The Iraq of a Grasshopper's Dream

It's one theory of reality: nothing actually exists as we imagine it. We and everything else in the Universe are simply artifacts in the dream of a grasshopper sleeping in a warm meadow in another universe. We move through his dream, live our lives within his dream, perish when his dream says it is time for us to go, and vanish into the nothingness we were before he began dreaming us. It might seem unlikely, but you cannot disprove it. We have no way, in considering an ontological argument, to transcend the severe limits of our own consciousness. Cogito, ergo sum? Or I am only to the extent I think I am?

I don't know whether Bush really believes what he is saying about Iraq because I can't inhabit his consciousness. I would say that he seems an unusually obdurate man; it would be good, just once, to see him abandon the staged situations, the Q&A with handpicked interlocutors, and really engage in an argument with someone, maybe on the floor of the Senate, where the conversation goes back and forth and we actually have an opportunity to gauge the empirical basis for these things he says. Bush is so relentlessly controlled in format. No one ever has the chance to delve deeply into his premises or analysis. Is he afraid and insecure? Does he buy that far into his own arrogance?

I'm not trying to be arch or condescending here. I sometimes feel for the guy, I have to say. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was not the worst thing a world leader has ever done. Hussein was an immensely cruel and insanely barbaric tyrant. Despite pictures of Saddam shaking hands with Rumsfeld in the early Eighties, Hussein should always have been our natural enemy. We should not have countenanced his despotism, and it is too bad that our addiction to oil forced us to do business with him. Yet Bush ordered an invasion into a culture that is vastly different from America, and about which he knew little. He operated on the basis of naive assumptions about the essential similarities among people everywhere, an insular and provincial ignorance which typifies many American attitudes about the rest of the world. Maybe he was right to hope the Shia would not only forgive the Sunni for the depredations of the Saddam years, but would let the disputes about the rightful place of Ali in the line of caliphates dating from the 600's go too, all for the sake of peace and prosperity in Iraq. Wishing didn't make it so. He needed to understand that clearly in 2003 and he didn't. He unleashed an unrelenting Hell in Iraq.

I wonder if he understands that this Iraq he talks about, from all reports, must be in a state of near anarchy. Extrapolations of the 2006 Lancet study, undertaken with the assistance of epidemiologists and statisticians at Johns Hopkins, place the number of violent deaths in Iraq, over and above baseline expectations, at more than one million Iraqis. Add to this number the two million internally displaced Iraqis (victims of sectarian and ethnic cleansing and refugees from violence) and two million Iraqis who have left the country (many of whom were the country's professional, business and economic elite) and you reach a number which represents 20% of the Iraqi population at the time of the invasion. If the same thing happened, proportionally, in the United States, a total of sixty million people would be displaced, driven out of the country or murdered. Then consider the well-documented stories that chronic shortages of electricity, gasoline, water and basic services, such as garbage collection and medical treatment, torment those who are still there, and that unemployment affects at least half the populace.

How can Bush talk about Iraq, give a speech on national TV, without mentioning any of these incontrovertible facts? How can he possibly talk about "success" in Iraq? His Iraq may exist in the dream of a grasshopper, or in the reverie of a boll weevil chewing away on cotton on a farm somewhere in central Texas, but it doesn't exist in the Middle East.

President Drymouth Advances to the Podium

I'll certainly tune in tonight to listen to George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America, lay it out for us on this whole Iraq situation. I'm a loyal citizen, after all, taught in my civics or social studies or whatever we called them classes in elementary school about the demands of citizenship. I need to be informed, and the man who is briefed daily on this obviously critical situation in Iraq is clearly the guy who can fill me in. So I'll watch, trying my best to ignore all the incredibly irritating tics, mannerisms, mispronunciations and affected sincerity which we've come to expect from our Chief Executive.

My main question is probably also your question: why is he giving this speech? Put another way, who is the audience? It can't be the American people, as I usually think about those 300 million souls. George W. Bush long ago stopped caring about the American people, if he ever cared. If you think about his life, its main focus is to avoid all real contact with us. He lives inside multiple layers of insulation, and his announced goals, upon retirement, are to retreat inside various fortresses, such as the Crawford "ranch," and to reduce his interaction with the American people to the vanishing point. People bug George. He doesn't like them. He likes riding his bike and going fishing with Barney. All his "friends" have left the White House now, and it must seem increasingly bizarre to him that he goes on being President, month after month, year after year, with the end still so far away.

So he's not talking to us. We all know what he's going to say anyway. The surge has begun to work, but there is still much to be done. President Maliki is making slow but steady progress toward political cooperation, but he needs more breathing room to put together a functional coalition government. Conditions have improved, and if they remain on this track, he can foresee a draw-down of perhaps 30,000 American troops by next spring. He'll remind us that he's aware of the pain and sacrifice endured by America's brave men and women in Iraq, that he's grateful for their service, but that we must be patient while we complete the mission in Iraq, the central front in the global war on terror. We must not forget that the world is a dangerous place and America has many enemies who would do us harm if we are not vigilant...I wonder if at about this point, his own mind wanders off and he finds, on coming to, that he has been reading from the TelePrompter for 5 or 10 minutes without realizing it. You've had that happen to you many times, right? You're in a conversation, or in class, and you realize you haven't been consciously present for...how long has it been? It's weird, isn't it? I'll bet it can happen during a Presidential address too. I'll bet it happens tonight. Let's look for it!

I don't think Bush is addressing his fellow Republicans. This war could be the end of their political careers, and they don't believe his Panglossian evaluations for a minute. The Saudis? There's a chance, but he talks to them privately all the time. He doesn't need TV for that. So it's not us, it's not the Republicans, it's not the Saudis. The Iraqis? No, I don't think so; why would they listen to this guy who's never really been to Iraq?

Okay, so is there is no audience. Why's he doing this? Because it's what Presidents do? Because he's bored? Because he's....? Okay, so we've reached a new milestone in George's presidency. He's now doing things for no reason whatsoever. He's doing them to do them. It makes the time go faster. Something is solipsistic about this, isn't it? George has completely personalized the office. He's going to do things now, not to get anything done, not to accomplish missions (he can't get anything done anymore), but to pass the time. To get from here to sometime in January, 2009. He can't spend the whole time on vacation; he's already broken the record for that. At a certain point, a President who is always on vacation begins to disconcert an already very nervous populace, even if we're glad he's away. When he's in a foreign country, though, really weird things start happening, such as calling the Australians Austrians. Early in his Presidency, he thought the Swiss Guard were Swedish. He walks into doors, or off the sheer drop of a stage, or runs his bicycle into a group of Scottish policemen. So we need to keep him around where we can keep an eye on him. So that's the answer to tonight's riddle: we'll know where he is, what he's doing, and it won't do any harm because it doesn't mean anything at all. That's why I'll watch: to relax.

Comrades, Let's Not Get Hysterical Here

"Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies. Described as China's 'nuclear option' in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels." Telegraph (UK), September 8, 2007.

[the following is a transcript of telephone call from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson's office, intercepted by the NSA as part of its routine monitoring of overseas calls]

Hi? Mr. Hu? No, it's a terrific connection! Huh? Heck no, no one's listening in! That's just for terrorists.

I'm saying your name right, aren't I? It's Hu Jin-Tao, I know, but you put your first names...oh never mind, even the President got it right. How tough can it be? Ha ha. He's a card, isn't he? What will he do next? Like that whole dust-up about melamine in the pet food. Sheesh. Okay, so Rover's evening meal tastes a little like IKEA furniture. Is that so bad? And everybody's little darling Tiffany curled up next to her lead-based Barbie -- maybe ten or fifteen IQ points, tops. Who's counting? If an American loses IQ points, can you even tell? Ha ha! We elected Bush! Ha ha ha!

No seriously, Mr. Hu, and I mean this sincerely...hey, do you know that Abbott & Costello routine? It's hilarious! Hu's on first? Get it? Oh, they would kill you with that, Mr. President. Really, I can find a CD for you...what am I talking about? You guys have already bootlegged it! No, that's another lousy joke. But on this nuclear option thing, Mr. Hu. You know...this is starting to make people nervous. Now I know, I know -- Congress likes to talk awful tough about fair trade and exporting jobs and labor standards and environmental stuff and blah blah blah. Even putting a tariff of 27% on Chinese imports because you guys won't let the yuan float up against the poor old hammered dollar! You know, so the things we make and sell to you will be cheaper, you know, things like...like...well, you know, stuff we make. Okay, so we make all of "our" stuff in factories in your country. Still, the idea is...huh? No, I'm not babbling! I don't think so, anyway.

Look, can I be honest for a minute? Just between us "comrades." Get it? Oh yeah, we love to laugh here in the States. Yeah, I know, I know - when I laugh these days it sounds like I'm strangling. You've got us a little on edge with this "dump-the-T-bills" stuff. That's getting way out there, right? I mean, come on. Sure, maybe we shouldn't have put a couple of wars on our Chinese credit card over the last six years or so, and maybe, when a country's standard of living is going downhill, that's the wrong time to double the size of the houses and buy cars the size of a Sherman tank, using all that money you send back to us after we send it to you to buy all the stuff that you make and we make in your country...huh? The tinkling noise? Oh, I guess I can tell you, Mr. President, I poured myself a little snort from the office bottle. I'm feeling a little nerved-up. Huh? Sure, he used to drink a lot. Not anymore. What? Yeah, he was running businesses while he was drunk, I'm sure... No, I see what you're driving at. Sure. Couldn't agree with you more. It looks like he's been running the country the same way. But that's all in the past. Tell you something else that's in the past, Mr. Hu. All this "trade sanction" talk, and tariffs and complaining about a little pesticide in the Meow Mix. We're friends, and friends cut each other some slack. So forget about all that. And that 1.3 trillion in Treasury bills you guys own? Why not leave it right here, where it's safe and sound. I'm sure you guys feel right at home here. It's almost like you own the place. What's that? Gotta go? Sure, you've got a big country to run, I understand. But I'll tell you who's on first for me, Mr. Hu. You, comrade. My pal! So just between us, Mr. President, no rude surprises, okay? You stay in touch...

[line went dead at this point in transcript]

David Vitter, the Gift That Keeps on Giving

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A former New Orleans prostitute who will be featured in Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine appeared at his office Tuesday to accuse Sen. David Vitter of having a sexual relationship with her in 1999. Wendy Ellis told reporters that Vitter visited her two to three times a week for sexual relations between July and November 1999.

"Abstinence education is a public health strategy focused on risk avoidance that aims to help young people avoid exposure to harm. These programs have been shown to effectively reduce the risks of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by teaching teenagers that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness." from Sen. Vitter's letter of June 21, 2007, to Sen. Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Committe on Finance.

Dear Senator Vitter,

Not to worry, David. Noted political commentator and sex impresario Larry Flynt has accurately doped out your situation. While your Republican colleague Larry Craig was quickly and mercilessly shown the door because of his wide stance and restless leg syndrome, your situation is very different. You're a freshman senator from a state with a Democratic governor. Craig, by contrast, represents the reddest of red states, Idaho. Moral censure of Senator Craig, therefore, is appropriate because his replacement will be named by a Republican governor. In a senate where the margins are so razor thin, where there are Republicans, Democrats and Joseph Lieberman, there has to be a limit to all this tiresome moralizing, right, Senator McConnell?
Personally, I would hate to see you go, David. Whenever the American political scene gets a little too dreary, out clatters another skeleton from your voluminous closet.

Maybe you don't personally make all those best choices for health and happiness, but you're faithful in your own way. The latest ho to blow the whistle on you, who apparently just passed a lie detector test and appeared on the Dan Abrams Show with that rascal Larry Flynt, uses the name Wendy. That's so...sweet, because that's your wife's name. Maybe it was a cry for help, or you were just being sentimental. However, I have to raise a delicate question, which you may know the answer to better than I, given your extensive work in the Abstinence Program. It Depends (I'm sorry about the lousy pun) on the precautions you took, but the ho says you were dropping by "to do your business" (sure, cold and mercantile, but what do you expect from a ho?, Senator) two to three times a week for four months. So if she's telling the truth, you were unfaithful to Wendy with Wendy perhaps as many as 50 times. Might there be an element of...risk there, Senator, of the kind you want the nation's youth to avoid? Could you unwittingly have been bringing a little of Wendy Ellis home to Wendy Vitter?

My guess is that Wendy Ellis, as opposed to Wendy Vitter, is not an adherent of the Abstinence Program, and paid no attention to your sound advice about monogamy. I guess what I'm saying, Senator, is that it's unlikely you were her only john, although, in fairness to you, I would wager that you were her most distinguished john - not only a United States Senator, but a major proponent of the Abstinence Education Program, Section 510 of the Social Security Act, which your almost unbelievably sanctimonious letter to Senator Baucus describes as "critical in supporting communities who wish to promote good and healthy choices for our nation's adolescents."

When I was one of the nation's adolescents fumbling around in the back seat of a 1965 Mercury Comet, I didn't have an Abstinence Program to steer me right. I'm not absolutely certain it would have done the trick, tell the truth. There is only so much that education can do when confronted by the forces of nature. I sense you know what I mean. Maybe this latest embarrassment will blow over soon. This gal could be an opportunist, despite the passing grade on Flynt's lie detector test. She's going to do a spread in Hustler, of course, and she'll be paid. That looks better for you, as you fend off another round of sordid accusations. I'd say your chances of keeping your seat are excellent, unless too many more revelations hit the airwaves. What might finally do you in is if Larry can get enough gals together to do a Girls of Senator Vitter issue. That probably wouldn't help a lot with Wendy #1, either. Anyway, go back and read your June 21 letter one more time. If it can stop a horny nineteen year old boy from making a serious mistake, it just might work for you.

Senator Diaper Weighs in at the Petraeus Hearings

I thought General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker showed admirable restraint when Senator David Vitter asked them for a "bottom up" analysis of the pacification of Anbar Province in America's 51st and most important state, Iraq. Petraeus, in particular, seems like a classic alpha male, a man among men, a natural leader, and I suspect he fought hard to suppress images of Vitter, as the Senator asked questions in his lisping, simpering fashion, lying swaddled on a bed, kicking his chubby legs in the air while a team of ho's slapped the Johnson's Baby Powder off their hands. Say what you will about the General's political ambitions and his aim-to-please-Bush approach to analysis of Iraq, he showed a lot of class in keeping a straight face despite the contempt that must have roiled his otherwise highly disciplined thinking. The General's name will not be found on the D.C. Madame's list, and I am confident Petraeus changes his own shorts.

So America's strategic defense seems to be in good hands as long as we have real men like General Petraeus willing to serve the country, and his willingness, furthermore, to submit politely to softball questions from Senator Diaper, while causing me to snort coffee out my nose while I watched, assures me that the continuity of this great Republic is a mortal lock. I guess. Of course, we have to keep in mind that the Iraq War has nothing to do with anything, and that General Petraeus presides (by default, since Bush has deputized his Commander in Chief role to his newest favorite guy) over the stupidest, most wasteful, most suicidal adventure in American history. And Congress just cannot stop talking about it.

I suppose Marshall McLuhan had a bead on this a long time ago. We can't even see "Iraq" anymore in its proper context. The constant repetition of the words "Iraq" and "Iraq War," and the endless train of images on television, together with the barrage of news in the big dailies and on the Internet, have created an Entity (The Iraq War) that dwarfs our capacity to conceptualize it. The important subtext of the message in the media is simply that, that Iraq is something we must talk about, all the time, it must dominate all discussions, it must set all our priorities, that regardless of its actual importance to the reality of America, we must continue, for years and years, to live under its tyrannical reign of dominance.

And Iraq, really? It's a country somewhere in the Middle East, east of Syria, west of Iran, north of Saudi Arabia, sharing a border with Jordan. It has a lot of petroleum under the ground. The population is less than the state of California, and seems to be declining steadily. It is a country now in the process of accelerating dissolution. It has evolved, with American intervention, from a police state with basic functionality to an anarchic shooting gallery. If I were an Iraqi, I'm not sure which state of being I would prefer. It's entirely possible I would choose the present over the Saddam years, but I would not see either life course as a lucky accident of birth. But we could leave Iraq tomorrow and the only effects for us would be completely positive. We all know that. We would immediately begin saving money, lives, our sanity. We would lessen the international threat of terrorism. Even the Great American Booboisie know that, which is why 70% of us want it to end. Congress could end it. And it won't. Members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, prefer the political calculations of maintaining power and winning the Iraq game, the game called "level of violence" in Iraq. That is what everyone now talks about, what Petraeus testifies about, what the analysts write about. Everything in the United States, the collapse of the housing market, the tanking economy, the falling bridges, the ruined city of New Orleans, the gargantuan national debt and trade deficits, the declining standard of living for about 90% of the populace -- all this is subordinate to whether in fact the monthly body count of Shia and Sunni in four provinces of Iraq is higher this month than during the same period in 2006.

Somewhere Over the Benchmarks

The Labor Department reported today that the U.S. sustained a net loss of 4,000 jobs last month, despite an earlier estimate the economy would increase payrolls by 100,000. The unemployment rate stayed the same, since 600,000 people "left the job market," whatever that means. Lost their minds? Turned to a life of crime? The stock market reacted by plunging about 200 points on the bellwether Dow Jones. Financial experts with a vested interest in pimping the vitality of the levitated economy, which depends entirely now on a positive outlook among American consumers (as does the rest of the world's economy -- it's all up to you Mr. & Mrs. Smith: are you going to buy that four-piece sectional or not?), were quick to point out that none of these numbers means anything, that all is well, that the economy is strong and "robust" (everything these days is robust), and we should not panic and think that the American economy (and thus the world) is headed for a Depression, because Bernanke may lower the discount rate by 50 basis points later this month and that should take care of everything.

I don't see how there can be any inherent strength in the American economy left, in my admittedly undegreed opinion (I mean, I have a couple of degrees, but they're not from the Stanford Business School). The USA built a Potemkin village of an economy by mortgaging all of its real estate through the use of recycled dollars returning from China, but I'm wondering if Bernanke can actually resort yet again to the same strategy in the face of a cratering U.S. currency. He may have no choice, of course, because Bush, who hit the 500-day mark today (so my National Nightmare Clock tells me), is going to look more ridiculous than usual asking for another $50 billion to invest in Iraqi oil futures on behalf of Exxon, Texaco, et alia, if it appears that the U.S. is about to go belly up. Not that it would deter him in the slightest, but I'm thinking that even this most unconscious of leaders (who apparently thought, while he was in Australia addressing APEC, that he was in Austria speaking to OPEC) must have some sort of upper limit for cognitive dissonance. You have probably noticed by now that Bush is not the most original of thinkers. If U.S. military occupation in Iraq is not working, his go-to solution is to increase the size of the U.S. military occupation. Thus, flooding the economy with cheap money by means of running $800 billion trade deficits in tandem with half-trillion dollar budget deficits, all against a national debt of about $9 trillion, is Bush's sole economic initiative for what you might call the American People. The upper echelons of large American transnational corporations, which are Bush's actual constituency, are interested also in the American populace as a segment of their world market.

I don't know what you call this system of government we've evolved into (even though I do have a degree in that subject). "Fascism" gets thrown around, but I've never thought that was apt. That's just American overreaction, a precious tendency to overvalue our troubles. Fascism, in the good ol' Hitlerian and Mussolinian way, always involves guys with thick necks and big boots beating the crap out of the domestic citizenry. I'm reading the second volume about the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans, Cambridge historian and personal hero (he was the principal defense witness in the David Irving trial), and he makes a very interesting point. Up until the Great Depression of 1929 and following, the Nazis were a marginal political party in Germany, controlling less than 3% of the seats in the Reichstag. After the bottom fell out of the German (and world) economy, the Nazis made their move, and Hitler complemented his political intrigue in Berlin by rounding up the Communists, Social Democrats and Centrists, beating and torturing them, and cramming them into concentration camps. Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

From a historical perspective, the acute danger to the United States probably will follow in the wake of Bush's misrule in the U.S. His indifferent approach to America's real problems, which are now beginning to surface definitively, has laid the groundwork for a very regressive and authoritarian regime. I will credit Bush with helping us get used to the idea of disappearing freedoms. The middle class is sinking beneath a tsunami of debt, our educational standards are going to hell, more and more people lack healthcare, and the looming nightmare of Baby Boom retirement en masse, seen against a backdrop of unsustainable debt, means the entitlement programs, on which most retiring Americans will depend for basic solvency, may evaporate.

When and if those distressing trends reach full materialization, we will see just how "resilient" our constitutional form of government is. I suspect there is going to be the same sense of injured pride and resentment as was found among the Volk in Deutschland in the early Thirties. A once-great power, still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, now humbled by a failed war and a rusting economy, will look around for scapegoats. That could get very dicey. Anyone wishing to write a dissident blog under those conditions might want to reconsider. Bush is not Hitler, after all. Bush is a spoiled dilettante with no sense of mission and no real agenda, except for self-aggrandizement. Hitler was the real, horrific thing, and the possibility exists that somewhere out there in the vast American hinterland there is a charismatic lunatic with just the right combination of ruthlessness and fanaticism to take advantage of what America may become, and to summon the aggrieved populace toward a dark future.

George Bush's Iraq, or Why Studying Matters

A friend and witty observer of the geopolitical scene writes to the Blogmeister here at the Pond:

"...as a loyal reader, could you please let us know how L. Paul Bremer the sixteenth is the chosen fall guy for Iraq going to hell. it all woulda worked out if we had only kept all major thugs in their positions of power; i think that's the message. instead, the way it is being put forth, L. Paul (sorry! maybe he's L. Paul the fifteenth - forever getting my Yale legacies and bow ties all mixed up) got on his cell (this was in pre-IED days, that mahvelous acronym even David the Latin General Petraeus had never heard of before this REALLY FUN INVASION for guys like General P)...anyhow L.Paul the thirty-seventh gets on his cell and in perfectly fluent Arabic, at least from the script MacKenzie consultants put together for him - with a part of their fee being generously provided by America's favorite flag-wavers - Halliburton, Inc. - so L. Paul the twenty-ninth says in arabic to nine thousand Iraqi generals and colonels and majors longing for freedom and a chance to go to the Super Bowl, L. Paul the ninth, he says, "you're fired." If we only could have stopped him! Then every single one of those longing-for-freedom generals and colonels and majors would have written go-to-the-ballot box pamphlets so Iraqis living in Vancouver, Canada could weep over the wonders of democracy. Plus, this sacred Army that L.Paul the twenty-second fired would have made sure no damn sectarian religious violence ever would have taken place, they would have got the oil up and flowing, and all the girls in Iraq would have become fashion models, as there most certainly would have been a military ban on burkas." (Reprinted without permission.)

As we anxiously await General Petraeus's doctored-up and bowdlerized report, which has been seditiously anticipated by the GAO report and by a leaked and undrylabbed version of the Pentagon report (that is, a version prior to a working-over by the Bush Fantasists, maybe like Philip Cooney, the petroleum industry lawyer who rewrote James Hansen's too-dismal dispatches on global warming, edits which have probably been of scant comfort to Yucatan residents during this hurricane season) - we might, moving past this digression, consider this colorful kibbitzing, centering as it does on what I like to think of as the central fallacy of the Grand Misadventure in Iraq, the If Only We Had Fallacy. The IOWH Fallacy has served as the central thesis of a whole shelf of books on Iraq, such as, most notably, Thomas Ricks's fine book "Fiasco," the title saying practically all there is to say. Ricks's book, as do such movies as "No End in Sight," goes into excruciating, exhausting, eye-crossing (was looking for that 3rd "e") detail about the key "early mistakes" of the Iraq Occupation. If only we hadn't disbanded the Iraqi Army, if only we hadn't de-Baathified the government, if only we had guarded the Baghdad Museum and not just the oil ministry, if only we had listened to General Shinseki, if only we hadn't hired 22 year old American interns to occupy such positions as Minister of the Iraq Economy, if only L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer had not been such a predictably wussy Ivy League silver-spoon bowtie-wearing horse's ass.

Here's the relevant If Only: if only we hadn't invaded Iraq. Stop right there. Now it's true that makes for a short book. I could write that book; in fact, I just did. "If Only We Hadn't Invaded Iraq," by Waldenswimmer. The book would consist of a cover and maybe a title page. Reporters such as Thomas Ricks, or the fine duo of Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor, who wrote "Cobra II," which is like "Fiasco" only with more footnotes, are more market savvy. They saw through the financial problems of the one-page (one-line, in fact) book, and realized that their talk-show appearances would have been severely limited. Casual buyers at Borders and Barnes & Noble (soon, I understand, to be Barnes&Borders or Borders&Noble, which might lead the way to consolidation of a lot of things: WalMart + CostCo = CostMart; General Motors + Chrysler = General Chrysler; McDonald's + Burger King = King McDonald - why do we have all those meaningless choices anyway? And then why not simply consolidate all these outlets into one enterprise called The American Company Store, and sell everything there, and be done with it, once and for all? another digression, of course, leading us back to our buyers at Borders/Barnes...) would browse the "New Nonfiction" table, pick up the book, read it in its entirety, and put it back down. Wouldn't that curtail sales? You betcha it would. So you see, Ricks (a Pentagon reporter for the New York Times with many valuable "contacts") and Trainor, a retired general, of course, really don't dwell on what you might otherwise think is a pivotal issue, invading a "sovereign" country in violation of international law, a "nation" of warring tribes which have not gotten along for about 1,500 years, which are still having homicidal arguments about things that happened, oh I don't know, in 732 or so, a country held together by baling wire and duct tape and the police state apparatus of Saddam Hussein -- and an invasion, furthermore, on the basis of fraudulent evidence about nonexistent weapons and completely bogus connections to 9/11 - it was the way we did it that matters, and especially allowing a guy who wears construction boots with his pinstripe suits and repp ties, all beneath that fashionably long mop of thick Waspy hair. Are we clear here?

What bullshit. What a waste of paper and celluloid. What a colossal waste of money for everyone who bought those books or saw those movies. True, they demonstrate the incompetence of the Bush Administration. Also, lying in the tropical sun all day will demonstrate for you the skin-damaging properties of solar radiation. We didn't need Iraq to prove Bush doesn't know what he's doing and that he's indifferent to everything except corporate cupidity; Katrina did that for us. The focus on "Bremer's mistakes," as my witty correspondent points out, simply confuses the issue. The invasion and occupation of Iraq were never going to work under any circumstances. We could have sent one million troops; we could have guarded all the armories; we could have sent an American Legion of Museum Curators to personally babysit every last precious antiquity in the Baghdad Museum; we could have kept the Iraqi Army completely intact; we could have avoided throwing all the babies out with the Baath water. And Iraq would look precisely as it does today. Iraq was centrifugal destruction waiting to happen. The essential difficulty is not described in the books written after the invasion (with the notable exception, perhaps, of Peter Galbraith's book The End of Iraq) but in all the books written about Iraq before the invasion which Bush & Co. never bothered to read, such as David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace." In this, the fiasco in Iraq is the perfect metaphor for modern America.

I hope, Aurie, this answers your question. I return now to the Bean Field and to working on the re-fi of my subprime mortgage.

High Solonic Night at the Congressional Bath House

Okay, it's officially getting weird in the Republican Party. The analogies between the decadent phase of the Roman Empire and the twilight of the American Imperium grow more piquant by the day. Or maybe the better comparison is to all that perverted shit going on in the Berlin bunker, circa March-April, 1945.

However we frame it, the Grand Old Perverts are losing control. At this rate, the most likely venues for the Republican Convention in 2008 will be Fire Island or poolside in Palm Springs. Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho, though not for long) is the latest to come staggering out of the closet, busted in the men's room at an airport in Minneapolis. The undercover cop, Sgt. Dave Karsnia, might consider a post-retirement career in noir crime writing, to judge from his incident report. Reminiscent of James M. Cain or early Dashiell Hammett. Craig, of course, is dead meat at this point, but I give him credit for creative explanation. If only someone who wrote less lucidly than Raymond Chandler had been in the next stall...

The most irritating part of the report was realizing what a creepy bozo Larry Craig is. Look, using a rest room for sit-down business in an airport is never a peak experience in any normal person's life. You want to go in, get it over with, and get out, all the while wishing you had planned your life better. You don't want to sit in there and have some sixtyish perv walk up to the crack between the door and the frame, stare in at you, step back, step up and stare at you some more -- then take the adjoining left hand stall, start with a Morse code routine of toe tapping, then begin side slipping his right foot under the partition until it touches your shoe, then finally reach with his left hand under the partition and begin gesturing...

I don't know what they're paying Sgt. Dave Karsnia, but it can't be enough. Maybe he just sits in bathrooms doing these sting operations during the day to support his writing at night. He's working on something that will make us forget all about The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. His police report is a masterpiece of spine-tingling (and stomach-churning) development. Leading to the famous scene where the Senator, with whatever dignity he has left, produces his business card and asks Karsnia, "What do you think about that?"

Well, I don't know what to think about that. Craig now "regrets" pleading guilty. I just bet he does. Still, it seems unlikely that a United States Senator would plead guilty to charges of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace stemming from the solicitation of homosexual acts just "to get it over with." He thought he could slip the whole thing by public scrutiny, and since there were already media reports about something similar in Union Station in Washington, D.C. last October, the more quietly the better. So no lawyer, no trial, just a guilty plea and a fine. Then the explanations about his "wide stance" while on the john. Lemme see, you're sitting on the toilet and your "wide stance" places your right foot all the way over into the adjoining stall so that it touches your neighbor's foot? I'm trying to imagine the biomechanical advantage of this highly unorthodox maneuver.

Larry Craig, need we say it, is a "family values" freak, anti-gay marriage, a supporter of the Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, or defining marriage as limited to one man marrying one woman, which must disappoint some of his large Mormon constituency there among the Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head suburbs of Idaho. Yet, despite being a men's room hook-up artist, Senator Craig is himself married, with children and grandchildren. So his own gay life didn't break up his heterosexual marriage; if that's true, why should Bruce and Dexter's marriage across the street have any effect? Of course, he denies that he's gay, which involves us in existential epistemology. I guess he just does gay things, while retaining his right to hypocrisy and intolerance as if he didn't. Increasingly, that appears to be the GOP's M.O. Not that there isn't anything wrong with that.

Inspector Boosh ees still ahn zee case!

One of the more fruitful collaborations in movie history was that between Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers, with such movies as A Shot in the Dark, The Pink Panther and The Party as the result. In the Panther movies, Sellers played Inspector Jacques Clouseau, of the French Surete, given to bombastic and somewhat pompous declarations about the unique insights of his approach to police work, and also to incredibly funny physical sequences in which he would, for example, destroy an entire drawing room while a staid and mystified group of aristocrats looked on in mute horror. In The Party, which Sellers plays in East Indian blackface, he manages to wreck, all by himself, an upstairs bathroom while the party is in progress. This destruction is inevitably effected seamlessly by a series of artfully connected pratfalls, inadvertent body movements, and futile attempts to regain his balance which cumulatively lead to catastrophe. They are nearly impossible to describe in words, which makes sense because they are sight gags non pareil. I imagine they originated with a few sketchily described prompts from Edwards, where he might say, "You are in an elegant parlor with the evil Victor and the beautiful Maria Gambrelli, also present are the chauffeur and gardener and a bunch of aristocrats. While describing the solution to the murder, you manage to destroy the room."
Peter Sellers and his comic genius did the rest.

And then we have another kind of genius, our very own Inspector Boosh of the Boosh Administration. I have maintained for some time that describing Bush's performance as "incompetent" or "bumbling" (the word always used with Clouseau) doesn't quite capture the man's true aptitude for destruction. While in office, Bush has overseen the destruction of the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, the entire city of New Orleans and the whole country of Iraq. While he's been at it, he's wrecked the U.S. military, reversed a budget surplus to a $9 trillion national debt, mortgaged the U.S. Treasury to the Chinese and Japanese, devalued the dollar to something resembling the Mexican peso, and utterly destroyed America's good standing and reputation internationally. He has accomplished all of this in only 6-1/2 years. Of course, this is a very partial list, because it leaves out his obstinate refusal to cooperate with the world on climate change, his subjugation of American science to religious stupidity, and his dismantling of the Constitutional Bill of Rights. All of his intelligence agencies report that the net effect of his profligacy, his war on terror, his endless battle for Iraq, his overuse of the military has been to create a far more dangerous world, while impoverishing and stigmatizing the United States.

Screwing up on this level goes way beyond "incompetence." I would posit that this (and this alone) is Bush's true gift. One might seek high and low to find some other evidence of talent or aptitude in W, but one would seek in vain. I sometimes ask myself how this might have transpired, and where I arrive is that Bush represents the peculiar, perhaps unique, confluence of certain forces in American history that produced just such an unprecedented personage at his particular time.

The first of these is the strange American preoccupation with dynasties. While it's true we threw off King George III in the late 1700's, we did not, it seems, transcend our taste for aristocracy. Whenever an American lineage rises up, with blue blood coursing in its veins, such as the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the (godhelpus) Bushes, and now with the ascension of Mitt, Son of George, and Hillary, from the self-fabricated dynasty of the Clintons, Americans bow and pay homage. I think it's more than name recognition or brand loyalty. We think there is something to this idea of "breeding," that a person from an aristocratic background will in some way have the natural self-confidence and -esteem to weather an international crisis or take an unpopular stand simply because it's the right thing to do. And because we think this way, Bush has inculcated and internalized society's regard for his special place in our society. He sees himself as a blue blood, a peer of the realm, who went to all the right schools (Phillips, Yale, Harvard), and if his younger years were spent in wastrel ways, that too is part of the aristocratic tradition. When called to the service of the kingdom, he put aside his dissipation, rose to the challenge and assumed his natural position of leadership.

This sense of noble privilege, I think, is what makes Bush immune from constructive criticism. Much is made of his religious belief, but from reliable reports, Bush does not even go to church. His religiosity is a P.R. creation of Karl Rove (an agnostic), and simply a useful trope in the Republican Southern Strategy. If Bush believes in divinity, it is in the divine right of kings to rule. As the eldest son of the Bush Dynasty (begun with Prescott and reaching its apotheosis with George H.W. Bush, who was head of the CIA, Ambassador to the UN, Vice President and President), George W. was entitled to the privileges of primogeniture, and his innate sense of specialness was reinforced at every turn by the money always made available to him, by the powerful friends of Poppy who cleaned up his mistakes and salvaged his mismanagement, who assured him of his greatness, who sought his name to legitimate their enterprises, who sponsored his rise to power.

Yet, as Oscar Wilde told us, there is only one true aristocracy, the aristocracy of the mind. Here is where things fell apart for George W. Bush. Reassured at every step of the way that he was special, despite all clear evidence (and wholesale devastation) to the contrary, George's encounter with the complexities of running the most complicated economic/military/diplomatic/political apparatus in the world came a cropper. His brain is simply not up to the task, and the aggressive, even antisocial, natural tendencies of his personality assured that the stupid and bumbling vectors of his decisions would always tend toward destruction and chaos. A man without his sense of entitlement, with a clearer view of the world and his place in it, would have long ago recognized his limitations, panicked, and sought the help of smarter and more capable aides. The smarter and more capable aides are precisely the ones that Bush gets rid of, since they threaten his regal self-image. L'etat, c'est lui.

There is a comic parallel to the epic bumbling of Inspector Clouseau. Bush is, in a way, hilarious, as he moves in his somnambulant, unconscious way from one disaster to another, always with that smirking self-satisfaction which projects his inner sense that he is completely on top of his game. Humor does rely on the juxtaposition of jarring discontinuities, but, sad to say, A Shot in the Dark was just a very funny movie. Inspector Boosh's America really exists.

the ungrateful Nouri

The apparent overarching rationale for the surge is that peaceful conditions in Baghdad may provide the Iraqi leadership with "breathing space" in which the sectarian and ethnic factions may resolve the issues which prevent a unified approach to Iraq's problems. That takes a while to say, but it certainly doesn't take long to figure out it's unlikely to happen. I note that Senator Carl Levin of Michigan is now actively clamoring for the ouster of Nouri al-Maliki, Bush's "good guy in Baghdad," and now Bush is defending Maliki, in a way, by saying his fate is up to the Iraqi people, not "American politicians." Mee-oww, Georgie. This suggests that maybe Bush and Levin, who are both technically on vacation, nevertheless could use a little breathing space of their own.

I'm beginning to think that the Shiite leadership in Baghdad needs a lot more than breathing space. There seem to be about three main things that the Shiite, Sunni and Kurd factions in parliament are supposed to agree on, and two of them are oil distribution and local elections. I would surmise that there's not a hell of a lot to do in the Green Zone, where parliament meets (when not on vacation, as it is now), and if the Iraqis were actually going to agree on these things, which they've been "working on" since last year, they would already have signed the deal. Instead, the Sunni members of the cabinet staged a walkout a few months ago, and now al-Maliki is under siege from his American sponsors because he hasn't put the deal together yet.

Waiting in the wings, I have read here and there, is the cleric Muktada al-Sadr (always referred to as the "firebrand cleric"), who of course led a Shia rebellion against the United States in 2004 in southern Iraq, and has existed as a free man in Iraq despite a three-year old arrest warrant issued by the Iraqi government at the behest of the United States. Thus, ousting Maliki, as urged by the often confused and heavily conflicted Senator Levin, may result in the rise to power of a fugitive from Iraqo-American justice; and from that point on, the U.S. military will be in the position of attempting to create breathing space for a government led by a Shiite cleric who is responsible for killing significant numbers of the U.S. military. Yet if the Iraqi parliament itself accomplishes this result through democratic processes, Bush will of necessity applaud the development and cite it as an example of a "young democracy" in action.

When I think about it this way, I begin to understand why Bush has decided that the real problem in Iraq is al-Qaeda, even if it isn't. At this point, there's no other way of looking at things that would justify remaining in Iraq, if indeed the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq offers any justification at all for remaining there. Even if al-Qaeda is in Iraq, I wonder if the main focus of its "insurgency" is to disrupt the formation of an Iraqi government, or, rather, if it simply sees the U.S. military as a target of opportunity. I will not hold my breath waiting for George W. Bush to spell this out. The U.S. military decided not long ago that Anbar province (where Fallujah is located), a Sunni area, was infested with al-Qaeda and then reached the seemingly counter-intuitive decision to arm the Sunnis (who had killed American soldiers in great numbers during the first few years of the Iraq War) so they could assist in fighting al-Qaeda, who are also, of course, Sunni Muslims. I have the feeling there must be considerably more to this part of the story -- such as the true motivations of the Sunnis in al-Anbar. I suspect that the Sunnis in western Iraq have decided that the partition of Iraq is a fait accompli; so much ethnic cleansing has already occurred in Iraq, with mass migrations out of the country and intramural refugees, that the majority Sunnis, who recognize that the idea of a meaningful role in the central government is a lost hope, have intelligently decided to join forces against the Sunnis (the dead-enders) who chafe at this decision. These dead-enders are what Bush calls al-Qaeda, and it is noteworthy that al-Qaeda is recognized from its "trademark" tactics, such as car bombs which kill large numbers of people. Since car bombs killing large numbers of people have been a staple feature of the Iraq war since 2003, it's hard to see how this is definitively taxonomic. But from the viewpoint of the majority Sunnis in Anbar, and probably in Tikrit and everywhere except war-torn areas of Baghdad, receiving arms and materiel from the Americans will prove strategically advantageous when the Shia begin the final cleansing of Iraq following the departure of the Americans, probably beginning in 2009.

Meanwhile, the Shia will continue to stall and temporize in the Green Zone, because they have no intention of sharing power with the Sunnis. Maliki, who spent the Saddam years as a fugitive in Iran and Syria, organizing and provisioning guerrilla bands of Shiites who attacked the Sunnis, is the kind of guy the Shia want in power, because he is uncompromising. He is disappointing to the Bush Administration because he refuses to put together the kind of smiling happy people government of Shia Kurds & Whey that Bush is looking for as the final (and single) triumph of his presidency. Maliki has had the colossal effrontery of parading his close ties with Syria and Iran recently, and Bush has had to remonstrate with him from afar. Maliki has even said he can find other friends besides the United States, if he needs allies, and I'm wondering if he's thinking of enlisting the military aid of, say, Russia or China, to help him stay in power if the U.S. applies too much pressure to oust him, so that the U.S.A. could conceivably find itself in World War III as part of its effort to give Maliki the breathing space he needs to put together a coalition government in Baghdad, only then the U.S. military's role would be to fight a war against Maliki and his allies (who would probably be promised Iraq's oil concessions after the war with the Americans) as part of the American effort to give that same government the breathing space it needs to form a unified leadership.

Anyway, Bush's friend with the permanent 5 o'clock shadow is just not playing ball. But I don't think it's because Nouri lacks the space to breathe. I think it's because he thinks Bush has done all he can for Nouri, and he's thinking, thanks, cowboy, and don't let the door to the souk hit your horse in the ass on the way out.

The MAD World Returns

August 18 (from the Los Angeles Times) -Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Friday reinstatement of the Soviet-era practice of having nuclear bombers routinely fly long-distance flights that bring them within striking distance of the United States and its allies.

"Today, just after midnight, 14 strategic missile aircraft, with support and fuel planes, took off from seven airfields across Russia," Putin said in televised remarks.

The White House sought to play down the Russian action, insisting that the resumption of flights did not indicate a worsening of relations or present a new strategic threat to the United States.

Muffley:

Well I assume then, that the planes will return automatically once they reach their failsafe points.

Turgidson:

Well, sir, I'm afraid not. You see the planes were holding at their failsafe points when the go code was issued. Now, once they fly beyond failsafe they do not require a second order to proceed. They will fly until they reach their targets.

Muffley:

Then why haven't you radioed the planes countermanding the go code?

Turgidson:

Well, I'm afraid we're unable to communicate with any of the aircraft.

(from "Dr. Strangelove," by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George.)

*************

Oh come on, admit it. It doesn't make you unpatriotic at all. Your nervous system has been conditioned to Mutually Assured Destruction, and you were feeling a little disoriented, that's all. You're kind of glad that Putin, former KGB operative, is back in the nuclear game. The good news is that the Russian resumption of strategic bomber flights includes the Chinese, so now the assurance of destruction is...well, it's never been such a sure thing, put it that way. Granted, a little permutation crunching (as Buck Turgidson might have said) reveals that the addition of a third player to a game of nuclear Russian Roulette doesn't increase the danger by 50% (3 represents a 50% increase over 2, you're maybe thinking). Uh-uh. Ask Dr. Strangelove, as he twists sideways in his wheel chair, fits another cigarette into its black holder and stares at you with those dark photo-grays. Here are the possible misunderstandings: 1. Russia mistakes U.S. intentions, launches nuclear attack. 2. U.S. mistakes Russian intentions, launches nuclear attack. 3. Russia mistakes Chinese intentions, launches nuclear attack. 4. U.S. mistakes Chinese intentions, launches nuclear attack. 5. China mistakes Russian intentions, launches nuclear attack. 6. China mistakes U.S. intentions, launches nuclear attack. Oh, and while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are in office, we have lucky #7: U.S. launches nuclear attack.

Let me tell you how you were unpatriotic. Remember those huge Ford Exterminator and Cadillac Escalation SUVs you were so fond of when you could still afford to gas them up? They made Russia rich. They made so much money selling oil they could afford to refurbish their bomber wings and build a lot more multi-megaton hydrogen bombs. So what was the point of Reagan bankrupting the U.S. by building up our military in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union by forcing it to build up its military? That's ...mad.

I think Vladimir is just pissed off because of two things. First, Bush is taller than he is. That's a rare thing, in international relations, but lately L'il George has been on a hot streak. Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Vlad -- Bush could dunk over all of them, if he could dunk. I'm almost certain Angela Merkel could blow by W. and jam it home, but we'll never find out. The second thing Putin is testy about is Bush's anti-missile bases sitting right on the Russian border, which are designed to protect the U.S. and "the West" (Bush is never too subtle) from Iranian nuclear missiles. Putin has been undiplomatic enough to point out that Iran doesn't have any nuclear missiles because they don't have any nuclear bombs. Then he goes on to say that these "anti-missile" installations can also be "offensive" missile sites, and they're sitting right on top of Russia, reducing Russia's reaction time to say,... 12 seconds. Not to mention one other major irritant, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which Bush unilaterally abrogated soon after taking office on the ground it was so 20th Century.

Well, guess what. The 20th Century, in stunning black and white, is back. It's all here again, baby. The fail-safe points. The inflight refueling. The sweeping radar. The flight crews waiting for the go code. The backyard bomb shelters. And for sixteen months or so, we're going to have all this and George W. Bush too. Duck and cover.

Rove Skitters Down the Gang Plank

Let us take a moment to consider the unconsidered, that Karl Rove left his position as Deputy Chief of Staff to the President not because he is concerned with the multiple investigations of his involvement in the usual dirty machinations which are his stock in trade, nor because he wishes to lower his profile in the face of a widespread perception that he has led the modern GOP to ruin. I suspect that Rove, rather more in line with his nature as a member of the genus Rattus Rattus, class Mammalia, order Rodentia, family muridae (black or "ship" rat) has noticed the water level rising aboard the Good Ship Fuckup captained by his ward and protege, George W. (for What?!) Bush. To wit, Rove's business has always been more closely aligned with toxicology than policy, and this gig as "Deputy Chief of Staff" is not really what Rove is all about. He's a slime merchant, and he is now concerned that his icky reputation is about to be permanently damaged by a too-close proximity to what lies dead ahead.

Bush's lone claim to legitimacy as a national leader has been, to the present time, a "good" economy. Certainly this is controversial; it is truer to say that Bush has created a tax regime and a trade policy that favor the super-wealthy and those involved in transnational business. They have done well. Corporate profits, particularly in such sectors as petroleum, are way up. To the extent that the economy functioned for the common man, it depended to a large degree on maintaining the pace of consumer spending on which 70% of the GDP depends. This, more than anything, is the reason that Bush thought the most patriotic response to 9/11, for an ordinary American civilian, was to go shopping. To shop, however, requires money, and since the American standard of living, in real terms, has been declining since about 1973, this has gotten harder to do. A temporary reprieve was achieved during the period between about 2000 and 2006 by a unique historical circumstance, which consisted of the re-fi boom, made possible by cheap money created by the reinvestment of foreign trade surplus (particularly Chinese and Japanese) into American T-bills, along with the usual sale of about one-half trillion in Treasury debt to these same foreigners to finance Bush's budget deficits (Bush illegally fails to count the confiscated Social Security surplus as part of the national debt, as Hale Stewart points out; the national debt has increased by about $3 trillion during Bush's 6 years in office, presenting so simple a division problem, even an American can do it). The Fed kept the prime rate low, the banks made cheap loans to Americans, cheap loans drove up the price of houses and created "equity" and the net result was a massive influx into the American economy, which some writers (such as Kevin Phillips) have estimated as equal to the amount earned as wages by Americans during the period between 2000 and 2005.

Bush benefited from these fortunate, unique and unsustainable circumstances. America, having danced a wild jig for the last six and a half years, must now begin to pay the piper. This is not going to be pretty. Wal-Mart and Home Depot (equivalent, in effect, to the "American economy") now forecast weak sales in the months ahead. The essential reason for this is that Americans don't have any money. If 70% of the economy depended on spending, and if roughly half the spending money has evaporated with re-fi extinction, then it is possible that the American economy could soon consist of the 30% of GDP not consumer-related + 35% (1/2 of 70) = 65% = Big Honkin' Recession. I am sure the picture is more complicated than this, of course, but the complications may actually make the situation more dire; for example, the interplay between consumer and non-consumer GDP may also drag the non-consumer element down, so that 65% is actually Best Case.

In grudging and horrified recognition (confused by heavy doses of denial) of these somber realities, the Dow Jones is tanking. Liquidity is drying up. Reset "subprime" mortgages, which form the rotten core of collateralized debt obligations and other derivatives, are falling into foreclosure in large numbers. The Fed is being asked to lower the prime, of course, and to give up the fiction that it has been curtailing "inflation" instead of retaining the minimum level feasible to continue servicing debt to its foreign dun-noticers. But how is the Fed going to face the Beijing Central Bank and inform our Commie loan officers that we're going to allow the dollar to weaken further? They're already growing restive with their paltry return, and if the U.S. is really going to stop taking shipment on all those $10 blow dryers, then what, exactly, is the point? You do not want to think about the consequences of a failure of the Chinese and other central banks to roll over their Treasury positions.

So Bush, in the course of allowing the U.S. economy to become completely hollowed out by trade imbalances, massive foreign debt, and job exportation, is nearing the end of the smooth part of his sailing. Whatever else we say about his First Mate, Rattus Rattus Rove, he's not dumb. He needs to finish that book and make a lot of speeches so he can establish big positions in Euros and the Yuan, and like all the other patriots on the captain's deck of the U.S.S. America, get ready to shove all the women and children out of the way so they can have the lifeboats all to themselves.

Our President and His Loyal Guard

I saw Mort Sahl the other night, the second time in five years or so I've been able to catch his act. I'm a lifelong fan, as you might expect. I think one of the funniest lines I ever heard was Mort's drollery during the Formosa crisis of the Eisenhower Administration regarding the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu. I must have been only 9 or 10 at the time, but I recall that one never heard Quemoy without hearing Matsu. Should mainland (Red) China have Quemoy and Matsu, or should Formosa have Quemoy and Matsu? Where was the United States on this issue? In those days we were staunchly in the corner of Formosa, of course, since everything Commie was evil, and there was no Wal-Mart to soften our hostility. Quemoy & Matsu were like Huntley & Brinkley or Procter & Gamble; it was unthinkable to uncouple them. So Mort had the answer: "I think we should give them Quemoy but not Matsu." I don't know why that's so funny, but funny it is.

Mort is cynical about all politics, so often the case with satirical thinkers, and five years ago he was a little contrarian where anti-Bush sentiment was concerned. The years between then and now, however, have won him over. He's become a superb Bush-basher. Bush has that uncanny knack; even the apolitical learn to despise him. Mort told a story about being invited by Alexander Haig, an old West Point buddy (yep, Mort Sahl went to West Point for a couple of years), to a fund raiser for Bush in Palm Beach. Bush's caravan arrived at the estate, a long dark phalanx of heavily armored SUVs, and behind Bush's own ride were a car full of doctors and another emergency vehicle rigged for onsite medical care. Mort didn't say much about it, he just reported the spectacle. But you know what he was thinking, along with the rest of the liberal crowd in attendance at his concert. All these extraordinary precautions, all this meticulous planning and preparation, all this government expense, so that the United States of America minimizes its chances of being deprived of the peerless leadership of that smirking specimen in the photos above. Because without that man and his incomparable intellect and character, where would we be?

Between Little Boy and Fat Man

The convention is to recite the names of the bombs in reverse order: Fat Man and Little Boy. It rolls off the tongue more smoothly that way. Nevertheless, Little Boy was dropped first, on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, 62 years ago yesterday. Two days from now will mark the 62nd anniversary of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. That atomic bomb was nicknamed Fat Man. They differed somewhat in design and materials. Fat Man was designed along the lines of the Trinity shot at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July, 1945, the only nuclear detonation in history before the Hiroshima bomb. So that means when the bomb doors were opened on the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945, that fateful morning above Hiroshima, the bomb that fell was of a design never before exploded. Little Boy was a "gun" device in which a subcritical mass of U-235 was accelerated by high explosives down a barrel toward another subcritical mass of U-235 and a neutron initiator. The chain reactions blow the bomb apart and, of course, anything and anybody anywhere near it. So you would be tempted to think that the Japanese citizens in Hiroshima that bright summer day had a fair chance the bomb would fizzle; I mean, you drop a cylindrical thingamajig out of a plane, you've never tested it before, it might just fall all the way to earth and smash a trolley or a couple of cars or someone's roof, right? It was heavy enough to do that kind of damage; about 8,900 pounds, and it was ten feet long and about 28" in diameter.

Nah, there was no real chance of a dud. The physicists were confident Little Boy would work, and work it did. It exploded about 1,800 feet above Hiroshima with the force of 13 thousand tons of dynamite, and it killed somewhere between 70,000 and 130,000 people with its immediate effects. Reconnaissance flights were flown over Hiroshima to review the damage, which must have been very impressive. So now, let us imagine that it is exactly 62 years ago. Yesterday we killed, to use a reasonable average of the guesses, about 100,000 human beings, and because of radioactive sickness and genetic damage, the carnage is really just getting started. The Japanese haven't surrendered yet, however. We've still got an awful lot of American soldiers out there in the Pacific, scattered all over the jungle islands, waiting for the fateful order to advance past Iwo Jima and attack the Japanese mainland. As bad as Guadalcanal and Iwo and Okinawa and Bataan and the rest of the Hells on Earth have been, maybe those assault troops haven't seen anything yet. Wait till you try to take Japan away from the Japanese.

On August 9, 1945, a different B-29 with a different pilot with a different target, Nagasaki this time, took off from the airfield at Tinian, armed with Fat Man. Fat Man was a bruiser, an ugly, inelegant spherical thing, 5 feet in diameter, over 10 feet long and weighing more than half a ton. It was a plutonium implosion device, just like Trinity. And man, that sucker could put out. 21 kilotons of TNT from the detonation, and the mushroom cloud rose 60,000 feet into the air. The immediate death toll is in dispute, although there is general agreement the bomb detonated away from its intended target, and the main part of Nagasaki was protected by intervening hills. Still, at least 45,000 people died instantly. No one is sure, really, of the exact number. There are estimates all over the place. In Nagasaki Peace Park the estimate is given as 75,000.

What do we do with this knowledge? J. Robert Oppenheimer suffered from remorse, of course; as the "father" of the atomic bomb, he knew what kind of monster he had sired and unleashed on the world. One thing I decided a long time ago is that I will not try to figure out the correct moral position on the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. I don't think it's my place, and I've never felt it was my job to have a definite opinion about everything. I wasn't a Marine corporal in a landing boat going ashore at Iwo Jima against enemy machine gun nests. If I were, and I could honestly have said I'll take my chances against another machine gun on the Japanese mainland to spare the world the use of nuclear weapons, then my opinion would have some weight. Or how about the argument in favor of a "demonstration" drop of a nuclear weapon to convince the Japanese (and probably the Russians) that resistance was futile? I don't know. I wasn't there. Japanese resistance in the closing months of the war was fanatical. Maybe, in the macabre calculus of war death, the sacrifice of two cities ultimately saved lives, both Japanese and American. I think it's presumptuous, at this great remove from the events, to wave away all context of the most horrible war the world has ever seen and make calm judgments about "obvious" courses of action which would have been morally superior to those actually made by Americans at the time.

So Oppenheimer, a much brighter man than I, expressed this idea: "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Such interesting language; they have known sin. Not that they committed it, not that they are ultimately responsible for it. But that they have known it. How could they not? That's why we should remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to remember this pause between Little Boy and Fat Man. To know mass annihilation, whatever the reason or justification for it, is to know sin and the darkness at the core of the human heart.

Missing Richard Feynman

Q There is this general concern after this disaster that the nation's infrastructure is crumbling. Do you think that's an overly-broad characterization, or do you think that this in general is a very serious problem nationwide?

SECRETARY PETERS: Well, we certainly have aging infrastructure here in the United States. Most of our infrastructure came about as long as 50 years ago, as the interstate highway system was being built. I do believe that America's highways and bridges are safe.

The peerless Richard Feynman, brilliant Cal Tech physicist and bon vivant, served on the Rogers Commission that figured out the Challenger disaster of 1986. Actually, with a little legwork from unlikely sources, Feynman found the reasons for the "O-ring" failure pretty much by himself. But in the course of his report, he took issue with many claims that NASA made about the safety of the shuttle program, and in his usual insightful and funny way, he dismissed the NASA notion of a robust "margin of error" in the faulty O-ring design by comparing it, tellingly, as similar to claiming that a bridge supported by a beam that is rotted halfway through has a "50% margin of error." William Rogers, who liked appearing important and reassuring more than actually finding out what happened, called Feynman a "real pain," maybe because Feynman insisted on noting that "[f}or a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." The peculiarity in language pointed out by Feynman resonates today as we consider Mary Peters, Secretary of Transportation, and her determination, in the classic Bushian way, to overcome the clear evidence of reality, and to give precedence always to public relations, by attempting to fool Mother Nature.

A better way to have concluded her remarks would have been to state: "I do believe that America's highways and bridges are unsafe." Coming from a Bush bureaucrat, this would have been shocking, to be sure, but it would have given precedence to reality. If it is true, as reports now have it, that 77,000 bridges in the United States are "structurally deficient," the last grade given to the W-135 Bridge in Minneapolis, then on what basis would someone whose job it is to oversee the state of American transportation infrastructure blithely conclude that the bridge's collapse was an anomaly? Rather, the logical conclusion to reach is that all the deferred maintenance on all the "structurally deficient" bridges, and the excess loads being carried by another 80,000 or so bridges that are graded "obsolete," is that crossing an American bridge at this point is a crapshoot. Again, that would have followed more logically from the Secretary's premise. She might have said in a way that gave precedence to reality over public relations, "I do believe that crossing an American bridge at this point is pretty much a crapshoot."

It's another subject entirely, but I'm continually amazed at the jarring, discordant nonsense that passes for public declaration from the Bushians. On an everyday basis they make statements which they know that we know make absolutely no sense whatsoever, and they make them anyway, and they are reported as if a sane person had just said something which made sense. And now there's no Richard Feynman around to remind us how nuts it all is.

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.