Life Back Home on Maple Street

Our induction into Rod Serling's black, white and macabre world happened on a weekly basis, often beginning with a disturbingly ordinary scene of a suburban neighborhood in Somewhere, U.S.A. It wasn't until we saw Rod Serling's wraith-like figure standing to one side, and the sign post up ahead that read "Twilight Zone," that we realized we'd arrived once again in Weirdsville. I wonder if this discombobulation seeped into the unconscious of David Lynch and affected his noir-style of depicting the very strange in ordinary surroundings.

Among the entire oeuvre, I would say my favorite episode (that is to say: the one that freaked me out the most) was "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." People in a simple American neighborhood suddenly experience strange mishaps. Beginning at 6:43 p.m. on a Saturday evening, the lights don't work in some houses, but they do in others. Power tools fire up of their own accord. Telephones mysteriously ring, or fail to work at all. The residents of Maple Street begin to wonder what's going on, they become fearful. And then they begin to suspect each other. What is that radio set the old man is working on down in his basement? Who is he communicating with? Why hasn't that family lost its electrical power throughout this entire strange episode? By the end of the half hour, the houses are on fire, the once-civilized people are running amok, and Maple Street is in ruins. The camera pans back to a hill above the neighborhood. A few extraterrestrials calmly observe the carnage down below. The leader explains the modus operandi in tones that are less gloating than sympathetic:

Alien #1: Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines, and radios, and telephones, and lawnmowers, throw them into darkness for a few hours and then, sit back and watch the pattern. Alien #2: And this pattern is always the same? Alien #1: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find. And it's themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch. Alien #2: Then I take it that this place- This "Maple Street" is not unique? Alien #1: By no means. The world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...One to the other...One to the other..

I thought about this episode after reading that 77,000 bridges in the United States are "structurally deficient," the rating applied to the bridge in Minneapolis just before it fell, and the estimate of the American Society of Civil Engineers that America has about $1.5 trillion in deferred maintenance on highways, bridges and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, every few months the United States Congress takes up a defense appropriations bill of some amount or another, or an "emergency supplemental" to keep the Iraq and Afghan wars going all-out, and then reflexively grants George Bush whatever amount he asks for (and then some) for his desert folly, which, even if "successful," will have no discernible effect on the quality or security of life in the United States. The low estimate of $1 trillion if averaged with the high estimate of $2 trillion as the cost of the Iraq War (by the Congressional Budget Office) is neatly congruent with the cost of repairing the country's essential infrastructure. So we can say that we're fixing and destroying stuff over there so we can't fix it here.

At this point the war continues so that Bush doesn't have to admit that he lost and so the Democrats don't have to defend themselves against the charge that they made Bush lose. In some ways it has become a war without an external referent. It is about itself, but built into itself is this fatal opportunity cost.

I have no doubt that Osama bin Laden is a canny and intelligent guy, but it's hard to invest him with the clairvoyance of those aliens standing on the hill above Maple Street. Isn't it? Could he have seen that one dramatic and horrific act of violence against the United States would so obsess the country that it would descend completely into irrationality, neglect its own priorities and throw everything it has into the pursuit of phantoms? Did he know that George W. Bush, a career failure in business, would pay no attention to the country's bottom line, that he could not order and prioritize the nation's resources to take care of necessary business here, and that the country would fall literally apart under his leadership? We lost New Orleans under Bush. Now bridges in the federal interstate highway system are collapsing while under normal use. The military is broken and debilitated. The national debt and the external debt to foreign countries have soared out of control. Was it a coincidence that Osama wanted to strike early in Bush's presidency so the Decider would have as much time to work with as bin Laden could give him?

Certain things seem obvious. In living memory, partisanship has never been so strident. The momentary cohesion in the country immediately after 9/11 has given way to a divisiveness that weakens the country profoundly. The essential civil liberties of American citizens are under assault. We have, in other words, turned on each other, and if bin Laden was the instigator, the devolution now proceeds without any further input from him. Down here on Maple Street, we're taking care of the destruction all by ourselves.

The Iraq War as a Spectator Sport

A couple of Brookings Institution think tankers, Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack, recently op-ed'ed a piece in the New York Times in which they cautiously described signs of progress in Iraq. This created quite a stir throughout the punditocracy. I have trouble, I confess, keeping the various think tanks straight, vis-a-vis their political leanings. I think the Heritage and Brookings outfits are on the conservative, neo-con side of things, whereas the Cato Institute is famous for simply being weird. Whatever, the two analysts were trashed by anti-war opinion-makers for daring to suggest anything could be going right, and the Right wing sound machine had a field day chortling about the vindication of the Decider's steadfast adherence to The Course.

O'Hanlon and Pollack pointed out, among their admittedly "anecdotal evidence and impressions," that the U.S. military sustained only 73 combat deaths during July, 2007. Naturally, thinkers from other tanks with a deeper grasp of statistics uncharitably pointed out that confining a data point to any 31-day period might produce an anomaly unrelated to general overall trends. For example, as if to mock the Heritage Twins, yesterday 6 GI's were boxed up and flown to Dover Air Force Base for their nocturnal appointment with oblivion. I can extrapolate from this that 31x6=186 GI's will die in Iraq during August, and my "analysis" is only slightly more flawed than these two important thinkers from the D.C. tank. Still, it's possible that things are quieter in some parts of Baghdad and Western Iraq, where such carnage and mayhem have prevailed before. I don't know, I doubt that these two war tourists really know, I doubt that anyone really has a composite picture of the situation in Iraq because it's simply too dangerous to try to compose one.

Yesterday the main Sunni bloc left al-Maliki's Iraq cabinet. Since the whole government is on vacation anyway, the effects of this defection probably won't be felt for a while. Anecdotal reports from Baghdad indicate that the citizenry can rely now upon about one hour of electricity a day. Given the mid-summer temperatures of 130 degrees, I imagine this is hellish. I once was in 116 degree heat in Phoenix, and it felt like living on a planet too close to the sun. Yet we had access to air conditioned theatres and malls which were chilled to Arctic conditions. I can't imagine what it's like to live in an inferno 14 degrees hotter without any relief possible. The women and children sleep outside at night, but the men must "sleep" inside, drenched in their own sweat, because of the fear of sectarian violence. The killing, the explosions, the torture, the mayhem, the fear all go on, maybe a little bit less some days, but always just around the corner.

So it seems a little hardhearted to begrudge the Iraqis some progress just because so many of us want Bush to be wrong about this as he has been wrong just about everything else. So we can win and he can lose. Although, in truth, how would he define a win at this point? We will spend, according to the Congressional Budget Office, at least $1 trillion because of this war. It seems probable that 5,000 GI's will be killed before we withdraw, and the number of wounded, many seriously, is obscured by the Bush Administration but is probably 5 times the number of killed. We don't know how many Iraqis have died, but no one has rigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins Lancet study which suggested, by extrapolation to the present, that probably 800,000 Iraqis have died as a direct consequence of the war. At least 10% of its former population of 25 million have been forced into exile in Syria, Jordan and other Arab states, or to other parts of Iraq.

So Iraq is a kind of game at this point. It's a spectator sport. Even if we've wrecked the country, shattered all hope of its eventual cohesion, killed or displaced millions of its people, what the liberals are worried about is that Iraq will calm down. And Bush is pouring in more troops and $250,000 every minute of every day in an effort to get Iraq to do just that. That's all that's left in America's monochromatic take on this nightmare. Will Iraq calm down? Not will it coalesce into a Jeffersonian democracy, not will it become a bulwark against Islamic extremism, not will it become a reliable oil partner for America -- those things have gone by the boards. They were FUBAR'ed years ago. Will Iraq calm down enough for America to declare victory, and for Bush to trumpet that his persistence paid off? I think that's where we are. That's how nuts it has all become.

The Sticky Problem of Being a Mob Lawyer

During a conversation I had with a friend recently, he brought up the interesting point that lawyers for scandal-ridden Presidents frequently get it caught in a wringer themselves. Many of us are old enough to remember John Mitchell, Nixon's avuncular, pipe-smoking attorney general (and we remember too his batshit crazy wife), and of course John Dean (who now operates in his post-Extreme Makeover Mode), who was Nixon's White House counsel before turning rat fink. They both were convicted of multiple felonies and both did federal time. And now we watch Alberto Gonzales twist and turn in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, up to his eyeballs in Bushian misprision and illegality, shucking and jiving his way through one hearing after another as he tries to extricate himself from perjury, illegal spying, conspiracy charges and God knows what else. Just on a professional-peer note: I wonder what the hell Gonzo is thinking. What makes him believe he can go in front of a panel full of ex-prosecutors and wing it, making up answers that can easily be checked against other, live witnesses and voluminous documentation? One must conclude that this little datum, all by itself, probably indicates that Alberto is in way over his head.

I think anyone who wants to take on the job of Attorney General for George W. Bush should probably consult first with Bruce Cutler, noted mouthpiece for many New York Mafia figures, including John Gotti. I would imagine that Mr. Cutler is a virtual gold mine of useful, practical information on safely representing the compulsive criminal mentality. The first thing that Cutler would have told Gonzo is that while a lawyer definitely represents a client, first and foremost he is engaged to resolve the client's problem. There is a real difference. Failure to maintain that professional distance is the path to certain ruin, especially when representing clients, like the principal members of the Bush Administration, who obviously have an inclination toward breaking the law. I doubt that Bruce Cutler ever has any illusions about the personalities he represents; if he did, he'd be in jail too, and his career, of course, has been marked by efforts of the prosecutors to go after him personally. Because of Bruce, and his withering cross-examinations of prosecution witnesses (which the New York papers took to calling "Brucifying" the witness), Gotti beat three federal raps. He acquired the moniker the "Teflon Don" because of Cutler's skill. Finally, the New York prosecutors succeeded in getting Cutler disqualified from the fourth (and last) Gotti trial on the ground he was effectively the "house counsel" to the Gambino crime family, and then the Teflon got scratched and the Don went down hard.

Gonzo doesn't see that his patron, George W. Bush, is a dangerous client. That's where Cutler's tutelage could have been so instructive. Bush, when confronted with two paths which lead to the same result, one legal and one illegal, will compulsively choose the illegal way. I don't think this is an exaggeration. Consider the FISA law, which Bush began routinely, and feloniously, violating in late 2001. His private opinion of this quaint federal statute banning wiretapping on a domestic basis without the rubber-stamp approval of the FISA court was that it was too "onerous" and antiquated for modern high-speed communications. Maybe there was something to this; if so, the submissive Congress, dominated at the time with Republicans and Democrats who were willing to agree to anything that looked anti-terrorist, would gladly have amended the statute (Bush is now seeking, in 2007, just such an amendment). Instead, Bush simply went ahead with illegal wiretapping. He gave Alberto the thankless job of coming up with a rationale, and the best Gonzo could do was to say that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (passed in a sweaty panic on September 18, 2001) must have made it OK. The AUMF stated, in relevant part, "(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." Well, I think Representative Jerry Nadler was on to something when he called this reasoning "specious." Indeed, "specious" is a pretty tame word. And the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan pretty much finished off this line of "reasoning;" the AUMF was not a blank check for violations of the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment, or for that matter, torture and Bush's abolition of due process for anyone of Muslim faith. And don't forget, Gonzo, that when your amigo Bush desperately rammed through the Military Commissions Act in 2006, as the Republican train was leaving the station, he included that little gem, incorporated from the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which provided “good faith reliance on advice of counsel that interrogation practices were not unlawful could serve as an affirmative defense in a criminal prosecution for abuse of detainees." Suh-weet, huh? Yeah, sweet. For everybody except you, Gonzo. You're the counsel. You and John Yoo and Bruce Bybee and Addington and the rest of Torquemada's Law Firm. See how clients can hang you out to dry when you don't maintain that distance?

So, now you're really in a jam. Bruce Cutler had to endure a little punishment for contempt because of some intemperate remarks he hurled at a judge, but you can't say he ever got snared in the same net as the Gambinos. They were the RICO defendants; he was the lawyer. Nice, clear lines of demarcation. That's quite an accomplishment; after all, he had to get paid, and that money came from somewhere (places he probably didn't want to think about). But you, Alberto, you don't have the drill down. No one from the White House will even go on Fox News now to defend you. On Fox News. The House wants to impeach you, the Senate wants to try you for perjury. All because, dutiful soldier that you are, you tried to hide the shenanigans about the U.S. Attorney firings from the Senate. You tried to conceal the palace revolt at Justice caused by the "Terrrorist Surveillance Program" (aka, "illegal wiretapping").

Gonzo, look: in case you're Googling for a lifeline and you come across this, take this advice. Get away from those people. They're using you. They've been using you. You don't really seem like a bad guy. You're just too malleable, too trusting, too certain of Bush's good intentions. Do what a man considerably smarter than you, John Dean, did. Turn state's evidence. Cooperate with your tormentors. Otherwise, after they take your belt and shoelaces, you're going to have to use your last dime to call Bruce Cutler.

As good as it gets

I sometimes wonder why George W. Bush doesn't simply do a few things that would make him more popular with the American people. His level of unpopularity is reaching absurd depths. Given that previous comparable lows were achieved only by Presidents in the throes of transient crises (Nixon with Watergate; Truman and the cashiering of the national hero General Douglas MacArthur), it seems that the revulsion of the public, where Bush is concerned, is somehow more fundamental. It isn't any one thing; it's everything. Yet it isn't difficult to read the polls, and a few gestures in the right direction could obviously alter things in his favor. For example, on an issue like global warming, Bush could simply accede to the express recommendations of the G-8; since the implementation of its largely hortatory goals is spaced out over the next forty-two years, they would hardly cause a ripple in Bush's remaining 540 days in office, while providing him with a modest bump in popularity. The same might be said about the Iraq War. Bush could short-circuit some of the criticism, and the damage to the Republican Party, simply by accomplishing some of the same things with different rhetoric. He could freely acknowledge that the early phases of the war were mishandled; everyone knows this already, and entire shelves of the library are occupied by heavily documented books detailing the screwups in excruciating detail. He could stop insulting the intelligence of the average American by claiming now that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror" and that the main foe in Iraq is Al-Qaeda, and focus instead on the necessity of a phased withdrawal to protect Iraqis who will be in grave danger when we leave. This sounds more responsible and compassionate, and even some war critics would have the wind taken out of their sails by this more honest approach.

He doesn't do any of this. He doesn't come close to doing any of this. His poll numbers appear to be in an irreversible nosedive, and he doesn't appear to care or even motivated to undertake simple fixes. I find, indeed, that this quality of Bush's, his complete unwillingness or incapacity for conciliatory gestures or remedial action, is the scariest thing about him. It's the clearest indication to me that there is something fundamentally wrong with him. When it comes to the Bush/Cheney cabal, and their designs upon the Constitutional integrity of the United States, it appears to me that yesterday's paranoid raving has a way of becoming today's realistic fear. I read a lot of stuff about Bush and Cheney, and very rational people, from various points on the political spectrum, seem to be converging around a single salient point. That while Bush & Cheney appear to have 540 days left in office, the deathly fear, which is now being articulated, is that a major terrorist attack on the United States during that period could afford Bush the excuse he's been looking for to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law in the United States.

One can line up the train of abuses beginning with the systematic violations of the FISA law in late 2001; the use of signing statements to ignore Congressional enactments; the systematic misrepresentation of the reasons for invading Iraq; the establishment of a secret gulag of CIA prisons to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and the federal War Crimes Act; the establishment of a prison in Cuba as an end-run around the habeas corpus provisions in the Constitution; the Executive Orders providing for the seizure of assets of Americans found to be complicit by the Secretary of the Treasury (and who might Henry Paulson consult before confiscating every dime you own?), directly or indirectly, or through contributions of money directly or through third parties (witting? accidental?), in acts of violence aimed at, or reasonably likely to be aimed at, the destabilization of the Iraqi government; the amendment of the Insurrection Act itself to allow Bush to determine when a "national emergency" has arisen, under a broader definition than under the prior act, so that he can call out the national guard to quell domestic disorder; Bush's declaration that the United States is itself a "battlefield," allowing the seizure of Americans such as Jose Padilla and their incarceration without legal counsel, without communication, without the right to a speedy trial, on the theory that such people are "enemy combatants" --

You can place different matrices above all these developments, of course. Maybe Bush and Cheney's supporters would simply say they're realists and take the problem of terrorism more seriously than the liberal camp. Their goal is not the overthrow of the American democracy, per se; it's simply that the world changed on 9-11, as they incessantly repeat, and the niceties of due process and search warrants and legal representation and habeas corpus for terrorists simply have to take a back seat to the critical problem of survival. You certainly could look at everything that's happened and see Cheney's "dark side" strategy as simply a philosophical difference in approach. That would be, in its own way, immensely comforting, and that's a strange thing to say. For what I'm saying is that I would be relieved that Bush and Cheney are directing their attack on America's external enemies and not on American democracy itself.

That's the most sickening part for me: that's as good as it gets.

A better America in 5 easy steps

As a reply and rebuke to those who might say I have nothing positive to say, I offer this simple five part program for dramatically improving the lives of everyday Americans. Please note that almost all of these steps can be accomplished from the comfort of your own home, or in some cases from the comfort of your local polling station. None of these ideas costs a dime; on the contrary, they tend to save massive amounts of money. All can be accomplished in one year, that year being 2008. Ready? Here goes:

Step One, The 535 Plan: Replace all 535 members of Congress. Mercilessly, relentlessly, without exception, refuse to return a single current member of Congress to Washington, D.C. Where possible, elect candidates from so-called third parties, such as the Greens or Libertarians. About 468 members (all members of the House plus 1/3 of the Senate) can be replaced in 2008; in successive two year cycles, 2010 and 2012, the plan can be completed. This simple expedient will immediately sever all existing relations between corporate lobbyists and existing members, will enable campaign finance reform, and will also make possible Steps Two, Three and Four.

Step Two: The new Congress will cut the defense budget, including all of the intelligence budgets and ancillary nuclear budgets which cumulatively add up to about $1 trillion a year, to 25% of this number. Wisely spent, this will be more than enough to defend America against real threats in their modern form. Leaving money to perform Steps Three and Four.

Step Three: Provide single payer universal healthcare for all Americans.

Step Four: Build a modern, comprehensive high-speed rail network serving the entire nation and providing point-to-point travel from everywhere to everywhere else.

Step Five: Stage a consumer revolt against professional football, basketball and baseball so that these sports go out of business. Instead of watching these increasingly sad, criminal and disgusting spectacles on television, go outside and do something instead.

Wasn't so hard, was it?

Seinfeld as the natural successor to dialectical materialism

It's my blog, and sometimes the urge to bloog (TM pending) can be irresistible. Writing about Larry David yesterday reminded me that while I don't have access to White House insiders, I probably know as much about Seinfeld as any man living, even including its creators, who are hobbled by their own lack of objectivity. And with Bush's popularity at 25% (new poll today), and with the Congress recalcitrant but ineffective, nothing much new can happen in American politics unless and until (a) Bush & Co. stage a coup, following a terrorist strike (real or contrived), using one of a number of "Continuation of Government" Executive Orders which they've been issuing at a disturbing rate lately, or (b) some cataclysmic event occurs in Iraq which fundamentally alters the picture there. The latter seems unlikely, the former about 50/50.

But back to blooging. Karl Marx's reputation suffers from the cruel perversion of his social theories at the hands of Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. That's actually a shame, although if you read Sigmund Freud's last two major works (Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion), you will note that the Viennese wizard was under no illusions about the ultimate fate of Karl's pie-in-the-sky ideas. They were doomed to fail, because humans just are not like that. At the mass level, they don't share. They don't give up what's theirs so the unknown and unseen can prosper, or at least survive. Humans, as Orwell showed in Animal Farm, are pigs, only without the ameliorating sense of humor. So what is the antidote to the necessary barbarities of pure capitalism? An enlightened government which constrains and softens it. So that, as in 21st Century America, when government is denigrated and free capitalism is allowed to run amok, society turns harsh and oppressive. Don't Bush & Co. see this? Do they really believe all this shit about the beneficial action of the "free market?" The answer comes in two parts: (1) Yes, they see it. And (2) they don't care.

I contend that one finds one's modern social theories where they are most effectively presented, regardless of the medium, and that the precursor to American narcissism can be found in the 9 seasons of Seinfeld, the brainchild of Respondent (in David vs. David) Larry David and his co-creator, Jerry Seinfeld. There are reasons that this sitcom occupies a unique niche in the annals of television. There was never anything like it before and nothing will quite ever match it again. Don't bore me with comparisons to The Sopranos or to Friends, which was, after all, simply a derivative for dumb people. No, Seinfeld was the genuine article. It presented American society in that period which Francis Fukuyama described as The End of History (his seminal work written before he succumbed to neoconservativism and became known on liberal blogs as Fukyomama). Francis (noted social theorist at Johns-Hopkins) correctly descried in the flow of history the complete abdication of Marxism, yielding pride of place to what Marx called Das Kapital, and the negation of the idea that the class struggle through dialectical materialism was going to produce a workers' paradise as just so much woolgathering nonsense. Not a bad sentence, huh? That's blooging for you.

So America during the Nineties, during the Seinfeld era, slipped irrevocably into the postmodern, post-ethical, post-moral, post-religious, post-post era of...being about nothing. America itself became about nothing. It's why it looks the way it does now. Laugh if you will. Indeed, that's the whole idea. Jerry, George, Elaine & Kramer. No spouses, no careers to speak of, no intellectual content, no sincere emotions, no caring, no children -- the whole animating idea behind their lives was to seek amusement and diversion, using other people primarily for this purpose. Their ideational content, as expressed in dialogue, was derived solely from pop culture, mainly old television series and comic books. Deep emotions were to be avoided at all costs, as maudlin and bummer-producing. The Bushian government is simply the dark side of what such emotional attitudes look like when played out on the stage of national policy, a culture of profound, even determined, superficiality. The religious backlash is simply a reaction to this inexorable cultural movement. It will not succeed.

These cultural attitudes explain why Hurricane Katrina's chief characteristic was simply its news value. In general, no one really cared what was happening. Certainly not Bush's government. For most Americans, 9-11 is a series of images, of the World Trade Center collapsing under its own weight. The main anxiety was, and is: what effect will an attack like this have on the stock market? Are people going to overreact?

Were it not for these macro-nugatories, the Seinfeld lifestyle would have much to commend it. Life can indeed be joyous when the lightness is almost unbearable. Unfortunately, humans have never been very good at noting that point when something becomes too much of a good thing. They're apt to carry it right over the brink, as I think we'll discover in the next decade or so.

Creator of modern American ethos becomes Respondent in David vs. David

I confess I burst out laughing when I heard Laurie David had filed for divorce from Larry David. It was kind of an autonomic response. While I don't really know what Larry David is like on a day-to-day basis (and probably don't want to know), he has provided so many clues, through his alter ego George Costanza, about his attitudes toward commitment in general and women in particular, that his marriage and family life presented a quandary. Either the self he has presented seriatim in two sitcoms is phony, or this attempt to play-act his way through marriage was hopeless. I couldn't see any other possibilities. Fortunately, life has confirmed the veracity of art. The anti-social curmudgeon and existential hero of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm is the real deal. Laurie David is beautiful, passionate about the great environmental cause of our day (global warming), and has even done something the talented Larry will never do, won an Oscar. And yet Larry reports that the divorce is "completely amicable" (reminiscent of George's acceptance of his fiancee's death after licking cheap envelopes which George picked to save money). He is not so much ready as anxious to move on. I suspect, in fact, that he's been ready to leave that marriage for about 9 years.

One positive effect is that the life of Curb Your Enthusiasm has probably been extended. The sitcom Larry David can now suffer through one season of marital discord with Cheryl, his sitcom wife, and that guarantees one season beyond that of Larry as a single guy and nebbishy swinger. It's all new material, and material is what Larry David's life is really about. Not a home, and children, and a warm glow. Material, which gives him something to think about, which gives him something to write about and create, which relieves him from the real demon of his existence, boredom. Curb was in its last throes, because Larry's life had become stale and predictable. Much as Lyle Lovett married Julia Roberts so he could generate some new emotions for his best album ever (Road to Ensenada), Larry needed out of the marriage to Laurie so he could experience life as a rich, single, divorced Meursault of the West L.A. set.

They were together 14 years, which serves everyone's purposes, including the two girls, ages 11 and 13. Laurie was in what California calls a "long term" marriage, longer than 10 years (that's an eternity in California, in fact) so the court will reserve jurisdiction on the question of alimony, meaning: it could go on for a long time. Laurie is entitled to support sufficient to maintain the life to which she had grown accustomed, which looked pretty sweet. All of this is subject to the
possibility of some overriding prenup, of course, but I'm thinking: Laurie probably didn't leave too much on the table. Think about it. She married Larry in 1993, about halfway through Seinfeld's run. They had the first daughter within a year. Larry was well-off and successful, no doubt, but he was not yet the Croesus he would become when Seinfeld entered syndication. Then, so the common estimate has it, he and Jerry Seinfeld both walked away with $200 million. That was money Larry earned during the marriage, that is, community property. Laurie's timing was perfect. Larry, who drove cabs and bounced around New York earning a half-assed living as a "comedian's comedian" until he was past 40, probably wondered, somewhere around 1998, just exactly what he had gotten himself into. He was like George, again, who was stuck in a situation where his pilot deal with NBC depended on his staying in the relationship with Susan, the NBC exec. So that, for the first time in his life, George Costanza had a cachet and marketable line with women - but he couldn't use it; and Larry David, in 1998, suddenly could graduate from his handicapped position as a bald and inept Romeo, with the help of the greatest aphrodisiac of all, the one that works with practically any woman on Earth -- LOTS and LOTS of MONEY. And he couldn't use it either, because he was (clearing throat) happily married to (swallowing hard) Laurie, with, um (dropping voice), two lovely children.

Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. To Larry's lasting credit, as proof that certain moral values within his core (which indeed are often on display in Curb) are vibrant and enduring, he hung in there another 9 years. That, I'm sure, was a very good thing to do for the girls. Then, as he turned the corner on 60, and Laurie hit a cognate point for women, 49, it was time to act. Waiting much longer to become the nebbishy, fabulously rich swinger would become, well, unseemly. As it is, he's got a few good years left. Laurie's got it made in the shade. All of it very much in line with the narcissistic ethos of our time, as adumbrated (and lived) by one of the great creative minds of our generation.

waiting to exhale

As I begin this, Bush is supposed to have 549 days, 23 hours and 32 minutes left in office. I know this because I have a Bush Countdown Clock on my desktop. You can have one too, freely available from such sites as nationalnightmare.com. Think about that as a sign of the times. The vast majority of the people in America ask the same question: where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket? So much so that a wide variety of outlets offer Bush Countdown Clocks for installation on your desktop, so you can check to see how far down the road toward liberation we are when you boot up each morning.

As for his actual departure: I'll believe it when I see it. I find it comforting that the Republican Party has a field of presidential candidates. They seem to believe that the normal election cycle will be operative in 2008. That's how spooked I am about what this out-of-control maniac might be up to. God might tell him He needs George to stay on, to "finish His work." Under assault by the Democratic Party, Bush is not backing off. If anything, he seems determined to provoke a true crisis. This is a key distinction between Bush and Clinton. Clinton, as you'll recall, was so afraid of being impeached that he offered to cut deals with Congress to avoid it. Just censure me, he said, I know I deserve something. Clinton said this although there was never any danger of his actual removal from office. The votes weren't there. In the Senate trial, he actually received a majority vote for acquittal. Bush is well aware that on any given workday in the House of Representatives, a vote could be scheduled to impeach him. The simple majority is there. Bush doesn't give a shit, because he knows he can't lose in the Senate. Indeed, the sooner the impeachment proceedings begin, the better his chances of survival.

He's provoking another fight now over executive privilege. As I've written before, and as John Dean writing in Findlaw.com appears to concur, executive privilege would not seem to apply to deliberations of the Justice Department over the hiring and firing of personnel, and it certainly has nothing to do with the issues involved in the Pat Tillman case. In the latter situation, the White House seems to assert that its right to mislead the public about an accidental death in combat is a matter of national security.

Somewhere, in a dark cavern in the Executive Office Building or some such haunt, a shadowy character who goes by the name of David Addington is dreaming this stuff up. Addington graduated from Sandia High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1974, which strongly suggests that he might be the product of some sort of nuclear accident. Whatever, he has been joined at the hip to Dick Cheney for a very long time, including his tenure as Republican counsel during the Iran-Contra affair. He achieved early notoriety as the author of a "controversial" minority report on the scandal. You can probably imagine which way he tilted the controversy. He went to Duke Law School, and I suspect he is as smart and creative as Bush is dumb and robotic. All these recent crises seem traceable to Addington, including the spooky assertion that Cheney is his own branch of government, and now the argument that it is up to the Executive Branch alone to decide whether to allow the Justice Department in the District of Columbia to prosecute Harriet Miers or Karl Rove for contempt in refusing to appear before Congressional committees.

Among the unintended consequences of Patrick Fitzgerald's half-assed prosecution of Scooter Libby is that we got rid of Scooter and got stuck with this guy as Cheney's new Chief of Staff, bringing with him all his necrotic ideas about torture and the unlimited power of the Executive during "wartime." I think that Addington and Cheney have their own countdown clock, and what they've decided is to test the outer limits of the most absurd, disturbing Constitutional arguments they can come up with. I will confess that is probably every lawyer's dream. How nuts can I make this and still have a chance to win? That's the problem: the Executive Branch does control the Justice Department, it does appoint all the judges, it does have the system gamed. These screwy arguments can work because the people who will decide whether they're tenable or not are people who owe their jobs to Bush/Cheney & Co. Let us face it: with all deference to the flawless perspicacity of the Founding Fathers, this is a major hole in the system. While the effort was made to design a government that would survive even bad people running it, it might not work where the heads of state are determined to break it apart, and where no one seems to pay that much attention to their efforts. That is why conservative lawyers such as Bruce Fein, who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan, and John Dean himself, have become such vociferous critics of Bush & Co. and their Constitutional depredations. They are aware of how outlandish, how dangerous these ideas are that are emanating on nearly a daily basis from Cheney and his mouthpiece. Somewhere in the cavern, you can hear their chilling laughter: moooooAAAAHHHHHaaaahhhhhaaahAAAAH. They have, according to my Countdown Clock, 549 days, 22 hours and 5 minutes to wreak unholy havoc. Don't think for a minute they won't use it.

Plame goes down swinging

Valerie Plame Wilson's lawsuit against Cheney, Rove, Libby, Armitage, et alia, has been dismissed. She was seeking damages for the destruction of her career at the CIA, proximately caused by the vindictive, and treasonous, retaliation by Rove and Libby, acting in concert with Cheney (or maybe at his direction) to discredit the criticisms of Valerie Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson. My own passing familiarity with the concept of sovereign immunity, inherited like so many American legal concepts from British jurisprudence, leaves me unsurprised at the result. This was an uphill battle, as Plame's lawyers admitted at each step of the case. In essence, sovereign immunity shields government officials from civil damages which result from actions performed in the course of their official duties. No doubt, in general, this is a salutary principle. It is hard enough to find decent and qualified people to run for office as it is. If you add to the existing risks the idea you can be sued for a policy decision which goes awry (or perhaps accomplishes the very purpose you intended), then even more crazy people would infest the halls of government. Imagine if George W. Bush were civilly liable for the damages caused by his disaster of a war against Iraq. Yes, nice to imagine...but could the damages even be calculated? How to chalk board those, as the lawyers say.

Still, I was hoping she would get somewhere with the lawsuit. Patrick Fitzgerald used the excuse of Libby's perjury to shy away from the true jugular of the case, which was the intentional disclosure of an undercover agent's identity. It seems to me the case was there; Fitzgerald, whose refusal to say anything explanatory about his decision not to pursue the main or substantive case has always struck me as exceedingly weird, simply didn't want to take on the bigwigs. He settled for a set of technical charges against one errand boy, and in the end the President, who doesn't care at all about legality or honesty, took even this hollow victory away from him.

So Rove, Armitage and Libby, along with the Vice President, engaged in a concerted plan to make public, to reporters and the world at large, the secret identity of an undercover operative working in the field of weapons of mass destruction, under the business cover of Brewster Jennings. She would have had contacts in the field, and some of them would have operated under that same cover in dangerous territory. Her disclosure, along with the wholly gratuitous disclosure by Robert Novak of her trade cover, exposed those agents and cooperators to arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution. And no one in Washington who was instrumental in blowing her cover, for rolling up those networks, will pay any price whatsoever. The administration will not conduct an investigation to find out what the consequences were of this blown cover. The civil lawsuit has been dismissed. The criminal conviction has been vitiated. No one even lost their security clearance. The White House never even initiated an internal investigation by its own office of security.

I don't think the idea of sovereign immunity was ever meant to go that far. It's a measure, however, of where we are on the road to a completely unaccountable government.

Mr. Mumbles and his lousy end game

If you want to play chess, you first learn the moves. Indeed, old chess hands refer to learning the game in just these terms: "I learned the moves when I was six years old," for example. There is a humility in this formulation; no one can ever say, "I learned chess." All knowledge of chess is partial, approximate. And all qualitative statements about strategy break down in the heat of battle, for example, "control the center of the board," "maintain your pawn structure." Heuristic clues, that's all we have here. They can't guide a specific move, which depends entirely on context and your wits in figuring out what to do, right then and there. Against a good player, a single blunder is fatal. There are "standard" openings which can at least get you to the middle game with your chances more or less intact. Given the myriad complexities involved in an early situation with 32 pieces covering 64 squares, all with different vector lines and potentialities, it's useful to master certain formulas which avoid the worst of the mistakes you might otherwise make if you attempted to figure it out from scratch.

In the world of politics, such as the initiation of the Iraq War, the opening was the Joint Resolution passed by Congress in the fall of 2002. In honor of our imperial leader, we might call this the King's Gambit. Bush/Cheney & Co. successfully browbeat the Congress into support of their preconceived (that is: prior to 9/11) notion of invading Iraq, deposing Saddam, and seizing control of Iraq's oil reserves. The Democrats blundered badly, especially in the Senate, where the 60-vote rule, about which we now hear so much, would have prevented the Republican majority from conducting a floor vote on the Joint Resolution. Among the 77 senators voting to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq (and there could have been little doubt that's exactly what he had in mind), was Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, currently Senate Majority Leader.

So, you screwed up the opening, Mr. Mumbles. And now your end game is a shambles, and here's why: the rules of the game. Once you sign the resolution, you transfer the power to make war to Bush. To take that power away (so you've convinced yourself), you actually need 67 Senators, enough to override all of Bush's vetoes of every single "timeline, benchmark, troop rotation" concoction you can come up with. See how the game is played? Pawns can move forward, two squares on their first move, one square thereafter, and they take other pieces on the diagonal. You can withhold power from the President with only 41 votes, but once you give it to him, you need 67 votes to take it back. Simple, huh? All games have their rules. If you don't know the rules, you'll never be very good at playing the game.

Now, the rule book (the U.S. Constitution) does say that all the money for the war in Iraq has to be appropriated by the Congress. Bush has to have money to keep fighting this disastrous war until January 20, 2009, which is his stated intent. You keep thinking, Mr. Mumbles, that if you make the Senate stay up all night, and say lots of fierce things, that you can change Bush's mind. You apparently believe that a President with an approval rating of 25% will be persuaded if he's concerned it might drop to 24. This seems to be your approach. Or, more likely, you'll do anything to avoid the "radical" approach of Senator Russ Feingold, which is to say to Bush, "no more money." That's a move, allowed by the rule book, which permits you to say "checkmate."

So face it, Mr. Mumbles. You're afraid to win this game, so you're going to keep making moves which you know can't win, all the while pretending that it's part of a brilliant strategy. Alekhine, Capablanca, Bobby Fischer would all just shake their heads in bewilderment: if you can move your queen to KB8 and announce your victory, why would you castle and lose the game?

Delusion & Criminal Enterprises

(Thoughts after attending a talk by Richard Dawkins at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park on Saturday...)

The author of "The God Delusion" arms himself well for the predictable assaults on his character and reasoning directed at his "blasphemous" positions on religion, although he finds humor even in that very accusation. As he quoted from a bumper sticker at the talk: "Blasphemy is a victimless crime." Religion has worked itself so much into the warp and woof of everyday thinking that it's hard to appreciate that we're always talking about ghosts, goblins and spooks who just aren't there. Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist from Oxford, leads the counter-attack of atheism with grace, good humor and bravery, I think. It's valuable work, and probably more necessary than the legions of atheists would probably like to admit. There was a huge crowd at Kepler's, the audience completely filling the bookstore and all its aisles. Maybe you'd expect that so close to a citadel of great learning, Stanford University. But I had the same experience when I went to Book Passage in Corte Madera to hear Christopher Hitchens talk about his atheist work, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Something is in the air these days. Nonbelievers are tired of getting pushed around by people who think "The Passion of the Christ" is a documentary, who believe that humanoids with white feathery wings are floating around just out of view. They're sick of the psychological child abuse of Sunday school brainwashing, the hell-fear bestowed upon the innocent and described so perfectly in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Or physical abuse, as we see today in Los Angeles, where the archdiocese is putting together $660 million to buy up the rest of the 508 claims against diddling priests and other perverts in its direct employment. If you really take to heart the idea that god is not only not great but nonexistent, is a completely fabricated mass delusion intended to supply an easy answer to an infantile wish for certainty about the meaning of life -- if you really get to that point, with the able help of courageous thinkers like Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris and one of the bravest pioneers of all, physicist Steven Weinberg (who was out there taking the body blows of the religious crazies before many others in the scientific establishment) --when you arrive at that point of certainty, and then you look at the Catholic Church with its cassocked legions of child molestors, and you realize there is actually no mitigating reason whatsoever for what has gone on there, that it's all a fraud and a sham, an elaborate game of make-believe involving the investment of billions, all of it milked out of defrauded "believers," in ornate buildings and stained glass, and in all the schools and colleges selling this hokum, and in the other what-not propping up the mythology -- then you begin to appreciate the need for a massive counterforce to oppose such pervasive madness. And leading the charge is this brilliant, funny, polite --and fearless --Englishman with the droll wit and uncompromising attitude essential to the job at hand. Godspeed, as it were, to the good Professor Dawkins.

President Bush's Interesting Distinction

Boris: Sonja, are you scared of dying?
Sonja: Scared is the wrong word. I'm frightened of it
Boris: That's an interesting distinction.
--Woody Allen, "Love & Death"

QUESTION: The intelligence analysts are saying Al Qaida has reconstituted in areas of Pakistan, saying the threat to the West is greater than ever now -- well, as great as 2001.

What's happened?

BUSH: OK, I'm glad you asked. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that opportunity to...There is a perception in the coverage that Al Qaida may be as strong today as they were prior to September the 11th. That's just simply not the case. I think the report will say since 2001, not prior to September the 11th, 2001. Secondly, that because of the actions we've taken, Al Qaida is weaker today than they would have been. They are still a threat. They are still dangerous.

--President George W. Bush, Press conference, July 12, 2007

I must remember to take deep breaths, to exercise regularly, to take my nutrients, to be temperate in all things (including temperance), and to hope, may the Force be with me, that I survive until late January, 2009. I simply have to believe that the United States is a better country than this. Bush must be some sort of statistical anomaly, a singularity, an act of quantum reversal. They say it might happen: an egg, lying splattered on the floor, could reassemble itself and leap up to the counter from which it rolled only moments before. The entropic arrow could reverse itself. Something on that order of probability might account for having a man this stupid as President of the United States of America.

To read an answer such as quoted above is to induce a kind of deep, existential fear in the mind of a common citizen. Such as myself. How could a person like Bush, so elementally confused, lead a country as complex and powerful as the United States? For that matter, how does he navigate his way across a furnished room without killing himself?

What could he have possibly meant by his answer? Only one thing comes to mind. On September 11, 2001, we are fairly certain that 19 members of al-Qaeda were killed instantaneously; thus, their ranks were diminished, to that extent, by late morning, September 11, 2001. They were at their lowest level of strength since earlier that morning. With Bush in charge of America's anti-terrorism efforts, however, they began to recover, beginning the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Therefore, if I read Bush correctly, according to the CIA's latest National Intelligence Estimate, al-Qaeda is at its greatest level of strength since the afternoon of September 11, 2001, although not as strong as it was that morning. This would appear to mean that al-Qaeda is still 19 members short, 20 if you count Khallid Sheikh Mohammed in Guantanamo. Also, "because of the actions we've taken," they've been unable to recover the loss of those 20 operatives.

Still, it is difficult to see how this could be an accurate assessment. I assume among the "actions we've taken" is the invasion of Afghanistan, and our destruction of the jungle gym complexes around Kandahar. We then left, and our ally Pervez Musharraf, democratic dictator of Pakistan, entered into an understanding with tribal groups in western Pakistan that al-Qaeda and the Taliban could have free rein in this cross-border area. Thus, the terrorist sanctuaries, probably including the crucial jungle gym infrastructure essential for teaching Islamic extremists living in Hamburg the art of flying American commercial jets, are back in business. In addition, the group in Iraq known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which President Bush cheerfully equates with the group "which attacked us on September the 11th," reportedly has about 10,000 new recruits, all of them joining up in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

While math is probably the stronger of Bush's facilities lying along the verbal/quantitative axis, I think he's miscalculated, indeed, misundercalculated. What the CIA may mean is that, as a "result of actions we've taken," al-Qaeda is now at a point where they have at least 9,980 more members than they used to have, plus two strongholds instead of one. By the time this guy's through, we may need a reversal of the entropic arrow just to put the world back together again.

The irresistible Senator Vitter

I confess that part of my fascination with Senator Vitter's story is connected to my own psycho-inculcation with prohibitory religious indoctrination, a condition for which one is likely in lifelong recovery. It can't be all bad; 'tis said by some that the Victorians were the sexiest people of all because virtually anything, the glimpse of a bare ankle, could be orgiastic. Nevertheless, today's follow-on news about the junior senator from Louisiana reports that in 1998, while he was still a state representative, Vitter wrote an op-ed piece in the Times-Picayune in which he proclaimed President Bill Clinton "morally unfit to govern" because of his sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky.

Probably the very best apothegm of all time, the pithiest, the most telling, the most incisive, came from the droll mind of Oscar Wilde: "Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue." No doubt Senator Vitter honors and reveres virtue in the abstract, and when he has engaged in vice (apparently the D.C. Madam was not his first procurer, according to some reports now coming out of the Big Easy), his public hypocrisy, including most of his work in the United States Senate, indicates that he knew better. The word "vice," however, brings up a delicate problem. Isn't Senator David Vitter now an admitted john? I believe that's a crime, which is an interesting distinction between Bill Clinton and David Vitter, insofar as sexual activity is concerned. Whatever Monica was doing under the desk in the Oval Office (and a lot of it sounds like huge fun for Bill), I don't think it was illegal. They were consenting adults doing legal, if sometimes nasty, things.

Well, some guys have all the luck. Bill Clinton didn't have to pay for it, and Senator Vitter, trying to keep it all quiet and impersonal so as to preserve his sterling image as a church-going family man, in a desperate and sweaty effort to get what he craved without being obvious about it -- well, he did. Does it mean he's morally unfit to govern? Not in my book. It just means he's a sanctimonious asshole.

Some Rise by Sin, Some by Virtue Fall

I do not think less of the junior senator from Louisiana, Republican David Vitter, because his telephone number appears on the list provided by the D.C. Madam to the press. Well, let me qualify that. Why didn't you use a pay phone, David? Sheesh. I think it behooves all of us to become intimately acquainted with our shadow selves, as Jung would have it, and thus to temper our quick condemnation of the human failings of others. He was away from his wife and kids, back home in Metairie, and Sen. Vitter, understandably exhausted from the hard work of trying to steer anti-gay legislation through an intractable, libertine Congress, took a walk on the wild side. Just because Vitter got jiggy with it one night (or ten, or twenty) does not mean his efforts at "defense of marriage" are hypocritical. In one sense, if you think about it, it just proves marriages need all the defense they can get, not just from gays who want to try what Vitter has obviously had some troubles with, but from pimps and madams who cater to our weakness.

I admit I was a little disappointed in Vitter, not just for being such a maroon that he used a telephone with his name on it, but because he won't talk about it now that he's made peace with his wife and God, apparently the only two people he thinks have a rooting interest in this thing. What a killjoy. His defense of marriage advocacy is so boring it makes your bones itch to think about it. But down and dirty nights in D.C.? Finally Vitter, who looks a lot like a choir boy grown fat on too much jumbalaya, would have something fun to talk about.

I wonder if he realizes it was God who got him into this jam in the first place. As a little Catholic, he sat in church on those sweltering Bayou days listening to the bombastic condemnation of perfectly normal human tendencies. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud (much as it might help) to see that's where the tantalizing urge to pimp his night originated. He just had to try it.

Oh well. Let's face it. His 100% rating by the Christian Coalition will be the first casualty of his fall from grace. And, of course, he won't be leading any more floor fights for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. And if he ever uses the word "moral" in a sentence again, everyone will be rolling in the aisles, and I'm not referring to Pentecostals. And since he was something of a vapid Ken-doll in the first place (he used his own telephone number?), he's probably on the home stretch of his tenure in Washington anyway. It won't be long before he'll be spending a lot more time in Metairie, and while God might be okay with it, it's hard to like his long-term chances with his wife. Some marriages need more help than the Constitution can provide.

White House Announces Alternative Benchmarks

"The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January when he announced a major shift in U.S. policy, according to senior administration officials closely involved in the matter. As they prepare an interim report due next week, officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war." Washington Post, July 8, 2007.

[following is a transcript of President Bush's remarks today in a Rose Garden conference with the press - July 10, 2007]

Good afternoon. I'd like to make a reporting on significant new progress in the war on terror, specifically Iraq, where's the military is engaged in active ongoing operations against an entrenched foe and al-Qaeda. We're making steady progress, and I am in constant communication with actual military commanders on the ground. In other words, we're making good progress and I'm basing these assessment and other on what military personnel is saying directly instead of legislating a war plan in the Congress. Some of the highlight to specify or to make further note of include a number of perameters which is highly suggestible of good progress. In other words, toward a goal, which is victory, which is criteria we are constantly reviewing and not just staying the course.

Some of these indicators are folks just living their life in Baghdad now in peaceful ways that before was made harder by evildoers and killers who hate their freedoms and the new democracy and institutions which is developed. On a Tuesday in the third week of May, as just one example, a Shiite unemployed teacher had a kebab lunch with his family and two Sunnis were also there and enjoyed the fine food. In other words not all this civil war talk you hear so much around this town really is like that. It's not all death squads.

Since 9-11 the world has changed. These foe are determined and will not give up their desperate fight on a Congress timetable. Six more years later after 9-11 when America was attacked by a ruthless ideology. We're taking the attack to these same ruthless foe now. In other words, we've gone on offense since 9-11.

Some perameters which can be seen in Iraq now includes fewer dead bodies on the Baghdad streets on typical mornings. In other words, fewer corpses. Today we are finding fewer bodies and often the heads are still attached. There is still too many headless bodies and drill holes in the skulls, often though with fewer drill holes than one more year before these count. Exploding cars in Baghdad are downward also with fewer cars actually blowing up on many days. In other words the streets can be more peaceful with less cars exploding in Baghdad. Also we are not counting the dead bodies from car bombs because too many Americans we're seeing cars blow up in their TVs and thinking that no progress was being made because of body counts, which we do not do. Far too many mosques are being blown up in Baghdad still, often in acts to retaliate because one group, the Sunnis, will blow up a mosque of the Shia. Then the Shia will often blow up a mosque which is Sunni. In other words, tit for tat. This is sectarian violence which is ongoing in Iraq, but some perameters are trending down, though not all or as many as you would like yet. Also our focus is al Qaeda, the same murdering ideology which changed the world by attacking us on 9-11 and we are taking the battle to the enemy. In other words not just waiting to be hit again. Iraq continues to step up so we can step down with many units fully operational according to commanders on the ground who report to me, although morale problems and the militia problem remains problematical, with units not always reporting for duty, but fewer incidents of Iraq army units we trained fighting against as militia are being reported.

The Iraq Parliament cut short its summer vacation and are in the Green Zone, where security remains good, although commanders do report daily attacks by evildoers on the Zone by mortar and artillery. Even in these conditions the brave new democracy meets and talks and while they do not yet have a oil law or any power sharing agreement, democracy is hard work. In other words you talk and then you agree, and Prime Minister Maliki, who reports often to me, is assuring this kind of talking and progress through agreement.

The biggest mistake we could make would be to heed the call of some who want to break off the fight with al Qaeda now when progress is steady, not as fast as we or other wants, but toward a goal of a stable Iraq. I urge the Congress to see the plan through and to give it a real chance to work. I would be glad to take any questions now.

The President Covers His Tracks

On the legality of Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence, there is not a lot to say. Critics can rant and rave all they want, but there it is in the Constitution, Article II, Sec. 2, where the President, on an unqualified basis,

shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

The Supreme Court has construed this power (which applies only in the case of federal law, such as the offenses for which Libby was convicted) to include the power to commute sentences, for any reason, for no reason, for a bad reason. The power has always been controversial, harking back as it did to the British king's power to let political allies off the hook. The more things change, the more they seem the same.

Looking at matters circumspectly, it is obvious that L'Affaire Plame is the true legal Achilles heel for both Bush and Cheney. It strains credulity well past the breaking point to believe, for a moment, that Bush did not know, in detail and in real time, everything there was to know about the coordinated leaks to the press which occurred in July, 2003. The press has been remarkably timid and reticent about this point, choosing to accept the ludicrous idea that Bush was telling the truth when he expressed his determination "to get to the bottom of the leak" etc. ad nauseum in the summer and fall of 2003, before he went underground with the excuse that he did not want to comment on an "ongoing investigation." Since we now know, to a moral certainty, that Cheney, Rove and Libby, among others, already knew everything there was to know about the leaks, what are the odds Bush was not similarly in the loop? His Vice President knew everything Bush professed not to know at the very time Bush was making statements to create the impression he did not know anything. We also know, from hearings which Henry Waxman conducted, that the White House's own office of security did not even open a file to investigate the leak. How, then, was Bush conducting his "inquiry?" There was no inquiry because Bush already knew the whole story. If he didn't know it as it happened, he knew when Cheney told him immediately after.

Lawyers use "Canons of Interpretation" to construe statutes, contracts, and other legal matters. For example, where a contractual matter is ambiguous, the interpretation least favorable to the drafter of the document is employed. The enumeration of specific things in a statute is assumed to be to the exclusion of things not mentioned, unless a contrary intent appears. And so forth. The main Canon of Interpretation to use with George W. Bush's every action and utterance is this: the man never does or says anything out of principle if such action could possibly be to his own detriment. Applying the Bush Canon to the Libby commutation, we see what's going on with renewed clarity. By commuting, instead of pardoning (which will come later), Libby remains in technical legal "jeopardy." (Try not to snort your July Fourth beer out of your nose as you read that.) Thus and therefore, when Libby's oft-testifying ass is hauled before a Congressional panel to find out what Bush and Cheney knew and when they knew it, he can escape, for now, with a Fifth Amendment plea. A blanket pardon would remove this cover for Bush and Cheney. That is the sum and substance of what is going on.

In the long run, Bush and Cheney know there is no way out of this trap other than pardons for both of them. They obstructed justice by failing to disclose the truth when they first knew it; they deliberately misled investigators and the American public. They are trying to run out the clock, with the feckless assistance of the pusillanimous press. Bush will eventually pardon Cheney, then resign, and Cheney will pardon Bush. They are going to give Article II, Section 2 a real workout. Just wait and see.

Musing about "SICKo"

Michael Moore, like Woody Allen, inspires a lot of envy among reviewers and other creative artists who wonder how these two can so inerrantly and consistently put successful movies up on the screen, and so they draw more than their fair share of ad hominem attacks. For example, Woody's amorous oddities are portrayed as pedophilia and Moore's critics are quick to note how fat and slovenly he is. It is true that Moore is grossly fat and dresses like a slob, and there is an irony to his appraisal of the American healthcare system, since it seems that a great deal of America's health woes can be traced to the epidemic of obesity, with its concomitant high incidence of diabetes, heart disease, failing leg joints and other problems. These are problems he never mentions in his film.

Nevertheless, "SICKo" is a superb movie. Moore has learned to avoid some of the annoying tricks and tropes of his earlier documentaries, such as the quick-cut collages, statistical inaccuracies (e.g., comparing total murders in Canada to the U.S. in "Bowling for Columbine," despite the great difference in population) and conspiracy-theory deadends. These habits set him up for easy refutation and a perhaps deserved reputation for doing agit-prop as opposed to documentaries. Contrariwise, I don't think there is a refutation to "SICKo." As the title of his film suggests, America's healthcare system is a sick joke. It is the ultimate expression of our end-point devolution from cohesive society to Darwinist nightmare. American citizens face awful decisions on an everyday basis, whether insured or uninsured, such as Moore's opening sequence about a woodworker who had to choose between reattaching his middle finger for $60,000 or his ring finger for $12,000; lacking insurance, his middle finger was thrown into an Oregon landfill. In an evenhanded, unforced, let-the-facts-speak-for-themselves way, Moore asks ironic questions of hospitals and healthcare workers in Canada, Great Britain, France and finally Cuba. "Where do people pay after they stay at the hospital?" "Where is the admissions office to see if my insurance will cover this emergency visit?" In one hilarious moment, he finds the "Cashier" window at an English hospital, only to learn that the office dispenses money to patients so they can take a cab ride home.

In the most celebrated sequence of the movie, his trip to Cuba by flotilla of small boats to seek care for 9-11 rescue workers who could not get coverage for their lung and PTSD problems in the U.S., his crew of patients are first told they cannot receive the care given to the "evildoers" at Guantanamo Bay, so they travel instead to Havana, where all of them are given compassionate, first-rate treatment by Cuban doctors and therapists, for free and apparently with few questions asked. A lung patient is given an inhalant drug which costs 5 cents in Cuba and $120 in the U.S. One's empathic state at this point is such is that all you care about is that these ravaged, miserable souls (one rescue worker had worn his teeth to stumps with PTSD grinding; he was given a full set of new teeth) finally found someone in the medical profession to take care of them.

Then in an immediate and heartbreaking transition to Los Angeles, we are witness, by video camera, to the practice of USC Hospital's dumping of mentally deranged homeless at the rescue mission in South Central L.A. Cutting off the identifying plastic bracelets, hospitals in the area simply buy a one-way cab ride to the shelter for the indigent, insane, uninsured detritus who can't pay for confinement, with instructions to the cab driver to dump them on the sidewalk. Two countries, two systems.

Some criticism has come Moore's way, of course, about his failure to prescribe a specific remedy. This is ironic, indeed. I am not sure, from the somber tone of this movie, that Moore really means to suggest a solution. He is more like a pathologist doing an autopsy. At one point he overvoices a question which had occurred by the same moment to most audience members: is this who we really are? I thought about this question as I left the theatre. I think maybe this question had already been answered by the Katrina debacle. America's reaction to that tragedy was to treat the victims as a TV show. There was great wringing of hands, for a while, about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were ruined, about all the helpless who drowned or died on the streets. We got over it pretty fast. Probably three-quarters of a million people have died in Iraq because of the American invasion, but we have no official policy of counting them and snipe at people (Johns Hopkins researchers, e.g.) who do. There is no "national conversation" about that, and the official candidates for President consider such a disquieting datum unacceptable in polite debate.

So we're not going to have a national healthcare service in this country. We have Medicare for the elderly, a flawed system which tries to co-exist with the health-for-profit system it's integrated into, but it's headed for a fiscal brick wall along with Social Security. No money is going to be pried loose from the $1 trillion allocation of the discretionary budget given over to war, armaments and intelligence. No serious presidential candidate running in 2008 is proposing universal care, in the sense all other Western industrial democracies already possess, and such a plan, if proposed, would never get through Congress. The flip-point for Social Security and Medicare, when they go red in the middle of the next decade, will ensure that calls for a national health service are labeled unrealistic and unaffordable, while America's "defense" needs are greater than ever, since so many young Muslim men have access to fertilizer and C-4 explosives.

Moore's movie has the quiet, respectful tone of a requiem, or of a grave prognosis made on the basis of a symptom that finally spells the end, despite all heroic efforts to reverse the course of the disease. Let his detractors say what they will, it is a masterwork.


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Searching for hidden clues to America's malaise

There are presently 2.25 million people in America's jails and prisons. China, commonly regarded in the West as a police state and a bastion for human rights violations, has about 1.5 million citizens locked up, although it has about 4 times the U.S. population. Simple math tells us the per capita rate of incarceration in the U.S. is about 6 times higher in America than in China (Chinese prison population = 67% of American; 4 divided by 2/3 = 6.) That strikes me as an astounding differential. Russia, famous for its gulags and Siberian labor camps of another era, weighs in with about 875,000. In fact, the United States, with 5% of the world's population, incarcerates about 1 in 4 of all people under lock and key in the world.

It is interesting to me that the same disproportion keeps showing up in various unfavorable parameters. The United States belches out about 1/4th of the world's CO2 emissions; it uses about 1/4th of the daily energy; it consumes about 1/4th of the world's supply of petroleum. Those three data points, of course, are related directly. I wonder if they might be related to the fourth, the incarceration rate. More than one out of every 150 Americans currently lives in the pokey, while outside the prison walls the free citizens spend their times driving and burning energy at unprecedented rates.

It's probably just a coincidence. We have to remember that 500,000 of those American inmates are in jail on drug charges. Although, when you think about it, could that be a clue as well? What's with all the drug use? Could it have something to do with the profligate use of energy, the indifference to the natural environment, the contempt for the natural horrors that such things bring about? Are all of these things actually related, and are they all, really, symptoms and different manifestations of the same social breakdown?

Lacking the Gravitas for Real Fascism

Thus, my conclusion, my take on the pretentious equation between modern American government and the truly impressive tyrannies of yesteryear, those run by sadistic brutes like Hitler and Mussolini who really knew their way around totalitarianism. As with so many things, we are apt to overrate ourselves and to take our own troubles too seriously. Hitler, in particular, was actuated by a desire to emulate and to outdo Napoleon; thus, his disastrous decision to follow the Little General right over the cliff and invade the Soviet Union. Hitler ran a police state, closed down the free press by force, terrorized the German populace and drove all the powerful and influential dissenters out of the country. The Bush/Cheney Cabal, by contrast, has it very soft. There is a free press, but it's no bother. Bush/Cheney serve the economic interests of the large congolomerates which own about 90% of the media outlets. Why would they have to coerce them? Haven't they always reliably broadcast Bush's pro-war propaganda? Of course they have.

As for running concentration camps - simply unnecessary. Americans, in general, pay no attention to what's going on, and their dissent is limited to writing stupid blogs like this one and to periodically altering the mix of Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate. At the time of the Iraq invasion, 70% of the American populace thought Saddam Hussein was chiefly responsible for 9/11 (see note on "free" press above). While it's true that Bush has a 26% approval rating and Congress is at about 25%, this is because of economic factors. Most Americans, probably on the order of 80%, aren't doing too well anymore, and they will channel their "rage" into voting in a slightly different mix of Republicans and Democrats in 2008, then turn on the 42" plasma and watch re-runs of "Everybody Loves Raymond."

Thus, despite the looming catastrophe of the entitlements programs, and the unstanched flow of American jobs to foreign countries, and our declining standard of living, and the absence of national health, or a comprehensive railroad system that really works, and the insane budget and trade deficits, the current workforce in Congress will, for the most part, remain on the job, enjoying premium healthcare, guaranteed pensions, large staffs, power and influence, and salaries the vast majority of them could not earn in the private sector. As such books as Hostile Takeover, by David Sirota; The Best Congress Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast; What's the Matter with Kansas?, by Thomas Frank (awesomely brilliant), describe in detail, Congress is not engaged in a "conspiracy" against the American people; it is just that they have learned that money is the means by which they can ensure their life-long tenure in Washinton. And the best source of money are the folks who have a lot of it, the lobbyists from America's (increasingly transnationally-oriented) large industries, who tell Congress what to do.

The power flowing through a system defines the system. So said the very bright people who devised systems analysis. What could be simpler? The power in American politics is money: serving the needs of Big Money, passing laws for Big Money, and ignoring anything (like the floundering entitlements programs) not concerned with Big Money. The Republicans build on an unlikely base of the not-well-off by throwing out anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-Fundamentalist rhetoric. The Booboisie swallow it, hook, line and sinker (see Frank, ibid;). The 26% residual support is only partly comprised of America's fat cats; there simply aren't that many of them. The rest are Falwell and Robertson's wingnut brigades.

So it's not Fascism. Fascism would almost be interesting compared to what we got. This is about as interesting as a new Starbucks opening on another corner downtown. The American Congress, and the Executive Branch (unchallenged by the Republican-stacked judiciary or by a tame and compliant press) are more simply a Chamber of Commerce. Whatever is good for business - war, defense contractors, monopoly, tax cuts, lax standards for the environment -defines their mission statement. I don't think it will end well, but neither is it reformable.

Americo-Fascism, part 2

The official budget deficit for the American government, for the last fiscal year available, was about $248 billion. Thanks to the diligent research of Hale "Bonddad" Stewart and others who actually study federal balance sheets, we know that this number is a fiction. It was concocted in the same systematically deceitful way that the federal government announces its deficits or "surpluses" every year, by pretending the "excess" FICA money paid into the Social Security "trust fund" and then swiped by Congress for war and other worthy causes is general revenue, and not a desperately needed reserve for ensuring the solvency of the system in future years. When the truth is told, or the federal cover blown, the actual numbers can be calculated by simply measuring the growth of the national debt year over year. When this is done, the calculation looks like this:
09/30/2006 --- $8,506,973,899,215.23 --- $574,264,237,491.73, where the first figure is the total national debt and the second (about $574 billion) is the growth in the debt from the previous year.

Thus, the true deficit is over twice the official, rosy announcement. Since Bush's pledge to "cut the deficit in half" by 2009 depends on lying, however, the real number is never used since it makes him look bad. Again, and since his latest "approval" rating is 26%, there is only so much more bad news he can take. As has been said so many times it has at last become part of the national discourse, the money swiped from Social Security is replaced with IOUs. L'il W, with his microencephalic grasp of Big Issues and congenital case of foot-in-mouth disease, nearly stepped in it big time when he derided the security for Social Security as a bunch of pieces of paper in a filing cabinet in West Virginia, the repository for the government bonds representing the total owed on an "intragovernmental" basis by the Treasury to the Social Security Trust Fund. Since the Chinese, Japanese and many other foreign nations have invested their Wal-Mart and Prius largesse in exactly these same pieces of paper, Bush's puppeteers told him to cool it with the "filing cabinet" talk. What Bush was unwittingly disclosing, of course, is that the federal government has no earthly way to pay back all that money it has been routinely embezzling in order to run the Military-Industrial Complex all the years since Social Security was reformed (about 25 years ago). The federal government is exactly like a stressed-out member of the American booboisie overheating in a double wide in Bullhead City with his credit cards totally maxed out and just able to pay the vig on his monthly payments. The federal government has no way whatsoever to come up with the actual cash it needs to retire all that foreign debt it has borrowed on time (over $2 trillion at this point) nor to catch up with the "intragovernmental" debts it's piled up. To the foreigners and domestic investors in T-Bills and bonds, the U.S. pays interest, to keep the game afloat. On its intragovernmental obligations, such as to Social Security, it adds another piece of paper detailing the interest "accrued but not paid."

A few years ago Bush had the bright idea of "reforming" Social Security in order to eliminate it. He would privatize it, and require investments of "retirement accounts" on Wall Street, thus rescuing his friends in that languishing industry and also getting the Feds out from under all the money that would otherwise be wasted on Social Security when the system tips from green to red in about 2017 or so. Understanding the mentality behind this move is the principal lesson in today's sermon about America's version of Fascism.

Congress is quite content with Social Security and Medicare so long as these two remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society do not interfere with its true purpose, which is serving the interests of corporate lobbyists. When the systems more or less pay for themselves, all is well. Indeed, better than that, because the boost of FICA taxes in the early 1980's meant that a hidden tax, off the top, was imposed on American workers that found its way into the general revenue, where it could be added to the $1 trillion or so that is spent annually on military and intelligence budgets. Social Security, in particular, thus paid for itself. True, it was boring to Congress members because there was no way to use its funding as a way to sell influence for money from lobbyists. But it was not a complete nuisance, either, because it was a stand-alone system that Congress did not have to pay for, and it did produce that little kicker of a surplus every year. And all those grateful AARP members, who are such diligent voters. Congress is not big on financial planning, however, and it became apparent that American demographics, at some point, were going to flip; there would be insufficient Gen-X and -Y workers working to support the leisure-loving Baby Boomers, particularly since Americans as a rule did not make much money anymore; and a system that had produced a surplus was not only NOT going to pay for itself anymore - it was going to require an actual injection of cash from the real budget, the play money that Congress earmarks and pays out to K Street parasites. And that time was coming within the next decade.

Alan Greenspan has disclosed the grim truth, surprisingly enough. There is simply no way, at this point in time, with so little time left, that America can grow or tax its way out of the coming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. No. Way. Whatsoever. The problem is an order of magnitude removed from fiscal solutions. When the federal government reneges on all of its obligations to Medicare and Social Security, fresh Hell, as Dorothy Parker said, is going to descend on America. The insiders see it coming and are preparing their getaway, in the time-honored manner demonstrated by Fulgencio Batista when he fled Cuba to avoid Castro's retribution. Asked how he had managed to get all that money out of Havana, Fulgencio answered with admirable concision and clarity: "In suitcases."



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