The Discussion Industry

In my opinion, the two writers who have brought more clarity to the American problem of insolvency and imperial overstretch than any others are Chalmers Johnson and Kevin Phillips. Johnson has put down his ideas about American imperial overstretch in his Nemesis trilogy; Phillips also has a trio of books about American finances, the last of which was Bad Money, about the "financialization" of the American economy. Interestingly, both of these intellectuals were formerly Republicans who worked, respectively, in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Since in this country any "radical" critique emanating from the Left is, ipso facto, regarded as bogus, naturally these two are afforded an enhanced credibility. (As a case in point, I note that Tom DeLay, that paragon of probity, recently concluded that Barack Obama was "definitely" a Marxist, probably meaning to imply that Barry got his ideas from the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya.) Despite their legitimacy, however, Johnson and Phillips are largely ignored.

The reason for the obscurity of their ideas, which seem so unassailable, is that they lie outside the parameters of the "mainstream" dialogue. J & P both contend that America is on the brink of fiscal disaster, although the paths they describe leading to perdition vary somewhat. Johnson thinks that a bloated military-industrial complex is unsustainable yet politically invulnerable. Phillips contends that America's reliance on paper-shuffling as a way of life, as opposed to productive activity which builds real wealth (such as a manufacturing sector), hollows out the fiscal core of the nation. Both agree that the U.S. has huge foreign and domestic liabilities (debt to foreign countries represented by Treasury obligations and intramural debt in the form of money robbed from entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare), and that the United States will probably try to monetize its way out of its debt. That is, succumb to the temptation to run the printing presses and inflate the currency to make the debt cheaper.

The problem with this loophole is that it may also be closing as the world's economies, particularly in hot emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil and a resurgent Russia, enter the active phase of "de-coupling" their economies from the United States and creating their own markets. Which is another way of saying that the dollar will not necessarily be Planet Earth's fiat currency anymore, and no one will be interested in our efforts to print paper with numbers on it and present it as legal tender. They'll see us for what we are: insolvent, energy deficient and basically irrelevant, except for our adolescent tendency to start wars whenever we get tired of dealing with our own problems.

The mainstream dialogue is not actually based on these realities. The real situation is supported by mountains of converging evidence, such as the sad situation that American depository institutions (i.e., banks) have current unborrowed reserves of negative $130 billion, according to the official figures published by the Federal Reserve, but on which no one comments. In May of 2007, the reserves were a positive $43 billion, so a negative swing of $173 billion has occurred over the last year as the result of the various "liquidity crises," which were actually just the last act of financial cannibalism the U.S. could come up with as it digests its real assets and offers them up to an impatient world.

No one talks much about the unfunded entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security; based on foreseeable outlays, each American family of four will have to come up with $1.4 million to keep the promises the government has made but broken as the result of its insatiable desire to maintain a huge military establishment. One does hear about the negative American savings "rate," and the dried up equity lines of credit which used to fund consumer luxuries like buying Asian electronics, but no more. What money is left is used for luxuries like eating and driving a car.

Actually, talking about these things won't help much at all, yet the Internet is full of blog sites, cable news runs 24 hours a day, newspapers publish on paper and online around the clock. A very small percentage of the yakking actually touches on the "radical" truth that thinkers like Phillips & Johnson write about so thoroughly and eloquently, based on such unimpeachable research. That's because the day-to-day discussions are actually simply an industry, an economic sector like bundling subprime mortgages or working in corporate "branding." It won't sell if one keeps hitting the negative notes over and over, so the tone alternates between hopeful optimism (the Presidential race! change!) and occasional nods toward reality, where some buzzkill expert like David Walker, formerly a G-Man who kept insisting we weren't facing up to things, is given a couple of minutes.

You can, in other words, buy optimism as yet another product of the relentlessly innovative American economy, one where the stock market is down a little, but is about to turn the corner toward positive growth in the "second half of the year," or where oil prices will moderate when the "speculators" are squeezed out, or where the housing market will soon recover once the loan money starts flowing again. Like a 24-hour Reality Show, only more like a 24/7 UnReality Show. Take your pick; it's on right now.

Changed Conditions Ahead

It was a road sign near my house: "Changed Conditions Ahead." I guessed it referred to a new set of stop lights at a previously uncontrolled intersection, but the lights had been there for at least a year. Surely we'd all gotten used to those changed conditions by now. I live in a county so renowned for its hippy-dippyness that the sign might be taken more as a randomly placed philosophical statement, although it looked like a regular road sign.

As Thoreau told us, we stand always at the frontier of two conjoined eternities, the past and the future; we "toe that line." Modern quantum theory might create a few wiggles in the sharpness of that border, a few results preceding a few causes, but that's nevertheless where we live in macro-reality. The future doesn't really exist; it is simply the order reality takes as that wave of time moves forward from now into the next moment, so that if we say we can't predict the future, what we're really saying is that we don't understand what's happening around us in the present.

I think a lot about this country we live in, write this blog about it, and particularly about the strange journey we've traveled during the last eight years or so. In the present political campaign, I sense that there is a widespread assumption that election of more Congressional Democrats and a new Democratic President will result in major "reform" of the worst political excesses of the Bush years, and will also bring on an amelioration of the tremendous economic difficulties the country now faces as the result of about 30 years of completely ignoring our problems in favor of a policy of never "changing our conditions." When the future arrives, I don't think the order of reality comprising the Now of that future will resemble a still image of a movie run in reverse to some American Golden Age.

Over the last couple of weeks, Scott McClellan and the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the use of pre-war information by the Bush Administration have confirmed what most Americans already knew: the Iraq War was set in motion through deliberate, calculated propaganda. In the effect, if not in exactly the style, the push to war was reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels's efforts in the summer of 1938 to supply the motive force for the German invasion of the Sudetenland. Both the Iraq War and the Third Reich's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia were completely "unnecessary" and sold to their respective audiences on the basis of specious "humanitarian" impulses (in the case of the Sudetenland, the alleviation of the "suffering" of the ethnic German minority in Czechoslovakia) and historical manifest destiny. It's ironic that Bush has borrowed the "appeasement" language of 1938; it's as if he doesn't understand which side of history he's on. He isn't a "peacemaker," he's a propagandist who in coldly calculated terms, and for reasons more personal than national, sold the United States on a disastrous and violent course of action that may prove our undoing.

The crushing expense of the war, the complete neglect of other pressing national problems, the torture and Gulag sideshows of the companion "war on terror," are only one part of this devolution. The problem is more basic than that. The Third Reich, as masterfully portrayed by Richard J. Evans in the second volume (The Third Reich in Power) of his three-part history, obviously had transmogrified itself into something unrecognizable before the rape of Czechoslovakia; but once the Wehrmacht rolled into the Sudetenland, the die was cast. Germany did not "reform" itself back to the society of civilized nations. Events simply took their course and Germany's fate was decided for it.

Momentous changes, within the context of modern international politics and economics, will happen here as well. The war and its aftermath will not simply blow over. There is a reason that this seemingly irrelevant misadventure in one, fairly small Middle Eastern country, whose fate is tied neither to our security nor to our prosperity, should preoccupy us, take up such a central place in American fortunes for over five years. Remarkably, as irrational as nearly everyone recognizes this war to be, how unaffordable it is in lives and treasure, in international goodwill, we can't find the political will to stop it. It's a form of national insanity. If we could figure out how we could have arrived in a state of such historical entropy, we could understand the broad outlines of the changed conditions ahead.

An experiment in Bush/Dow coefficients of correlation

As a brief endnote to Friday's musing, President Bush is about to address the nation on the "economy." I will watch this speech on CNBC and note the Dow at the moment when Bush begins speaking. I have noticed in the past that as Bush speaks, the Dow sinks with practically every word. It's already been a terrible day on Wall Street, and we'll see if King Bizarro Midas can work his magic again:

The Dow at the moment Bush begins to speak: 12,314 Down 289.
Dry mouth, slurring his words. He looks gaunt these days.
5 minutes in, Dow down 288. Confounding the theory.
7 minutes in, Down down 287. This man is a leader.
Uh-oh. At 9 minute mark, down 294.
Bush still on stage, Dow down 298.
Finished.
So when Bush began, Dow was at 12,314. As he turned to observe the swearing in of his new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dow was at 12,305.

9 point loss in the course of a 10 minute speech. It's good Bush didn't speak for an hour. Would have cost us 54 points. Wait-- now we're at 321 down. This must be the hangover effect from a Bush speech. Just when the country is feeling hopeless, Bush begins speaking and we have our confirmation - there truly is nothing but despair on the horizon.

The Bushed Legacy

I was getting a haircut and talking to C, the redoubtable scissors expert, about something which had been on my mind recently; to wit, that Nixon's great mistake, that which got him thrown out of office, was his timidity in breaking the law. Watergate was a minor episode in American politics, a "third rate burglary," which failed even in its immediate object. It became dangerous only because of the elaborate efforts at cover-up by a paranoid president, who enlisted the CIA's help in thwarting the FBI investigation, laundered money through Mexico to buy silence of the burglars, etc. Nixon came undone when it was finally revealed that his direct involvement in the cover-up conspiracy began a few days after the break-in occurred, thanks to the "Butterfield" tapes routinely maintained in the Oval Office.

To be sure, the Nixon Administration was guilty of other misprisions of office. The clandestine bombing of Cambodia (detailed masterfully in "Sideshow"), harassing tax audits of political enemies, illegal wiretaps, and the "enemies list." Modern Republican administrations (beginning with Nixon) always engage in systematic violations of federal statutes and of the Constitution. Reagan and Bush I had Iran-Contra, a scandal every bit as outrageous as anything Bush Junior ever came up with. I suppose it's because, down deep, Republicans, with their paternalistic attitude about governance, simply don't believe that the laws really apply to them. Laws simply help them do their job of governing the rest of us. They're not meant to stand in their way, because their intentions are good and they're only doing what they have to do.

George W. Bush found the corrective to Nixon's timidity by violating so many laws, and committing so many unconstitutional acts, that the press, Congress, bloggers, everybody, simply gave up trying to follow them. There can never be any focus on one scandal because the pattern of lawlessness is so diffuse and pervasive that the picture hazes over and you're left feeling powerless. My guess is that Dick Cheney is the true author of this innovative approach. Wear the opposition down with a thousand jabs to the solar plexus. While they're trying to digest the latest Senate report concluding that the country was deliberately misled concerning the true level of threat posed by Iraq (as the Senate Intelligency report released Wednesday stated unequivocally), they'll miss the redacted report from the FBI indicating that Scooter Libby practically admitted that he leaked Valerie Plame's name at the suggestion of the Vice President himself. While they're engrossed in all that, keep pushing that telecom amnesty bill to cover up all the illegal wiretapping in violation of FISA, which the House seems poised to enact, and then they won't notice that prisoners in Guantanamo, who have been denied habeas corpus, are having their cases dismissed because they've been tortured in violation of U.S. war crimes statutes. Oh, and we can keep a lid on politicizing the Justice Department by simply giving the finger to Rep. John Conyers through an outrageous extension of the doctrine of executive privilege, and the neat irony there is that's the very privilege which was so spectacularly curtailed in United States vs. Nixon by a vote of 8-0.

It just makes you dizzy. The very real danger the United States faces results from its very tolerance of all this illegality. A constitutional form of government can slip by degrees into autocracy. If you need a historical precedent, study the history of Germany between 1930 and 1933.

I note with unease that John McCain has completely reversed himself on the subject of whether the President is "above the law." It's remarkable the issue can even be posited this way, as if it's an open question. In December, responding to questions from Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, McCain was unequivocal in his answer: of course not. The President is subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and cannot wiretap or intercept the mail of American citizens without a warrant from the FISA court. Now, however, as his spokesman Douglas Holtz-Eakin says, McCain supports the telecom amnesty bill because of the President's inherent "Article II" powers in a time of war to order wiretaps against American citizens with or without court authorization.

This is the "unitary executive" stuff we've heard so much about from Bush operatives like Cheney, David Addington and -- always, inevitably, like a bad dream you can't wake up from -- John Yoo. Samuel Alito was chosen as a Supreme Court judge because of his amenability to this unconstitutional concept, one which rides roughshod over the old regime which served us so well until 2001 - the balance of powers.

The "maverick," who votes with Bush 95% of the time and is now buying into his most dangerous and loony ideas, simply must be defeated. Respect for the law has to be restored, beginning in the Oval Office.

In defense of my assessment of GWB's intelligence

I have been challenged by an e-mailer to defend my oft-repeated (okay, occasional and inconsistent) claim that George W. Bush is not dumb, and indeed my sometime and equally mysterious assertion that he is of above-average intelligence. I can understand the question. Listening to Barack Obama's masterful speech today to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), I was impressed again at how strange it is to listen to an American politician who is not only comfortable speaking English but can risk forays into foreign languages. (Indeed, by the end of the speech I think his Jewish listeners might have been convinced that he was educated in a yeshiva and not in the rumored madrassah, and that his middle name is Heschel, not Hossein.) I would probably pay pretty good money to listen to Bush attempt "tikkun olam" (repair of the world), for example, which Barry handled perfectly. With L'il George, I'm sure it would come out "tickin' all 'em."

Which points out W's major difficulty, of course. He can't talk real good. Verbally he's subpar. It would be fatuous to deny it, although Bush would say it's "fat-you-us." So he sounds like an idiot, but I maintain (maybe delusionally) that he's not. He's clever. I base this on a few observations.

First, he's still President. When one considers how many serious infractions of the United States Code and the Constitution have occurred under his direction while he's been in office, this is no small achievement. Any one of his misprisions of office would have thrown a lesser conniver out on his can. Consider:

(1) It is now commonly accepted that he misrepresented the state of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, systematically and deliberately, declaring himself and sending his reps out to sell the tale that Saddam was absolutely lousy with anthrax, ricin, nukes, nerve gas, you name it. Huge stockpiles of ghastly stuff. Upon arrival in Baghdad 140,000 American weapons inspectors were unable to find a single thing. Not only did Bush not pause in his crusade, he escalated the war. And nothing happened to him.

(2) Bush's closest circle of advisors were involved in a conspiracy to reveal the identity of an American covert operative, Valerie Plame, a felony. The chances of Bush not having direct, personal, and contemporaneous knowledge of the involvement of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove in talking to reporters about her work at the CIA are approximately .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%. He promised to get to the bottom of the leak, to fire those involved, to clean house. When it became public knowledge that his own lieutenants were among the leakers, nothing happened. He then set aside the one conviction resulting from the conspiracy and still nothing happened to him. He escaped unscathed.

(3) Bush freely admits that his administration violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), another felony, because they preferred their own methods to compliance with the law. Nothing has happened to him.

(4) Bush freely admits that his administration uses "enhanced interrogation techniques" which we and the rest of the civilized world know are torture and violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and which constitute war crimes under the United States Code (felonies). Nothing has happened to Bush.

(5) Bush's closest advisors, including Harriet Miers, Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten, have been subpoenaed to testify before Congressional committees. They say they don't feel like it. Nothing happens.

Of course, this is a partial list. While all this has gone on, Bush has appeared at many press conferences, press "availabilities," and in other public situations where he has taken questions about all these subjects. He answers them, sort of, out in broad daylight. With truly scary facts working against him, Bush almost never says anything which makes his situation worse. Indeed, often he will invoke the war on terror or Congressional inertia to make the case that he's only breaking the law because he can't get any help in his lonely quest to make America safe. Which brings up his other gift, his ability to bully Congress into giving him what he wants: exonerations, hundreds of billions for his wars, whatever, all while working with the lowest approval ratings of a modern president.

It's worth noting that Bush's SAT scores in math were good, in verbal aptitude not so much. So he is adroit with what you might call symbolic logic, just so long as the language of such logic isn't in word form. I have thought that this may be a paradoxical source of strength. A President like Clinton, for example, was so verbal, so prolix in his expatiation on the topic at hand that he inevitably got himself into deep trouble. He just said too much in too many complex (though well-crafted) sentences, which, when reviewed later, contained too many contradictions. Bush sometimes runs on, but always within the confines of that meager vocabulary. He repeats, over and over again, certain thunderously obvious conclusions in that same dreary language. "Evil-doers who lurk." "Killers." "New democracy in Iraq." "World's a better place without Saddam." "Keep Iran from acquiring the know-how to build a bomb." "Before 9/11..." "After 9/11..." "9/11." "Let taxpayers keep their own hard-earned money." It's hard for Bush to stray away from his "message" because the words don't allow it. He has a general, clear sense of where he's trying to go, and he doesn't care if it sounds like page 3 of a Dick & Jane primer. Granted, it doesn't sound much like an intelligent man speaking, but you try it sometime. Commit all those felonies, all that deception, all those unconstitutional actions right out in the open, then conduct a press conference where you don't take the 5th and see how long you last.

A dubious skill, I admit, but a skill nonetheless. One that a "moron," as Bill Maher habitually calls him, could never pull off.

America's IQ Test in November

Next January either Barack Obama or John McCain will be the 44th President of the United States. If Obama is elected, there is a reasonable chance the country will make progress toward modernity and sustainable prosperity over the ensuing four years. If McCain is elected, there is a reasonable chance the country will enter a period of irremediable decline.

One measure of intelligence, and probably a particularly relevant one, is the way a human behaves when confronted with an environment of limited knowledge and uncertain outcomes. The more adept a person is at synthesizing data into relevant combinations and working with that information in a creative way (meaning, as one definition, the ability to see previously unanticipated combinations among such data sets), the better such a person will perform in the face of uncertainty. This is the kind of person we need presently as chief executive: a smart and creative person who can absorb information quickly, see pathways toward results and organize resources to get there. I think this is the kind of person Barack Obama is.

His contest with Hillary Clinton should never have been close. She was the presumptive nominee with an established, wealthy political machine at her disposal and the all-important air of inevitability. Big Media had preordained her coronation. The observation that the primary race has been close or that Hillary won overwhelmingly in the white trailer-home demographic
misses the point entirely. A reasonably good showing by Barack would have been amazing; instead, he kicked Hillary and Bill Clinton's ass up one side of the street and down the other. That's a simple fact. He accomplished this feat because (a) he's a born winner and (b) because he's smart as hell. He put together a political organization that took advantage of modern technology, i.e., the Internet, and cast the tenor of his campaign in terms of youthful reinvigoration of the country, which everyone knows we need.

John Sidney McCain, on the other hand, is another aging dumb white guy with anger management issues. I think we've just concluded the experiment on how that works in terms of keeping America competitive and modern in the 21st Century world. There is absolutely nothing special about him. A child of privilege, the son and grandson of Admirals in the U.S. Navy, he attended the Episcopal School outside Washington D.C. and then his father secured a place for him at the Naval Academy, not too far away in Annapolis. In a class of 899, McCain graduated in 894th position. This is an important point and not some casually observed calumny. He's a goof-off, a glad-hander, a back-slapper, a guy who regales the country club set with his tales of derring-do in the Vietnam War. He retired from the Navy at the age of 44 and immediately went to Congress. He has no background in anything other than flying a jet and politics (and beer distribution), and no advanced degrees in any discipline. We should believe him when he says he doesn't know anything about economics. He reportedly called George W. Bush "dumb as a stump" in one offhand assessment a few years back. No, George W. Bush is not dumb; but this was a case of a door knob calling the stump dense. McCain thinks that the Sunni al-Qaeda would go to Tehran, seat of a Shiite theocracy, for training and support. And terrorism is his signature issue?

McCain has no new ideas. He talks about the United States in strictly militaristic terms. Here's an interesting observation from Dmitry Orlov's book op.cit. about the U.S. military in the modern world: "Russia has scaled back defense spending considerably after the Soviet collapse, but the defense spending of the United States has kept growing like a tumor and is on course to match and surpass what the rest of the world spends on defense. While one might naively assume that the rest of the world is quivering before such overwhelming military might, nothing of the sort is occurring." Orlov points out that the U.S. has never bombed or invaded any nation formerly within the Warsaw Pact. That's because we can't; we can't attack any country with nuclear weapons nor use our conventional army against such a country. A big conventional army may make us feel secure, and it's useful for fighting useless wars, such as McCain's current favorite, Iraq. But it can't make us secure. If it could, why did 9-11 happen? Al-Qaeda succeeded on 9-11 because we had incompetent, out-of-it guys (and a gal) running the government, although don't take my word for it, consider the words of the House Senate Joint Inquiry Report, Findings & Conclusions: "For a variety of reasons, the Intelligence Community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of September 11. As a result, the Community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."

When you read the 9-11 Commission information, including the Congressional Report cited above, you realize the CIA and FBI actually did a pretty damn good job. It wasn't a case of needing more aircraft carriers; it was trying to get someone at the White House, other than Richard Clarke, to pay attention to what the agencies were finding.

John McCain is not convinced that the $1 trillion we spend annually on defense, wars, intelligence and security is enough. We should keep building our Maginot Line and other World War II relics to make ourselves feel safe. This isn't going to help. We need to be smarter using what we already have. We can't disregard the $10 trillion national debt the next president will inherit, the lack of modern mass transporation, the antiquated and soon-to-be obsolete energy paradigm on which the entire economy is based, the quivering entitlement programs. It's not a time to just keep going with the same old, dumb, out-to-lunch ideas and see what happens.

Give me the smart guy. Give me the kid from the broken home and mixed racial parentage who aced his classes at Punahou, took Columbia University by storm, went on to be President of the Harvard Law Review, then wiped the floor with Billary Clinton. Give me that guy. I'm tired of losing. I think this guy knows how to win.

Krugman's Doppelgänger writes another column for New York Times

I'm relieved that I've found the answer to the mysteriously off-base columns appearing under Paul Krugman's byline in the New York Times recently. He's not writing them. Apparently, a doppelgänger has assumed his place in the Op-Ed department and is churning out nonsense in some sort of weirdo retribution move. I don't have all the details.

It's a great word, Doppelgänger, from the German for "double-goer," an apparition or ghost who takes corporeal form and appears in the place of his human counterpart. Spooky. Like Paul Krugman's Doppelgänger's ("PKD," for short) column today. If you think America currently has a problem with inflation, reflected in such luxuries as basic food and gasoline, you're wrong. You might think in such an erroneous way because you're stuck in a 1970's mind-set. Out-of-control inflation gets underway because of a "wage-price spiral," and while prices are going up, wages aren't, so there's nothing to keep driving the prices up. PKD cites a case from 1981 to prove his point, involving the United Mine Workers. In those days of high inflation, the union demanded a hefty 11% pay raise over the next contractual period to keep pace with anticipated inflation. That isn't happening now, so there is nothing to fuel inflation.

PKD notes in passing that there really are no unions to speak of anymore, and any demand for higher wages would fall on deaf ears because of the weak job market. So: "And since there isn’t a wage-price spiral, we don’t need higher interest rates to get inflation under control. When the surge in commodity prices levels off — and it will; the laws of supply and demand haven’t been repealed — inflation will subside on its own."

It's uncanny how well PKD has internalized his double-goer's style, even down to beginning the sentence with "And." Unlike the human form of Paul Krugman, however, the PKD doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. Or he does and he's deliberately making Krugman look bad as part of that karmic thing which must underlie this episode of double-going. Maybe it has something to do with his shilling for Hillary.

I'm not an apparition currently serving as a Geist-instructor (that joke is only for the very subtle) on the economics faculty at Princeton, but it seems to me that the main sources of inflation in food and gasoline do not lie within the direct, one-for-one control of the cash-strapped American consumer. If PKD excludes food and gasoline from inflation computations, as the Federal government does in order not to give Social Security recipients a living stipend, then there's not much of a problem anyway. Simply eliminate everything Americans really have to buy and the inflation problem goes away in a hurry. So I applaud PKD for a more realistic approach in this respect.

However, let us also be realistic about the effect that fading American buying power can have on the world price of oil. 87 million barrels per day, worldwide usage. We import 14 million barrels and produce another 7. Our importation figure against world usage, therefore, is about 16%. The gouging American oil companies, of course, have a "me too" attitude about the prices OPEC and the other big oil producers are demanding, piling up dough against the day when they'll either have to go into the ethanol business or simply start drinking the stuff. So our share of total usage might fall a little and have a diluted moderating influence on price, which may be completely offset by a further decline in the purchasing price of the dollar as our economy continues to tank, in part because of the crushing cost of fuel. And (see?, PKD, I can do it too) since world prices for oil are denominated in dollars, the Saudis and our other friends will jack the price, which will not be felt as strongly in areas of the world which have hard currency instead of American Monopoly money.

We're not in Kansas anymore, PKD, and it's not 1978. Our market does not determine everything that happens in the world. We're, hate to say this, kind of at the mercy of the world.

The food problem is also related to petroleum costs. Displacement of grain crops by ethanol-corn, cost of transport, cost of fertilizer inputs, cost of everything. So it was a cute title for the column, Doppelgänger --"A Return of That 70's Show?," but the real Paul Krugman knows you should not be seduced by a clever title into writing a whole column on a specious theory. Nicht es wahr? You probably looked up that "supply and demand" thing in Chapter 1 of one of PK's econ textbooks. Not much depth there; you're just phoning it in. Maybe it's time to head for the Ausgang.

Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse"

It's certainly worth reading, this new book by Peak Oil theorist and "collapse" thinker (he pointedly disavows the titles "expert" or "activist") Dmitry Orlov, a native-born Russian who witnessed first-hand the economic collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties and early nineties. The précis might be stated this way: the Soviet situation at the end of the USSR and the current American situation are strikingly similar. Overextended, bloated militaries; foreign wars gone wrong (Soviet: Afghanistan; American: Iraq, Afghanistan); crushing foreign debt; a declining currency; an unresponsive, incompetent central bureaucracy, etc. Add to these preconditions the looming crisis of Peak Oil, and you have an American economy set up for disaster.

Orlov's background is scientific, in engineering and computers, and he writes in a droll, frequently hilarious deadpan style about modern America. There is nothing malicious in the sometimes unfavorable comparisons he draws between the old Soviet Union and the USA, but he makes clear that there were definitely superior aspects to Soviet life which Americans, for ideological reasons, are incapable of seeing. Nevertheless, I don't think he wrote the book to settle any old scores or out of resentment, not at all. He seems like a man incapable of envy or even of much caring who has the upper hand.

The precipitating event for America's collapse (and he means this literally) is Peak Oil and its consequences. He sees the USA returning to an agrarian, atavistic society intent mainly on sheer physical survival. Orlov contends that in some ways the USA is less prepared for such a fall than the old USSR. For one main reason, the USSR was far less dependent on the private auto as a means of transportation, whereas the United States is practically helpless without it. Soviet housing and medical care were provided by the government, so that when hyperinflation hit, and the ruble became worthless, the residents were not turned out into the street or denied health care. Obviously, neither of these situations obtains in the USA. Those who do not own their own "shelter" and some modicum of arable land (at least 1,000 square feet) when disaster hits are likely to become homeless nomads.

Orlov, in common with other Peak Oil theorists I've read (such as James Kunstler), denies that "technological" fixes can save us from this future. No combination of renewable energy or conservation will rescue us. Sometimes their insistence upon disaster suggests to me that Peak Oil is cultist, in some ways, a kind of End Times dystopia, and their revulsion with the look and feel of modern America lies at the base of a destructive fantasy.

But Peak Oil is not like Y2K or waiting for the Hale-Bopp comet. If you go over to theoildrum.com and noodle around, you'll discover there's an awful lot to what Orlov is saying. For instance, the depletion rate for oil worldwide exceeds the rate of new discoveries coming on line by a factor of four. The depletion rate is defined as the downward trend of production of existing fields (as pressure is lost over time and water intrudes, the rate of extraction from a field goes downhill) plus the growth in demand. Currently, the world's oil fields are producing about 85 million barrels per day, and everyone except Saudi Arabia is pumping full-out. Some of the exporters we depend on are going to start hoarding their own supply because their fields are playing out (Mexico, e.g.). Demand at least equals supply. We're in an unstable equilibrium, and the U.S. takes a way disproportionate 20 million barrels a day, 14 million imported. The United States hit its own peak in 1970, and the Peakies say the world hit one in mid-2005. There are new fields which could be drilled, in Iraq, off the coasts of the USA and Brazil, in Alaska. The problem is that new fields are no match for the depletion rate even under best case scenarios. We're going to steadily lose ground. All that new discoveries can do is retard the onset of shortages.

None of this sounds much like Y2K, much as we would like it to. Neither does the realization that oil costs 5 times as much per barrel now as it did when Bush took office.

You know, I have to confess something here. Dmitry Orlov, while I was reading his book? He didn't seem hysterical at all. Thing is, he seemed really, really smart. He's given up the idea of motivating people to do anything, if he ever entertained the notion, because he can't see it happening. Anything which might work is politically impossible. One of those paradoxes, like the slow-as-molasses response to global warming. How can things which are crucial to survival be politically impossible?

Ken Deffeyes, the Princeton geologist and author of Hubbert's Peak - The Impending Oil Shortage Crisis, does something which Orlov does not do; he places the problem on some sort of time line. At oil's current price, fluctuating at about $130 per barrel, about 6-1/2% of the world's total domestic product is being consumed in buying petroleum. His estimate is that at $300 per barrel and about 15%, the world's economies will go into shutdown. Extrapolating from recent price rises, this might happen in 6 to 24 months. $300 per barrel oil translates to about $12 per gallon gasoline. A car with a 15 gallon tank would cost $180 for a fill-up. If you're driving a Lincoln Navigator or an Escalade and getting 15 mpg, it will cost you $12 to drive 15 miles, or 80 cents a mile. A 45 mpg Prius will allow you to drive 15 miles for four bucks. Those prices do sound crippling, and it's important to remember that if you consider the myriad applications of petroleum in agriculture and manufacturing, the cost increases are incorporated nearly everywhere you look.

The question forming in my mind is not how could this happen here, but the more ominous: why won't it? Probably what gives Peak Oil and the idea of impending disaster its air of unreality is the official silence and the lack of concern in the popular media. No blockbuster movies (okay, Road Warrior), no documentaries, no speeches by President Bush other than the occasional reference to our "addiction." How could something this dire be potentially this close with a "gas tax holiday" for the summer as the only official reaction? Dmitry would have a droll response; personally, I think mine will be to find a nice level lot with a high water table.

Obama beats McCain: then what?

It appears that the Democratic elders have seen enough of the Obama/Clinton road show and are about to ring down the curtain. Fun while it lasted; if the superdelegates definitively side with the majority of the chosen delegates, then Barack will be the nominee. If Hillary persists in her "campaign" past that point in the hope that Obama implodes or dies or something, she will be seen as someone who simply went around the bend, and as a crazy person who needs restraining more than anything else. Maybe that will become Obama's strongest selling point; he is now the only viable candidate from the two major parties who is not clinically insane.

I notice that the latest California poll shows Obama leading Clinton by a vote of 51-38%, despite Hillary's 9% victory in February's primary. This appears to be a reliable marker of her depreciation in the public eye, given the variegated nature of the California electorate. McCain barely registers in the poll; Obama demolishes him. To this hopeful sign must be appended the caveat that California's 55 electoral votes will go to Obama no matter what, so the size of his margin doesn't really matter. But I think Obama will defeat McCain in the general election. For one thing, McCain is a terrible campaigner. He's boring and uninspiring. He doesn't look or sound like anyone who can lead the country out of serious problems that most thinking people see all around them. When people are spooked, they want a leader who seems resourceful and innovative, who can lead them out of the box canyon. George W. Bush in 2000 was helped along by the good years Clinton left behind, by the relative peace and quiet. And Bush was a much more talented campaigner than McCain, using his narcissistic, phony personality to convince Americans he was a good ol' boy, and not a prep school cheerleader with serious intellectual inadequacies. The irony being, as Americans have learned, that Bush's obnoxious personality has become one of the major sources of national insecurity for the country. I'm convinced that many national leaders work against our interests not out of an animus against the USA generally, but because they just can't stand him. That could be yet another singular distinction of the Bush presidency.

So Obama gets elected. This is where my predictive limits are certainly reached. I think the major, immediate difficulty he will encounter is the energy crisis, reflected in the "structural" high price of imported oil. He will succeed to the leadership of a country wholly consecrated and dedicated to the private automobile, where the living arrangements of suburban sprawl far from urban work centers are now a serious problem. Where the viability of commercial airlines is uncertain, and where the public transportation system is mostly haphazard and dilapidated. I've read his website and it's certainly progressive on energy efficiency, carbon abatement (cap& trade, e.g.), higher CAFE standards (which are now beginning to take care of themselves as many Americans have to choose between filling the tank and eating) and renewable energy, such as cellulosic ethanol, which shows a hip familiarity with work being done at the University of California at British Petroleum (UCB-P). But his ideas are almost too little, too late before he starts, and he will have to deal with an intractable Congress protecting the corn-for-ethanol-growing Midwest and other irrationalities.

And the affordability of food, which is related. Maybe Barack will urge, as a matter of government transparency, reinstatement of the CPI standards which existed during the Reagan years, instead of all this Greenspan malarkey about "hedonic enhancement" and substitution of Spam when ground beef becomes too pricey. If so, Americans will see in print what they already feel, that inflation is currently running at 11% or so.

Not to mention the solvency of the entitlement programs. As the turnaround date for Social Security, 2017, nears (and that's if there is no serious recession), surely it's impossible to keep talking about using the Social Security "surplus" as general tax revenue and replacing it with a fictitious "trust fund." The bill has come due, and there is no money to pay it with. And the health care system is simply DOA at this point.

If Barack Obama is honest in his first State of the Union, there will be very little talk about national security in terms of foreign "wars" (in Iraq, on terror), other than the recognition they have to end immediately. His speech should sound like a FDR radio address in the depths of the Great Depression. An honest call to serious action before it is entirely too late.

Puffy Parachutes To Left Bank of the Potomac

Rudolf Hess, who worked as Hitler's Assistant Dictator in Nazi Germany, veered off from a German airplane formation over the North Sea in May, 1941, and bailed out over Scotland. He was captured and held by the British as a probable spy, although the Germans disavowed him as any sort of agent. "Ganz verrückt," is how they summed up their feelings about Rudolf. Crazy. Hess's own story is that he wanted to meet with a member of the British royalty whose acquaintance he had made at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to arrange an alliance to fight the Soviet Union. None of this saved Hess from trial as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was convicted and sentenced to a life term at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he spent the rest of his long life as its only prisoner, dying at 93.

In other words, in more serious times decent people knew how to deal with political criminals who decided they might be on the losing side of history and fled to the opposition. What's done is done, the Allies said. Once a Hitler henchman, always a Hitler henchman. But thanks for dropping in on us.

Among the various terms of derision for Scott McClellan, my favorite was Puffy McMoonface, since it seemed to capture his essential ridiculousness. I recall him best as Bush's stonewaller during the Plame matter. Day after day, he stood at his podium and informed a nation curious about treason in high places that he could not talk about anything to do with Plame because "of the the ongoing investigation." Part of the ongoing investigation had been his personal conversations with Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, who assured him that they had had no involvement in leaks concerning Valerie Plame's CIA identity. This he dutifully reported to the press corps, since it seemed favorable to George W. Bush. When facts developed in the Libby case proved that Libby and Rove had lied to him (so Puffy says), he could not comment because of the ongoing...whatever. Investigation, trial, sentencing, exoneration by Bush, and eventually because of Puffy's own resignation and intention to write a tell-all book for big bucks. He couldn't detract from his own punch lines.

While McClellan's book is treated as a "bombshell" by the inbred culture in Washington, D.C., it is obviously nothing of the kind. Fortunately, the narcissistic reporters in the D.C. press corps have already read the book for us, looking for references to themselves, and so have divulged all of the parts worth mentioning. No one needs to read this thing now. Puffy does not say anything we did not know, as far as I can tell from the available hearsay. We all know that Bush lacks curiosity; that he's not "intellectual" in his approach; that he sold the war as a defensive measure against WMD's, but that the messianic purpose Bush "concealed" was to remake the Middle East (as the Neocons said at the time, in fact). We know that Bush is insecure and won't admit mistakes. We know, first and foremost, that he deludes himself, because he actually thinks he has what it takes to be President.

The one place where McMoonface might have helped the course of justice was in describing Bush's true state of knowledge about the Valerie Plame disclosures. He persists in the Official Story that Bush remained in the dark even though Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, all direct assistants to the President, were not only fully informed but were the principal sources of the leak. This is highly doubtful, and I suspect McClellan knows it. The net effect of Puffy's book, therefore, is to give Bush a pass on a critical matter, one where serious legal jeopardy once threatened him. The rest is carping, a lot of adjectives thrown around for the purpose of impressing us that Puffy is an insider. Bush, as usual, will lose no sleep over this book. In fact, I feel reasonably confident that the "firestorm" of criticism aimed Puffy's way by the High Command was choreographed. It's part of the marketing strategy and a quid-pro-quo. Go ahead, Scott, and say bitchy things about Bush's complacency and susceptibility to manipulation. That's your opinion, and anyway, who doesn't know that? Just don't say anything that really matters. We'll attack you to help you sell your book and make you look like a "traitor" to us and a hero to them.

Scott's still playing the same game, in other words. Pretending to redemption, whereas his experience is redeemable only down at the bank.

And Up On Rocinante, Don Bugliosi

Here comes Vincent Bugliosi again, this time with a book called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. One thing I have to give the guy, he does not mince words.

Part of the self-promo for his new opus have been a couple of teaser posts on The Huffington where he hyperventilates about the bad habit of the mainstream press in laying out the fundamentals of a criminal case against Bush and then "turning the page" or "going on to the next paragraph," unlike Vince, who will stay with the subject. He will not simply go on to the next paragraph, not this dogged, relentless, maniacally thorough former L.A. District Attorney. No, he'll go on to the next ten or fifteen or 15,000 paragraphs and write a whole book about a hypothetical murder case which will never happen, which makes him, what? More authentic? Serious where other people are just screwing around?

If I hadn't read all the predicates for such a case a thousand times already, I would probably read the book. I know that George W. Bush misled the country into war. I know that he knew the evidence for WMD in Iraq was pretty sketchy at the point he ordered the invasion. I know that Bush suddenly and surprisingly gave Saddam & Sons 48 hours to clear out of Baghdad in order to bring the invasion under another covering rationale of the Congressional AUMF and the "regime change" mandate of an earlier resolution passed when Bill Clinton was President. I know these things indicate "consciousness of guilt," and that Bush was already nervously looking down the line to see if he had his ass covered against a war crimes charge.

But Bugliosi's book is still dumb. I say that without actually reading very much of it, so take the opinion for what it's worth. Bugliosi's basic premise is that Bush lied the nation into war and therefore the deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis (his number) are murders which can be charged against the President of the United States. I don't know how Bugliosi handles little details like the doctrine of "sovereign immunity," which essentially shields public officials from liability for acts performed in an "administrative capacity," you know, like being President and Commander in Chief and ordering an invasion based on something called an Authorization for Use of Military Force which a compliant, 9/11-spooked Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, were only too glad to give Bush.

Since he's calling it "murder," I assume that Bugliosi is talking about a statute such as California's Penal Code Sec. 187, " (a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus..." which requires "intent" as an element of the crime. So Vince would have to persuade his jury that Bush intended to kill the 4,000+ American soldiers. Now, there are different ways to do that, as anyone who has been to law school becomes aware from all the hypotheticals that law profs use to pass the time during their Socratic exchanges with bored students. Suppose an anarchist is walking down the street with a bomb, the fuse lit (in the diagram, the "bomb" is always round and black, about the size of a bowling ball), and he tosses it into an open window. The anarchist doesn't know whether anyone is in the building, and "can't see into the building." (That last part is always thrown in.) Three people are blown up. Is the anarchist guilty of murder? The defense will say, well, he didn't "intend" to kill any specific person, that he could see, anyway; he just intended to throw a bomb with a lighted fuse through a window, not knowing whether anyone was home or not.

Let's just go to the answer: yes, he can be prosecuted for intentional homicide. It's common sense, isn't it? If you go around throwing bombs, it's completely foreseeable that you're going to kill someone, and that's good enough for intent. The state is not going to let you off because of some argument based on philosophical, semantic baloney. So my guess is that Bugliosi would use similar reasoning to satisfy the "intent" requirement for Bush's hypothetical murders. If you lie the country into a pointless war, it's completely foreseeable that lots of people are going to die unnecessarily. Ergo, in the same way as the anarchist, Bush intended to kill people.

The same common sense tells you that approach isn't going to work. It may be dramatic, it may seem forceful and "principled," but it's silly. The case would never get to a jury.

Now, Bugliosi might have turned his prosecutorial talent and prodigious capacity for research to misprisions of office which might, indeed, result in successful prosecutions of Bush for felonies, such as death under torture of detainees in U.S. custody. Sovereign immunity will not save anyone from prosecution for violations of criminal statutes which are not excused by "administrative discretion," not at all. Indeed, the purpose of such war crimes statutes is to constrain U.S. officials in the exercise of their governmental duties. I suspect, however, that such a real case is not Bugliosi's kind of action. He made his rep busting guys like Charles Manson for violations of California Penal Code Sec. 187, and in a hundred other cases where the evidence was in his favor, with the full, august power of the state behind him.

But one thing of which I'm fairly confident: Vincent Bugliosi cannot claim among his career laurels the successful prosecution of a United States President for "murder" based on conduct of a war, any war, at any time. Bush's lawyers would argue, as Bush has done, that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing for the world, an argument the bomb-throwing anarchist could make only in the event of an amazing coincidence. And while Bugliosi didn't stop after criticizing Bush for misleading us into war, and he went on to the next paragraph, he kept writing for the same reason the pundits complain and never do anything: to make a buck. So please spare us the self-glorification in your lonely, quixotic quest. Anyway, maybe the ultimate responsibility lies with the American public for putting this mendacious bumbler in office. Or the Supreme Court, for appointing him in 2000. Oh wait, you already did that. Your case against the Supreme Court in None Dare Call It Treason (no one dares except you, of course). How's that case coming?

Against a sea of troubles

Streams of consciousness...

It's from Hamlet's soliloquy, but you already knew that. The Bard of Avon certainly possessed a fine poetic gift. A "sea of troubles." No one could have topped Shakespeare's metaphor for a euphonious and evocative image of overwhelming adversity.

In his soliloquy, which was actually an early form of blogging when you think about it, the Prince was trying to figure out whether living was really worth all the trouble. He laid great weight on the fear of death, and the uncertainties of the "afterlife," if any, suggesting that the decision to live, and to act, was more a matter of compulsion than desire. Anyway, Hamlet was paralyzed by indecision, by the gnawing sense that action was futile in any case, an attitude presaging other great literary ditherers such as Dostoevsky's anti-hero in "Notes from the Underground" and Camus's Meursault in "L'Etranger."

Politicians aren't like that. They are congenital can-do types, which is good, because whoever becomes the next leader of this country will certainly encounter a sea of troubles. I suspect that American life will need a new paradigm in order to thrive, and for that I think Barack Obama is probably the best situated candidate in terms of his age, outlook and sense of the moment. Roger Cohen wrote another smart column yesterday in the New York Times about Obama's mastery of the Internet style of campaigning. Hillary Clinton is mired in older forms of connectivity, which is why she found herself outflanked by Obama in the early part of the primary season. By the time she realized what had happened to her, she had spent all the money she thought she was going to need to lock up the nomination and was playing catch-up. She was banking on her "inevitability," but in the computer age these images can change very quickly. Her habit of saying stupid and erroneous things (such as lying about her accomplishments) which can be easily refuted by Googling and YouTubing set her up for failure. Her gaffes go viral and her composite image takes another pounding. She's never figured that one out. Slowly but surely, she has Photoshopped herself into a grasping, desperate, unhinged harridan whom the hip crowd want nothing to do with. She's the first casualty of the new on-line style of campaigning.

In many forms of game-playing, such as politics, the person who knows the applicable rules better often wins, and the way you raise money nowadays is by small donations solicited through the Internet. I read that Obama now has 1.2 million individual donors, making small, repetitive donations. That's an astounding number. Money, that mother's milk of politics, is never going to be a problem for Barry, and it acts as a counterweight to lobbyist money. McCain and Clinton struggle along with the old school style of fund raisers and high-end cocktail parties, where they rub elbows with all the rich people they've met in their years of whoring out their souls. I have no doubt Obama has done much of the same thing, but he's allowed also this lofty superiority because of his direct connection with common folk. Very smart in these class-riven times.

If McCain is elected, I think the USA will go into a devolutionary phase. It will be disastrous. McCain is one of those guys who was programmed early to think of himself as a great leader with a great mission, but he's actually just a dumb old fart with no ideas who will not be able to implement any changes in the American way of life. He can't; he's not smart enough, flexible enough, informed enough. I'm surprised that people aren't more horrified by his ignorance about sectarian divides in Islam, for example, particularly when he's so casual about threatening to bomb Iran. When he claimed that Sunni al-Qaeda traveled to Shiite Iran for training and support, the press treated it as a "slip-up." If he had been talking about the American Civil War and had said that Robert E. Lee frequently traveled to Washington to consult with Abrahama Lincoln about men and materiel, we would have realized that McCain was a mouth-breathing idiot. His mistake was comparable, yet his error was attributed to some age-related malady like a transient ischemic attack or the stress of travel. Didn't I just see this movie?

McCain skims along the surface of issues and takes mildly "contrarian" positions (compared to Republican orthdoxy) which have earned him a "maverick" reputation without substance. Fundamentally, he thinks of the United States as on a fixed course determined by its World War II mission. His ideas are about 63 years out of date, in other words. If the U.S. continues to bankrupt itself by playing its Globo-Cop role, it's over. What Chalmers Johnson calls "Nemesis," our propensity for maintaining an empire without the means to do it, will finish us off. I doubt, however, that most people see that. If they had, we would not just have had eight years of George W. Bush.

What Undertow Pulls at Paul Krugman?

Perhaps you are like me and have found, over the Bush-ravaged years of 2001 to the present, consolation in the wise and steady analysis of Paul Krugman, resident economics columnist on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. He was among the first to suggest that the Iraq fiasco would be ruinously expensive and that the financial course BushCo had charted for the country was unsustainable. He has been right far more than he has ever been wrong. When it seemed that Bush's power was invincible, Krugman was confident that, in fact, Bush and his administration did not know what they were doing and that a helluva mess was being created that would require "adults," at some later point, to clean up. If anything, the conjoined crises of financial meltdown, oil shortage and unaffordability, and runaway federal budget and trade balance deficits are worse than Krugman predicted. I think the question now is not whether serious remedial action is required of "adults" who succeed Bush, but whether even such wiser heads are going to have the resources to deal with what may become a chronic, structural recession.

At some point, however, around the time that Ben Bernanke was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Krugman began pulling his punches. I thought perhaps it had something to do with collegial courtesy; Bernanke, like Krugman, is on the economics faculty at Princeton, and maybe Krugman realized that his "wilder" utterances might come in for enhanced scrutiny by readers who in fact are the ones setting the policies that he criticizes. He wrote a column a while back in which he lauded Bernanke's bailout of Bear Stearns and suggested that the American economy had "dodged a bullet," holding out the hope that all of our problems with a deflating housing market, $130+ barrels of oil, rising unemployment, runaway real inflation, growing unemployment, dwindling consumer spending, collapse of the commercial airlines sector (as their very "business model" has been called into question by the cost of jet fuel), the struggling independent trucking industry -- all this could be handled with a little interest rate jiggering and other legerdemain by his Princeton colleague.

Krugman has also in not very subtle ways indicated his ardent support for Hillary Clinton. This became noticeable in a series of crushingly boring dissections of the two health care plans of Obama and Clinton. Krugman couched his criticism in terms of what is apparently to him a self-evident truth: that the content of the platform of a candidate is a reliable guide to his later style of governing. This strikes me as nuts; George W. Bush ran on a platform of a "humble foreign policy" in which "nation-building" was anathema to the interests of the USA. Since taking office, Bush has done little else except meddle in Middle Eastern and Afghan affairs.

My own take is that Krugman simply used his analysis of these boilerplate formalisms from the two candidates as a means to signal his support for Hillary Clinton in an "objective" fashion. Lately, however, he has been less subtle. For example, from the column of May 26:

"So what should Mr. Obama and his supporters do? Most immediately, they should realize that the continuing demonization of Mrs. Clinton serves nobody except Mr. McCain. One more trumped-up scandal won’t persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along. But it might incline a few more of them to stay home in November."

This was Krugman's handling of Clinton's "RFK assassination" gaffe. What's strange about the solution Krugman prescribes is that he places the onus on Obama's supporters to remedy the problem of Hillary Clinton's habit of extraordinarily divisive and, at times, borderline crazy public statements. She's the one who made up, out of whole cloth, the lie about being shot at in Bosnia. In what sense is that "trumped up?" It's not a scandal; it's a strong indication of a reality deficit. Ditto her miraculous intercession in the Irish peace talks. Her "phone call at 3 am ad" was a home invasion scenario. The literal-minded can play games with the imagery all they want, and simply treat the story line of a lone mother at home with children, including her vulnerable, pretty teenage daughter, as coincidentally suggestive of a crime scene but really a stand-in for the general fear of "terrorist" attacks, even though this tableau makes absolutely no sense in terms of terrorist threats. And if you want to buy into Krugman's analysis, go ahead and agree with him that the "RFK assassination" reference was just to help us remember that campaigns sometimes last into June.

So: maybe Krugman received an indication at some point, like other liberal academics (Robert Reich, for prominent example), that the Clinton Dynasty might find a place for him in their new Administration. I don't know; that's speculation. He might welcome the change. For he's a terrible writer. It's painful to read an entire column in which 95% of all sentences begin with conjunctions or prepositions. I've thought of writing an entire blog piece as a parody of his style. And maybe I will someday. If I feel like it. Because that's what you can do with a blog. And no one will stop you. But then no one is likely to hire you in their administration. Because you're a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Yet maintaining your integrity. And not suggesting to people that their problems with Hillary Clinton are just something they made up.

Clinton Campaign Takes a Turn For the Creepy

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out. Hillary Clinton, in a recent interview with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader.

While it's always unsettling to watch a personality fragment into a million shards right out in public view, I admit that I've become fascinated about Hillary's future possibilities. Not about winning the nomination, which I don't think can happen. No - fascinated by the prospect of what she might say next. This one was a lulu, the best yet. She was warming up with her description of her backers as "ordinary working voters, white voters." And the one about Barack not being a Muslim "as far as she knew." Those were good, and by good, I mean sick.

But this was completely deranged. She apologized within a couple of hours (to the Kennedys, actually), but her apology didn't make any sense. How could it?
Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee says she was only referring to her husband and Kennedy “as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer.” Well, sure. In fact, if you wanted to find examples of the nominating process going well into the third or fourth round of voting at the convention, a little superficial historical research will do the trick. But look at what Hillary actually said and you'll see that's not what she had in mind.

In June, 1968, Bobby Kennedy, another charismatic political superstar, had just won the California primary and was poised to win the Democratic nomination as its presidential candidate. He had beaten back the insurgent campaign of Eugene McCarthy. He would take on the wily Nixon in the general election and restore Camelot to the White House, all within five years of losing the first Kennedy to an assassin's bullet. And then in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian gunman, blows the dream away.

It's astounding that all these years after Sigmund Freud did his groundbreaking work in the field of the unconscious, we are still so slavishly literal in our interpretation of what people say and mean. Dick Durbin, for example, Barack's Senate colleague and backer, defended Hillary by saying she and Barack are "good friends" and she would never wish him any harm. Umm-hmm. Never, huh? If you want to understand what Hillary meant, break her statement down into two categories:

1. Bill had not clinched the nomination until June, 1992, in the California primary.
2. Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, but not the nomination in June, 1968. The political thinking was that he had knocked McCarthy out of the race, setting up a one-on-one against Hubert Humphrey (whom he defeated in California) at the convention.

Hillary is talking about what's behind Door Number 2. Barack's got the momentum, the magic, the flow of history moving his way. He's young, he's talented and he's charismatic. He's a lot like Bobby Kennedy, in other words (Barack is actually older than Bobby was in 1968). People like believing in Barack for the same reason they liked the Kennedys: because he makes them feel like there are fresh possibilities in this tired, oppressed land, however nebulous and inchoate those "ideas" are (and they're very nebulous and inchoate). How do you beat that? Hillary has the racists and the white women over 50 as her key demographics; that's it. Obama has everything else. She needs a miracle.

Hillary's quest for this nomination borders on (hell, is) obsession. Where it came from is anyone's guess, but my thinking is that she feels victimized by talented, charming smoothies who get what they want because people (including young women) fall all over themselves to give it to them. She's endured this marriage to a womanizer who humiliated her at every turn by lavishing his attention on women who never approached her own levels of educational, professional and intellectual accomplishment. She endures it all, lives the lie, even moves to New York so she can be a Senator so she can be the President. And she won't be a weak, compromising, whimpering Mama's boy President like Bubba. She'll be a ball-buster and vindicate suppressed women everywhere. She's smarter than he is, more resourceful, tougher in the clinches. Afraid of nothing. It's all lined up. The payoff at last.

And then this...this...black guy from Illinois, with his "pretty speeches" and tall, lean body strolls to center stage, wins a long string of early primaries trading on his charms, and she's back in the shadow again. How can this keep happening to me? I'm so much better! So, you know...under stress and anxiety, and the mounting millions in personal debt, the fatigue of nonstop campaigning -- things slip out, like a memory of sniper fire in Bosnia that never happened, or conscious expression of an unconscious wish. She's just reminding us that anything can happen. She's counting on that.

Hillary' s Meta-Racism, Obama and Schrödinger's Cat

Now hold on a minute, I might have something here.

Hillary Clinton's latest gambit might be called "meta-racism." The virtual world of electronic media eventually gets around to creating a meta-everything, and this may be its latest artifact. It works this way. Hillary claims that she does not encourage her supporters to vote for her because, ipso facto, she's white, even though she cites (and even lauds) her popularity among "ordinary working Americans, white Americans." Rather, she urges these ordinary white working Americans, and "progressive"-minded Americans everywhere, to simply face the facts. Racist Americans (real racists) are not going to elect Barack Obama in November; sad but true, she laments. So when choosing between candidates in the Democratic primaries, everyone who wants a Democrat to win should vote for her in a very race-conscious way which is not, paradoxically, racism, but simply a form of meta-racism necessary in order to achieve ultimate victory.

Now I harbor a sneaking suspicion that among Hillary's throngs of supporters in such states as West Virginia and Kentucky, and in "rural" Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, and in many other places, are quite a few people who aren't so much meta-racists as they are the gen-yoo-wine article. And while I'm being cynical, I might as well admit my other suspicion, which is that Hillary sure as hell knows this. So I'm saying that Hillary is deliberately courting a white racist vote, by being "their" candidate, under the guise of simply doing what's right for the party, which is making sure she's the nominee come November, the one who can win.

The meta-racist argument proceeds on the assumption that America in 2008, almost four hundred years after the first importation of African slaves to North America, is just not quite ready, not just yet, to elect a black person President, and that's what Hillary means when she whispers to party bigwigs that "Obama can't win!"

Yet we don't really know that, do we? Presidential campaigns are often full of surprises. The most unlikely people sometimes succeed. George W. Bush in 2004, with Iraq erupting into nonstop violence, no WMDs found, every rationale for the invasion exposed as a blatant lie - and he does better in 2004 than in 2000? Many people now talk of a younger, post-racial electorate coming of age, of a galvanized African-American voting bloc, of Southern states now in play for the Democrats, all of these changes in the electoral scene taking place against a background of great economic and geopolitical uncertainty, and against huge disenchantment with Bush in particular and Republicans in general.

It seems to me that the state of electoral politics in this country calls to mind the conjecture of Schrödinger's Cat, that clever thought problem dreamt up by
the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. It was his subtle criticism of the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics with all its wave/particle dualities, its indeterminacies, its dependence upon observation to fix the state of things. If you're a cat lover, as I am, it's a little unsettling that Erwin used a cat as the example, but I suppose "Schrödinger's rhino" lacks the same bemusing quality. So the experimental arrangement involves a cat sealed in a box with an element which may or may not emit an alpha particle as radiation, but if it does, the particle will be detected by a Geiger counter, which will trip a hammer breaking a vial of hydrocyanic acid, which will kill the cat. The paradox lies in the clever coupling of quantum and classical domains. Before the observer opens the box, the cat's fate is tied to the wave function of the atom, which is itself in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. Thus, said Schrödinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, observes the cat, and "collapses'' its "wave function."

Lots of people, including Einstein (who thought it was brilliant), have weighed in on this paradox. While the box is closed, the Copenhagen Interpretation forces us to conclude that the cat is both alive and dead, with its "superposition" undetermined. It is not until the "wave-collapse" moment of opening the box that the cat's status is determined. But surely, argued Schrödinger, the cat was alive or dead before the box was opened. Simply because subatomic particles exhibit the "superposition" quality of wave/particle duality until the moment that observation "fixes" their position doesn't mean that macroscopic entities like cats behave the same way. It was a head-scratcher for Niels Bohr and the rest of the Copenhagen gang, that's for sure. Schrödinger himself said later in life that he wished he had never thought of that cat.

It seems to me that Hillary Clinton is suggesting that we never open the box and find out. Is Barack's campaign alive or dead? Is the country so racist it cannot elect an African-American or not, is something new happening in this country or not? I'd like to know; I'd like us to perform the act of observation. And beyond that (and I don't know how Schrödinger would fit this into his analysis): if the Democratic Party really is completely incapable of winning in this country unless it runs candidates who appeal to Appalachian racists, and racists everywhere else; if that's still where we are almost four hundred years after slavery began, and after the 1868 ratification of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause, which was supposed to have "freed" the slaves once and for all; if those Constitutional guarantees are still meaningless because of the relentless and ineradicable bigotry of this country, then I'm not sure I even care anymore. Because it's pretty obvious that at such a point we will have looked inside and seen something dead, and an old, querulous white coot like John McCain, a guy who voted against Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday, and who casually hooks himself up to religious, ethnic, and social bigots, is good enough for this place.

So give up that line of argument, Hillary. Get out of the way. Let's open the box and take a peek.

John McCain's Pastor Problem, Revisited: Was Hitler an Agent of God?

In Sunday school, Revelations was always my favorite book of the Bible. The church I attended was pretty square, and too much time was given over to dreary stuff about sin and redemption, all the things you weren't supposed to do (anything fun), and of course that macabre crucifixion story, forever and ever, amen. But Revelations -- as close as a Fundamentalist church ever got to the psychedelic, this side of glossolalia anyway. I liked the theories I heard later (not in Sunday school) that John of Patmos was tripping when he wrote it, maybe stoned on righteous (or Righteous) hash, or smoking some of the opium crop growing there around the Seven Churches in Asia Minor.

The Book of Revelations is full of beasts, dragons, pale horses, war, lakes of fire, bottomless pits, Satan, thousand-year reigns, Gog and Magog, and Chapter 20 is the main action sequence. It reads like a screen treatment for a Biblical "Star Wars." 1:"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. 2: And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years." While the bust of the Devil is going down, the righteous are raised up and live and reign with Jesus for a thousand years. The rest of humankind, quick and dead, sleep through it, little suspecting what's going to happen at the end of that first Millenium. Hint: you don't wanna know.

When the thousand years are up, Satan's let loose again. You might ask why. It's like asking why the girl in the deserted house always walks down the dark hall when she hears a strange noise. I guess God just has a good feel for narrative flow. Sure, he could wrap things up right there, but that would leave the Faithful feeling cheated out of a big finish. Glenn Close needs to come up out of the bath tub one more time. So the Devil (staying in character and having learned nothing from a thousand years chained up in a bottomless pit) immediately hoofs it (heh heh) and starts deceiving the nations in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, and to gather them to the battle of Armageddon, which may refer to Har Megiddo in present-day Israel. Once Old Scratch has them in position, surrounding the camp of the Saints, fire comes down out of heaven and devours the Devil's Irregulars. Satan is then cast into the lake of fire and brimstone (which makes the Bottomless Pit seem like the Ritz Carlton), alongside the beast and false prophet, and is tormented day and night forever. The Final Judgment follows soon thereafter.

That's only the Cliff Notes version of the End Times, of course. I'm leaving out some other great stuff, like Chapter 13's description of the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. (As a kid, I wondered: did each head have ten horns, meaning seventy horns and seven hundred crowns? If some of the heads didn't have horns, that would be one spooky beast. Well, either way, actually.) Also, I would be remiss not to mention the seven angels with seven vials with the seven plagues, because that is some wild, wild stuff. Quick recap on the Plagues: #1: sores on those engaged in Beast-worship. #2: turning the sea into the blood of a dead man. #3: turning rivers into blood (kinda derivative, Angel No. 3). #4: vial poured on sun, angel acquires scorch-power vs. men. #5: vial pouring on seat of the Beast, which turns out the lights and causes the Beast to gnaw his tongue for pain. It is when Angel Numero Seis opens the Sixth Vial (have they made a movie called "The Sixth Vial" and if not, why not?) and pours it out on the Euphrates that things go freaky-deaky. The river dries up and three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon (guess who? He-e-e-e-e-e-re's Johnnnny!) and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. "Rev. 16:14: For they are the spirits of the devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty." So Angel No. 6 has the vial that's really vile, because it brings on the final battle. Angel No. 7, batting clean up, pours his vial on the air and a voice comes out of Heaven saying, "Th-th-th-at's all folks!" Actually the voice says "It is done," and I'm accurate here because I'm not going to run the same risk as someone else I could name, as you'll soon see.

I'll have some of whatever John of Patmos is having. And speaking of amphibious creatures, John Hagee, John McCain's Go-To Pastor, looks a lot like a mutant bull frog with a learning disability. The latest bad news on Hagee is that he gave a speech, or sermon, or was simply ranting and raving about Hitler's role as an agent of God who acted as a "hunter" driving the Jews back to Israel so the Final Act could get underway. You know, let the End Times roll.

Now I recounted a lot of Revelations to (a) have fun and (b) make a point. Isn't it strange, after reading through that delirious account of angels with killer vials, frogs as Army recruiters, Devils-in-Chains, and goats (or whatever) with seven heads and ten horns, that the part everyone would find weird is calling Hitler an agent of God? That's so... tame. You're going to compare that little squirt from Austria with a seven-headed animal with seventy horns and seven hundred crowns? The Third Reich with Gog and Magog? You're messing with me, right? Hitler was just a man, a shitty little man to be sure, but just a man. The Devil-Dragon, the Beast with the Number 666, the False Prophet, all with their frog-filled mouths, these are spirit world creatures of immense power, of unimaginable evil. And they're completely mythological, the fabulisms of a guy who sounds like he was trying to shake off the DT's after a four month bender on ouzo.

So if I've got this right, millions and millions of Americans have absolutely no trouble if John Hagee believes literally in the End Times story I just summed up. That's why the Evangelicals are such fervent supporters of Israel, because the Jews need to be there when Vial No. 6 kicks things into high gear. So no problem with all of that; and if John McCain seeks support from a man who really, really believes that's how it will all play out, it's a sign not of clinical schizophrenia but of sound religious faith. It's a plus for McCain's campaign. The only thing pulling Hagee down is he got a little creative with this Hitler stuff. If he had kept to the story and said that God got the Devil-Dragon to do it, everything would have been all right.

Well, I've got a word or two for John Hagee, because I paid attention in Sunday school. Seems to me his exegesis runs afoul of the very last chapter of the Bible, Revelations 22: 18: ..."If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book." Vials Nos. 1 through 7, inclusive, John-Boy. I'll see ya; wouldn't want to be ya.

Teachings from Chairman Kahn

I mentioned a while back that I was reading On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn, polymath, RAND Corporation fellow and model for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." Herman Kahn didn't look much like Peter Sellers's caricature, actually; indeed, not at all. He died fairly young, probably for reasons associated with a lifelong problem of obesity, which again is nothing like his movie version.

The brilliance, however, and the blood-chilling willingness to look at any existential situation which humans can create, no matter how horrible, with a steady, penetrating eye are the same. That implacable fixity of purpose allowed him to "think the unthinkable," and it's evident throughout his long book that he delighted in exploring ideas all the way to their inevitable, awful conclusions, wherever they led. I suppose that's what prompted his occasional vilification, along with his Cold Warrior conservatism.

Society needs thinkers like Herman Kahn as a kind of reality check, so we don't get carried away with idealistic notions about ourselves. That self-glorification, I believe, has been a major impediment to American innovation in the face of global challenges. Kahn was a physicist first and foremost and looked at any problem from a rigorous and detached perspective. Writing about the revulsion that most Americans felt in pondering the value of life after a thermonuclear war, Herman pointed out a simple and homely analogy, our tolerance for traffic fatalities, as an example that we are perhaps far more callous about the suffering of others than we like to think. After even a catclysmic war, the survivors would go on, seeking meaning and even happiness to the extent possible. It's simply part of our genetic disposition, however much we like to believe in heroic traits of empathy that would make us "envy the dead."

In modern times, under the heavy influence of conventional political correctness (where idealization of homo sapiens is de rigeur), we're inclined to characterize such sang-froid as "sociopathy," a term often hurled in the general direction of the Presidential incumbent. This criticism (in his case) has to do, largely, with deaths in Iraq, American and indigenous. The sad truth is that if the president is "sociopathic" about such deaths, so are most Americans. I think the true grieving for the fallen American soldiers in Iraq is largely confined to the families and comrades-in-arms of the dead and wounded. Most Americans don't think about the Iraqis at all. Most Americans have compartmentalized the Iraq war as useless and futile and so don't see the outcome as affecting their daily lives in any meaningful sense, except as a waste of money. So we go about our business, as news of the war retreats from the front pages and becomes a kind of dull buzz in the background.

One could even trot out Herman's car wreck analogy on the subject of sociopathic indifference. As relevant today as ever. When he was writing, in 1960, the U.S. had a population of about 180 million with about 40,000 traffic-related fatalities per year. Today the numbers are about 42,000 fatalities and a population of about 300 million. The improved statistics no doubt reflect major advances in safety design, such as air bags and inertial seat belts. The term "traffic fatality" includes pedestrian deaths caused by cars and motorcycle deaths, along with a few other categories which are motor vehicle related. Kahn pointed out that if you lowered the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, you could probably eliminate most deaths. In our era, it seems reasonable to say that most deaths could be eliminated by a reduction in speed to 35 mph, given the improvements in car safety. There would still be deaths caused by bad weather, driving over cliffs or into water, etc., but it isn't difficult to imagine a drastic reduction in mortality, maybe by 90% or more.

And as I write this, the price for oil is topping $130 per barrel. Since the power necessary to overcome air resistance increases by the cube of increasing speed, lower speeds mean improved gas mileage. Indeed, at 35 mph (enforced by governors placed on car engines), it isn't difficult to imagine all our personal transportation needs being met by electric cars, eliminating gasoline altogether. So: virtually no deaths and no oil importation. It seems likely as well that since it might take 12 or 14 hours to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles at such a tortoise-like pace, the demand for high speed rail would increase dramatically. Finally, imagine that all cars were equipped with breathalyzer interlock systems that did not permit operation of the slow moving electric car by a driver with a BAL in excess of .02 (the standard in such countries as Sweden, where the designated driver is a social institution). The roads would be about as safe as we could make them.

So why don't we do all of that? Because it's inconvenient and because we've set the economy up to run at a faster pace. We tolerate all that blood and gore on the highways, all those tragic deaths, all that wasted gasoline, the growing problem with the balance of trade, our funding of autocratic regimes in the deserts of the Middle East, because it's just easier to own a car of any size we want and drive it as fast as we can to get where we're going, and because we perceive that more money can be made living that way. All the deaths caused by driving too fast for safety are a tolerable and necessary side effect of those simple values, or so the evidence of our behavior indicates. So even though the total deaths per year exceed the total soldier fatalities in Iraq by a factor of 10, we don't care, even though we could obviously do something about it immediately.

As I say, that guy Kahn was a smart dude. Makes you think, doesn't he?

And the same society that thinks that way is supposed to worry about soldiers they never met? Just remember, young men & women, as you enlist in the Army: saving your own ass is Job One.

Golub versus the Rubber Chicken

Shirley Golub has managed to go viral with her "rubber chicken" ad aimed at La Diva, Nancy Pelosi, the present Speaker of the House and U.S. Representative from San Francisco. It's a YouTube hit. I saw the actual ad on network TV and it caught my eye. So there really was a genuine challenger from within the Democratic Party for Nancy's seat in the House.

Shirley's originally from New Jersey, with degrees from Boston University in speech therapy and education. She worked in Hayward, California in that field, then bought an auto tune-up franchise at Pacific & Polk in San Francisco. She operated that shop for 20 years, then transitioned into real estate (according to her website) because "her lease was up." I guess I follow. Maybe she got tired of running a tune-up shop and longed for the corridors of power in the Capitol Building. Obviously a woman of parts, as the Brits say, and sometimes auto parts.

The political ad features a yellow rubber chicken talking into a microphone next to a name plate with "Nancy Pelosi" written in block letters. It takes La Diva to task for supporting the Iraq war, torture and for refusing to initiate impeachment, which Nancy famously took "off the table" as soon as she succeeded to the Speakership. The ad says that Pelosi is "spineless" and a "coward."

I don't vote in Pelosi's district, but a challenge such as Golub's does focus my attention on the way things are run in Washington. The "insider's game," which Pelosi plays to the hilt, is based on strategies of incremental gain; consolidating Democratic power; and huge compromises. Her confederates Rahm Emmanuel and Steny Hoyer play the game the same way. I think Pelosi's strategy from the start was probably shrewder than we give her credit for. She had been in the District of Columbia a lot longer than Bush when W came to town in 2001. I think the Democratic leadership had L'il George marked for a rube who was in over his head from the beginning; once the Dems took over the House and gained a marginal advantage in the Senate, they settled on a ploy of giving Bush the rope he needed to hang himself. Pelosi said as much; Iraq was "Bush's war," and the funding would be there, but the execution of the war was up to him.

Along the way the Democrats placated their base with occasional tokens of resistance. Doling out the money in small increments at times, so that Bush had to make a public display of demanding funds more often, imposing "nonbinding" time lines so that Bush would veto the bill (confirming that Iraq was a war without end), placing veterans' benefits in the funding bills so that Bush's hypocrisy in "supporting the troops" without supporting the troops became patent.

Drip, drip, drip. Along the way, the Democratic-led Congress became, in opinion polls, at least as unpopular as Bush. But the Democrats also knew that the American populace did not identify itself with Republicans anymore, and more than anything else, the borderline destruction of the Republican Party has been accomplished by one man, George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States, a politician so radioactive that when he sent his VP to Mississippi to rescue a Republican candidate in deep trouble, it sealed the deal for the Democrats.

I have a hard time arguing with anything in Shirley Golub's platform. It's just what you'd expect in a progressive agenda: single payer health care, out of Iraq in 90 days, aggressive approach to global warming, abolishing the electoral college, no telecom immunity. The sort of issues that liberal-minded people of my generation throw around the dinner table and solve so easily in their heads.

And which never seem to happen in real life, not in this country. Meanwhile, I think at least in the House the Democrats will go on to their super majority. Talk has it they will own 250 seats out of 435, a 57% majority. I don't think they'll need to overcome Presidential vetoes after January, 2009, so the remaining bottleneck will happen because of that strange "60-vote" rule the Senate uses without any Constitutional authority. Something else Shirley would no doubt change if she had the chance.

I don't think Ms. Golub will defeat Nancy Pelosi, of course. San Franciscans aren't going to turn the big-eyed Diva out of the Speakership and replace her with a tune-up shop owner. Nancy has real power. She's made her bones in D.C. playing against the Big Boys. It may be true, of course, that her power is mainly used in order to consolidate more power for her party, and that the "issues" are mainly game pieces toward that purpose. The war's okay as long as it sinks Bush and his party, which it certainly has. Whether any of this is good for the country is, in the final analysis, quite beside the point.