Why Is McCain Upset About Winning the War in Iraq?

So did the surge work? How would I know? If a chicken crosses the road on South Padre Island in Texas and Hurricane Dolly hits one hour later, did the chicken cause the hurricane? I assume that all of the major media, the MSM, would assume that the chicken did, for such is their trenchant level of "analysis."

As I followed the war in Iraq, it always seemed to me that there would come a time when Iraqi insurgents would "mature out" of their desire for armed conflict, much as crime rates fall as a population ages. It takes a lot of energy to cause trouble. Let's face it: that's a draggy way to lead your life. Holed up in hovels, hiding ammunition, building bombs, getting blown up by American helicopter attacks or shot down in the street. I suspect that Muqtada al-Sadr reached an accommodation with the Ungrateful Nouri at some point and decided to cool it with his Shia militia brigades. If you look at the casualty count over on the right and scroll down to April, 2008, you'll see that in that month of militia uprising in Basra and elsewhere in Shiite Iraq, American casualties resumed their "pre-surge" levels. I suspect also that General David Petraeus is a crafty tactician and used other means to reduce the incidence of IED violence, such as walling off enclaves at the border of sectarian neighborhoods. And of course that most trusted of American methods: we bought off the Sunni insurgents by putting them on the payroll. Petraeus was hired, after all, because of his record of success up north in Kurd country. He's good at his job. These factors seem more important than 30K/130K = 23% increase of American troop levels, especially if we recall that General Shinseki pegged the correct level of troops to control insurgency in 2003 at somewhere around 300,000, and was fired for his trouble. He was right, and a lot of Americans died because the Bush crew does not like inconvenient disagreement.

Yet Petraeus has obviously done good work. Maybe too good. Now John McCain is fulminating because he thinks Barack Obama is proposing to accept defeat when victory is within our grasp. I doubt that victory is ever going to look more permanent than it does now. As I was saying yesterday, I think the Bushies got punked by al-Maliki. I was amused to read a Maureen Dowd column today in which she continues the MSM trope that Maliki is a marionette. In haec verba: "McCain is hopping mad that the surge that he backed, and Obama resisted, has now set the stage for the Bush puppet Maliki to agree with Obama’s exit strategy." No, Maureen, I don't think Nouri is a "puppet." Haven't you been paying attention? [Dear Readers, you really should write your own blog; the great pleasure is in talking back to these self-appointed know-it-alls, and since their stuff is mainly read on line and for free, you have the same access to the public they do and in the same way.] Why would Maureen Dowd think that a guy with perpetual 11 pm shadow who persists in saying things Bush doesn't want to hear is his "puppet." Doesn't Maureen Dowd even want to try to make sense?

Never mind the "surge" and other phrases devoid of content, like "aspirational goals" within a "time horizon." The simple fact is that the Iraq war played out too fast for John McCain's purposes. He wanted there to be carnage, bloodshed, American casualties, chaos, and political divisions right through the election season. That isn't going to happen, and that's what he's mad about. Maureen Dowd completely misses the point. [Seriously, go to Blogspot and get started. You'll love it.] McCain is now in the same position as the liberals were in the heyday of the insurgency; kinda hoping for another bomb in some Baghdad market area.

Which is the true tragedy of Iraq. It's a cynical exercise in pointlessness, used by political factions for domestic advantage. Bush started the war to assure his reelection in 2004; McCain wanted the war to get worse so he could win in 2008. Bush's defeat comes about because Nouri outflanked him on the oil issue, borrowing our army to solidify his own grip on power long enough to build a police state to take over after we leave, while stalling cleverly on any oil concessions until our departure became inevitable. And now McCain has to run on some other issue. And what the hell would that be? His economic leadership? His gas tax holiday? His sexist jokes? His pledge to pacify the Iraq-Pakistan border?

The Bush Countdown, and End of an Era

As I write this, George W. Bush has about 181 days left in his dubious tenure as the 43rd President of the USA. I'm beginning to think that no more terrible things are going to happen while he's in charge, other than the playing out of things which his presidency has already set in motion. For example, the kangaroo court trials in Guantanamo, with their corrupted rules of evidence, admissibility of hearsay and coerced confessions, and juries comprised strictly of military officers who can convict with a 2/3 majority. Oh well. No one ever explained to my satisfaction why Zacarias Moussaoui, who by government account was actually involved in the 9/11 plot as a principal, was tried and convicted in open court in the regular federal court system, using all the normal rules, while Osama bin Laden's chauffeur must be tried under these medieval procedures. It doesn't make the country look particularly good. It is this strange arbitrariness in everything the Bush Administration does that is so unsettling, such as arresting and denying all due process (assistance of counsel, confrontation of accusers, speedy trial) of three American citizens who were placed in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina carefully chosen for its location in the most reactionary federal judicial district in America (the Fourth). The British Home Secretary has now issued this great ally's official report stating categorically that President Bush is "not to be trusted" when he states that the United States does not engage in human rights abuses such as the torture of detainees.

We've come a long way, baby. Still, we're miles ahead of such countries as Russia and China when it comes to basic civil liberties. Let there be no doubt about that. Russia has sunk into a kind of fascist oligarchy again in a country ruled by ex-KGB agents. China remains one of the world's most repressive tyrannies. I wouldn't write a blog like this if I lived in either of those places, of that I assure you. Americans are free to express their opinions here, mostly without official hassling other than the enhanced possibility you'll be unable to print your boarding pass at home. Ah hell, the airlines are going out of business anyway.

The truth is, like a lot of amateur socio-political critics on the Internet, I feel an odd kinship with ol' W. We would not exist without him. He is the font from which all satire flows. He is maybe the most intellectually and temperamentally unsuitable man ever to occupy the Oval Office. The irony of his reign is stupendous. At a moment when the country, and the world, most needed a visionary, brilliant, dynamic leader to deal with environmental stresses and an emerging new world order...we came up with him. So we devoted those eight years to one thing, and to one thing only. Not to dealing with the energy crisis, nor dealing with the increasingly terrifying specter of global warming and ocean acidification, nor revitalizing America's declining economic base -- no, none of that. Our goal was, first, last and always, to assure the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. That's it. That's what the last eight years were about.

And in that one project, W painted himself into a corner. Would you like to know how Iraq is going to turn out, what that "victory" John McCain insists upon will actually look like? Okay, here goes. First, there is no one in this country who really has the street-level background of Nouri al-Maliki. All of our guys, like Bush, Cheney, Obama, McCain, are typical American softies. We love our nice cushy life. It's why 95% of the country pays no attention to Iraq; it's a bummer, dude. To play in Nouri's league, you have to live Nouri's life, and that doesn't happen here. So how has Nouri played this situation, and us? Very simple. He's said, "Thank you very much, now get the hell out of here." Bush really has no comeback. Isn't he the one who's insisted Iraq is a "sovereign nation," the "world's newest democracy," where the joyous citizens hold their purple fingers up high? Yes, Bush is the one. So Nouri now says, no long-term deal on a Status of Forces Agreement, and as soon as the U.S. military is gone (along with all of those "permanent" military bases we've spent a fortune building, which will now be expropriated by the Iraqi Army), al-Maliki will do what all the oil-rich countries do: he'll create a "sovereign wealth fund" based on Iraq's oil patrimony. He will nationalize the oil industry. He will cut deals with Russia, China, anyone else who wants to play ball his way. Eventually, he'll be in a position like his Gulf neighbors to buy Manhattan skyscrapers. Will Iraq be a "democracy?" Kind of. A Shiite theocratic regime with "elections," just like Iran. Massive corruption. Sporadic sectarian violence, ruthlessly suppressed, as it is now.

The only uncertainty is the fate of Kurdistan, up north. Their blessing, and curse when it comes to Nouri, is that they also have a lot of oil around Kirkuk. How autonomous will the Baghdad, Shiite government allow them to be? Will they crush the Kurds, as Saddam did before them?

So what did we get out of this? With our 4,100 dead, our multiple tens of thousands of wounded, amputees, blinded, brain-damaged? Our $540 billion spent so far? "The world's a better place without Saddam Hussein." Yep. It would probably also be better without Putin in Russian, the junta in Myanmar, Assad in Syria, Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, Quaddafi in Libya, Ahmadinejad in Iran, Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Mugabe, killing squads in Darfur...we could go broke making the world a better place. In fact, maybe we did.

Lost on the Iraq-Pakistan Border

"Asked by ABC's Diane Sawyer Monday morning whether the 'the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent,' McCain responded:

"I think it's serious. . . . It's a serious situation, but there's a lot of things we need to do. We have a lot of work to do and I'm afraid it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border," said McCain, R-Ariz., on 'Good Morning America.'"

I agree with Senator McQueeg on one point: it's a serious situation, alright, very serious. It's a very serious situation that McCain is running for President. McCain has now turned his geographical expertise east of modern-day Czechoslovakia to focus on the turmoils in South Asia, or as he calls it, the "Middle East."

First, I'd like to reassure the addled and chronically out-of-it Senator about one thing. There is not now and never will be a situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border. We should be glad about that since McCain would have tried bombing it otherwise.

Anyway, I'm not really writing this for McCain's edification. The reason for that is that McCain doesn't know how to use a computer.

How serious is such a gaffe by one of the two main candidates for President? In the first place, I don't think it should be considered in isolation. Not even George W. Bush thinks there's a border between Iraq and Pakistan, nor thinks that Czechoslovakia exists, nor (now) believes that Sunni insurgents in Iraq would travel to Shiite Iran for training in terrorism. McCain thinks all of these things.

I don't see how a president could possibly have any sort of coherent geopolitical grasp if he's not just conversant, but absolutely grounded, in these basic details. It would be like hiring a chemist who was not familiar with the periodic table or a physicist who doesn't know what "force" is.

It makes you wonder whether the Republican Party might be kidding by running this guy. Is it some sort of unprecedented, bigger-than-life, meta-joke? Is the GOP slyly asking Americans, having fallen for the gags with Reagan and the two Bushes, how about this one?

Obama and the Brandenburg Presumption

In the Deep South where I was born and not raised, there were many colorful, pithy aphorisms which neatly summed up that worst of all offenses against the Scots-Irish, white trash ethos: the putting on of airs. Thus, such phrases as "being educated beyond your intelligence" or, more apt for our immediate purposes, "getting above your raising" (you can drop the g's in the gerunds if you like, for more down-home authenticity).

Lately I have noticed a new style of attack against Barack Obama from certain Right Wing pundits that proceeds along just such lines. It is the presumption meme. His tentative plans to give a major address in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (since dropped) on his current Big Tour afforded an opportunity for another salvo. Take, for example, Charles Krauthammer's column in the Washington Post on Friday:

"Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?"

Well, let me start by answering Mr. Krauthammer's question: Yes, I know of such a candidate. Ronald Reagan, your hero. His prior experience consisted of a career as a B-movie actor and of running California into the ground as its governor. His policies of deregulation and fiscal irresponsibility have brought the U.S. to the brink of economic disaster. But on to Krauthammer's ("cabbage kudgel?") true, snarky point: has Obama gotten above his raisin'? Or, what Charles really wants to ask but can't because he's a serious commentator: is Barack just one of them uppity n----r's?

First of all, how the hell does Charles Krauthammer know (a) what Americans are "beginning" to notice and (b) what Obama's "estimation of himself" actually is? His entire premise, therefore, rests on dubious assumptions. He literally doesn't know what he's talking about. Has there ever been a wider gap between a columnist's estimation of his comprehension of a situation and the shittiness of the column he produced for a major newspaper? Maybe. I'd have to look at some more of Krauthammer's columns. Anyway, a candidate has to meet Constitutional requirements to run for office. At least thirty-five years of age, native-born American citizen (criteria which John McCain does not meet). Beyond that, there is no requirement that a candidate meet the notional qualifications of the Washington Beltway class. Increasingly, those people are just in the way. What people have begun to notice is that Congress and the White House are lousy at getting anything done, and unlike Krauthammer, who bases his opinion on what another reactionary said at lunch, I base my idea on consistent national opinion polls which show Congress's approval ratings at figures consistently below 20%. The less acculturated a politician is in the utterly corrupt and inbred politics of Washington, the more "hope" there is for "change."

Then there's the always hapless, always wrong William Kristol of the New York Times, the true piñata of American letters. Needing a topic for one of his irrelevant columns and finding nothing, coming up empty because of the essential sterility of his political outlook (can we invade another Middle Eastern country or not?), he decided to dilate on that most crucial of all dilemmas facing Americans: should we wear flag lapel pins? Barack wasn't wearing one at the time and it bugged Bill Kristol to distraction because flag pins are neat, they mean you're patriotic and powerful, you're in the club of people who care, and nationalistic icons are always a good idea to cement solidarity, sort of like the Death's Head insignia worn by the cuddly Schutzstaffel. Plus, Kristol's always been nervous about how he's perceived by Americans whose fathers were not Trotskyists. (Just think: Billy came that close to being a Red Diaper baby.)

So Billy wrote a whole column about why Barack doesn't wear a flag lapel pin. People in the country are beginning to starve, tent cities are springing up, many workers can't afford to gas up and drive to work, the economy is hemorrhaging jobs, and when winter hits we will see many cases of death by hypothermia in those areas where Hugo Chavez does not provide free heating oil. Nevertheless, Kristol is fixated on that most crucial of all problems: to wear or not to wear a flag lapel pin? Look, he doesn't care so much whether Barack wears one or not; it's how he explained not wearing it:

"What’s striking is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest."

There it is again. Grandiose. Vanity. Too good. See a pattern? He's talking about a guy wearing a decal, but he was "struck" by Obama's explanation because this stupid-ass issue means so much to Bill. Oh for crying out loud. If Obama hadn't explained it one way or another, if he'd said, "Because I don't feel like it," then Kristol and Krauthammer (they need one more "K" to form their own columnist brigade in that same old Deep South tradition) would write two columns each going on and on about Barack's disdain for the flag.

I realize this was bound to happen once a genuine minority ran for President. The effrontery. It's like an exchange student from Bangladesh running for student body president of Andover Academy. These clowns think they own the Establishment, and the idea of a pretender speaking in front of the hallowed shrine of Brandenburg Gate drives them nuts. Although, question for you, Chuck, Bill: hallowed shrine for whom? Reagan? Don't think so. It's not a movie set, really. Hitler's the one who used it most effectively for propaganda. It's a block from the old Reichstag building, built to honor the old Prussian emperors. Give it a rest and write another rave for the Sixth Beach Boy, singin' John McCain. No pretension there. Nothing else either, but that's what you guys like.

The Obama-Maliki Plan for Iraq

In some ways it isn't even fair. Barack, of course, has always been an ace student. George W. Bush's approach to scholastics has always been "aspirational," as in the song "Don't Know Much:"

(bridge)
Now I don't claim
to be an A student,
but I'm tryin' to be
I think that maybe by bein'
an A student, baby,
I could win your love - for -me-e...

Thus, George's adult continuing education, reading all those books that more diligent college students read about forty years ago. Such as books on the Middle East, where the fundamental schism between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, occurring some fourteen hundred years ago, is discussed in depth. Book learnin' is not always completely irrelevant to real life, after all. If you want to assess the probability that sectarian conflict will emerge after you remove the police state mechanism (Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party) which held it in check for a generation or so, you would first have to know that there are Sunni and Shiite sects in Islam. Extra credit on the exam could be earned by booking hard on the topic of where in Iraq you might find concentrations of Iraqis of one religious stripe or the other; say, for example, Karbala and Basra for the Shia and Tikrit and Western Iraq for the Sunni. To nail that 4.33 GPA you need these days for Harvard or Stanford, you could show off by learning that the northern Kurds are an ethnically distinct people within Iraq, non-Arab, with trans-border affiliations in Turkey and Iran, and who consider themselves a state separate from Iraq.

George looked at the map and saw one word: Iraq. In Iraq lived good, decent, hard-workin' people just like us, and they wanted freedom because Freedom is God's gift from the Almighty (slightly redundant, but the point can't be made too strongly). In other words, they wanna be free (hold hands in front of chest, thrust slightly forward). Also, because we're Good, we came with Good intentions, and we would be welcome forever because freedom-lovin' peoples the world over love havin' us around.

If Mr. Bush's historiography and ethnic analysis sound strikingly reminiscent of old ideas of your own, it's probably because such ideas were current in social studies classes in the United States in the 1950's-1960's, when in the fourth grade or so you learned about "the world." George Bush could not be immune from such ideas because at that age you're in class, you hear it, you internalize it, the teacher's an authority figure, quod erat demonstrandum. Since you read this blog from time to time and know its ideological bias, you probably moved on in life to disturb such comforting ideas about your "homeland" by reading seditious tracts by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Scheer, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, and watched such movies as "Dr. Strangelove," "Born on the Fourth of July," "Seven Days in May," "Network," and "Platoon," and therefore began to develop a more nuanced view of your patrimony. Which is another way of saying that the erstwhile purity of your patriotism became somewhat tainted by contrarian views, and you perhaps emulated Albert Camus in his assessment of France: "I love my country, but I love it in justice."

I don't think this process happened with George W. Bush. It is a somewhat established thesis in the literature of addiction treatment that emotional development is arrested at the point that serious chronic abuse begins. From late adolescence on George drank hard and often and got into other drugs as well and went through the motions of college education and graduate school while under the influence, until finally at the age of forty he gave the stuff up and began to make real progress in his life. For which he is to be commended. At that point, however, he had wasted over half his life and thrown away all the amazing advantages which his rich and powerful birth simply handed him, like all the best schools and a head start in business.

Yet an adult awakening and renaissance is not as good as diligence and perseverance early in life. You will not find many concert pianists, for example, of the very first rank who started playing the instrument at forty. Okay, you won't find any. You simply can't develop the mind-muscle coordination, the sight reading capability, the patience for repetition that are possible at six or seven years old. Ingenious people who are indifferent about school often go on to be great innovative businessmen or artists (maybe most artists, in fact), but George W. Bush is not an ingenious man, not at all. For him competence depended on diligence and discipline and he simply never learned these intellectual habits when they are best acquired. It is often said about Bush that he is not "intellectually curious." Another way of describing this phenomenon is that he never learned how to learn and he is stuck with an old bagful of tired and sterile ideas.

So then comes Barack, the academic superstar, the quick learner, the adaptive genius. Don't underestimate him for a moment. The dude is very, very, very sharp. He does know how to learn. For him reality is a source of new data, all the time, to be assessed, processed and synthesized into new ideas. When he gets back from Afghanistan and Iraq (brilliant move to go there, by the way), he will announce innovative ideas on how to move forward, ideas of his own conception and initiative.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki likes Barack Obama for more than his name. Now he has a guy he can actually work with. George Bush wears people out because of the utter tedium of his cliched approach. Nothing can penetrate his ossified conceptions; he can't see things from your perspective because he doesn't know how to adapt and he's not intellectually interested enough in your problems to think them through. The sad fact remains that, try as he might, Bush simply cannot fake his way through his intellectual inadequacies. It just isn't there, he doesn't have it in him, and more than anything else, this country needs someone who does.

Bush & Valerie, Screaming from the Gallery

It's not exactly "High Noon," but a showdown of sorts may be in the works between Bush's (true) arch-nemesis, Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Los Angeles) and Bush's legal mouthpiece, Attorney General Michael Mukasey. (I have to say once again: thanks ever so much, Dianne Feinstein, for paving the way for this awful AG appointment. Who says that Californians don't elect Republicans to the Senate?)

The issue concerns Vice President Dick Cheney's FBI interview about the Valerie Plame matter, conducted during its investigation prior to the trial of Scooter Libby. The Bureau put together a report, termed a 302, on the interview. My instinct tells me that the VP probably growled a few lies during that one, and with the extraordinarily complicated matrix of evidence built by Fitzgerald during his thorough investigation (and candy-ass indictment), it seems inconceivable that Cheney could have shucked, jived and "if-you-will" -ed his way through that Q&A without (a) perjury and/or (b) obstruction of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor, claimed at the end of the Libby trial that "a cloud" hung over the Vice President concerning the Plame outing, but that Libby's many lies kept him from getting at the truth. (Let the record reflect that this cop-out has never made any sense. Fitzgerald proved that Libby lied because he had so much contradictory testimony and documentation demonstrating Libby's inconsistencies and was able to reconstruct a true narrative of events. How, then, could he have not seen plainly what Cheney did or did not do, despite Libby's obfuscations? His reasoning, however, sounded better than saying, "I don't want to go after the Vice President because he's too scary.")

Maybe that's for another day. Back to Cheney's 302: Chairman Pit Bull of the House Oversight Committee feels, like the Rolling Stones feel about love, that pursuit of truth is real and not fade away. He wants that 302. So Michael Mukasey (did I mention that without Feinstein's support we might have forced Bush to appoint an actual independent AG instead of another pocket consigliere for W?) wrote Bush and told him to write back telling Mukasey not to produce the 302 on grounds of "executive privilege." Bush's White House has really worn that concept down to the nub at this point. What, you may ask, is executive privilege? The most definitive statement of the concept was provided by the Supreme Court in Nixon vs. United States in 1974: It recognizes

"the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties" and that "[h]uman experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process."

Mukasey is obviously familiar with the case; thus, his little jewel of sophistry in his letter to Bush, imploring W to tell Mike to do the right thing, informing Bush that failure to protect Cheney's 302 from Waxman may have a "chilling effect" on future cooperation of the Executive Branch with FBI investigations. You know, how can you be "candid" if what you tell the G-Men may wind up in the hands of a Congressional committee, particularly one headed by the oppo-party?

Rest assured that Mukasey's long, case-citing letter is full of sophisticated legal arguments referring to every conceivable basis for asserting the privilege and deep-sixing the 302. You might think that because the letter is so long and makes so many arguments that there must be something to all this verbiage, and you can be excused if you think so. Having more than a passing familiarity with how such briefs are prepared, however, I can assure you this is not the case. The issue is actually pretty simple: was Elliot Ness in Dick's office to "advise and assist" him or to grill him on what he knew about blowing Valerie's cover? Kind of clarifies things, doesn't it? So Mukasey's letter is all about covering Mike's ass - he's the one defying the subpoena and a former judge knows all about the perils of contempt. He told his staff of legal eagles to write the hell out of the memo so it looks like there's something to his stonewalling besides...stonewalling.

Let's put it this way: don't "high government officials" always have a duty, a preexisting duty, to cooperate with the FBI when they're being investigated? How is their "candor" affected by subsequent House oversight? You mean, knowing that Congress might exercise its Constitutional prerogatives to look into the matter of how the Executive Branch handles serious breaches of classified information means the VP can start lying to the FBI so he doesn't look bad later?

Maybe if Obama is elected and appoints an ethical attorney general we'll get to see that 302. It will be difficult for the House to enforce its subpoena against Mukasey since ordinarily, in sane times, they would be asking for the AG's cooperation; that is, requesting Mukasey to bring a contempt action against Mukasey to compel Mukasey to produce the 302. For now the system is completely broken; a Constitutional crisis a day with this crew, and we've gotten used to it. Congress storms and splutters about the breakdown and gets nowhere, because ultimately the system needs patriots and people of good faith to function properly. And those are almost nowhere to be found anymore.

Bush in Retrospect

I try, not always with 100% success, to be a scrupulously honest man when it comes to matters of the intellect (with respect to all other forms of integrity, I concur with those who believe that when a man tells you he is completely honest about everything, immediately feel for your wallet). So when I watched President Bush yesterday at one of his rare press conferences, I had to admit that the man has made strides since his early days as chief executive. True, his eyes still dart about the room, he hunches his shoulders and stares at the podium, he mangles words with the same alacrity as ever, but his diction and even his candor seem to have improved with the passing years. He used the word "conflate" correctly, as one example. I forget the context, but he nailed it.

President Bush even makes sense if you disregard (a) all previous history of what he's talking about and (b) reality. His discussion of the energy crisis yesterday is a good example. To hear him talk, you would be hard put to identify the person who has been president for the last 7.5 years. Apparently, he "warned" us about the coming problem with gasoline and his administration has been "working hard" on alternative fuels because they've always known the remaining fossil fuels (he even used the word "hydrocarbons") are simply a transitional energy source till we get to the next paradigm (he did not use "paradigm;" let us not hope for too much too soon).

It's funny, but I don't remember President Bush, in the period between 2001 and late 2006, when the Republicans owned the government, pushing hard for higher CAFE standards for American auto manufacturers. Or seeking a repeal of the gas-guzzler tax breaks which insanely rewarded purchasers of truck-sized SUVs with accelerated depreciation while enacting enhanced tax credits for high-mpg cars. Or proposing revitalization of America's 177,000 miles of railroad right-of-way (ROW) by proposing mass electrification of freight and passenger lines powered by alternative energy. Man, imagine that! Exciting, huh? What you can do, see, is double up on the ROW (avoiding delays and freight-passenger conflict, as we have now) and then use the corridors themselves for electrical transmission lines, all powered by vast solar arrays and wind energy where conditions are favorable. We don't need to move to high speed rail right away, not yet, just inject lots of money into the rail system, which is so frigging energy-efficient. Creating millions of jobs, tons of high-tech work, transformative research.

Instead of, you know, doing what you did, Bush, and starving Amtrak from the very first days of your administration. Refusing to give it $2 billion as its new CEO requested in order just to bring passenger service up to First World standards. Nah, you'd rather spend ten or twelve billion a month in Iraq. In Iraq. So when Barack Obama gave that speech yesterday right after you finished and talked about the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars on an unnecessary war against a country with no connection to terrorism, with no connection to any American interest whatsoever except our squandered effort to grab those hydrocarbons you're now so dismissive of -- well, you see -- you got spanked. Because there's no real answer to what Barack is saying, not if you're intellectually honest, too.

History did not actually start yesterday. The President attempts to avoid all blame for the country's predicament by pretending that his very first responsibility as President, the ordering of national priorities, is not in his job description. It doesn't work that way. In modern times, I do not expect a president, any president, actually to be versed in the arcane and sophisticated detail of every scientific, legal and economic discipline which is involved in making decisions. That's impossible and probably not even desirable. But a president does have the responsibility to figure out which few of the thousands of things the government might do with the limited resources at its disposal are actually in the national interest, and to make decisions accordingly. It does not satisfy the criteria of effective job performance to become bogged down in a marginal project somewhere in the Middle East and to spend all your money, and all your time and attention, on this one dumb idea, mainly for the purpose of vindicating yourself politically (while young men die), and to obstinately refuse to admit that it isn't worth it, that it's a mistake, that it's a classic tar baby of throwing more and more good money after bad, and that the country is suffering hugely as a result of this misallocation and colossal misjudgment.

That is Bush's legacy, and it is way too late to change it. My true sense about him is that he allowed his presidency to be hijacked by a group of dedicated ideologues, led by Dick Cheney, who are fundamentally uninterested in what you might call everyday American life. Behind every scandal plaguing the Bush years, you will find them lurking - illegal spying, torture, Valerie Plame, destroyed e-mails, defiance of Congressional subpoenas, and war, war and more war. For all his bluster and feigned overconfidence, I think Bush is a very insecure and fundamentally weak man who allowed a cynical and ruthless cabal bent on military adventures and arrogation of power to achieve a coup d'etat, and it is his weakness that has been our undoing, and his own.

McCain's America: Not so Current but Right Anyway

"I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense, and again some of the Russian now announcement they are now retargeting new targets, something they abandoned at the end of the Cold War, is also a concern." John McCain, speaking on July 14, 2008.

PRESS RELEASE
for immediate distribution

From: John McCain for President Committee
Re: Confronting the Soviet Union
Date: July 15, 2008

My friends, I want to expand and amplify some of my comments yesterday about the aggressive moves taken by the Soviet Union against some of its satellite states in the Warsaw Pact, including Czechoslovakia. The promise of the Prague Spring is now in jeopardy, and what I fear most of all is a domino effect where the democratic movements in these countries behind the Iron Curtain are nipped in the bud.

For these reasons, I have launched a new initiative to make sure that East Germany does not also come under the crushing heel of a Soviet crackdown. Planes will fly around the clock into the American Zone in West Berlin, bringing natural gas, coal and food to this island of democracy so that the Russians do not succeed in their plan to starve the West Berliners into submission. I will call this program the "Berlin Airlift" and it will continue until we win, for unlike my opponent, I know how to win wars, and this war is no exception.

We should take heart from the example set by President Tito in Yugoslavia. He has continued his brave stance of open defiance of the Soviet colossus and has held his country together, with all its different ethnic groups and religions, united in their belief that the tyranny of the U.S.S.R. must be resisted.

Premier Kruschev may believe that there are those in the West that he can bury simply by a display of force, as he has done recently with his targeting of cities in Czechoslovakia, a nation straining to resist fracturing along ethnic lines and to maintain cohesion through all its historic ups and downs. As President, I would summon the Soviet envoy Andrei Gromyko to the White House and make it plain to him that thermonuclear war is not a one-way street, and that our B-52s, circling at or near their fail-safe points, simply await the go-code to even the score.

There are those who will say, and I can probably include my opponent in their number, that this bold statement of America's strength is warmongering and out-of-date in an interconnected world. Yet I know I will have the full support of my Secretary of War and of the combined strength of the League of Nations in making clear to the Russian Bear that they cannot tread on us.

My friends, calls to action such as "Remember the Maine!" and "54-40 or Fight!" are not, to me, just empty slogans; they are recent news releases, as current in their relevance as our need, finally, to break the back of Japanese resistance by an assault on Okinawa in our pursuit of final victory.

Advantages of a McCain Presidency

UPDATED: Don't miss the comment; it's funnier than my post.

I note today that some national polls show Barack Obama's previous 15 point lead over John McCain has shrunk to about 3 points, within the statistical margin of error. Thus, although 90% (± 3%) of the American populace will not understand the concept, this means that statistically the race is now a dead heat. Translated further, this means that the twitchy, confused, borderline-insane, dull-witted senior senator from Arizona with a penchant for making nuclear war jokes has an even chance of becoming the next President of the United States.

While suicidally depressing at first glance, there are always advantages to any development on the American political scene. For those who say I sometimes strike too bitter a note in these posts, I offer this list of advantages to a McCain presidency:

#1: Continuity of shittiness in government: One very confusing recurrent theme in American politics has been the periodic interruption of extremely incompetent and promiscuously over-spending military juntas run by Republican presidents by short spasms of competence and sanity. Thus, the Reagan/Bush years of colossal government debt leading to a deep recession were stopped short, just as they were about to crash the American system, by the presidency of Bill Clinton. By using concepts known as "intelligent management" and "national priorities," Clinton's team reduced defense spending, brought the budget under control, created jobs and ushered in a period of prosperity. Disoriented, the American electorate panicked and voted for George W. Bush in huge numbers, bringing back a reign of idiotic government, unnecessary wars, gigantic deficits, unemployment, exploding defense spending and near collapse of the financial system. In return, the American Right received a veto on the stem cell research bill, thus sparing countless (well, they're easy to count, actually, because they're so few) murder victims and various negative remarks from the president about gay marriage. Given this huge head start by GWB, I think McCain will be able simply to finish us off, the lethal injection of incompetence the country has been waiting for, thus ending the boom/bust cycle and era of false hope.

#2 Eclipse of America as the World's Biggest Polluter: As President Bush left the recent G-8 meeting, he jauntily said goodbye "from the world's biggest polluter," shocking Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain and Nikolaus Sarkozy of France. Apparently, these two spoilsports don't think destruction of the Earth as a habitat suitable for humanity is all that funny, but maybe they don't get that George's somewhat nervous sense of humor is part of what makes him "special." Our ability to pollute, however, depends in large part on our ability to run an economy, which in turn depends on our ability to import oil. Since we're near the breaking point on that capability, during the McCain presidency we can expect America to fall to a status somewhere around Zimbabwe in terms of environmental impact. Leading to:

#3 Relaxation of America's Self-Image from High Maintenance to Low Maintenance: At some point shortly after McCain's inauguration, it's going to dawn on Americans, however inchoately, from the tract homes of Tustin, California to the trailer parks of Bullhead City to the sprawling megalopolis of Dallas/Fort Worth to the rusting industrial ghost towns of the Midwest and Great Lakes to the cratering financial markets of Manhattan's Wall Street, that electing imbeciles as President of a country such as this, election after election, also perforce says something about the quality of the electorate, which is to say, the American people themselves. While it is psychologically comforting to blame the incumbent dimwit for everything going wrong, a people so uneducated, uninformed, distracted, and maybe just so drunk as to keep putting up large numbers for such cretins on election day has a lot to answer for. When this sinks in, when we realize that although we're in a very, very deep hole, we nevertheless keep hiring excavators to get us out of it, we may come to terms with one of the most disabling of all American delusions, the idea we're "unique" and "exceptional," which is the narcissistic trait that has motivated our tendency to invade other countries and to fix everything so everyone can be just like us. Which has led to our (a) excessive militarization, (b) social backwardness and (c) bankruptcy.

After McCain (just a couple of years of McCain, in fact), we simply will not have the wherewithal to carry on our quixotic and messianic missions. Which will be a good thing, although it will be very painful getting there. So you see - 'tis an ill wind indeed which blows no one any good.

The Banality of Idiocy

For a couple of minutes there yesterday, I watched President Bush address the nation on the most current, desperate financial crisis in America, the implosion of the two big government-chartered mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie & Freddie sound like a couple of lovable losers in a British sitcom, but they're actually a couple of unlovable losers in the American subprime fiasco. They once played a starring role in Bush's "ownership society," but that was then. They're lucky if they can get a cameo spot in an infomercial now.

I didn't switch Bush off; he only talked for a couple of minutes. He had just met, or at least said he had, with that genial banker-about-town Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury. I've looked but I've been unable to find a transcript of the entirety of Bush's remarks, brief though they were. Here's what was available on the White House website:

"I want to thank you all very much for your briefing. These are tough economic times for the American citizens. There is a way forward to help relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. And I'm looking forward to seeing -- watching this Congress respond in a positive way."

That is indeed the essence of his remarks, although it lacks some of the defining quality of Bush commentary. What I like to call the "descriptive meaningless." We've all heard examples of it. While in China at a G-8 summit, Bush reportedly told the President of China that China and Russia were "big countries." I don't see how any honest person could disagree with Bush's statement. Or why the President of China would need to be told. In his verbatim remarks this morning, Bush did the following:

1. Confirmed that he had just met with Paulson.
2. Stated that Paulson and his team (Bernanke, et al.) were "working the problem very hard" with Fannie & Freddie.
3. Confirmed that Fannie and Freddie were "important."
4. Said what's indicated up above, that these were "tough economic times."
5. Congratulated Secretary Paulson on sending out a lot of stimulus checks, and cited the number of checks, which Paulson must have just told him (in order to demonstrate Paulson was trying to do something to keep the country from unraveling completely.) Bush said consumers were spending this money.
5. Cited the cost of oil as one of the reasons for our troubles, and said the high price was caused by supply and demand.
6. Said that Congress should not go home for the August break until we're drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska's wild life reserve.

He then thanked us all for coming.

It's as if Bush, upon entering a room, would feel the need to name the furniture. Wrinkling his brow and squinting fiercely with those small eyes, Bush looks around the parlor: "That's a couch," he says. "There's some chairs there, by that table, and then there's the table itself. On the floor, down below us, is a rug, which covers the floor. Then there's some lamps, on these, which are end tables. Thank you all for coming out."

Somewhere along the way, Bush was told by one of his image-creators that he needs to stay away from anything remotely abstract, such as using words to express intellectual concepts. Thus, he is reduced to naming the actual events which have just occurred and applying a generic, uninformative adjective to (a) the event and (b) the subject, if any, which was discussed at the event. Let' see how these instructions are actually put into play by the bozo running our government:

Paulson came by to talk to Bush, and Bush confirmed that he did. He thanked his Secretary of the Treasury for telling him about how bad things are in America. Then he said the Secretary had sent out a lot of checks, and recited the number. Then he said the Secretary and the Fed Chairman were working on the problem "very hard." Then he said the two government-backed mortgage companies were "important."

That actually concluded the "briefing." Bush, however, being a mean and vindictive little man who absolutely hates the widespread, completely accurate perception that he's grossly incompetent and has driven the country into an economic ditch, could not resist blaming things on the "Democrat" Congress. Thus, he wanted Americans to know, the ones enduring the "tough economic times" which Bush has been absolutely incapable of alleviating, that the "pressure on their pocketbooks" could be relieved by a "way forward," namely, lifting the ban on drilling off American coasts and in the ANWR. Bush did not mention that the most optimistic estimates of the effect of this effort would not be felt until about 2018, at which point the "pressure on American pocketbooks" would presumably have reached 5,000 lbs. per square inch. And even then, the oil production would have a marginal effect on the price of gasoline in that distant future, when it might cost $1,000 to fill up the family Tercel.

So again, to sum up, because I'm trying to get a handle on this guy: Bush had just been informed that a couple of major pillars in the American financial structure had crumbled and collapsed, rotted out by worthless loans and overwhelming liabilities. Presumably, Paulson had also told him that IndyMac Bank would be seized later that day by federal regulators to stop a bank run (one of many were going to be seeing over the next few months). The Dow Jones is slightly above 11,000, which measured against the Dow Bush inherited, minus the government's own lala-land inflation figure, means it's worth 15% less than when he took the oath in 2001. The euro is just shy of $1.60 American. Oil is at an all-time high, touching $146/bbl at one point on Friday. When the federal budget deficit is honestly tabulated at the end of the year (refusing to count the Social Security surplus as part of general revenue, in other words), and if the "stimulus [bribe] package" is added to the costs of bail-outs of huge financial institutions, and enormous ongoing costs of Bush's twin wars, all financed with borrowed money -- we'll be lucky if it doesn't add up to $1 trillion.

And what Bush proposes doing is drilling offshore. That's it. Stay in Iraq, make the tax cuts permanent, and drill offshore. Just what constituency do you think he might be serving? At this point, I only hope the worst happens before he can sneak out of town. After all, that was the purpose of the Bribe Program; to allow Bush to slither out the back way from the White House just ahead of the roof falling completely in.

The Ungrateful Nouri: Return of the Sultan

This guy is really starting to piss George off. He doesn't understand how the game is played with The Decider. Kind of like Mo Green in "The Godfather:" "You don't buy me out. I buy you out." Check out the latest token of Nouri al-Maliki's epic ingratitude:

"BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces. The comments by Mouwaffak al-Rubaie were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. They came a day after Iraq's prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal. President Bush has said he opposes a timetable. The White House said Monday it did not believe Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals."

My favorite part, of course, is where President Bush "opposes a timetable." He's always opposed a timetable. It's worked with that group of Scyphozoa of the phylum Cnidaria (you know them as jellyfish) otherwise known as the Democratic majority in Congress, Man O' War Harry Reid, and Steny "the Stomolophus meleagris " Hoyer and the other invertebrates who keep caving into Bush. They timidly tried suggesting timetables in funding legislation but Bush told them to stop it. "Take 'em out!" he snarled, and they quickly did so, expelling water from their combination mouth/anus to propel themselves away to safety (Cnidaria have incomplete digestive systems so that one orifice does double duty - you know, they really should run for Congress).

Of course, Nouri's just being political. Provincial elections are coming up in the fall and he knows that the overwhelming majority of everyday Iraqis want Americans out of their country. On the order of two-thirds, and they've felt that way for a long time. As wonderful as we've been, they can't seem to wait till we're gone. The party that delivers on ousting the foreign occupiers has the inside track on loading up the local governing councils with their sectarian cronies.

Meanwhile, Bush is finding this whole thing a revoltin' development. The oil deals, at long last, were beginning to fall into place, just ahead of the United Nations eviction notice on December 31, 2008. We lose our legal cover for occupying Iraq after that, and you know what a stickler Bush is for doing things legally. And you probably also appreciate why this thing is such an 11th hour rush job; it's a quality shared by many alcoholics. He procrastinates and just can't seem to get things done. Look around the country and the world and see all the stuff he's left undone, things he started work on seven years ago and then put aside. Two-state solution for Israel/Palestine? He's workin' on it. Rebuilding New Orleans? Remember the Big Speech in Jackson Square? Ummmm.... I was just about to do that! Balance the budget? 30% of the national debt accumulated in the history of the country has accrued under Bush's "stewardship." Capture Osama bin Laden? Bring a single prisoner to trial in Guantanamo after he rushed through that Military Commissions Act in the fall of 2006? Look, I meant to tell you, I was going to do that next week...The one thing the dude's good at is getting Congress to pass bills exonerating him from past criminal conduct. I'll give him that. He spends an inordinate amount of time doing it, and I don't why Congress keeps complying...well, I do actually. Note that "Godfather" reference. Cheney must have watched that a hundred times, I'll betcha. The idea is you make everybody (or key players in the leadership, like Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman) into "made men." Brief them on illegal wiretapping, spell out the torture techniques years before anyone else knows, and then you've got them. What are they gonna do? They have to let you off the hook.

But Nouri is from, shall we say, a different tradition. Worked in the anti-Saddam Shiite underground, a very dangerous line of work, with a .000000000000000000000000000000001% margin of error, the penalty being a sulfuric acid transfusion. Nouri's were not the kind of mean streets where Steny and Nancy and Harry made their bones. A little more real, shall we say. Grittier. A desperate situation for Nancy Pelosi would be the discovery of a phylloxera infestation at one of her vineyard properties up in the wine country. Nouri, on the other hand, probably knows more about hardball than even L'il George himself, whose knowledge of the subject is typified by his decision to trade Sammy Sosa. So if we want to stay in Iraq under the terms of a Status of Forces Agreement after January 1, 2009, it's going to be on Nouri's terms, and I think The Decider will find that his veto power does not extend too far out into the Atlantic, and certainly not across the Tigris & Euphrates. There may be a phased withdrawal, it may take a few years, but I think Nouri is going to get us out of there unless we can get Nouri out of there first and replace him with someone a little more malleable, a more Chalabi-esque Arab perhaps.

But here's a bet: I think ol' Nouri can see that one coming. He survived by staying one step ahead of the occupiers for a long time, after all. He's working on his home turf, and I doubt that those elections in the fall are going to be tabulated on Diebold machines.

Never Mind Details, Barack - Just Give Us Some of that Change!

I just have to admit it: Barack is beginning to give me an uneasy feeling. In his campaign, he promised to filibuster any FISA re-write legislation that contained retroactive immunity for telecom companies that cooperated in President George Bush's program of felonious wiretapping. Here's what his campaign had to say in October, 2007: "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." That's clear, all right. Let's imagine it in action. A bill comes to the floor of the Senate which contains retroactive immunity for telecom companies which cooperated in President George W. Bush's program of felonious wiretapping. Under these circumstances, how should Senator Obama react in order to fulfill his campaign pledge? Let's make it multiple choice to simplify the test. Barack should:

A. Filibuster the legislation to keep it from becoming law.
B. Move up the schedule for his trip to Iraq so he can skip the debate and vote.
C. Vote for cloture so that all debate (including filibustering) is brought to an end.
D. Vote for cloture and then vote for the bill granting immunity to telecom companies for their cooperation in President George W. Bush's program of
felonious wiretapping.

Well, we can certainly eliminate C. That's a position directly contrary to filibustering. D. is a ridiculous suggestion; of course Barack would not end all debate and then proceed to vote for a bill to which he was so opposed he was going to stop it from coming to a vote at all. B's out; he's not in Iraq. But they voted on Wednesday, and there was no filibuster, so A doesn't work. Hmmm. I think I'll just flip to the back of the book and get the answer, because the suspense is killing me.

The correct answer is D.

Huh?

Okay, I already knew, and ever since I found out, I've been trying to rationalize my way around his complete reversal of position. A few posts back, I took his, ahem, flip-flop as an aberration necessary for debating John W. McCain; you can't be such a softie on terrorists that you insist on compliance with the Bill of Rights in the government's relationship with its citizens. Hell, what is this? Denmark? We've got wars to fight and Muslims to kill, and if an American is talking on the phone overseas or sending an e-mail somewhere outside the borders (and here's a little secret for you: if an American is talking on the phone to anyone or sending an e-mail anywhere), he's just got to realize that Big Brother is watching. It's for your own good. Who knows what you're up to? Well, the Feds are going to find out because we've just done away with the two pesky impediments to free-for-all government spying: the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe it was unrealistic to think the Bill of Rights could survive nineteen Arabs, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, commandeering our own planes and knocking buildings down, killing a lot of people. That was just a deal-breaker. For some reason. So the modern, post-9/11 Republican and Democratic Parties now operate in a new arena, one where Constitutional rules simply no longer apply. We're just winging it from here on out. That is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole. Senators such as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania take to the floor of the Senate and declare, in grandiloquent prose, that it is unconstitutional to eliminate habeas corpus through the Military Commissions Act. He then proceeds to vote for the bill, despite his oath of office, which is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. And every Senator who voted yesterday, including Barack Obama, for the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unlawful searches and seizures without a duly authorized warrant also violated his or her oath of office (and thanks again, Dianne Feinstein, for selling out your liberal constituency here in California).

It is very dangerous to operate without legal principles, without a Constitutional framework. We're told, however, that this is all just normal politics. Take this post yesterday on the Huffingtonpost from someone named Peter Clothier, who advises that our misperceptions about what's going on owe to brain-hemisphere problems:

"We progressives need to get our left and right brains working together, and to do this means first recognizing the conflict, which amounts to a significant "left brain" misunderstanding about what Obama stands for. Obama believes it is less important to defeat Republicans on every issue than to repair government so that good ideas can begin to flourish again."

So that's it: I'm using the wrong half of my brain. Clothier says that liberals need to let go of their "pet issues" and see the bigger picture. Barack is a centrist who's going to unite the country and work in a truly bipartisan way. Okay. But what is going to be the basis of that unity? Barack Obama has declared a truly astounding "centrism" lately, on a wide array of constitutional issues. For this is the slippery slope we're on: protection of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution has become a "pet issue" of those on the Left. Let's let it go so we finally get some "good government" to solve real problems. Or, let's execute mentally retarded child rapists. Never mind the Eighth Amendment, we need "good government." While we're at it, let's not worry too much about the First Amendment, with its separation of church and state. If we get fixated on it, we'll lose out on a chance at good government. The Second Amendment interpretation of Justice Scalia was ridiculous and impossible to apply rationally; that's okay, why do we need the 2nd, if we don't need the 1st, 4th or 8th? You know, actually the 5th Amendment's due process clause is kind of in the way too, and it was certainly ignored in the Jose Padilla case. Let's throw that out. Now we're getting somewhere. We're on the way to Good Government!

The kicker, of course, is that on every one of these issues, John McCain is much, much worse. With the Maverick, we go way beyond a congenital indifference to unconstitutional activity, as we have with Bush -- McCain doesn't even know what the Constitution says.

I'm not going to pile on Barack Obama. His fund raising has taken a serious hit as disillusioned supporters emotionally process all of this. All that's needed to revive his candidacy is to listen to McCain some more, maybe another hilarious joke about weaponized cigarettes exported to Iran.

What's that word the kids use? Whatever.

I see why they use it.

Newton's Laws Applied to the American Body Politic

Drawn back ceaselessly on a tide of inertia...where was I? Recently viewed the film, "Gonzo," about the life and fractious times of Hunter S. Thompson, innovative journalist, model for Duke in "Doonesbury," gun enthusiast, titanic drinker and drug-taker, chronicler of the death of the American Dream. He drank a quart of Wild Turkey a day just to keep his parts oiled, and that was before he mellowed out with hash, grass and God knows what else, as detailed in dizzying vividness in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, perhaps his trademark book.

Despite his air of world-weary (and hungover) cynicism, he did become a staunch supporter and completely subjective flack when it came to the candidacy of George McGovern in 1972. He believed in him, genuinely, admiringly. I did too, actually. It says a lot about the currency of my own ideas on America that McGovern was utterly pummeled by a gangster and war criminal, Richard M. Nixon, truly one of the despicable characters in American political history. McGovern carried the state of Massachusetts; that's it. The two-bit crook and Commie-baiter won everything else.

The movie makes a pretty good case, as seen through the jaundiced and often delirious prose of Hunter S. Thompson, that the American dream flicked it in about 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, on the heels of the Tet Offensive, followed by the riots in Chicago, the secret, criminal bombing of Cambodia, Four Dead in Ohio, and the flattening of George McGovern. That's an awful lot of negative mojo. When the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy, the country was only 17 years past the great speech of Dwight D. Eisenhower warning of the perils of the military-industrial complex. McGovern listened to him; he wanted to end the business of "old men sitting in rooms dreaming up wars for young men to die in," and he wanted to make massive cuts in defense spending and use the resources saved to implement universal health care and improve the social safety net. As a genuine war hero, a pilot of B-25s who flew the full complement of his bombing missions during World War II, McGovern had the unassailable credibility to challenge the MIC. A Democratic operative interviewed for the movie said it simply: "With that platform in this country, all I can say is: Good luck."

So now forty years later, we see that the U.S. is bound up inextricably, immovably, by Newton's First Law of Motion: I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

America is stuck in a militarized state of uniform motion it cannot alter. The motion of the country is toward war and more war, defense spending and more defense spending, security measure piled on top of security measure. At a moment when the nation's chief climatologist, James Hansen, is warning us that the next few years will be make-or-break for climate tipping points; when the seas are becoming too acidic to support coral reefs or the bottom of the marine food chain; when bees and bats are mysteriously disappearing from the ecosphere for reasons the mainstream government and media are not even curious about, we spend our time thinking about the influence of Iran on Iraq's internal affairs, and whether our security might be enhanced by yet another preemptive war.

So go back to Newton's Law and notice how he describes the force which changes the motion vector: external. I think in our case what will finally break the back of the military-industrial stranglehold on the nation is that largest of all external forces, Reality itself, soon to visit a force arrow near you.

Gee, What Could Be Making Those Salmon Die Off Like That?

Where have all the salmon gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the salmon gone,
Long time ago.
Where have all the salmon gone,
Down to the bottom, everyone,
When will we ever learn?
When will we ev--er learn?
- with a nod to Pete Seeger.

Wild Pacific salmon have pretty much disappeared from the West Coast fisheries. You can still get the farm variety, but people are reticent to eat fish which swim around in their own shit all day. The option, for awhile, was to eat Pacific salmon which swam around in acid all day, out in the Deep Blue, but that door is closing now, too. I did notice that the San Francisco Chronicle actually carried an article on Saturday, July 5, about the problem of ocean acidification. Right on schedule. I heard Dr. Inez Fung from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory give a detailed presentation on the details of this problem just about exactly two years ago at the China-U.S. Climate Conference. One of her points was that the temperature change problem, the global warming hypothesis, was one issue which, while not actually debatable, gets debated because ExxonMobil and other companies, foundations and CongressWhores working hard to kill off humanity can argue "we can't even tell what the weather will be next week," or "sun spots!" or "natural cycles!" And the human race goes back to sleep while another chunk of Antarctica the size of Russia goes spooo-lash! into the Southern Ocean. But ocean acidification is a little different, Inez ruefully explained. It's not hard to figure out why the oceans are becoming acid -- it's because of all the CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere.

It's nice to understand things at a basic level, even when the thing you're understanding maybe means you're going to die. Humans are just naturally curious that way. This is from Realclimate.org, that redoubtable website that bravely swims against an incoming tide of human stupidity and massive corporate fraud. First, how do you make carbonic acid? Simple, really. Take CO₂ and add water, H₂O, to form carbonic acid, H₂CO₃. Count 'em up; the H2 is there, the C is there, and the O2 became O3.

Realclimate continues:

"An acid is a chemical type that releases H⁺ ions into solution, as does H₂CO₃ to form HCO₃^- and CO₃^2-. Adding CO₂ to water causes the pH to drop. Coral reefs are built from limestone by the reaction Ca²⁺ + CO₃^2- == CaCO₃, where Ca is calcium. Acidifying the ocean decreases the concentration of CO₃^2- ions, which by le Chatlier’s principle shifts the equilibrium toward the left, tending to dissolve CaCO₃. Note that this is a sort of counter-intuitive result, that adding CO₂ should make reefs dissolve rather than pushing carbon into making more reefs. It’s all because of those H⁺ ions."

Unfortunately for those of us who love the taste of wild salmon (with a nice dill sauce and a squeeze of lemon), and even more unfortunately for the fleets of Pacific salmon fishermen, salmon depend heavily upon a species of plankton which builds a calcium carbonate shell. The plankton are having a harder time building their shells now because of a raw materials shortage, as noted above, and they're at the bottom of a very long food chain.

Different theories have been advanced to explain the disappearance of the salmon. The one I've sketched out is very unpopular with fishermen and Sacramento politicians, who prefer to think the salmon are infected with a gill bacteria which has caused a die-off, or water diversion from the Delta area, or perhaps the salmon are simply on strike this year, seeking better swimming and spawning conditions. It's better if they're right and the acidification hypothesis is wrong, because the acidity of the oceans is a permanent condition. If this is the reason, waiting till next year won't help. Nor the next. As we sit here in California beneath smoke-filled skies, skies which have not produced a drop of rain since late February, with the entire state on fire because of the crackling aridity, we're beginning to get the idea that things have really changed.

The Terrorist Threat in America

The first bombing of the World Trade Center occurred in 1993, while Bill Clinton was President. Six people died when a urea/nitrate bomb enhanced with hydrogen exploded beneath Tower One. Investigators concluded that the principal operatives behind the attack were two Kuwaitis, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, his uncle. Ramzi Yousef is serving a life sentence in the federal Supermax facility in Colorado, and KSM is awaiting trial by military commission in Guantanamo for his role in the attacks of September 11.

In 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols exploded a urea/nitrate bomb enhanced with hydrogen in Oklahoma City, destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killing 168 people. McVeigh was executed and Nichols is serving a life sentence. At the time of the OK City attack, it was the deadliest terrorist incident in United States history. It was, of course, eclipsed by the attacks of 9/11, which succeeded in the object of Yousef's plan: to topple the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

That is more or less a complete list of the big terrorist attacks against the United States homeland in modern times. There have been other attacks against U.S. possessions and facilities overseas, of course, and Americans have been killed there, including two embassies in Africa, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the U.S.S. Cole.

I have a simple question to which I doubt that I will ever get a meaningful, let alone definitive, answer from any responsible government official: just how serious is the threat of Islamic terrorism against the United States?

Vice President Dick Cheney often points out that there have been no attacks on the U.S. homeland since September 11, 2001 (which occurred, not mentioned as often, during the Bush/Cheney Administration). Cheney doubts that this is a "coincidence." He believes that the absence of further terrorist incidents owes to stepped-up security measures. Of course, it is also true that there were no Islamic terrorist attacks within United States borders between 1993 and 2001, a period longer than the surcease to which Cheney proudly points, and during this period the whole issue of "national security" was not the front-and-center, 24/7 Fortress America Reality Show it has become under Bush/Cheney.

That's what I wonder about. Have Bush & Cheney frightened away all terrorists, or interdicted all their plots, or, another possibility -- is the threat overblown?

One way in which I think we have been paradoxically blessed is that the Man Who Declared War on America, Osama bin Laden, seems to me a kind of Jihadist Drama Queen. He doesn't like plots that aren't showy and spectacular. He needs to take down a whole embassy, or the Capitol Building, or - and here he succeeded by joining the Mohammed/Yousef conspiracy already in progress - the World Trade Center. Big Symbols of American Power. He doesn't want to knock over Taco Bells or 7/11's, even though far more Americans identify with chain stores than with the World Trade Center. He doesn't send jihadis to blow up gas stations, or drop bombs in post office boxes, or, taking it up one notch, to park and detonate a panel truck as McVeigh/Nichols did. Or, more pertinently, al-Qaeda does not engage in the systematic bombing of buses and cafes in the United States, as Arab terrorists have done in Israel, even though American security is completely lax compared to the Israeli equivalent in such situations.

The effect of bin Laden's actual attacks has been aided immeasurably, I think, by the reaction of the Bush/Cheney group. The decision of the Bush Administration to politicize the terrorist attacks for partisan advantage, and to use them as illegitimate cover for an unrelated war in Iraq, greatly exacerbated the effects which the events of 9/11 would otherwise have had. I don't know if bin Laden actually "foresaw" all that. Sometimes he's given qualities that are more properly ascribed to fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, Dr. Moriarty. America actually "got over" the 9/11 attacks, in terms of economic recovery, in a reasonably efficient manner. What we're struggling unsuccessfully to overcome now, as the economy disintegrates, is the effect of Bush's reactions to the attacks.

If a group of Islamic terrorists actually (a) existed and (b) were capable of inflicting real damage against the American homeland and (c) were motivated to do so against the United States, common sense tells you it would be happening right now. Terrorists don't really need spectacular events to disrupt and paralyze the U.S. Recalling such episodes as the D.C. Sniper or the anthrax attacks of October, 2001, it seems that the kind of attack or crime wave that most disrupts everyday life here (as it would most places, as it has done in Baghdad) is the random, small-scale event that makes everyone wary, causes them to change habits, instills suspicion and pervasive fear. Regardless of what Dick Cheney says, it isn't really possible to stop such attacks in a bustling, crowded, anonymous place such as a large American city. The anthrax episode was never solved, for example. Smaller scale bombing in American city centers is probably not a great deal more complicated logistically than the drive-by shootings that are part of the normal abnormal life in Oakland, California and South Central L.A. It simply requires the will to do so.

It's generally conceded that American borders are like a sieve; thus, a terrorist can enter the country, if he's really determined. The wherewithal to build bombs (as McVeigh and Nichols did) can be obtained. It is estimated that there are as many guns available in the U.S. as there are Americans - freely accessed, thanks to our rights vouchsafed by the Second Amendment and Justice Antonin Scalia. And America is full of crowded downtowns, where bombs and guns can do terrible damage.

Things like that don't happen. Our streets are not like Baghdad's during the worst of the sectarian violence, or like Israel's during the Intifada. I don't think most of us expect random acts of terrorist violence to happen, except as a rare (and regrettably spectacular) occurrence. Yet I don't think we could actually stop terrorists from small-scale attacks any more than we can bring an end to all violent crime in America. Does that not say something about the true nature and extent of this endless obsession that dominates our budgeting and national priorities?

Independence Day

Tomorrow, I would recommend that you read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety. Not just the stirring opening paragraphs, which some of us may have committed to memory, or the closing words on pledging "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" to the battle ahead. It's not a bad idea, in this day and age, to read the "train of abuses" which Thomas Jefferson enumerated in order to justify breaking away from Great Britain in 1776 -- those reasons which "compelled them to the separation."

You will find in that long list an overarching theme - the abhorrence which the Founding Fathers held for tyranny in all its many guises and manifestations. Things such as abducting colonial prisoners, transporting them across seas, and holding them for "pretended offences." If that sounds a great deal like "extraordinary rendition" or the unraveling rationale for holding Guantanamo inmates without charges or a fair hearing, it's probably no coincidence. The United States has itself sunk to the level of using the tactics of a tyrant -- throwing prisoners in dungeons without recourse, never to be heard from again, all in the name of "state security."

A moment's reflection reveals that from the British perspective of 1776, tyrannical practices were advantageous. It kept the Colonies under the iron heel of the English Crown for about 160 years. What the king said was the law, and while the American colonists were granted rights such as local governing bodies, in essence any of these rights could be taken away arbitrarily, as Jefferson itemized in his "reasons." The British could quarter soldiers in your house; they could enter your house without a warrant and ransack it, looking for evidence of sedition; they could tax you what they wanted, and you weren't allowed to vote on the imposition; they could commandeer soldiers from the Colonies to fight in British foreign wars; they used Colonists to execute other Colonists for offenses against the Crown.

The Founding Fathers got mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore. Jefferson's magnificent bill of particulars throbs with passionate belief in the essential Rights of Man. It should make any American who cares about this country proud of his heritage, and jealous of guarding the democratic principles which these men laid down.

I just wonder, at this point, how proud they would be of us. The Founding Fathers, in 1776, put together a ragtag Continental Army to stare down the mightiest military and navy in the world. Signing the Declaration of Independence was akin to autographing one's own death warrant, and indeed a number of signers died in the war which followed under terrible circumstances because of their act of treason against England.
They thought it was worth it.

In modern America, a terrorist attack in September, 2001, knocked down some buildings and killed innocent Americans. I think it's fair to say that the openness of American society may have contributed to the feasibility of the plot organized by Saudi and Egyptian radicals. Does this one event portend the eternal insecurity of the United States, which became, in the two hundred years since the Revolution, a military power far more dominant than the British ever were? Was it necessary, in order never to expose ourselves to any threat whatsoever to pass the Patriot Act with all its violations of the Bill of Rights; to pass the Military Commissions Act with its abrogation of habeas corpus; to sanction systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment by exonerating telecommunications companies which spied on Americans? What does that say about American courage in this day and age? We'll dump the Bill of Rights if our leaders will just promise nothing will ever go "boom!" again?

I'm picturing a Signer of the Declaration in the dark days of the Revolution who has been captured by the British, as five of them were. They were tortured and horribly mistreated as prisoners of war. Yet they had the courage of their convictions. They put it all on the line, their lives, their fortunes. What would such a patriot say, returned to Earth to view modern America and the new, homegrown "train of abuses?" I think we owe it, as a matter of our own sacred honor, to do better than we've done over the last eight years, to vindicate the courage that put this great country on the map.

Faith-Based Request for Money

Memorandum

To: President Barack Obama
From: Henry Waldenswimmer, President, Church of Seinfeld ReRuns
Re: Funding request, 2009

Dear President Obama:

I was astounded to see that you intend to continue and expand former President Bush's program of "faith-based initiatives," particularly in light of your past work as a professor of Constitutional law. I would assume that the "Constitution" in question is that of the United States and not that of, say, Vatican City or the world's "newest democracy," Iraq, which uses Sharia as its fundamental source of legislation. That being the case, I am perplexed; is it possible that you taught only the unamended Constitution? That could explain a few things; for example, if you had gone on, you would have encountered the First Amendment, which reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Simple, economical language. Those guys were good, weren't they?

You know what I think they were saying? I think they were saying that the federal government should stay the hell out of religion. Period. End of story. G-Men don't go into churches or synagogues or mosques and tell the congregations how to pray; and in public school, we study science and other secular subjects and leave the prayer and "intelligent design" to the churches. There is no "national religion" in the United States. This is not a "Christian nation" despite what people like George Bush or Mike Huckabee say. The government tolerates religions; it doesn't get involved in their establishment, maintenance or practices. There are Christians in this nation, as there are Jews, Muslims, Hindus and millions and millions of atheists. The First Amendment guarantees that all are free to pursue their religions, or their irreligion, to their hearts' content. Justice Souter of the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the principle in the case of Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994), where he wrote for the majority "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."

You're convinced that religions are good at delivering "poverty alleviation" and other services. So they well may be. People who attend churches often do good works. They also give money, their own, when the basket is passed. The churches can use this money to alleviate poverty, run a food bank, build a homeless shelter. The federal government should stay out of it and let the churches do what they want with the money they have. If you think that the federal government needs to do more to alleviate poverty, then you can dust off ideas from the Great Society, for example, and run something called a "government based initiative." Otherwise it looks like you're just trying to buy votes from churches by promising them money. You know? A "faith based initiative" is another name for "taxpayer supported religion," and please don't pretend you don't understand that. You're way too smart. George W. Bush walked around in the world with the guiding presumption that whatever he was, whatever he believed, should work for everybody, and so if he thought that the government should get involved in the religion business, particularly
Protestant religions of a decidedly Right Wing bias, then that's okay, because "it's the right thing to do," the Constitution be damned.

Now you're doing it. This is the way that a bad idea, a clearly unconstitutional idea, becomes standard operating procedure. The same kind of thinking led to the repeal of the Fourth Amendment. If the President does something long enough, like illegal spying, and Congress is "in on it" and does not draw a distinct line early, it becomes the new normal, and the process of devolution then begins from there with the new administration.

But if you're going to give religions money to do government work, then give me some too for my Church of Seinfeld ReRuns. We watch Seinfeld "religiously." It is true that the characters in Seinfeld ReRuns don't practice religion; in fact, they don't appear to believe in anything. They are all post-modern Existentialists who depict the other great trend in American culture, the one that isn't about End Times and the Rapture and the rest of it. The trend toward mindless narcissism, materialism, rejection of normal family life, lack of connection. As American as apple pie, really, and to give money to the local Baptist Church for their do-good projects while leaving out our group is "preferring religion to irreligion" in contravention of Grumet, supra.

I know what you're thinking: We're a decidedly irreligious group and perhaps for that very reason should not expect a government hand-out. Yet when you think about it, that can't be what Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, et al. had in mind - why should we be the ones who are disfavored? The federal government is supposed to be neutral on the question of religion. Why don't you give us a try? If you're going to violate the First Amendment as official policy, at least make it worth our while.

Tom Friedman: On the Case!

The text for today's sermon is derived from Thomas Friedman's most recent column. As you probably know, Mr. Friedman is the award-bejeweled star pundit of the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Pulitzers drip from his masthead like bling. He is the Voice of Authority. And he's figured out something very important which you would be wise to heed. To wit:

"I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November — whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue.

"It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not Al Qaeda or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card — one way or another — is, in my view, seriously deluded. Things have changed."

Wow. Now that's chutzpah. You see, among Mr. Friedman's other titles is Chief Neocon Cheerleader for the Invasion of Iraq (sorry that doesn't work out as a cute acronym, but it's Monday morning). He is the inventor (perhaps discoverer, depending on whether you believe it existed in nature before his description) of the Friedman Unit. The Friedman Unit is six months. Mr. Friedman, at any point in the ongoing train wreck which is the U.S. occupation of Iraq, has counseled that six months are needed to determine whether a "decent outcome" is possible in Iraq. Unkind kibbitzers have pointed out that Friedman, in fact, has advised waiting a Friedman Unit about 13 times, which if linked together actually exceed the length of the U.S. occupation to date.

I think his tune has changed along with "things." Tom believes that anyone who now thinks that Iraq is the key issue for current America is "seriously deluded." Not just "deluded." "Seriously deluded." Let's look up "delusion" in the American Heritage Dictionary and figure out what Tom is calling people. "Delusion: a false belief held in spite of invalidating evidence, esp. as a condition of certain forms of mental illness." I cheated a little by leaping to the third definition, the one I liked best. But Tom Friedman cheats all the time. The way he's cheating you now is by jumping to a place in front of his new parade and pretending that Iraq-as-a-bad-idea is a brand new issue for Mr. Friedman to instruct you about. Instead of, say, devoting his next twenty columns to a detailed apology for the horrendous course of action he and a lot of other Makers of Fashionable Opinion enabled back in 2002-03.

Iraq was a tremendously bad idea in 2003, too. For exactly the same reasons, those "things" Friedman refers to. Those things include (a) America's bankruptcy and (b) economic destruction. In 2003 the United States was in no shape to invade Iraq. It doesn't matter if toppling Saddam Hussein was "the right thing to do." It doesn't matter if one hundred years of war in the Middle East, against one country after another, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, might finally produce stable democracies so we could finally quit worrying about losing another couple of skyscrapers to our own commercial jets. We never had the wherewithal to mount a big invasion and a long occupation in a distant Third World desert, spending $12 billion a month and breaking down the military, and allowing this one foreign policy project to dominate all national discourse and the attentions of Congress.

Because now look where we are. We have run deficits (as measured by growth in the National Debt) of a half trillion dollars per year, and the debt will be $10 trillion when Bush leaves office. The Dow Jones is now lower than during the Clinton Administration. The dollar has lost 40% of its value against the euro. Unemployment is on the way up. Consumer spending is on the way down (masked briefly by Federal Bribes financed by borrowing more money from foreign creditors, but that won't last). The banking system is teetering on the brink of insolvency. Unaffordable gasoline. A cratering real estate market. Mr. Friedman and many others like him who were so gung-ho for this war because it gave them something glamorous and adventurous to write about would have you believe that these developments fit into the neat confines of their perceived "news cycle," which is perhaps even shorter than a Friedman Unit. That America woke up one morning and said to itself, hey, we've got problems here at home, too. Maybe a constant fixation on violence in Iraq as a spectator sport is a diversion we can't afford any longer. We don't make our livings writing about the Iraq War. We have to participate in what you might call the "general economy," and the general economy sucks.

So yeah, Thomas Friedman, you might be right. Anyone who thinks Iraq is the major issue facing America is seriously deluded. And has been for at least five years.