under that much sail. It's irresponsible, as Mel laudably admits. But it's not fall down drunk. If it were, half the tail-gaters at a Raiders game would never make it to their stadium seats by kickoff. A 170 pound man (I figure this is approximately Mel's tonnage, because I was surprised to read he's about 5'7" - that sly camera work!) needs about 5 beers in a one hour period to hit the .12% mark, but the concentration falls away at the rate of .015% per hour since the time of the first drink. It looks suspiciously like calculus to figure out how drunk you are at any snapshot in time, something you don't want to try with a full heater on.

But driving a car and knowing not to reveal your anti-Semitism are two very different things. The first involves motor skills, judgment and reflexes; the second requires having your head screwed on straight. Here is where I take issue with what Mel says in his PR note: with a buzz on, you don't "say things you don't believe to be true;" you say things you wish you hadn't said. At a cocktail party that goes on for two or three hours, with strong martinis going down the hatches, with maybe half the revelers nudging up against that .12% Rubicon, you don't ordinarily expect the guests to start screaming out anti-Jewish invective, revealing fears their children's blood may have found its way into the matzoh down at the synagogue. Not unless, of course, you happen to be throwing your cocktail party in Nuremburg in 1938.

Mel drank enough to reveal that he's a rabid anti-Semite. I suspected as much. His artful dodging on the question of the Holocaust, where he couldn't quite bring himself to dissociate himself from his father's denial, was a clue. The grotesque portrayal of Jews in "The Passion of the Christ" was another; and the slight loss of inhibition on the side of the PCH a few nights ago sealed the case. We now know what informed his "artistic" decisions in his Christian snuff film. Mel has been decoded, and we can thank his bad habits for that. He's diseased, all right, and it's safer to stay away from diseased people.

An Innumerate Look at Iraq

John Paulos, a math professor at Temple University, wrote a series of books years ago about American "innumeracy," the quantitative corollary to illiteracy, by which he referred to basic misunderstandings about statistics and probabilities. Innumeracy was the first of the oeuvre, and laid out such commonplace mistakes as fearing a trip to Europe because of the chance of a terrorist attack (about 1 in 238,000) while remaining sanguine about driving to the airport for a trip somewhere "safer," oblivious to the 1 in 5,000 chance of a fatal car wreck on the way to the plane. We misunderstand statistics and probabilities for a variety of reasons, such as a "focus"or "selection" error where dramatized events acquire an importance out of scale with their actual frequency, or where we fail to appreciate proportionality in assessing a risk.

I was thinking about this phenomenon recently while reading about the 100 or so deaths per day in Iraq because of car bombings, kidnappings, drive-by shootings and other mayhem inflicted on the citizenry, and I realized that a kind of reverse innumeracy was at work in my own thinking. The reports on daily carnage, total killed in Iraq, etc., never (in my reading) attempt to place these numbers in a population context, so we might acquire a sense of scale in assessing the impact on daily life in Iraq. The absolute numbers, in other words, don't tell the whole story.

Iraq has about 25 million people. The official census of the United States places the population here at about 300 million, or 12 times larger. Thus, here is what the Iraqi numbers would look like if scaled up to American proportions:

1. If 100 people per day are getting blown up, tortured to death or shot in Iraq, this would translate to 1,200 American citizens getting blown up, tortured to death or shot (over and above baseline violent crime rates) each and every day. For comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which was at the time the deadliest single act of terrorism in American history, killed 138 people, slightly more than the actual number of Iraqis killed every day as the result of insurgent violence and the ongoing civil war. Thus, at Iraqi levels, the USA would now sustain 8.7 Oklahoma City bombings each and every day under such conditions. 9-11 caused about 2,700 deaths; thus, at Iraqi levels, every two days or so the U.S. would witness slaughter equal to the worst attack in American history.

2. The total number of Iraqis violently killed, over and above the preexisting death rate, since the American invasion of March, 2003, is the subject of debate. President Bush has conceded 30,000; the Baghdad morgue report in late June estimated 50,000; the famous Johns Hopkins report estimated about 100,000 (at the time, almost 2 years ago). Some estimates have been higher than these.

Scaled up to American proportions, these death tallies are 360,000; 600,000; and 1.2 million. The lowest estimate (based on Bush's concession) means that proportionally more Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion than all battle deaths of U.S. service personnel during World War II (about 291,000). The middle estimate produces a death toll exceeding the total number of battle and nontheater deaths of both armies during the American Civil War (about 500,000); and the highest number (Johns Hopkins study) exceeds the total number of battle deaths (651,000) plus nontheater deaths (525,000) of all wars fought during America's entire history, beginning with the American Revolution.

3. Using a similar analysis, how is the American occupation perceived by the Iraqi people? The Pentagon has deployed approximately 130,000 service personnel in Iraq, equal to about 1/2 of 1% of the total population there. A proportionate occupying force in the U.S.A. would equal 1,560,000 troops spread out over the American landscape, driving our roads in fearsome Humvees bristling with machine guns, building permanent bases, importing contractors and dictating the operation of our governance. We would notice, in other words.

And given how many of us were dying every single day, we would probably begin to resent the occupation, too.

Osama bin Luthor?

Simply a whimsy. Should Osama bin Laden be considered George W. Bush's Lex Luthor? Lex, as fans of Jerry Siegel will recall, was Superman's nemesis in the old DC Comics, a guy who once had noble aspirations, as a young mad scientist in Smallville, but then went off the rails when Superboy accidentally blew up one of his inventions, rendering Lex prematurely and permanently bald and earning Superman the life-long enmity of Luthor, who became an arch-villain dedicated to destroying Superman by any means necessary. Lex's bitterness led him to increasingly complicated and bizarre strategems for killing the Man of Steeel, including synthesizing Kryptonite and devising his own battle-suit (purple and green) which gave him some, but not enough, superpowers of his own. An over-reaction, to be sure; why not simply a toupee or allographic transplant (I realize Lex had no side hair to work with). Superboy's mistake was understandable, after all, and the Boy of Steel lacked Lex's intellectual brilliance. As Jerry Seinfeld, noted Superman fan once joked, Siegel actually portrayed Superman as kind of a yutz, despite his Kryptonite parents with the Hebrew names. It's why, to the everlasting shame of Jor-El and Lara, Kal-El went into physical work and never became the brain surgeon they hoped.

But I stray from the point, perhaps because there are an amazing number of websites devoted to Superman trivia. Osama as George W. Bush's nemesis, along Luthor/Superman lines, is something of a stretch for a number of reasons. Osama perhaps fits the bill better than Bush, although W is unquestionably something of a yutz himself. But the rivalry just seems a little one-sided, when you think about it. As those swimming in adjacent lanes here on the Pond know, I am not one of those haughty Bush-is-dumb critics. I hold firmly to the view that Bush is somewhat better than a mediocrity, and I will defend Bush's intellectual prowess with all the vehemence that such a tepid view commands. I will murmur from the rooftops, in other words, that Bush is a little better than so-so when it comes to thinking and analysis. In the pantheon of super heroes, Bush proudly takes his place as MediocreMan. Take that! you needling Leftist pundits!

But, in all intellectual honesty -- is MediocreMan as clever as Lex Osama? Bush has the Pentagon to support his side, a vast array of power rivaling even the Man of Steel's armamentarium. Surely the U.S. military has things faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. OBL has a camel and a laptop, which he can't use for anything other than video games or we'll pinpoint his location. Certainly, then, we have asymmetrical warfare on our hands.

To make it a fight, Osama has used manipulation. He can't fight the hated, decadent West by direct military means, or he'll be wiped out in an instant. His strategy, therefore, has been to provoke the United States into self-destructive acts of retribution, counting on the knee-jerk, play-to-the-uneducated-masses style of America's prep-school cowboy, MediocreMan himself. Bin Laden arranged for the assassination of Ahmed Massoud, the Afghan anti-Taliban leader, on September 9, 2001, using Qaeda soldiers posing as journalists. No doubt it was OBL who orchestrated the $5 billion buy-up of U.S. Treasuries (long positions) and simultaneous short-sale of airline, insurance, and tourism stocks in the weeks before 9-11. The SEC investigated, but of course its findings were either inconclusive, embarrassing or classified immediately because they were inconclusive except to the extent they were embarrassing. As with all such interesting and important questions in recent American history, such as who it was that dumped anthrax all over the American landscape in 2001, the inquiries sank beneath the relentless tide of ensuing disasters and were never heard from again.

I don't know if Luthor bin Laden could have foreseen events all the way forward to July 2006. I'm a chess player and appreciate the difficulties of imagining changing positions in a fluid environment, that is, where you must envision the results of your opponent's possible moves, your response, his possible responses, etc. 'Tis said the greatest chess players are able to imagine the board, seeing it steady and seeing it whole, perhaps 3 or 4 moves in the future. If you think that's easy, you haven't played much chess. Clearly Osama Lex saw the Afghan invasion coming, and did what he could to slow the inevitable American victory. I doubt that he was ever in Tora Bora, or spent any time in Pakistan, where Mastermind Khallid Sheikh Mohammed was captured. I think OBL simply floated rumors to that effect so the Democrats could harp endlessly about MediocreMan's failure to "capture or kill bin Laden at Tora Bora." I think Lex has always been in Iran, where he can count on consistent anti-American feeling and a more or less stable regime.

I think OBL saw the Iraqi invasion coming, and could probably foresee that 9-11 would be used as a generalized motivating principle by Bush to invade an Arab country. The handwriting for that one was on the wall, and not just in an Afghan cave. The PNAC crowd of neo-conservatives had been beating the drum for years. Of course, invading Iraq was a completely irrational response to terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., but taking stock of your arch-enemy's irrational tendencies is part of good strategic thinking. I think that bin Lexen also knew that MediocreMan's analysis of the post-invasion aftermath would be "facile," and not in the sense Bush intended in his solecism yesterday at the Maliki press conference, where he argued for a "flexible and facile" approach to curbing violence in Baghdad, demonstrating the dangers inherent in a new-word-a-day program when practiced by a verbally inept leader (Bush's verbal SAT actually was about 150 points too low for admission to Yale, so in this sense he is LessThanMediocreMan).

Bush's homely, touching vision of Iraqis as just like people everywhere is, of course, a noble ideal, but it appears that media accounts that Bush did not know about the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sects until the invasion was underway may have been right on the money. The Cowboy divided the Iraqi population into only two groups, (1) the aspiring democrats, and (2) the killers who hate freedom. This oversimplification has proved an intractable flaw in his analysis. Lex bin L., an ideological and religious foe of Hussein, probably had a good sense of what would happen when the artificial cohesion of Saddam's tyrannical rule was loosened; namely, exactly what we're seeing today, where the Iraqis are waging civil war and killing each other in carload lots, along with smaller numbers of American soldiers and international journalists. Osama knew about sectarian rivalries in the House of Islam, not always a perfect Dar es Salaam.

Could Lexama have seen all the way to the ascendancy of a Shiite government pulled gravitationally toward Shiite Iran, the strengthening of Hezbollah by its ties to Iran, the alawi Shia in Syria, and the new Shia government in Iraq, and the ensuing difficulites with Israel and the cascading difficulties for the United States in attempting to cope with a disintegrating Middle East? All as the result of 9-11 and of a hamfisted, unlettered response to a terrorist attack by a President in way over his mediocre head? Is this why bin Luthor would have timed his 2004 video to aid the Cowboy of Steel in his neck-and-neck struggle with another yutz, John Kerry?

If all that's true, bin Laden is a helluva chess player, and probably clever beyond the imagination of even Jerry Siegel. I think our modern day Lex has been pleasantly surprised by the fortuitous cooperation he has received from MediocreMan. To bring the world close to a Clash of Civilizations 5 years after hijacking 4 American airliners and committing what was, at bottom, simply a stateless, criminal act, exceeded even the arch-villain's fondest, perfervid fantasies. It is as if all bin Laden did was to pull the plunger on a pinball machine. The ensuing lights, bells, crashes, caroms and mounting death toll -- someone else did all that for him.

Bush as Rocket Scientist

Watching a recent panel discussion among New York Times columnists via the Web, I saw the execrable David Brooks huffing and puffing about his intimate access to the "inner circle" of the Bush Administration, much to the annoyance and disdain of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, the other two panelists. I don't usually say much about the personal appearance of other people, reasoning that we all have our crosses to bear, but there was something disgusting about the pudgy little Mr. Brooks sitting there in his tan suit with black shoes, grinning his smug little snaggle-tooth smile, his white sidewall haircut -- all of which must make the Bushies, with their rough frat boy humor, viciously savage him when he's not around.

But he does seem to be around. He carries the BushCo's water at the Old Gray Lady, writing irritatingly "evenhanded" columns that nevertheless wind up as full-throated defenses of every Bush insanity that comes at us with sickening regularity, and they have rewarded him by making him seem like a "serious" journalist with the inside scoop, and he's not going to give that up. He attempts to take the "social sciences" seriously, arguing with a "rigor" usually reserved for physics and mathematics (so he may think), but one thing I've noticed is that his columns are so incoherent, the arguments so diffuse, that you can read one sentence at a time and realize, as you go, that none of the sentences adheres to the one before or just after it. It is simply a series of ponderous, not to say sententious, declarations about....something. Iraq, or the tendency of Mexican illegal immigrants to buy children's furniture in greater abundance than Anglos (an actual example), and none of it ever leads anywhere. One is reminded of the great exchange between Sir Thomas More and Richard in "A Man for All Seasons." "More: It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales, Richard?" For the sake of his little nook at the NY Times, his piece of Wales, Brooks has bartered his soul, and the withering disdain of Maureen Dowd, as she listened to Brooks tell his little story about going to a U-2 concert with someone on the Bush staff (Maureen looked as if she'd just swallowed a bad oyster), told me she shares this Faustian view.

But that's not really the point of this post. Brooks, as such, isn't interesting enough. He's another hack doing Bush's dirty work. The panel at one point turned its focus on Bush's intelligence. They all agreed he's actually smarter than he often appears in public. Thank God for that. What if he were actually stupider? Brooks, in his rigorous, quantifying way, said that Bush in private was about "20 points" smarter than he seems in public.

The natural question thus arises (although not addressed by the panel): What is y, where y = x + 20? I put the matter algebraically to show Brooks I'm a real numbers man myself. I also know you can't solve that equation without positing a value for x. So I'll posit one. In public, Bush comes off as a guy with an IQ of about 100, the center of the bell curve distribution. Some learned analysts who have attempted to estimate the IQs of U.S. Presidents have considered the syntax used, the papers written and published, and other (admittedly subjective) criteria to place the Presidents on some sort of continuum, and have ranged the IQs from the really smart (Nixon, Carter, Clinton) to the fairly smart (Kennedy, Johnson) to the not very smart at all (Bush the Elder, Reagan). Bringing up the rear in this analysis was L'il Georgie, who was pegged at 97, not flattering at all. But perhaps the data were forced? And anyway, George Junior has never published anything, probably including blue book exams at Yale and Harvard.

So I'll give Bush 3 points more and then agree that he's got an IQ in the range of 117 to 120, giving the serious cognitive metrics guys their due. I also think this comports with results he apparently achieved on the SAT and Texas Air Guard tests, and is also consistent with the tougher Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) his score on which has perhaps understandably been kept confidential, since he failed to get into the University of Texas Law School despite his father's ownership of the state. A guy like Clinton, on the other hand, with a nice, normal Southern White Trash upbringing (about which I personally know quite a bit - not his, mine) got into Yale undergraduate and Georgetown Law all on his own merits. I just threw that in.

So Bush isn't dumb. He's somewhat above average. That's what he hates about himself, and why he's so pretentious, arrogant and delusional. He needs to believe, against all evidence, that he's actually brilliant, but in some iconoclastic, ethereal way that maybe only he understands. The thing is, he's not. He is somewhat better than a mediocrity. The question thus settled then leads to another one: is somewhat better than a mediocrity actually good enough to be President of the United States?

We might compare it to other fields, such as brain surgery, rocket science or law. If you needed difficult neurosurgery, say removal of a tiny tumor on the pituitary gland requiring entry through the nose and impinging dangerously on the optic nerves, would you be content with a neurosurgeon who told you his IQ was 117, that he'd graduated near the bottom of his class in med school, and spent the first 40 years of his life drinking? Inhale that anesthesia? How about if you were an astronaut sitting atop a Saturn rocket and the director of mission control was someone who had (in some nepotistic way) achieved a PhD in astrophysics, but whose IQ was 120? Count down to zero? You're on trial for a capital offense (killing a blastocyst with a .45, e.g.), and your lawyer tells you he graduated in the bottom 3rd of the class, he has an IQ of 118, but don't worry, we'll get through this thing? Sign the retainer?

The answers are likely to be (1) no, (2) all systems no go, and (3) you're fucking kidding me, right? A rational response in each instance. And why? Because these pros just aren't smart enough for what's involved, that's why. They're not fixing a faulty flush mechanism on your toilet, they're dealing with your survival. Suppose something goes wrong during the procedure, the orbit, the trial? You want someone who can improvise, think outside the box, come up with something quick that works. You want someone really, really smart, don't you. Otherwise, supposing this man is President, the second plane could hit the second tower, and he just sits there, stupefied, without a clue as to how to react. If you began to bleed profusely during your brain surgery, you don't want the neurosurgeon to grab his copy of "My Pet Goat" while he tries to figure out how to stop your imminent exsanguination. If the heat shield burns off your reentry vehicle, you don't want some clown who screams "bring it on" to your spacecraft as you atomize on hitting the atmosphere. If the prosecution elicits surprise testimony during your penalty phase, you don't want your lawyer to start complaining about what "hard work" being an attorney is.

Bush is a so-so guy trying to hold down a job that is one of the most complex and demanding in the world. The results are predictable. Everyone can see it. Thanks, Mr. Brooks, for providing a starting point, and have fun in Wales.

The logical labyrinth of the stem cell veto

Embryonic development, when it proceeds inside the uterus, is usually divided into 23 specific stages and occurs during the first 8 weeks following fertilization. Stem cell research, as envisioned by the Senate's just-vetoed Enhancement Act, does not use embryos developed within the human uterus; rather, such research employs embryos which have developed outside the uterus in a nutritive medium to about Stage 4, where mitosis (cell division) is arrested by freezing and held in cryonic suspension indefinitely. At the point of freezing, the embryo has developed to a blastocyst comprised of about 100 cells, is smaller than a millimeter, and has no discernible human shape or characterstics.

There are currently about 400,000 blastocysts sitting in freezers in fertility clinics around the United States. Fertility treatment tends toward redundancy wherever possible, since in vitro fertilization is inherently more problematic than the natural human thing. Couples seeking a child through such techniques often create more embryos than they ever intend to implant, and fertility specialists pick and choose among the embryos created to select the best cell clumps (morphologically and otherwise) for implantation. Most of the embryos will never be implanted, and will ultimately be thrown away.

President Bush has, in a relatively straightforward manner, equated the deliberate destruction of IVF embryos with murder and the killing of innocent life. This is his rationale for vetoing the Enhancement Act; to sign the bill, in his view, is to offer federal financing for murder of the innocent. While he concedes research using embryonic stem cell lines offers promise, the moral equation is such that the bill must be vetoed. Bush pointed out in his tele-op conference, surrounded by "snowflake" babies, that his veto does not mean embryonic stem cell research cannot proceed through private funding or through state programs, such as those currently in California and Massachusetts.

This is a curious acquiescence, under the circumstances. If Bush is going to go so far as to equate the destruction of human embryos for research with homicide, then how can he rest his case with a simple veto of the Senate bill, denying federal funding for research? If it's murder, it's murder, and his oath of office includes his promise to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, which Bush quoted at his tele-veto conference. One of the "unalienable" rights is the right to life, which may not be taken without due process of law. While Bush was actually quoting the Declaration of Independence, you get the idea. All 50 states and the federal government have criminal laws against homicide, and Bush is sworn to enforce those laws.

So we find ourselves in a logical labyrinth, where the Swimmer always likes to splash around (excusing the mixed metaphors). Consider the following direct consequences of regarding the destruction of cell clumps as murder:

1. Why should a couple ever be allowed to "abandon" or consent to the destruction (by thawing, for example) of any currently-frozen embryo? Why isn't this, at the very least, conspiracy to commit murder?

2. If an arsonist burns down a building which happens to contain a fertility clinic housing 5,000 frozen blastocysts, hasn't the arsonist committed mass murder on a scale comparable to the 9-11 plotters?

3. If a maintenance company responsible for servicing the embryo freezer at a clinic negligently does its work, resulting in the unintentional thawing and killing of 5,000 embryos, would the employees involved be guilty of 5,000 counts of involuntary manslaughter?

4. Why would anyone in his right mind run a fertility clinic, given the heavy criminal consequences of any kind of screw-up?

Much more branching paradox can be found within Bush's Labyrinth. Focus on the idea that the destruction of a 100-cell blastocyst is the same as shooting down a grown man in cold blood, and the examples will come to you. It will also suggest the arbitrariness of investing an embryo with a soul only after fertilization. Why wait so long? The embryo, after all, resulted from penetration of an ovum by a sperm cell. Certainly the raw material of the soul must have been present in each of these component parts before fertilization and mitosis began. These arguments have all been anticipated in the abortion debate, of course. But in my memory, Bush's statements yesterday were the first time a President actually used the term "killing of innocent life" to describe the destruction of an embryo outside the human body. It's a new frontier, a new premise, an expansion and deepening of the invasion of essentially religious ideas into American life.

Not that any of this ever occurs to Bush. He just says stuff and moves on, leaving the serious thinkers capable of extrapolation to wonder just how nuts it will all get before he's through.

As the Four Horses Round the Clubhouse Turn and Head Down the Backstretch

Behold a Pale Horse, the Death Pony,
by a neck over War, the White Horse, but in the money
we got yer Pestilence and Famine, bringing up the rear,
but Famine should do well after War, Pestilence and Death work their Satanic magic.
Pestilence the Bird Flu, esp. the Second Wave,
and War we have in abundance, all over the globe now,
but especially where the world's billion Muslims pay the most attention,
and George, and Dick, and Rummy, here's what the Track Touts are sayin,
down at the Armageddon OTC,
even an army full of Farsi-spoutin' Mr. T's, I pity the mullah, won't be enough,
esp. after the unholy distribution network of Pakistan's Nuke Wal-Mart
run by A.Q. Khan (The Night Manager) gets into full swing,
and the Millenialists square off against the Virgin Seekers with bristlin' thermonukes,
and those who, unlike Bo Belinsky, that Original Angel,
who found Paradise right here in the chicks spilled like lazy hour glasses along the beach in SoCal,
absolutely must destroy this world in order to bring on the hallucinatory Next One,
will finish us off perhaps before Heat Death can do the trick,
and the pity is, of course, that as dissolute as Bo Belinsky may have seemed,
he represented the preservation of Order in the Universe,
of holding things together through peace, harmony and diversified sex,
whereas the Apocalyptics have the massive teleological advantage of Entropy working for them,
the raving madness that moves all order in the Universe
toward a finished condition of stasis, powerlessness and dispersion,
and they just can't wait to get there.

Terrorism By The Numbers

Assuming that only Islamic Fundamentalists are potential terrorists (and this is a false assumption), a reasonable calculation of the resource pool from which such terrorists might be drawn can be undertaken mathematically as follows.

While disputes exist concerning the total number of Muslims in the world, a round figure often accepted is 1.2 billion. Muslims currently comprise about 22% of the world's population. Since Islam tends to be concentrated, as a majority population, in underdeveloped or poor regions of the world where population growth is higher, the growth rate among Muslims is higher than in Western countries. As a result of this disparity (about 2.2% annual growth versus 2.9% for Muslims), Muslims will comprise approximately 30% of the world's population by the year 2020.

Muslim populations tend to be younger than in the Western countries; for example, in Algeria half the population is under 20, and this is common among all densely populated Muslim areas, such as Iran and Indonesia. Assuming that terror activists tend to be younger rather than older, the cohort "bubble" moving through the population would naturally swell during the next 2 decades or so.

Taking the present numbers (1.2 billion) and assuming that half the population is male (600 million), and assuming that currently one-third of all such males are age-appropriate for terror activism (200 million), and further assuming that only 1% of such males are inclined to act out terroristic tendencies, we have a group of approximately 2 million Muslim young men who might engage in terrorism against the West or within the Muslim world. Further, since the population pressures in the Muslim world are increasing and tilting toward the younger end of the population distribution curve, one would expect the numbers to increase, even holding steady the very conservative 1% guess, especially since this figure is apt to rise as poverty in the Muslim world increases with larger populations and the relative disparity in wealth in West/Asia versus the Muslim world also widens.

Therefore, the "war on terrorism," while useful as a shibboleth or for domestic political purposes in the West, is completely hopeless. Such a conclusion is given enhanced inevitability by noting that nuclear bombs are now proliferating among "rogue" nations, including Pakistan and North Korea, and that nuclear know-how is diffuse among Muslim scientists in former republics of the disbanded U.S.S.R. If the West uses a single instance of a nuclear explosion in the West as the result of terrorist activity as a kind of Rubicon noting the end of civilized life anywhere (which it very well might be), then it seems appropriate to say that such Civilized Life has an expiration date printed on the gable spout of this particular quart of milk in world history, and that date is not very far off.

Therefore, in Game Theory, a different approach is clearly called for. Under an analysis where "realistic" approaches, such as the War on Terror and Getting Tough in general are seen to lead to the inevitable end of Civilized Life, as the above analysis suggests, then ANY approach which offers a promise of sustaining civilized life is by definition more "realistic" and productive. Such an approach has already been described.

Sing the words to John Lennon's "Imagine," take them to heart, and live by them.

ACOA (Adult Citizens of Alcoholics) Meeting: Minutes of July 11 mtg.

Facilitator: Who has something up right now?
Jones: I'm concerned that the President said global warmings are debatable on whether it's caused by humans or naturally occurring, and that we need to decrease our reliance on foreign sources of oil.
Facilitatior: What bothers you about that statement?
Jones: It doesn't make any sense.
Facilitator: Anyone else? Bob?
Bob: The President keeps saying Iraq is going well and it actually looks like holy hell over there, with people being dragged out of their houses and cars and shot, and American skinheads with personality disorders raping and murdering civilians...
Facilitator: Take a moment and breathe.
Bob: It just seems so fucked up.
Facilitator: Okay, good. That's your truth then. Yeah, Nancy?
Nancy: North Korea is firing off missiles like the 4th of July or something, and that nut case has actual bombs, but Bush seems obsessed with Iran, which maybe could have a bomb in 10 years or so. I just don't get it.
Facilitator: Good, Nancy. Be with that feeling.
Jones: So what's going on? How come everything he says is so way off the mark?
Facilitator: What makes you say it's off the mark?
Jones: Whaddya think? It's not happening that way!
Facilitator: And this distresses you?
Jones: Well, yeeaaaahhhhh.
Facilitator: Anyone else feeling the same way? What comes up for the rest of you?
Nancy: It's like he's living in another world or something.
Facilitator: You think you're seeing things very differently, you're saying.
Nancy: Right.
Bob: Check.
Facilitator: It's why you're all here. You are all Adult Citizens of an Alcoholic, and reality distortion is probably the common denominator behind all of your troubling reactions. Mr. Bush is an untreated alkie who habitually lies and distorts reality, and who is actually so far gone that he doesn't even know the difference anymore.
Nancy: Is that why I don't see what he says I ought to be seeing?
Facilitator: Precisely. He always has excuses, for example, obviously with global warming there is no serious scientific debate; however, to admit now that this has been a serious problem for the 5 and a half years he has been in office, while he has done nothing about it, would cause a deep shaming reaction which his weak ego cannot allow. He has led the world to the precipice of disaster and so he has to pretend that he failed to act because of the uncertainty, although none exists.
Bob: Sometimes he says he's actually doing something about it.
Facilitator: Yet it can't be both, which is symptomatic of his denial. In moments of relative clarity, even Bush would recognize the difference between an aggressive, proactive program to deal with the problem versus a few calls to limit "foreign imports" or develop a hydrogen car 10 years from now with about the same money he spends every week in Iraq.
Jones: Then Iraq is a fiasco?
Facilitator: Of course it is. What the Alcoholic-in-Chief is asking you to buy into is his sense of pervasive denial, necessary to support his debilitated ego structure, and to deny the authority of your own senses, to not see what is so plainly right in front of you. This, of course, causes tremendous problems in everyday living.
Bob: What can we do?
Facilitator: For now, simply don't believe a word he says, ever. He can't be trusted on anything.
Nancy: And then?
Facilitator: I would suggest we have another meeting in 2 and half years. Things might improve by then.

If Iraq had been a democracy before 9-11

SCENE: An apartment in Hamburg, Germany, near the al-Qods mosque. It is winter, 1999, and 9-11 pilots Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Sheihi, Ziad Jurrah and Hani Hanjour are discussing the plot.

ATTA: The Emir wishes us to press forward with the mission! Death to the infidel!
AL-SHEIHI: Just a style note, Atta. Do you always have to speak in exclamation points?
ATTA: The Emir's will has been expressed! We shall cut off the head of the Serpent Satan!
AL-SHEIHI: Answers that, I guess.
HANJOUR: What, again, is the Emir's beef?
ATTA: Be not frivolous! The army of the infidel even now defiles the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, at the invitation of the corrupt rulers of Sacred Arabia! He shall be driven out!
JURRAH: And that's because we're going to...
AL-SHEIHI: Don't get him started...
ATTA: The Emir is clear!
JURRAH: Verse, yet...
ATTA: This is the year to finish our pilot training! In America!
JURRAH: Any idea what that FAA cert is worth on the open market? I know a guy...
HANJOUR: You're very unclear on the concept of this thing, Ziad.
ATTA: The Emir awaits us with The Brain in Islamabad!
Al-SHEIHI: We have to go there again?
ATTA: Final instructions before we move to realization of jihad!
HANJOUR: One thing, Mohammed...
ATTA: Yes?
HANJOUR: (clearing spit from eye) Are you aware Iraq is a democracy, kind of?
ATTA: I am aware that a pro-Iranian Shiite government has replaced Saddam, yes! I've got CNN too!
HANJOUR: Well, how's this thing supposed to work now?
Al-SHEIHI: I'm not seeing the difference, Hani. I'm from the UAE.
JURRAH: Lebanon, here.
ATTA: Egypt!
HANJOUR: Yeah, but it's a democracy, kind of, in the heart of the Arab world.
AL-SHEIHI: Heart? Where'd you learn anatomy, Baywatch?
JURRAH: Ankle, maybe.
HANJOUR: But with the swamp drained, how do we even exist?
AL-SHEIHI: You mean, how did four or five guys from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen come to Hamburg, become radicalized by exposure to the West, then get recruited by the Kuwaiti Khallid Sheikh Mohammed and the Saudi Osama bin Laden, then arrange to get about 15 additional guys from Saudi Arabia as muscle on a hijack plot, all of which had nothing to do with Iraq? Is that your question?
HANJOUR: Yes!
AL-SHEIHI: Now you're doing it. I don't know, Hani, why don't we leave that question to the Americans.

Plato's Odyssey: A Story from the Political Nightmare Future: Chap. 2

Plato’s Odyssey: Chapter 2

Plato had simply faced unflinchingly that it was a New America which confronted the Twenty-first Century, and he was a Twenty-first Century Man. Maybe one of the very first. The extrication strategy involving Sheila, which presumably Control knew all about, might impress his handlers, who were themselves implacably New Americans.

Plato had been chosen by a top secret search engine designated “ApoCalypso®,”jointly developed by DataGen® and the Counterterrorism Unit of the Department of State® (“CUDS®”). ApoCalypso® was a drill-down type of database which sought a category of Americans termed the “ÜberDeracinated®,” the most untraceable and undistinguished citizens available in the population, for top secret activities related to the ongoing War on Terror®. Plato was first notified by CUDS® in early 2013. He was given a round trip ticket to Los Angeles International Airport, then driven in an airport shuttle to an elementary school in Fullerton, California, where a meeting was held on a Saturday morning in March. None of the participants was aware of the purpose of the meeting; the calls summoning them were disguised as promotional events in which they would be given free passes to GlobalLand® in exchange for their agreement to listen to a sales pitch for a new development of condominiums in Marina Del Ray.

It is probably a measure of ApoCalypso’s® acuity that the come-on met with a 100% success rate. ApoCalypso® had identified ten American male finalists, and these ten males arrived at John Adams Elementary within fifteen minutes of each other. They were greeted there in Miss Simmons’s homeroom by three men in their late thirties or early forties, dressed casually in sweaters and jeans, sporting conservative haircuts and pleasant smiles, and graciously thanking each of them for agreeing to come. The leader, transparently enigmatized as “Bill Jones,” began by apologizing for the ruse, while assuring each of them that in fact the attendees would be given free passes to GlobalLand® and Knott’s Berry Farm, but that no new condominium developments had been built in Marina Del Ray for more than two decades.

Jones then got down to business. The recruited attendees, or AmeriCruits®, were chosen because they were “positioned” to give the United States a unique form of assistance in the WarOnTerror®. Because of their demonstrated intelligence, good citizenship, impeccable records (no criminal raps, no credit derogatories more than thirty days, many other parameters), lack of personal entanglements (none of the men had wives, children or surviving parents) and other desirable qualities, they could serve as “cut-outs” for a top secret mission which would be described to the survivors among them. The AmeriCruits® assumed, understandably if incorrectly, that Jones was referring to a winnowing process or competition among them for the five jobs available.

The truth was somewhat otherwise. ApoCalypso® was compiled through a crash joint effort by the private and “public” sectors, beginning in late 2001, while the heat of Ground Zero was still gradually dissipating in New York’s early winter. It was, as operatives within the Department of Defense were fond of saying, the Mother of All Databases, the database of databases, designed to run on a network of superfast Crawfish Computers®, which crunched billions of data bytes about every American who had ever surfaced sufficiently to attract any form of attention by the human race. Thus, prior to “augmentation” through an analysis of subjective data, ApoCalypso® churned at relativistic speeds through personal data such as birth certificates, report cards, high school diplomas, religious affiliation, military records, high school and college transcripts, voting registration, vehicle license and registration records, driving records, any purchases ever made on the Internet, any registration ever made on any Website, credit reports from all reporting agencies, records of all bank accounts, all tax returns ever filed, Social Security accounts, professional licensing and discipline records, any appearance on any customer list ever sold in commerce (this tended to multiply exponentially all other data points culled from all other sources, since many of the customer tendency databases resembled a lower-level ApoCalypso® search), all records of marriage and divorce, court records, any land records in any County Recorder’s office, all hotel registrations domestic and abroad, any petitions ever signed regarding any issue, passport records, all books ever purchased or checked out of any public library, visa records, credit card statements, brokerage account statements, utility bills, telephone bills, wiretap records, clandestine surveillance tapes (visual and audio), any request ever made under the now-abolished Freedom of Information Act regarding anything, all letters to Congress or to the editor of any newspaper, all travel arrangements and itineraries ever undertaken, and a catchall category called “idiosyncratic behavior.” This massive data “snapshot” of all subject Americans was subjected to a secondary analysis by a subsidiary application called “ApoCoSorter®” which used weighted values for various data points in an effort to optimize the “InnocoScale®” (short for “innocuousness scale”) and to be certain that the population of this subcategory was comprised solely of the most unremarkable, faceless, anonymous and undistinguished American males between the ages of forty and fifty-five then extant in America.

There were two hundred and fifty semi-finalists in this preliminary cohort. 98% of them were Republicans (affiliates of the Incumbent), 75% of them were members of a social or business club (such as the Optimists or American Pioneers), 83% of them played golf, 97% were football fans, 97% were somewhat overweight, 86% percent of them read Tom Clancy novels, 73% were graduates of a four year university, 3% had been to graduate school, 83% had served in the military, 4% had been to Vietnam, and 0% of them appeared in any Google® match.

The initial cohort was then studied manually by CUDS® operatives, who undertook an exhaustive subanalysis to discover what were termed indistinguishing secondary characterists or ISC® index. The ISC® was then given a logarithmically derived scalar value of 1 to 10, with 1 representing one or two mentions in a local daily newspaper before the age of thirty (such as a wedding announcement or agate-type boxscore for interscholastic sports) and 10 signifying what was termed a “borderline fictitious existence.” Each of the finalists in Ms. Simmons’s homeroom had ISC index ratings between 9.5 and 10.0. Plato’s ranking was 9.7, exceeded only by a balding forty-eight year old from Nebraska, about fifteen pounds overweight, brown hair, brown eyes, brown polyester pants, plaid orange and blue shirt, blue windbreaker, black work shoes and white socks. Names were not used during the orientation session, but the ISC rankings were explained and given for each of the finalists.

Plato had mixed feelings about his inclusion, of course. He knew he was quiet, was aware he didn’t believe in “rocking the boat,” and was peripatetic in his romantic life precisely because he did not like the complications which seemed inevitable with “commitment,” such as shared finances, co-ownership, mutual friends and intimate secrets. All of this simply appeared wise to Plato in the second decade of 21^st Century America. It did not mean he did not have a mind of his own.

For example, after ApoCalypso® was preliminarily explained by Jones, Plato, thinking to himself, was aware of certain logical fallacies and elisions in its design. Plato was actually well-read and as informed as an average American could be in 2014. He made use of the extensive law and general library available at City Hall, but was careful not to check books out, as a rule, although occasionally he would break this pattern so as not to arouse too much suspicion through holding an underused library card. When a new number was published by Karl Manrove or Deborah Jousting or one of their numerous imitators who had achieved fame since the Ascendancy of the Incumbent, Plato checked the book out or at least placed his name on the computerized waiting list. He knew that this practice must have improved critical subcategory values within his overall ISC®, although he did not know by how much.

Plato’s Internet use was similarly misleading, since he always signed on using Mae Wan’s handle and password, which he’d gotten from her during their brief period of physical and “emotional” intimacy, covering his acquisition with his occasional need to sign-on while hanging out at her Inner Richmond District flat on rainy Saturday mornings. He then used the remote function of her ISP to sign on at City Hall’s computer research room, and from there he could acquire the foreign press, opinion journals from European Union capitals and dissident websites hoisted by Americans exported during the period since the Incumbency began. Plato imagined, with a twinkle, what sort of ISC® Mae Han must have been tagged with by ApoCalypso®. The mind reeled. All those hours logged on to anti-American sites, the late night perusal of articles written by exiled American investigative journalists; not a pretty picture and not a salutary index. Mae Han might find herself eating Hunan in its place of origin.

So despite his impressive ISC®, Plato was something of a pretender, someone who, despite outlandishly adverse odds, had apparently outsmarted the system. He found it difficult to credit that viewpoint, however. Increasingly, the Administration of the Incumbent left absolutely nothing to chance. Which was probably the reason for this written examination which Plato found himself enduring in the early afternoon in Ms. Simmons’s homeroom, his knees jammed under the little hinged top of the laminated desk, sitting on a hard blond laminated chair, the helical flourescent lights above humming and crackling. The test did not seem designed to test the power of the intellect. It seemed cast more toward a personality multiphasic, but with a weird orientation toward “American values,” including questions such as:

“1. Does the United States have any history of supporting dictators abroad?

“2. Does freedom of speech extend to battlefields during wartime?

“3. Does the United States owe any obligation to explain its foreign policy to any international body?”

Plato suspected that some sort of Game Theory was at work here. There were only two columns of dashed spaces to blacken with his No. 2 pencil: “Yes” and “No.” To answer “No” to all three questions, which seemed like the safe approach under the Regime® looked suspiciously like pandering. To answer “Yes” to one or more might prove disastrous. Plato resolved the conundrum by answering “No” to Questions 1 and 2 and “Yes” to Question 3, reasoning that the qualifier “any” to the harsh word “obligation” to engage in an action as noncommital as“explaining” was fairly benign and did not signify any sort of impermissible intrusion on American autonomy, which had been raised over the last fourteen years to the status of a religious tenet.

Yet at base, Plato was profoundly uneasy about this entire exercise, the selection by ApoCalypso®, the trip to Los Angeles, the vague references to “serving” the country in a unique capacity. With the broad shroud of secrecy cast over every governmental action during the past decade, it was certainly possible (and no credible means existed to refute this possibility) that the Government used the ruse of honor as a cover to lure dissidents (or “traitors,” as they were termed by the Administration) into just such a self-revealing exercise as this Multiphasic he was now second-guessing his way through. Still, there was no way out of the exercise, and he completed the questionnaire, listened to a few more of Jones’s remarks regarding future contacts, received his free passes to GlobalLand®, and left quietly with the other AmeriCruits®.