Although on the Other Hand: Who Would Want to be President Now?

Being a blogger myself, I read blogs. It's what I like best about the Internet: the chance to be an information junkie. I realize a lot of what one reads in this undisciplined, unregulated world is creative speculation, and practically all hard data in blog-writing is lifted, almost entirely, from reporters doing the actual work of interviewing and investigation. Although one must say that reporters are increasingly incompetent; even on the largest dailies, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, the writers seem dreadfully uninformed about the basics of economics, law and science. The politicians count on it in using Big Media to sell their patently illogical arguments. For example, Harry Reid's mush-mouthed excuse for never seriously opposing the Iraq war: "We don't have 60 votes in the Senate, and we have to have help from the Republicans to change course." Pelosi pulls the same crap in the House, using a different but equally specious argument. For every one writer who sees through the fallacy, there are five Stenographers of the Fourth Estate who will repeat it uncritically.

There are numerous exceptions. Rosa Brooks (a Yale-educated lawyer), who writes for the Los Angeles Times is a brilliant analyst and polemicist. She always gets the law right, for example. Dan Froomkin of the WashPost is similarly good; Bush never gets an even break with Dan, and it's an imbalance which W has earned and richly deserves.

Yet the mainstream writers cannot match les enfants terribles of the true Internet underground, writers like Mike Whitney on Smirkingchimp.com. Big Media have to remain mainstream and respectable; I think when the solar system nears its end, and the sun begins its final expansion at the end of its Main Sequence, burning off the Earth's atmosphere and boiling our seas before we undergo complete vaporization, the New York Times will report that "numerous experts have cautioned that data are incomplete, and that the current average global temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit may abate sufficiently to allow life to resume on the surface within the next six to eighteen months." The non-Mainstream writers are not so constrained; the coming Apocalypse has never been described more colorfully. The Clusterfuck Man his own self, James Howard Kunstler, is another brilliant Cassandra and herald of impending disaster. As an example of their style, Whitney writes about the collapsing American economy thusly:

"Roach notes that the recession of 2000 to 2001 was a collapse of business spending which only represented a 13 per cent of GDP. Compare that to the current recession which “has been set off by the simultaneous bursting of property and credit bubbles.... Those two economic sectors collectively peaked at 78 percent of gross domestic product, or fully six times the share of the sector that pushed the country into recession seven years ago.”

"Not only will the impending recession be six times more severe; it will also be the death knell for America's consumer-based society. Attitudes towards spending have already changed dramatically since prices on food and fuel have increased. That trend will only grow as hard times set in."

There is, of course, a barely disguised glee in such doomsaying. Whitney and Kunstler positively hate what America has become. Their writing wallows in all our misfortunes. Underlying their approach is the tacit argument that the only way to move from the America of Henry Miller's "Air Conditioned Nightmare" to the Ecotopia they prefer is through a wrenching, incredibly messy, radically displacing Depression.

I have read for years, of course, about the mounting toll that America's loss of its manufacturing base; its excessive borrowing; our staggering trade imbalances; our astronomical national debt; our completely insane health care costs; our dangerous dependence on unstable sources of oil -- would take on our standard of living. One way or another, I have preferred to believe in American Exceptionalism. That while cranks and misfits might describe the disaster that must inevitably follow from such a daunting set of conditions, nothing really bad could actually happen. Those really bad things are now actually happening. I think, in truth, the full extent of the problem is being actively concealed by the government, to wit, the regulators are not being candid about the shape the big banks are currently in. The dollar is pancaking, the "derivatives" and mortgage-backed securities markets have ceased to function, the largest financial houses are allowing themselves to be taken over by foreign "sovereign wealth" funds, Americans are walking out of their houses and sending the keys back to the lenders, jobs are being lost (not added), gasoline is approaching four bucks a gallon, inflation is accelerating, the Dow Jones is where it was about eight years ago. And we have George W. Bush in charge of the American system of government.

Whitney predicts the Dow will be at 7,000 at year's end, using a different "methodology" than I used in pegging it at 9,100. My algorithm had more nuance, if you ask me. He's just being dire. But this certainly doesn't feel very good. The Iraq war debate is bound to change as the ground shifts under the feet of the Presidential candidates. It's one thing to talk about spending three trillion (as Joseph Stiglitz predicted) on an unnecessary war when times are relatively good; quite another when bread lines snake around the street and homeowners hold off the sheriff's eviction squads with sawed-off shotguns. McCain may find his admission that he doesn't know much about economics serves quite well as an exit line; no one is going to want to hear about how well the Iraqis are doing with the billions we're investing in them. The remaining question is whether anyone is going to want to preside over this triage tent beginning in January, 2009.

Staying Too Long at the Fair

I tried to warn W to leave when Karl Rove did, while the getting, while not good, was at least almost tenable; it's because, beneath all the sarcasm, I feel sorry for George W. Bush. I can't help myself - I'm simply a compassionate guy. It's along the lines of Atticus Finch's admonition to the children in Harper Lee's unforgettable "To Kill A Mockingbird." He told Scout and his son not to make fun of Boo Radley, and used the simile of killing an innocent bird to block any prosecution of Boo by the sheriff. What was the point of punishing Boo for his heroic act in saving Atticus's children from their tormentor? Boo was simple, in the sense the word is used in the Deep South. Not quite right in the head, but well-meaning. Like a dumb bird.

I know that there is something psychologically amiss with George that makes him appear indifferent to all his monumental screw-ups. It's an illusion. All his striving and ambition to live up to standards he perceives as the family destiny belie this casual disregard of his epic incompetence. He knows what he's done; his bravado is in direct proportion to the agony of recognizing he can't do anything right. Every sane person in the country whose salary does not depend on being a Bush partisan knows that he has screwed up in ways that are almost unimaginable, that seem the stuff of fable or science fiction. How can anyone surrounded by so many advisors, with so many resources to help with what is essentially a figurehead job, create so much destruction and havoc? He has broken the back of the military, the national treasury and now, at long last, the American economy. It's breathtaking, really. In a little over 7 years. And every single piece of the catastrophic destruction can be traced to a single cause: his phenomenally bad personal judgment.

It is Bush's particular form of genius. Forget all talk of IQs or personality disorders for the moment, as diverting as those can be while trying to solve the riddle of this strange and simple bird who has presided over the destruction of the United States of America. It is almost impossible to be as bad at being President as George W. Bush has been. Probabilities, aleatory considerations, the laws of chance, dumb luck -- these usually mitigate the effects of the maladroit. Not in Bush's case. "Call it," said Anton Chiguir in "No Country for Old Men," as he put his victims to the test. "What am I playing for?" the old guy asked. "Everything," Anton calmly answered. Every time Bush calls it he's wrong. Every single time, about everything.

He was wrong to ignore the al-Qaeda warnings, allowing the worst terrorist attack in American history to occur during his presidency. He was wrong to invade Iraq, the most colossal foreign policy blunder in that same history. He was wrong to declare "Mission Accomplished" at a ludicrously premature point in the war. He was wrong to persist in the occupation, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, thousands of American lives (more, now, than were killed on 9/11), and literally trillions of borrowed dollars. He was wrong to cut taxes and run huge deficits, wrong to run the national debt to over $9 trillion, wrong to mortgage America's security to an increasingly hostile Chinese government, wrong to allow Greenspan to create a Potemkin housing bubble with that borrowed-and-recycled money, wrong to resist the transition to nonrenewable energy, wrong to hamstring efforts to deal with climate change, wrong to introduce torture into American foreign policy, wrong to engage in routine violations of the Fourth Amendment against American citizens, wrong to hollow out the regulatory agencies to the point where Americans now eat downer cattle and lose entire cities to weather catastrophes.

Sure, I know. You think such effects can be produced through simple neglect. Not at all. However perverse it may be, this is talent, pure and simple. The merely incompetent could not produce the skein of catastrophes listed above. They are, for better or worse, the stigmata of a rare and perhaps incomparable gift. A man so lousy at what he does that it rises, in the last analysis, into the realm of art.

Hillary's Tax Returns

First off, a little street cred. I'm not a Hillary Basher. Or in the cyber age, a HillaryBasher. Once, in a fey and whimsical mood, I betrayed my own egalitarian principles by pointing out that Hillary's substantial (massive, really) undercarriage could be used to good effect by comparing it favorably to Obama's (or, a fortiori, Kucinich's) lower body strength by mounting the debate stage a little more dramatically. To wit, Hillary would bound onto the platform, charge a blocking sled and drive, drive, drive that sucker all the way over to Tim Russert's podium, where it would up-end that blowhard and his clipboard of "gotcha!" questions. Those short, chunky legs pumping, muscles straining the seams of that burnt-orange pantsuit -- what a moment! A great visual, but, of course -- such a suggestion casts enormous discredit on me, and I'm deeply ashamed I ever thought of it, especially when it still doubles me over with helpless laughter.

Anyway, things between Barack & Hill are going to get wild enough as it is. You can feel it coming. The other night Hillary answered a question on "60 Minutes" about Barack's religion by saying he was not a Muslim "as far as I know." Oh man, this is gonna get ugly. It's good they're not debating anymore because I don't think they could stand the proximity to each other. But back to my street cred: there is no question that I would (a) vote for Hillary vs. McCain and (b) even send Hill some money to help her cause along. Whatever else happens, I don't want the Supreme Court nominations to be in the hands of the Republicans for another 4 to 8 years, because people like Stevens, Ginsburg and Kennedy are not going to last that long on the bench. So imagine Scalia, Thomas, Roberts & Alito augmented by another three legal Neanderthals for another twenty years. Bye-bye, Roe vs. Wade. Hey, Bill of Rights! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way to the dump. Hillary will be okay. Stop whining, Obamaniacs. Anyway, pull your socks up and get to work. If you can't stand up to Hillary, how do you plan to face down the Chinese Colossus when you're in the Oval Office? America's taking a good hard look to find out.

What we can't take a good, hard look at to find out concerns Hillary's tax returns, on account she ain't showin'. This is a mess. As about so many things, I have a theory about this which may be just beneath the surface of what you've heard so far about the reasons for her reluctance. She has said she would release them "if she gets the nomination." The blow-dried, room-temp IQs on cable news (nota bene, there's a blog title: The IQs of Cable News) of course think this has to do with the practical necessity of disclosure (technically, it's never required, since they're privileged documents for her and everyone), but I suspect it has to do with timing. By waiting till then, she'll release her 2007 tax return, not 2006 or earlier. I further suspicion (as my Southern ancestors usta say) that earlier years may have been joint returns with Bill the Horndog, which must be enormously complicated 1040's, and which probably have a huge number representing adjusted gross income, since the story is that Bill routinely pulls down $100,000 + every time he addresses some group like the Allied Magneto Importers of America (the manufacturers having been disbanded for failure to achieve a quorum). But a 2007 return just might be a separate 1040 of Hillary alone, because she (and Slick Willie) have anticipated this moment for a long time. I think Bill does a ton of business with people you might associate with so-called Petro States (or PetroStates; see above) and other unsavory characters, and the inference drawn even by the emaciated intellect of the American Booboisie (op.cit., Mencken) might be unfavorable.

A separate return shields Bill from unwanted publicity and makes it more difficult for forensic accountants to figure out where, for example, Hillary got that $5 mil she loaned her campaign a few weeks ago. Reverse engineering of capital gains, dividend and interest income will suggest (but not definitively reveal) her holdings of stocks, bonds, real estate and foreign investments, but not necessarily spell out the principal amounts nor the identity of income sources. And with careful money management in 2007 (i.e., avoiding liquidations or income recognition), Hillary could conceal a lot more, confining things as far as possible to her Senate salary (which for her is lunch money).

Hey, that's okay. It passes for candor and good faith in this sullied age. The main, overarching thing that Hillary didn't want all those laid-off factory workers in Ohio to find out, like the guy who can't afford to pay for his wife's multiple scelerosis palliative treatment because his job went to China and he's uninsurable, is how frigging rich she is. Because then those tears coursing down those magnificent cheek bones (a little self rehab there) would seem, well, vaguely unconvincing. Bill & Hill, remember, like summering at Martha's Vineyard and starting the New Year off right at the Renaissance Weekend with all the other glitterati (op.cit., Herb Caen). They feel your pain, all right; they just don't want any part of it.

Two birds with one stone

I think one of Hillary Clinton's major difficulties in her campaign is that, inevitably, her major strategists tend to be old farts who are way out of touch with the way America really is these days. They just don't get it. I've written about it before (and thought about it a lot more than I've written), and it runs along the lines of what the psychiatrists call our "trance of everyday living" which governs what we see and how we see it. Phenomena assault the sensory apparatus every whichaway, and a consciousness perforce orders those phenomena according to Gestalt frames of reference. In turn these frames of reference are ordered by the formative experiences of childhood. I understand Hillary's frame of reference because it's the same as mine -- the United States as a major industrial power, possessed of a mighty military and the world's fiat currency, international leader in innovation and cutting edge technology, with the world's best health care system and a highly-educated populace. Hillary's mental picture of America is a Caucasian fantasy of emerald green lawns, kids dressed neatly for school and Dads going off to their well-paid jobs at Acme Manufacturing where they've worked as white collar execs for the last 20 years, with good bennies like health insurance and stock options. Most of this stuff isn't true anymore. America, as a nation, is like a couple in their eighties who are subsisting on a reverse mortgage, flipping through old photo albums and hoping they die before the money runs out.

Although Hillary & Bill strive mightily, like all Baby Boomers, to be as hip as the kids, to dig iPods, FaceBook and text messaging, to use numbers in the place of vowel sounds so they really reson8 with Gens x,y & z, it's actually all a little pathetic. They belong to an obsolete culture in Washington D.C. where they spent their primes and which they still see as the answer to America's many ills. Hillary has no ideas. She offers bromides instead. Faced with the lamentable state of American manufacturing, the export of jobs to China and Mexico, she suggests a "time out" on NAFTA and other trade deals, like an exasperated mom trying to impose order on a group of unruly three year olds. Take all the time you want, Hillary. A much smarter take on the situation was offered to me recently by a 90 year old veteran of the war in the Pacific. He said that jobs would flow back to America when China's wages were the same as in the United States. Why don't you talk like that, Hillary? It sounds like you're going to have to take a lot of time out.

On health care she wants to subsidize private insurance. Big whoop there. Does Obama have better ideas? Hell no. The point is that a race for the White House by a serious contender entails the abandonment of empirical solutions to empirical problems. Once a candidate strays into Reality, his prospects are finished. It would take much more space, and a higher IQ than available here Pondside, to spell out definitively why this should be the case in modern America, but we all know it's true. You cannot propose something truly useful, as measured by objective criteria, and have any hope of election.

Ideas such as? Easy, really. Tell the world we're no longer Globo-Cop. You got a problem with your local despotic immam, you deal with it. Is this "isolationism?" Who cares what you call it? It's a practical recognition of our fiscal limitations. No more Garrison Earth. This approach will allow us to reduce the military budget by 75%, maybe 90%. We retain enough to protect ourselves against nuclear attack and terrorist threats. Period. We invest the difference in socialized medicine, a national rail system and mass transportation, and an energy grid which is 100% renewable, such as a 200 square mile solar electric array in the Mojave Desert. All roofing materials will incorporate integrated solar panels. The sludge problem of desalination will be solved, and the process made cost-effective. The entire country will give up beef so that feed-lot culture will disappear, and with it its devastating impact on climate change. No more "improve gas mileage by 5 mpg by the year 2020," which the stegosauruses in D.C. see as a huge breakthrough.

The ossified Democratic and Republican Parties cannot talk like this, which is why they nominate candidates without ideas responsive to the real world. But Barack has two main advantages which are decisive for me: he would be the first President not of Northern European Christian stock, AND the first President whose last name ends in a vowel. Hey, that's what we're down to in this clown country, but at least I'm voting my principles.

Barack Can Dance

You've maybe seen it by now, on YouTube or cable news: Barack dancing a little on Ellen DeGeneres's show, either in person or by video hook-up while he was at a campaign rally. It doesn't go on that long in either case. He's a little too cool for that, but here's the thing: the guy can actually dance. If it comes to pass, if the stars align correctly so that he's inaugurated next January, then the unthinkable will have happened: America will have a President who can get down.

I know it's a cliche: White Man's Disease and all that. No finer exemplar than the incumbent. If you saw any of that footage of Bush in Africa dancing to a tribal beat, you know what I mean. Even the memory of it makes me cringe. It looks as though Bush is suffering from the end stages of some horrible degenerative nerve disease. He makes a face like a blowfish, hunches his shoulders and starts waving his arms around, pointing at the tribal chief, bobbing his head. It's a horrible sight. You wonder why someone doesn't grab a tranquilizer gun. I realize the idea is that Bush is being a "good sport," and not too much should be made of it. But that's hard to keep in mind when you realize how scary it must have been for small children to see.

When I was in high school, I was fortunate to have a basketball teammate, an all-star, Af-Am athlete, who straightened me out at a young, formative age. This friend (I'll call him Fred because that was his name) watched me on a dance floor one night, shook his head and uttered four crucial words: "Don't do too much." Fred's idea was simple and immediately grasped. It has saved me from a great deal of trouble at high school dances, college parties, wedding receptions. In the modern free-form dancing that came to dominate the rock 'n roll era, a guy is supposed to just be out there. The women bust the moves, know the fancy steps, do the spins and dips. If you'll think back, you'll remember that there was nothing sexier on God's Green Earth than watching a girl who could cut up. A guy moves with the rhythm, turns a little bit side to side. And the other critical part of Fred's guidance: whatever you do, not too much with the arms. The upper body should be still.

Bush, by contrast, always looks like a man trying to wave down a passing automobile while rolling a log in a fast-moving stream. I would not want him on my basketball team or dancing next to me at the prom. The dude's an embarrassing spaz. On the other hand, Barack does just what Fred said you should do. Subtle, suggestive, cool. His arms are bent at the elbows, he turns a little side to side, he moves on the beat. That's it. A guy who can look cool on the dance floor can command respect and calm everyone down. After watching Bush's African spectacle, how can we regard him as a leader? Why would we ever think he could have a good idea about anything when he does that?

I'm not saying that at state dinners, with foreign heads of government in attendance, that they should clear the East Room floor while Barack does a Travolta number to a BeeGee beat. Or maybe I am saying that. Yeah, I'm definitely saying that. I really wish he would, as long as he doesn't do too much.

The arbitrariness of conviction

In reply to those who claim I don't really know much about Barack Obama, I answer: true. I don't really know much about Hillary Clinton, either. I didn't know much about Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Only staffers and campaign managers, who hang out with these people, know much about them. They see them in day-to-day situations, watch how they react to surprises and contingencies calling for a decision, and they gradually form realistic appraisals about them. That's what we call human beings "knowing" someone. We don't have the insiders' vantage point. I've never seen Barack or Hillary in person; they exist as pixel images on my flat screen TV; in a close-up, I'm guessing they're represented at about a 1:2 scale, but they only have two dimensions. I listen to them, but they're mostly reformulating sentences they've said hundreds of times before. They're not actually engaged in a give-and-take with me. Maybe if I hung out with each of them for thirty days or so, and we talked for a few hundred hours about just anything that occurred to us, and went to a ball game and to a bar, and played chess or Scrabble and watched Jeopardy! together, maybe shot some hoops, and I got my guitar out and we sang "Margaritaville," and then I asked each of these lawyers for help on some complicated legal issue I'm working on...well, then I'd probably actually have the basis for an opinion.

The odds of those things happening aren't very good, are they? I suppose when the Founding Fathers put their ideas of democracy together, the structure for it, the connection between candidate and electorate was much closer to what I've just described than it is now. The operation of the town hall was close to their experience; it was unlikely, in the Concord election of Selectmen in 1795 or so, that the local Yankees would put the village drunk in charge of their finances. As visionary as they might have been, there was no way for Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin to imagine the post-McLuhan Age of virtual reality. Essentially, we still use the same system they devised, but the candidates who succeed now are not necessarily the people who would do best at the level of one-to-one interaction I described above. They're the ones who are adept, under the guidance of their handlers, at manipulating the images they project to appeal to broad-based demographics. I think we all know that. When we express our preference for a candidate, however, we are not basing it on the appeal of their "image;" rather, we are using our intuitive powers of perception to imagine what this person would be like if we actually had the opportunity to get to know him/her. It's possible, if I ever had the chance at any sort of intimacy, that I would like Hillary more than Barack; she might be funnier, quicker with an insight, more reassuring in her comprehension.

I don't even understand very well what process finally produced these two as the "inevitable" candidates for the Democrats. I would surmise that it's not an accident that one is a woman and the other is African-American. Both seemed like plausible candidates. The mainstream media saw the "story line" implicit in their choice and began playing them up. Let's face it, it's a more compelling narrative than Joe Biden versus Chris Dodd. After they seemed inevitable, after their images were burned into the psyche of the American populace, it then became our job to form some kind of "commitment" to one or the other, even though we did not really have much of a role in narrowing our choices to these two.

That's how it works now in the World of Mass Media Man. Don't pretend it doesn't. You can come at me with your "arguments," and your "insights" into the candidates based on something you've read on the Web written by some special pleader; and I can counter with some obscure thing I've read somewhere else. And the truth is neither one of us will be very convincing.

The Discomfiture of the Caucasians

Now that Barack Obama appears to be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, we are beginning to see the first signs of overt racism from what you might call the White Establishment. The form such racism takes is subtle, an obeisance to the "enlightened" age in which we live, but its telltale feature is the condescension of those who have always thought they owned the system to someone they view as getting above his place in society. I thought about this while speed-reading through William Kristol's latest steaming pile in the New York Times, called "It's All About Him." Kristol's "thesis," if you want to call it that, is that Barack Obama's reasons for not wearing an American flag lapel pin are "grandiose" (I kid you not), because instead of simply saying that he chose to discontinue wearing this decal, he framed it in terms of a "more patriotic" reaction to 9/11; namely, his resolve to "speak out on the issues." This, Kristol reasons, is in some way unbearably egotistical and a clue to an underlying personality derangement.

Of course, Kristol must know that the flag pin has taken on the sinister characteristics of the Death's Head in Nazi iconography -- it's worn by all the Neoconservatives, such as himself, as a clubby reminder that they own the franchise on nationalism and power. And as the soft, squishy, preppy scion of wealthy and highly-educated parents who saw to it that Billy attended the Collegiate Preparatory School in Manhattan before his matriculation at Harvard, who did things the old-fashioned way (by having the track greased by family influence), he's naturally impatient with anyone who doesn't see what a great place America is. Even if that someone is from a background where his forebears first entered the country in 1619 as slaves, where by a 1645 court decree an African could legally be held in captivity for life, with no recourse; where he was viewed, in fact, as 3/5ths of a person for some (white) purposes and as a nonentity for all other reasons. Even if the American black constituted one-third of the population of the slave states (4 million out of a total population of 12 million in the 15 slave states in 1860), they were essentially invisible. Go back through all the names and faces of the 43 American Presidents -- all white, all Northern European. What the hell is Barack Obama doing on the verge of becoming the President?

It's got guys like William Kristol very, very worried. It threatens the established order of things, the one where people like him always win, where class and privilege (look at George W. Bush!) carry the day versus talent and brains because that's the way things are supposed to be. The system has certainly taken care of William Kristol; all he had to do was attend elite schools and then go into his dad's business of selling conservative bullshit.

So it must be especially galling when an American Negro begins dissing his preferred form of patriotism, the gaudy display of symbols and insignia, and talking all this trash about "struggling" Americans who need government help. Kristol deplores the "nanny state;" the idea is to make it on your own, just like William Kristol did, through diligence and hard work. There's a great irony there, of course; those in the comfy class actually hate the idea that someone without their advantages, from the lower classes, could become president of the United States through skill, cunning and hard work. It's what they hated, really, about Bill Clinton. He outsmarted them. And now here comes another preternaturally gifted politician, a guy who keeps getting cooler and sharper as he grows into his role, as he realizes once again that he's just one of those guys who frigging win, even on the biggest stage of all -- and William Kristol and David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and the rest of them are absolutely freaking out, because it's ten times worse this time around -- this guy's a Negro. What makes it worse is that Obama was absolutely right about the Iraq War (he called it a "dumb idea" before the invasion) and Kristol's most famous, most frequently quoted line is his howler about there "being a lot of 'pop psychology' that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni," as he assured us the Iraq War would be a cakewalk that would cost America virtually nothing.

Which means that Little Billy not only has to deal with the idea that Obama is hipper, sharper and better looking than he is - he has to come to terms with the inconvenient reality that Obama is smarter than he is, which in Kristol's pasty, dough-colored world was the only advantage he thought he had left. And now Obama won't even wear his merit badge.

I am reminded of the great line from J.D. Salinger's book "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters," in a footnote though it was, that sometimes the Universe is so bountiful in its sense of justice that one might believe "in a cosmic Santa Claus."

Nader's Run for the White House

At one level, admittedly an idealistic one, I would point out that the words "Republican Party" or "Democratic Party" are not found in the Constitution. The domination of American politics by these two parties results from a de facto monopoly, and their ownership of power in the United States makes it virtually impossible to dislodge them. They have been in power so long that they have changed the rules of the Senate, for example, with the "60 vote" rule, which is not a Constitutional feature, and it is assumed that all committee chairmanships and assignments are done on the basis of only two caucuses. The "independents," such as Lieberman and Sanders, simply choose which of the two main parties they wish to align with.

While we speak of liberals in the Democratic Party as being "left" or even "leftists," in truth the main political scene in this country does not have a Left in the sense that such a term developed in French politics (the designations "gauche et droit" dividing the Parliamentary aisle). In the way that Karl Marx or classical political thinkers would have used the term, Leftist referred to social ownership of the means of production, social services, etc., as opposed to private enterprise. The French still go through occasional spasms where industry or part of it is "socialized," e.g., reflecting the continued vitality of true Leftist thinking in that country. Neither of the two main political parties in the U.S. varies from a capitalist orthodoxy in any significant degree. The Democrats are a center-Right party, and the Republicans, increasingly, are a Far Right phenomenon.

Nothing in the Constitution, which we tend to forget about because of the long domination by only two parties (which we identify now as synonymous with "Government"), prohibits a person unaffiliated with the Republicans or Democrats from running for office. If he can satisfy the entrance requirements, Nader has the right to run. The objections, of course, arise from considerations of Realpolitik; Nader tends to draw votes which would otherwise go to the mainstream Democratic candidate. Nader's impact on the Florida vote count in 2000 was considered decisive in favor of Bush, although he disputes this conclusion with some logical arguments. Operatives in the Democratic Party resent his gate-crashing because he doesn't have a real chance to win, and because it runs the risk of giving us another Bush, this time in the form of the mentally unbalanced John McCain.

There is no way to dismiss the Democratic Party's complaint decisively; they're right, of course. In a tight race, Nader gets in the way of the Democrats. The arguments of the Democrats, of course, would be easier to take if they had used what power they had to block the excesses of the Bush Administration. For example, why didn't they use the 60 vote rule in the Senate to block Bush's tax cuts, which have been fiscally ruinous? Why didn't they use their majority ownership of the House to deny all funding for a continuation of the Iraq War? Why didn't they use the 60-vote rule in the Senate to refuse passage of the Military Commissions Act until habeas corpus was restored, and until the war crimes exonerations were removed? They had the clear, invincible power to do all these things. Their failure to do anything, to play ball with Bush when they didn't have to, validates Nader's central point.

In terms of the present race between Obama and Clinton, why does neither ever argue for a streamlined military which is commensurate with the nature of a true terrorist threat? Where are the calls, for example, for a 25% reduction in military spending? Well, as the Democrats will say, you simply can't do that. We'll look soft on defense. The American electorate isn't smart enough, they're saying with a wink, to figure out matters of detail and nuance. We have to keep spending way too much money just to keep up appearances. Then we look tough and resolved, even if it's a stupid waste of money. Same with the health care issue; it has to remain a business-for-profit in this country; hell, this isn't Denmark, they say.

It sure isn't. Nader does say all these things, of course, and the Democrats claim (correctly?) that he can say them because he can't actually get elected. So we're stuck, permanently, with two ossified parties that cannot react to reality. Is that it? Nader's idealism (not his megalomania, as Democratic operatives have it) impels him to run. He doesn't like accepting that cynical conclusion without a fight. No one has to vote for him, and few people do. But don't attack him for doing what he thinks is right.

The McCain Mutiny

Whatever else one says about it, at least the story of John McCain's reported affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman (what a great name for an Other Woman) is fun. It isn't fun to contemplate this latter-day Captain Queeg actually sitting in the Oval Office. He strikes me as yet another intellectual dilettante with narcissistic deficiencies similar to the current occupant of the White House: McCain seems unaware that we're aware that he's unaware that we're on to his whole phony game of pretending to be an honest "straight-talker." This is more or less exactly the same mistake the country made in 2000, and if we make it again...

So the press and the public are pretending to be utterly engrossed in whether Johnny Mac was "warned" in an "intervention" by his "staff" that his relationship with Ms. Iseman "appeared inappropriate." All these words are in quotes because this is the way the game is being played. McCain, who may have been warned by "associates" who were not technically "staff," is artfully engaging in etymological niceties that make Bill Clinton's meditation on the meaning of "is" seem candid and forthcoming by comparison. In his brief remarks yesterday, McCain reassured everyone that he had done nothing to "betray the country," which seems a little off the main point, yet it's hard to take all his words in their full context without reaching the conclusion that he's saying, believe it or not, "I never had sex with that woman, that Ms. Iseman."

David Brooks of the New York Times, the paper which started all this, lays the whole thing off on a rivalry among McCain staff members that led one of them to mutiny. Brooks then stated that McCain's "career will be over" if it turns out he actually had an affair. As this thing has developed, I think that's right, because McCain has decided he has to stonewall this thing and hope no one can prove he's lying.

So to review a few basic rules about men and adultery: Men are not accused of having affairs; they have affairs. McCain obviously spent too much time around Vicki Iseman and the inevitable happened. A man's sexual fidelity is like the capsizing of a sailboat; the trick is to avoid reaching that angle of critical heel, which will always occur with the right combination of familiarity and opportunity, such as traveling together on a private jet to a remote location. This is asking for it, and McCain, after all, left his first wife for his present wife as the result of an affair with his present wife, although it was his present wife at the podium yesterday assuring everyone that McCain would never do what he had obviously done with her. Remarkably, Mrs. McCain's head did not explode during her brief remarks.

The Straight Talker has now hired noted go-to mouthpiece Robert Bennett to stage manage the complexities of his forthright denial. The reasons for this can be figured out: there is the implied threat of a defamation suit if anyone takes the story to the next level and states unequivocally that McCain had an affair; and, using the attorney-client and work product privileges to keep everything discreet, Bennett can talk to all the players for McCain and help them get their stories straight. Remember that Clinton's weasel-out foundered when Monica started talking to Linda Tripp, plus Monica's decision to save a little Presidential Splooge on her blue dress as a fond keepsake of happier times under the Oval Office desk. In this sense, McCain's co-respondent is a better choice: quieter, more worldly, definitely way north of legal age. Maybe she's a "collector;" just a hunch. Iseman is maintaining a very low profile, probably confining her remarks on the matter to conversations with Robert S. Bennett, Esq.

So to sum up in a way that Bennett cannot find actionable: I think McCain was boinking Iseman, which is significant ethically only if it influenced his judgment on matters pending before Senate committees involving the two of them, but is significant electorally because it's game-over for the Express if the facts come to light. There is probably no way to prove the affair conclusively unless one of the two principals admits it, which is not going to happen. That is why the Times has confined itself to circumstantial evidence and the suspicions of staffers; however, the presence of this smoke probably indicates a major forest fire somewhere. There is always the possibility of a bombshell - an eyewitness hotel clerk, a bartender who saw the two of them nuzzling. The usual mistakes the lovestruck make. As far as Honest John is concerned, he doesn't care how he gets out of it as long as he gets out of it, and as the lone survivor of the Keating Five, he might just wriggle out again.

White House Wizard Nails It Again

“That these people were ready to go into action as terrorists in Spain — that came as a surprise,” said Judge Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s highest antiterrorism magistrate. “In my opinion, the jihadi threat from Pakistan is the biggest emerging threat we are facing in Europe. Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.” New York Times, Sunday, February 10, 2008.

"Appearing today on Fox News Sunday, President Bush laid into Sen. Barack Obama, claiming he would 'attack Pakistan' and 'embrace' Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Associated Press, Sunday, February 10, 2008.

Occasionally, here and there, I read accounts claiming that George W. Bush is "a lot smarter" than people think he is, and that The Decider deliberately cultivates a stumblebum persona so that his political opponents will misunderestimate his true depth and canny comprehension of the issues. David Brooks, for example, who routinely prostrates himself before the Bush Throne, epitomizes this approach. I find all of this irritating in the extreme not because I have a vested interest in thinking Bush is a moron (I don't), but because it completely misses the point: Bush is an intellectual mediocrity who exacerbates his limitations by being lazy as hell.

Do you ever wonder what Bush actually does as President? We know, from countless stories, that he gets up very early and goes to bed at around 9 p.m. It seems that he front-loads all his "briefings" from the CIA, NSA and other initialed spooks first thing up, that is, when he's in town. Then he probably holds a conference in the Oval Office with Cheney and the rest of the gang. Then he usually meets with some bewildered out-of-towner like the President of Peru or the King of the Maldives for a half hour, followed by a few irrelevant questions from the domesticated White House press. Time for lunch. In the afternoon he works out. He dislikes White House dinners and all socializing, a characteristic he shares with many reformed drunks. In the evening he reads his books about Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill. (I find it interesting, to use 50% of Bush's adjectival vocabulary, that Bush thinks because historians write contemporary books about George Washington, it must mean the "jury's still out" on whether Washington "succeeded" or not. By a parity of reasoning, muses Bush, he need not worry yet whether he's done anything wrong. Could it be that historians repeatedly write about Washington (and Lincoln) because they were unquestionably great?)

He's apparently very good at delegating...everything. There is not a scrap of paper on his desk -- no calendar, no memos, no notes, no blotter, nothing. It looks like nothing goes on there. Jimmy Carter was such a micromanager that he scheduled playing times on the White House tennis courts. Bush is so hands-off that he couldn't be bothered to react to a memo like "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within U.S." in August, 2001. He stayed on vacation in Crawford, even though he'd only been on the "job" about 7 months before taking off for 5 weeks.

About a month before he left to clear brush, Richard Clarke, Bush's counterterrorism chief, summoned a meeting on July 5, 2001, to inform the reps from the FBI, INS, and the Secret Service that "something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon." The CIA was aware that two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khaled al-Midhar, had left an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur and flown directly to Los Angeles. Reports were coming in from the Phoenix and Minneapolis FBI field offices that Arab men were taking lessons in flying commercial jets under suspicious circumstances indicating an inappropriate curiosity about flight patterns around New York City (Moussaoui, in Minnesota) and an inappropriate lack of curiosity about how to do anything but fly the plane and make turns, leaving out the business of taking off and landing. All of this is laid out in detail in Lawrence Wright's 2006 book, The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11. The book builds upon the 9-11 Commission report and the Joint Congressional Inquiry, and it's difficult to read all this material (as I have) without coming away with the distinct impression (as I have) that the 9-11 plot could have been thwarted if Bush had convened the counterterrorism meeting Richard Clarke had been urging since Bush's first inauguration. In other words (another of Bush's favorite phrases), if Bush had ever gotten serious about terrorism before it became a political football. The intelligence agencies actually were closing in on the plot. What was missing was not the alphabet soup of new agencies that have since been invented with Teutonic labels like "Homeland Security," or the Patriot Act, or a Director of National Intelligence, or any of that costly, redundant, unwieldy bureaucratic superstructure. Someone just needed to pay attention during the summer of 2001 when the lights were "blinking red." The existing intelligence agencies and the crime-fighting G-men just about cracked the case. What was missing was leadership; what we got instead was the routine incompetence and cronyism of the Bush Administration.

And yep: Pakistan was a huge problem back then, and it's a huge problem now. "Taliban" is a Pashtun word meaning "students," and the students in question were those educated in Muslim madrassas in Pakistan funded largely by the Saudis. But this is way too much detail for Bush, who wasn't aware of the Shiite and Sunni sects until the eve of his invasion of Iraq. Obama doesn't want to invade Pakistan, but of all the people to castigate someone else for invading the wrong country! Pervez Musharraf is our buddy because we need a reliable tyrant to ride herd on those A-bombs. It's not heresy to point that out; it's just that Bush has become so inured to his own confused hypocrisy that he doesn't realize when he's saying something unintentionally hysterical. Just ask Baltasar Garzón. Es la pregunta, no?

Sure, I Voted for Obama

It is my considered opinion that this nation has moved past the point where carrying on with business as usual will succeed. I tend to agree with an erstwhile professor of mine, Chalmers Johnson, that the nemesis awaiting America is the combination of consequences stemming from imperial overstretch, environmental degradation and international competition. If we continue doing things as we have done them for the last 35 years, our standard of living, which has been on a downward trajectory since 1973, will fall to Third World standards, we'll continue as greenhouse-gas outlaws, and our financial system will unravel completely due to federal deficits, national debt and trade imbalance.

We call ourselves a "service economy," which is the current euphemism now that "information age" has lost its cachet. We didn't arrive at an economy based on consumerism through deliberate choice; it's what was left to us after our industrial base was hollowed out by foreign competition and and offshoring of American jobs. Asian countries in particular have succeeded to those mainstay jobs of our former middle class, replaced by the "crap jobs" of the service economy. However, it seems to me that the world, which is currently in a state of 40% overshoot in resource utilization (which is breaking down the Earth's capacity to sustain human life), cannot long continue with the nonrenewable energy paradigm. Things have to shift fundamentally. The United States, under the right leadership, could again lead the way.

Since that's where I think we are, I look at the available list of viable candidates and conclude that only Obama makes any sense. "Experience" is not the key factor; indeed, it may be a huge liability to the extent that it indicates a candidate, such as John McCain, will tend to think in antiquated ways about meeting modern challenges. The same can be said about Hillary Clinton; I have no doubt she understands all the issues (when she discusses global warming, for example, she's a model of clarity and comprehension), but I think ultimately she won't change anything because her style is to make whatever compromise is necessary for the sake of political expedience. Obama may turn out to be the same, but at least he's demonstrated some independence of mind, most notably about the Iraq war. Clinton and Obama are both very smart, but Obama's younger, and that's a plus in my book. His generation will have to live longer in the America he begins to create, and he's less tied into the old (as in fossilized) approach to doing things.

In general, I think there's a huge problem with senescence in American politics, an artifact of the near-impossibility of voting out incumbents. The Senate, for example, is by and large a club of ancient white men. Their frame of reference for the United States is about forty years out of date. The Republican Party is infested with "social issues" parasites like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich, and amoral apparatchiks like Karl Rove, whose only interest is in maintaining power for one party as a sort of political game. These aren't people who can lead the United States effectively anymore. If the United States attempts to continue its Eisenhower-era economy, we're not going to have the dubious luxury of worrying about gay marriage and abortion-on-demand, because the middle class will be destroyed, the entitlements programs will go bankrupt, and we'll lose our competitive place in the world.

I think Bill Clinton was a good president, whose personal style (not the sex, but his political cowardice and his disorganization) kept him from being great. I don't see how that has anything to do with Hillary Clinton. She does not strike me as anyone unique or charismatic, which is really all Bill had going on, but, like Bill, her administration would mostly stir the pot because of a kind of obsession with compromise. Small, incremental changes, slight decreases in defense spending, tinkering with the tax code, some "middle ground" on Iraq and Afghanistan, such as phased withdrawals over a four-year period, and a nod of acquiescence toward alternative energy and transportation, such as increased tax credits. Healthcare will wobble along toward complete breakdown. All of this follows from the perception that the stodgy members of Congress will recognize that Hillary is someone "they can do business with," meaning, continue to do the business of lobbyists.

As I say, Obama may find the political culture of Washington, D.C. an immovable object, and will slump down into feckless compromise. If I were a betting man, that's the way I think it will turn out; but it's guaranteed if Hillary is elected. So what the hell? My hunch is that Obama holds more promise than he can put on display within the dreadful limitations of Big Media politics. A candidate has to reserve the big ideas until after election; remember that in 1999, George W. Bush scoffed at the notion of nation-building. By the time of his second inaugural, he had decided on the messianic goal of rebuilding the entire world. Maybe Obama can use the amped-up power of the unitary executive forged by Cheney & Co. to do something really useful and transformative, as opposed to merely insane and delusional. You never know until you give a guy a chance to try.

The True Third Rail in American Politics

First, in an effort at scrupulous accuracy, I should note that yesterday's calculation of the budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 incorrectly stated that the $150 billion stimulus package was not included; it is, actually, thus reducing the actual deficit to the high $600 billion level. However, the Treasury Department's forecast is based upon a growth rate of 2.7% in GDP, which is unrealistic if the United States is in fact entering a recession (an implication the growth rate will be negative for at least two consecutive quarters), as the CBO notes. One way or another, Paulson's forecast is made out of moonshine and fairy dust, and Bush is going to leave office with huge budget deficits, a staggering national debt and reeling entitlement programs, and mainly all because of That Thing Which Cannot Even Speak Its Own Name, which, as a public service, the PondMeister lays out here:

The world's top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:

1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
6. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
7. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
8. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
9. India (2005 est.), $19 billion
10. Saudi Arabia (2005 est.), $18 billion.

It might be noted that Saudi Arabia's military budget is actually a subsidiary account of the U.S. budget, since the Saudis spend their money on American high-tech gizmos and jet planes. Be that as it may, if you add the bottom 9 budgets, they come to about $323 billion, or about 1/2 of the American budget. Now, the American budget is actually understated; adding in, as Chalmers Johnson does, the "black budgets" of the CIA, the Department of Energy, Homeland Security and the multitude of intelligence agencies (all of which are unconstitutionally kept secret from the American people), the real figure is about $1 trillion per year for defense and homeland security.

If you support a mainstream candidate (meaning, someone who could actually get elected and preside over this fruited plain), the one thing you will never hear him or her say is that we ought to drastically cut military spending. This is the ultimate no-no. When Bush talks about cutting "government spending," he never means the military budget; on the contrary, his budget proposals always urge increases in military spending.

Since we're spending all this money, here's a fair question, I think: against whom are we defending ourselves? Here's another question: why did the 9/11 plotters use hijacked American passenger jets as missiles? Answer: Because they were part of a ragtag terrorist group that couldn't afford its own air force, that's why.

Suppose, as a rule of thumb, the USA decided to spend as much as the next four countries on the list combined. That comes to about $200 billion. That assures us that if Russia, China, France and Japan ganged up on us, we would have the resources to handle them, although the notion of a war among such advanced countries is a little anachronistic anyway. No country on that list is going to tolerate a massive invasion of their respective "homelands." They're going to go nuclear, just as Israel would in the event of a massive invasion of its territory by surrounding Arab countries. We all know that. The days of Normandy Beach and island-hopping American conquests in the Pacific are over. The A-Bomb made them obsolete. The USA maintains a large standing army and all this expensive hardware so we can invade countries which are not nuclear powers in order to influence geopolitical conditions, mainly, fossil fuels; however, if we gave that up as American policy and focused our expenditures simply on (a) a military sufficient to protect the American homeland from invasion and (b) a nuclear deterrent, how much would that cost?

If any other nation on the list can pose a serious threat to the USA, with its budget reduced to the parameters noted, how would they go about that with their own budgets so limited? Why are they able to operate so efficiently where we can't? It doesn't make any sense. The United States could institute a program of one-year, universal military service for every American, immediately after high school (as countries such as Germany and Switzerland have done) to guarantee itself a large pool of able-bodied people who could defend America against invasion. It could reduce the standing army and decommission all overseas bases. It could refocus its military and intelligence apparatus against the interdiction of terrorist acts carried out in an "asymmetrical" way.

It's too bad that Obama, or Clinton, or someone with the nation's attention won't take the time to educate the American public about what's really necessary to defend the USA. The vast amounts spent arise simply from the inertial force of the military-industrial complex and are unrelated to our real needs. With the available tax revenues, we can't fix anything else unless we reduce the military and intelligence budgets.

Co-Dependent Nation

The stock market is tanking again today (in the morning, as I write), an indication that the Plunge Protection Team meeting in the basement of the White House is running out of gas. They just don't have the scratch to do it all by themselves, folks. Look, all you American Idol fans: you've got to do your part. Isn't there anything you want to buy right now, even if you're unemployed and you've missed your last two mortgage payments? Where's your sense of commitment? The "service sector" numbers are down, and since "service sector" = "the economy," we've got a real problem. And the American consumer is causing it. How can we put this to you? Try this: Buy shit or die.

I've been watching Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson bob and weave before a Senate committee this morning, and he's valiantly striving to explain how Bush's last budget can be reconciled with his pledge to balance the books by ...some date in the future. The current estimate calls for an "official" deficit of $409 billion; however, it must be pointed out that this number fails to include anything, even though everyone knows that huge expenses are being deliberately left out in order to maintain the fiction that Bush's "budget balancing" is an actual phenomenon and not the reality distortion of a dry drunk trying to convince himself he's done something he hasn't.

You can see how the personality problems of our national father engender anxiety symptoms in his citizen-children. How come Daddy still refuses to admit that he's not including the Social Security surplus of $200 billion in his calculations? So that takes our deficit to $607 billion. And what about the uncounted "emergency appropriations" for Iraq & Afghanistan, which apparently will add up to $70 billion? So we're up to $677 billion. And then the "stimulus package" of $150 billion, taking us to $827 billion, or twice the official figure. That's about 25% of the total budget of $3.1 trillion, and will take the national debt to about $10 trillion when Bush leaves office.

The Senators, however, are obviously afraid to point out Daddy's problem. He's addicted to military spending. No matter how bad his financial situation gets, he absolutely insists that his war jones has nothing to do with it. He's got it under control. He needs it, in fact. While we're talking about that, this year he'd like more money to feed the monkey. He wants to cut medical research, education funding, subsidies for seniors freezing to death because of high fuel oil costs, transportation funding (like resurfacing our washboard roads), benefits for veterans getting maimed in his wars, but dammit -- give me that military money!

Gee whiz, it does seem that until someone has the guts to point out to Daddy he's got a huge problem, and that he's nowhere near his fantasized goals, that we're going to remain stuck on Step One. Where we've been, unfortunately, since January, 2001.

The Unsinkable Patriots

I was watching the Super Bowl yesterday in my den in the company of a lifelong pal, a fellow I can share stories with about seventh grade teachers as easily as the current perplexities of the American economy. A liberal like me, whose views of society were informed as much by the lower middle class California housing tract we both grew up in as by our later exposure to student agitation at the University of California at Berkeley in the late Sixties.

So maybe you'd expect us to be a little cynical watching the Declaration of Independence reading that preceded the game. Switching from one NFL star to another (and including others, such as Pat Tillman's wife), most of the Declaration was read, all except the bill of particulars laying out the specific grievances against the British Crown. I have a framed copy of the document on my den wall, in fact, and I make it a practice to read the entire Declaration every Fourth of July. So maybe I expected myself to be inured to yet another reading, and if so, I would have been wrong about myself, too. Because both of us sat there crying, within a few moments of "When in the course..."

The Declaration of Independence is simply the most eloquent, stupendous, inspiring, and brilliant political document in the history of the human race. Yet there was something else going on there, too. Maybe the thing was being broadcast on the Fox network; maybe half the guys reading it are Bush supporters; maybe it's simply my wishful thinking, inspired in part by the ascendancy of an African-American man and a woman to positions of political prominence in current politics. Maybe all that's true, and yet the inclusion of a couple of vignettes before and after the reading, Ben Franklin warning that the Declaration was a perilous act ("either we hang together or we shall surely hang separately") and the signing by John Hancock in large letters so that "George" would have no trouble reading it...and the inclusion of Pat Tillman's wife, who has been a courageous critic of Administration propaganda...is it possible that entities so mainstream and corporate as Fox and the NFL were subtly sending out messages that it's time to reclaim the spirit of democracy once again, and to demonstrate the courage of the Founding Fathers in our own time?

Just for a moment I didn't feel so alone in this sense our country has been betrayed, that if I'm a crank writing under the sobriquet "Waldenswimmer," that's okay, because I'm doing it for the right reasons. Because patriotism isn't dead in this country, and it will live to fight another day, just as Tom Brady will recover from that injury and resume his greatness soon. It's very early on a Monday morning and I find myself utterly incapable of cynicism, a triumph in itself; and I feel resolved to demonstrate in my own life at least 1/10th of the courage of Adams, Jefferson, Washington and Franklin. Or, for that matter, Eli Manning on the last magnificent drive.

The Bush Foreign Policy Legacy

I think that's a pretty cool title for this essay. It makes me feel like Walter Lippmann or someone like that. Very summary in its breadth.

My hope is that we now know what Bush's foreign policy legacy will be, at least in rough outline. While the Decider talks about "sprinting to the finish" and that sort of thing, it's okay with me (far preferable, in fact) if he just sort of ambles along, taking the time to clear brush and ride his bike and use his elliptical trainer or whatever. I, personally, would have no problem if he collected his 400K now for 2008 and took early retirement. I didn't see the SOTU address the other night (I'd eaten some bad filet of sole and didn't want to risk it), but numerous commentators pointed out that Bush seemed perceptibly giddy with the realization that this was it, he could stop the serious act now and go back to being...whatever he was before.

We probably won't get that lucky, and Bush will "build" on his progress to date. Which consists of: the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Now, you can say whatever you like about our 43rd President (and most people have), but one thing you must admit, if you're at all honest, is that the mustachioed, Ernie Kovacs look-alike, who always wore uniforms that made him look like a generalissimo in Woody Allen's "Bananas," is permanently gone from the scene. Deposed, captured, hanged. Dead as a doornail.

That's it, of course. That's the sum and substance of Bush's record of foreign policy successes. Afghanistan? Um, I don't know. Are the Taliban really gone? I don't think so, principally because they were actually a Pakistani phenomenon, and Pakistan's insidious capacity for generating mischief is as vibrant as ever. Anyway, the Big Cheeses of the Afghan situation, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, are still very much extant, more than six years after 9/11. You can't declare victory in Afghanistan with the Evil-Doers waiting in the wings for a Lib softie to take over in the USA.

But Saddam? He's done for. Kaput, finis, terminado. We took care of that problem. Which was...what again? That's right, he was a despot from the same part of the world that gave us the 9/11 hijackers. Bush used just those words to remind us of his wisdom in toppling Saddam. "Imagine if Saddam was still in power in the same part of the world where the 9/11 hijackers came from," something elegant like that. By the "same part of the world," he means, of course, just north of Saudi Arabia, where Osama and 15 of the hijackers were from, and sort of northwest of Egypt, where Atta and Zawahiri were from. I confess this is a little confusing.

Personally, I think most Iraqis, despite everything, were glad to see Saddam go. Especially if you were a Shiite during his reign of terror. The arbitrary brutality of despots makes everyone nervous. By somewhat similar thinking, I'll be glad to see Bush go because his pattern of routine law-breakinng (FISA, the Geneva Conventions, the 4th Amendment, designation of American citizens as enemy combatants) makes me nervous. Maybe we can get someone in office (Obama, Clinton, either way) who understands how the Bill of Rights works, and sort of gets the whole separation of powers thing. So that when a statute (like FISA or Common Article 3 of Geneva) is inconvenient, you amend the damn thing, you don't simply commit a felony and then ask Congress to exonerate you retroactively.

But we were talking about Saddam. He's gone. We can all agree on that. And he was an Arab, just like Osama and Atta. It's not surprising, of course, that Iraq would have had an Arab as its leader. But still...where was I?

Another Year, Another SOTUS

So a rabbi walks into a bar in New York City with a duck on his head. "Where'd you get that?" the bartender asks. "Brooklyn," replies the duck. "There's hundreds of 'em."

That's a pretty good joke and useful for deconstructing the nature of humor. It has the familiar elements: surprise, absurdity and conflict. We're surprised that the duck answers instead of the rabbi. The absurdity and conflict arise because we can't quite make sense of a duck commandeering a rabbi and going to a bar. Your mind races to comprehend a situation made of nonsensical elements and for some reason it makes you laugh.

The idea of George W. Bush mounting the podium and delivering his seventh State of the Union address (which the Washington Post calls "probably" his last - why probably? oy vey) has some of the same feel of a silly joke. If the element of surprise is now gone, the sense of absurdity and conflict is as vibrant as ever. One way or another this country wound up under the bumbling leadership of Chance the Gardener. For seven long years, going on eight. We all have our comical parts to play: Bush will pretend to be giving a serious speech in which he's interested, and the people sitting in the House's chamber will pretend to take him seriously, and then lots of TV pundits will weigh in and dissect another dumb oration which describes a world which doesn't even exist. It is all an exercise in mass delusion and everyone involved knows it's a delusion and they all do it anyway.

If the United States seems completely nuts these days (and it does), I think this process explains how we got there. Our everyday lives are like the rabbi, the duck and the bartender. It is an absurdist farce that is so far out of whack with rationality that we can no longer even get our minds around it. We intuitively sense that the President, instead of reciting a serious speech written by other people who at all costs want to avoid saying anything even remotely connected to reality; about lots of things the President barely grasps; instead of all that, we know that Bush would much rather prepare for his oration by eating Texas-style chili for about three days and then walking around the floor of the House asking esteemed Members to pull his index finger and see what happens. If he did that, we would have a better sense of who and where we are. It wouldn't be so funny, but it would change the joke. The bartender would ask the rabbi where he got the duck, and the rabbi would answer: "What duck?"

Let's Face It, It Will Be Fun

"The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughty boy. I'm going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy." Senator Larry Craig, speaking to Tim Russert about William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, circa 1999.

Okay, Senator Craig, you're batting .500 while playing Truth In Politics. You whiffed with the "I never have been gay" stuff a few months back (that misplaced adverb is a tell), which statement, in its studied and manifestly fraudulent vehemence, matched Bill's "I never had sex with that woman, that Ms. Lewinsky..." a decade or so ago. Remember Bill's face, as he pointed at the camera in self-righteous indignation? What man, who dares call himself a man, hasn't played that game? Richard Pryor summed it up with his deathless, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?"

Of course, we realize now that Senator Craig's conjoined adjectives were simply intended to titillate himself. He was picturing President Clinton one stall over in a Union Station men's room. The esteemed senator from the Land of Potatoes (memo to Dan Quayle: the "e" goes only with the plural) was in the throes of a reverie: granted he's bad, most assuredly he's naughty, but could he even be nasty? How his heart must have thumped!

So now Bill is that close to being back in the general vicinity of the White House. He's overplaying his hand these days, of course, but that's simply a measure of how bad he wants it. I think Bill doesn't quite exist to himself if he's not in the limelight. If the Baby Boom's vast legions represent the Culture of Narcissism, then Bill Clinton is our patron saint, the personality around whom the cult coalesced. We can't hate him without hating ourselves, and to love him is to affirm ourselves, to authenticate our image-obsessed, amoral, ethically irresponsible dedication to our self-aggrandizement. He's so American. L'etat, c'est lui.

I think he's coming back to the center ring, where he belongs. And you know what that means: bimbos on parade. Seriously, gentle readers, whaddya think Bill's been up to between about January 20, 2001 and the present moment? The differences between the Bill Clinton of his presidential days and the Bill of Billary are these: now he's very rich, very independent, free-spirited, less scrutinized, and far less careful about what he says and does. In short, he's even more attractive, and not just to the Republican Senatorial caucus, although that's a gimme. He's been traveling all over the world since he left office. While Hillary is often in Washington D.C. , Bill has been based in New York, Southern California, anywhere he wants. Thus, the question: what kinda numbers do you think we're talking here?

Now it's true he had the multiple bypass surgery not so long ago, and he probably takes cardio medication which could slow him down some; but since 2001, medical science has also made great progress on what you could call compensatory pharmacology. Net result: no great loss of potential. So you take a lady's-catnip guy, give him a hip new wardrobe and millions and millions of dollars from speaking fees, fly him around in private jets to exotic spots all over the world in the company of female volunteers who share his passion for eradicating hunger, AIDS, poverty, the heartbreak of psoriasis, maybe even erectile dysfunction -- who share all his passions, in fact. Get out your calculators, folks.

We are, of course, going to hear all about it. What fun that will be compared to these dreary tales of waterboarding and wiretapping and subprime and all the rest of the dreary litany of tired subjects the present dibbick in the White House burdens us with in his sour, dyspeptic, buzzkill way. We're going to have a good time again! Dirty talk, the kind that made Ken Starr glad he was raised in a fundamentalist church just so he could savor the delicious feel of moral outrage (and excruciatingly tantalizing images that troubled his sweaty dreams) that another guy, much sexier than he could ever be, was playing around with the luscious...oh never mind. Moralists, fasten those seat belts. The front car has just reached the top of the roller coaster...

Economics, Definitively Explained

I know there's a lot of confusion out there right now about the American economy. Has it reached its bottom, as measured by the stock market indices? (No.) Will the U.S. economy collapse? (No.) Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Not in January.)

I base my analysis not on the smug explanations of a bunch of guys wearing pastel ties on the business cable channels, as so many people do, but on the work of the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, circa 1927. To wit, Sir Arthur gave us the elucidating phrase "time's arrow" to describe that curious temporal asymmetry in macroscopic phenomena that can only be explained by means of statistical probability. Time's arrow, in any complex system, tends always towards greater entropy, which we call the future, subject to the fluctuation theorem, which holds "after the discovery of statistical mechanics physicists realized that the second law [of thermodynamics] is only a statistical one, so that there should always be some nonzero probability that the entropy of an isolated system will spontaneously decrease; the fluctuation theorem precisely quantifies this probability."

Look, I'm not going to take a lot of time to explain why these ideas, as applied to the American economy, clear everything up. You're either with me to this point or you're not; however, the resistance to entropic anomalies implied by massive and complicated phenomena (like a big economy) certainly teaches us that the egg is not going to reassemble itself on the floor and leap up onto the counter from which it recently rolled. Agreed? Of course. By the same token, Chicken Little guys like Jim Kunstler, with his collapse ideas and sudden reversion of America to the Stone Age, proceed at their own peril and in defiance of clear and settled laws of physics. I mean, geez...the idea I actually have to spell this out. Sometimes for fun I read their stuff, but it's just for the colorful language. If the reassembling of the American economy has a statistical probability approaching (but not reaching) zero, by a parity of reasoning a sudden acceleration in entropy in defiance of the system's inertia and tendency toward modulated and highly interdependent processes is also (although not as) unlikely, providing the limiting criteria are held constant over the period in question (availability of resources, productivity, steady-state workforce, etc.). Again, I realize I'm being obvious, but these points are important.

I believe in rigor and in the laws of thermodynamics, wherever they may lead me. So let me tell you where the bottom of the Dow Jones Averages will be (other prognosticators shy away from such predictions; not me, I relish the opportunity to be precise). The Dow will move to 9,100, or a drop of about another 20% from its high of approx. 14,000. I know you know how I got there, but for the sake of those new to the class, look: the American economy = 70% consumer spending. The source of the money for spending was, during the period about 2001-2006 the sum of x (employment earnings) + y (MEW, or mortgage equity withdrawals); thus, x + y = .7(G), where G = gross domestic product. (Why do I have to crunch these equations all by myself while the guys making $500,000 per year on CNBC get by with all this blather about "market exuberance" and its opposite number?) During this period x ='ed y, approximately; thus, simplifying, 2x = .7(G). .3(G) came from somewhere else (Bill Gates's money market account interest, probably). 2x/2= x, (reflecting the fizzling out of MEW, or y), thus leaving only .35(G) as the contribution of consumer spending to GDP, or a reduction of 35%.

14,000 x .35% = 4,900. Subtracting this number from 14,000 = 9,100.

There will be another kegger in the quad Friday at noon. Please liquidate your Schwab accounts and plan to be there.

365 Days to Go

Various pieces here and there on the Internet have noted, with a great exhalation of relief, that George W. Bush has one year left to finish up his impersonation of a president. Some of them were a trifle premature in precisely noting "365 days to go," perhaps forgetting that American presidential elections happen during leap years, and that February 29 occurs between January 20, 2008 and its counterpart in 2009. Today, however, we can actually make that statement.

In our fevered times, the learned analysts and commentators are impatient with the actual transpiration of history and yearn to write it before it happens. Thus, we see in these "prehistories" an anticipatory description of what life will be like in America after Bush returns to Crawford or Dallas or Asuncion, or wherever he winds up. Most depict a country trying to haul itself up out of a morass of problems and quagmires caused by Bush's reign of incompetence and cupidity. These efforts are all versions of chewing gum with the mind, in my opinion. We just don't know at this point, any more than we know what will happen over these last 365 days.

With all that in mind, however, we can reliably predict that Bush's vaunted "sprint to the finish" (a signal characteristic of Bush's thinking is that his self-image is wildly incongruent with his lived reality) won't produce any great breakthroughs. Bush starts things and doesn't finish them. That's true across the board. Can we recall his "Road Map" which was going to lead to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff? Anthony Zinni as the envoy, way back when, Colin Powell leading the way to peace in our time? If that seems like ancient history it's because it is. Bush didn't want the United States to participate in the Kyoto Protocol; he was going to propose a different regime "based on science." He never came up with anything. He let the United States languish in the obstructionism of inertia.

His counterpart in the White House, Dick Cheney, is very different. He made his bones as a career apparatchik by always finishing his tasks. With the assistance of his Man Friday, David Addington, Cheney installed his torture regime in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and at all the black sites in the CIA's gulag of illegal prisons. Cheney was determined to work the "dark side," as he put it, and he delivered. The Executive Branch's obsessive secrecy and utter contempt for Congressional oversight are other hallmarks of Cheney's influence. These two features of the Bush/Cheney years, the sullied reputation of the United States as a moral force and a broken balance of powers, will linger far into the future after Bush leaves office.

On the economic front, we could say that Bush has no head for business and Cheney is indifferent to the national prosperity, although the VP is intensely interested in his own net worth. I don't think either one of them realized how much the global economy was changing while they were in office because their focus was always on wars of aggression and investing in the military-industrial complex. America's dependence on foreign sources of oil is as great (and ruinous) as ever, and the balance of trade issue remains a looming disaster. By staking his reputation on a single failed project, the Iraq war, Bush diverted vast national resources to something which cannot possibly yield a decent return on investment. Had the one trillion dollars been invested in domestic uses (alternative energy and rebuilding infrastructure), the United States would have made progress during his tenure. It is the cardinal sign of a lousy businessman that he can't figure out how to allocate his money to bring about optimal results. In this sense, Bush has simply replicated his brief failed career in the oil business.

You might say that when January 20, 2009 rolls around, the new president will face a situation where all the problems which existed in January, 2001, have been exacerbated, and many very serious dilemmas have been added to the mix -- America's economic competitiveness, the insolvency of the entitlement programs, the unmanageable national debt, the unaffordability of energy supplies such as oil. Eight years will have passed with nothing but depreciation and deferred maintenance to show for it. A truly patriotic gesture on Bush and Cheney's part would be to resign now and to allow successors to get started on the salvage operation. Consistent with their attitudes to date, however, we can be sure they won't.

What Is It Bush Isn't Telling Us?

Something's happening here,
What it is ain't exactly clear...
-- Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth."

My analysis of anything George W. Bush says or does is guided by certain interpretive principles, or canons of construction. The first of these is that his announced purpose is never the actual purpose. For example, his program to "spread democracy in the Middle East" is a sham. Some of our closest allies are the most repressive police states in the world, and Bush will brook no criticism of these regimes, e.g., Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. Bush never urges American intervention unless oil lies under the soil of an uncooperative government, for example Iraq and Iran. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Second, Bush never espouses any national policy where the chief purpose is to benefit what you might call the "American common man." Our President has no interest in American citizens per se. His loyalty is vouchsafed first, foremost and only to the high-net-worth investor class, from which he comes and among whom he has lived his life. Why the American booboisie, in its cracker barrel wisdom, would think that such a person would naturally incline toward their interests is one of the wonders of the modern world.

So now Bush is proposing a massive giveaway of about 800 bucks for every American whose name shows up on a tax return as a "short term" stimulus program. Tellingly, Henry Paulson, the fidgety and harried Secretary of Treasury, talked today in terms of refunds to "consumers." The taxpayer moniker is just an ID badge for sending the checks. The idea is to get money out there to the weary American buyers with the hope, the prayer, that they'll run right out to Wal-Mart and buy a Chinese hair dryer and save the U.S. economy. The cavalry has mounted up their Broncos and Mustangs (by Ford) and are attacking the mini-mall! Sound the bugle! We ain't finished yet, Jedediah!

Suspiciously, Bush is in a real hurry to get this done. And get this: he's not even insisting that his cherished tax cuts be made permanent (his absolutely cherished wet dream) in exchange for this populist relief.

Applying the Waldenswimmer Canons, we can deduce the following: first, as suggested by Greg Palast recently, the actual purpose of Bush's trip to the "Middle East" was to see his old pal (and America's arch-enemy) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. They required a cheek-to-cheek to discuss Bush's great need for lots of petro-cash, like right now, in order to fund this bonanza. I mean, let's face it. Bush can't keep sending money through a fire hose to Baghdad and fund this bribe unless he's sure the King will write the checks. Screw us on the price of oil with your systematic anti-trust violations, King, that just affects my stupid subjects. But I've got to have this cash as bridge financing until January, 2009, because I just can't face another financial meltdown while I'm in charge. You know what I mean: Harken Energy, Spectrum 7, and now the United States of America.

In his press briefing today, Bush looked uncharacteristically worried. Nervous, darting eyes, his head down, with Cheney in the frame just over his right shoulder, a sure sign that things are serious. Cheney was smirking, of course, because none of this is his fault (he's not in the Executive Branch, as he told us) and anyway, his corporate headquarters are already in Dubai, where the money is.

I conclude that Bush knows something he's not telling us, weird as that may seem (knowing something, I mean). Why would he do something as extreme as helping out ordinary Americans? He vetoed medical insurance for sick children, after all. I guess I have to leave it there. I suspect that certain of his friends in the "investment banking" world have gotten to him. They've told him just how close to the line they are. These billions floating in from the "Gulf States" to Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and the rest of them are symptomatic of some profound disturbance, so obvious (once it is drawn in crayon for Bush) that even the Decider gets it. No more horsin' around, George, they tell him. Drop the ideological bullshit and send some good Socialist pay-offs to the people. They can't borrow it anymore, so you're just gonna have to give it to 'em. Because if we start to fail, you're going to wish you'd been impeached three years ago.

The Cruelty of King Abdullah

In the course of kissing, hugging, dancing and holding hands with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President Bush found time to put in a word for justice and decency. Not, this time, on behalf of the young woman who was going to be flogged for the crime of having been gang-raped, abudcted while in the company of a non-relative male (originally her sentence was 90 lashes, but it was increased [before her pardoning after international pressure from New Zealand and elsewhere] to 200 because she attempted to influence the "court" through the media), but on behalf of American SUV drivers. Please oh please, King, for the love of God & Allah, open the Royal Spigot. My people await this supreme act of generosity! Maybe the Minister of Oil had already told us to take a hike, but Bush had a Hail Mary plan (to mix religious orthodoxies) of his own. He's tight with Ab-doo-lah, the House of Saud and the House of Bush go back a long way, and surely the King, whom Bush has tirelessly protected from scurrilous insinuations (okay: factual and accurate allegations) that he rules a land where 78.94736841052631% of the 9/11 hijackers were born and raised, could grant a Royal Solid, don't you think? Bush went so far as to redact from official government reports any evidence that Saudi ministers were involved in financing the plot. All those blacked-out pages, and this is the thanks he gets? We sell them $20 billion worth of our best military toys, let them buy our biggest banks, let it all go that they were one of the few countries to recognize the Taliban, and you're tellin' me King Abdullah won't turn the goddam valve a little counter-clockwise?

Maybe the King is simply performing an intervention. Remember when W himself said we were addicted to fossil fuels? And now he's over in the King's enormous, country-sized sand box begging (like any junkie who's thought through the true consequences of his rash decision to get off the stuff) for petroleum. For our own good, the King is keeping the liquor cabinet locked up. If Bush is too weak to face the inevitable recession his previous bravado has brought on, the King, his goateed, fat, father figure, will be strong for him.

However -- I am reminded that a Berkeley prof once told us that Saudi Arabia is not so much a nation as a family-owned filling station. We need to remember that oil is what the Saudis do; what's under all that sand is all there is. The famous Ghawar field is sputtering out, they're pumping ever-increasing quantities of seawater into the wells to force the light, sweet (now salty) crude out. By constraining supply, they keep the price way up. What they have left is going to be sold for the highest price possible, because they foresee the day when those thousands of robed playboys, the Princes, who depend on the King's largesse for Monte Carlo condo payments, yacht upkeep, gambling debts, cell phone bills, and all those European whores on retainer -- will have to dip into savings, not income. The Saudis have finagled hard to keep the price in that nice $90-$100/ barrel range, and while they'd like to help you out, Georgie, out of deep respect for all you've meant to each other...

Besides, think it through. They'd just be encouraging us. If we'd gotten realistic a long time ago about mileage standards and had built a decent railroad system, we wouldn't have to import any Saudi oil at all. We have to concede that, as contrary as humility (and intellectual honesty) is to the American ethos. But Bush, that clever poker player, is reminding Abdullah that an America in recession can't buy as much oil. Ever thought of that, King, huh? (Bush snickered with the cleverness of that ploy - hehhehhehhehhehhehhehheh!) Unfortunately, the King responded by saying "I've got two words for you. China. India."

You have to read your audience, I guess. These could be the wrong people to stir with appeals to conscience. We’ll import as much oil as they’ll let us have, pay their price, and shut up about it. We have no choice. Do we, George?

The Narcissists in their Senescence

I'm re-reading Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism just to check in on the relevance of his ancient (30 years ago) ideas about American society, and to see whether they have any continuing pertinence to America's current travails. I think they do, maybe more than ever. Lasch (a prof at Rochester University at the time he wrote the book) was clearly a polymath and Deep Thinker with a profound interest in Freudian analyses of consciousness-formation, and in particular the role of society vis-a-vis the individual personality. Fascinating stuff. In essence, Lasch described a society in which the individual members were incapable of seeing their lives as part of an historic continuum, devoting their existences not to the creation of a society where general prosperity was enhanced and posterity cared for, but rather to a Hobbesian world of merciless competition and self-aggrandizement, where the only societal "values" were the acquisition of status symbols and the creation of an "image of success." Thus, the "Narcissist" dilemma: a society in which ordinary human connections were shattered in the relentless drive to survive in a heartless world.

Sobering thoughts. I suppose my own consciousness was "formed" during the Fifties, refined during the Sixties and cemented during the Seventies. A not uncommon path for a Boomer. I never experienced that "all for one and one for all" can-do ethos of the World War II generation. Our war was a vastly unpopular exercise in futile madness that galvanized my generation only in the sense that not many of us wanted to fight in it. Along with the Civil Rights Movement (largely the result of black leadership with the assistance of ethical Jewish intellectuals and Lyndon Johnson), the anti-war movement was the main "unifying" cause of the Sixties. Had there been no draft, I'm sure the Boomer generation would have been as indifferent to the killing and dying in far-off Vietnam as America (which includes the Boomers in their narcissistic maturity) is now about Iraq and Afghanistan. No skin in the game, who cares? I've got Porsche payments to make, and what if my kid doesn't get into Hoity-Toity Country Day School?

So it's somewhat amusing to see America in its current throes of recession, unwinnable wars and general ungovernability. We have another election cycle on top of us, and most of the candidates (including, perhaps especially, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) want to be president because they want to be president. What could be more narcissistic than that? Their bromides and anodyne references to America's golden past are all nice to listen to for a few seconds, but no one is seriously proposing anything which is going to make the slightest bit of difference. As with all once-great empires sliding into decadence, the good folks of America in general do not see that the former wealth of the country was built upon its singular ability to harness a manufacturing and educational base to a world which could be exploited for cheap resources and a ready market for its exports. All of those factors have disappeared, and we're currently consuming our capital in order to maintain the (narcissistic) illusion of prosperity.

It is not that our problems could not be solved, as a matter of abstract empirical science, it's just that this society is not going to do it. To understand why, social psychology is probably the right place to start. Solutions require cooperation and a sense of common purpose, not an aggregation of 300 million special interest groups. On the other hand, Christopher Lasch wrote his book 30 years ago, and did anyone pay attention then?

Taking Stock of the Bush Years

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed at 10,587 on January 19, 2001. Today it closed at 12,606. There were times during the Clinton years when the DJIA was well over 11,000, but to be fair, one must use the benchmark established on Clinton's departure and Bush's inauguration when assessing how well even this somewhat irrelevant marker of national economic health has fared under George W. Bush.

Thus, the Dow has gained 2,019 points in the seven years of Bush's presidency. Dividing 2,019 by 10,587 = 19%; dividing this result by 7 = 2.7% per year. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains tables for yearly inflation (increases in the Consumer Price Index), these are notoriously (almost hilariously, in a darkly humorous way) non-inclusive of the things an American citizen needs to buy in order to remain alive; nevertheless, even using these fantasy numbers, the overall inflation between January 19, 2001 and the present at least equals the average growth in the DJIA. If one were to undertake a serious analysis of the increase in the price of imported oil (from about $20 per barrel when Bush took office to a figure approaching $100 now, with concomitant increases in the price of gasoline), and the effect of increased transportation costs on the general cost of living, it's clear that during Bush's reign it would be optimistic to say that we've made no progress.

Sometimes the "subprime" mess gets talked about as if it were some adventitious growth on the otherwise healthy body politic. In reality, the subprime mess is the essence of how even the miserable performance of the American economy during Bush's years was achieved. Namely, with wages stagnant against steadily rising prices, Americans resorted to mortgage equity withdrawals (MEW, re-fi's with cash out, lines of credit) to the tune of about $800 billion per year in order to persist in their roles as the world's go-to consumers. This was Bush's "ownership" society; a chimera achieved by the Asian habit of lending money back to us at dirt cheap rates in order to sustain a housing bubble to use as a home-sized ATM for the vanishing American junk-buying junkie.

That's over now. Wall Street is freaking out because Americans aren't buying anything anymore, the MEW game is up, and the economy, which depended on consumer buying for 70% of its life blood, is now on a heart-lung machine. There will be no revival in the short term. If you think you've seen flop sweat on Bush's brow in the past over such debacles as the American occupation of Iraq and the Katrina fiasco, you ain't seen nothin' yet. The candidates running for president, mostly old white men with secure personal fortunes who made their money, in many cases, from using their political connections, can't talk about this unnerving reality because it's too negative for Americans to face. Instead, having presided over a political system which has bankrupted the social entitlement programs beyond redemption, and will thus visit an unsustainable burden on GensX&Y, they talk about assuring that today's youth will enjoy the same prosperity which they knew as boys. In truth, the Old Ones will be lucky if they do not become the main course at a GenX&Y Cannibal Banquet.