The ultimate horror - $4 for a gallon of gas

I'm so grateful to John McCain for proposing a way out of the morass of high gasoline prices. It's this sort of creativity that bodes well for our nation's future in the unlikely event Captain McQueeg takes the helm of the Good Ship USA in a few months. And we've actually got two chances out of three because Hillary Clinton, displaying the same kind of originality that impelled her to sign on to the Iraq War Authorization and the Kyl-Lieberman Bomb-Iran-Now permission slip, has said "me too!" with that trademark toothy grin. It's simple, really: suspend the federal excise tax of 18 cents a gallon for the summer.

Wow. That ought to do it. Let's see, my car has a 14-gallon tank, so every time I fill up I will save $2.52. With prices so high, I've been driving a lot less, so a tank lasts about two weeks these days. So I'll save that $2.52 six times! That's $15.12. You know what? With that kind of bonanza, I think I'll fill up every week so I can save $30.24. If I don't use the gas, I'll just siphon it onto the ground before I fill up, because I want in!

As I understand it, the excise tax is used to maintain federal highways and bridges, like the one that fell down in Minnesota not too long ago. Have you driven on an interstate freeway lately? Try I-5 between San Francisco and L.A. If you hit a pot hole at 75 miles per hour, as I have, you'll need a lot more than $30.24 to put your axle back together. I assume that McQueeg and Hillary, both ready to rock on Day One, are not seriously suggesting that the federal government is going to stop maintaining the roads. So they'll still maintain the roads but without the funding, as with so many federal programs these days, like war. Thus, McCain/Hillary are going to borrow money to fix the roads while encouraging Americans to drive their cars on vacation this summer.

I thought those two were the big global warming experts. America has three hundred million people and two hundred million cars, more than any other nation on Earth. Of worldwide usage of 87 million barrels of oil a day, we use about 20 million because (a) we drive pigs, (b) we drive too much, and (c) we don't bother to provide any other way to get around. If The Maverick is serious about global warming, why doesn't he propose something more lasting to deal with one of those problems instead of a three-month gimmick to make himself look good before the election?

We're envious of the Germans, naturally, because they pay only $2.27. Of course, that's per liter. They pay about $8.60 per gallon. They tax the hell out of their gasoline, but then driving on the autobahn doesn't require a chiropractic adjustment when you're done. And they subsidize mass transit, which they have a lot of. They were once paying about $4.07 per gallon, too. Back in 1996.

The repeal won't happen, even if Chuckie (The Hedge Fund Manager's Best Friend) Schumer says "it's in the works." Here's an idea. Let the worldwide, borderline shortage set the price of oil, and pay the price you have to pay for gasoline. Get used to it, because it's not going to get better on a permanent basis. It's going to get a lot worse. If the federal government wants to subsidize someone (and that's what the "gas tax holiday" is, a short-term subsidy, just like the "stimulus package" of Chinese money sent to American citizens), subsidize the trucking industry. They're the ones getting hammered because they have to drive. Keep collecting the 18 cents and give some of it to them. Tell everyone else they're lucky they're only paying 4 bucks a gallon. Walk somewhere. Ride a bike if you can. Trade in the Yukon EarthDestroyer for a car shorter than a city block.

Look, Captain, I know it's not Day One yet, but try leading for a change.

Obama's Reverend Wright Problem

The way to play the religious angle in these presidential campaigns is Hillary's way. She doesn't actually go to church, she probably thinks (deep in her private thoughts) that religion is a load of crap, but she recognizes that a God-struck country like this one is not going to tolerate any ambivalence about piety. Believe or die, it's just that simple. And no cop-outs with a gauzy "theism" of the sort true intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson were able to pawn off, that kind of nebulous "spiritual sense" that smart people who don't want to go so far as to claim a relationship with an imaginary friend often resort to when pressed on the issue. This is modern America, which is to say, in the main a very obscurantist and anti-intellectual society. So: tell us about your belief in the God of the New Testament or get the hell out of the race.

I was kind of hoping that Barack Obama might have been signaling this sort of ruse when he made his now infamous remarks in that Gomorrah of the West, San Francisco, not too long ago. You know, when he talked about desperate people "clinging to guns and religion." See, if his faith was real he wouldn't put it like that; if you actually believe in God, then He's there whether you're in the chips or not. You "cling" to illusions when reality is overwhelming. I took that as Obama's subtext. So naturally Barack rose in my estimation, the sort of paradoxical effect you'd expect when dealing with a contrary crank like me.

But Barack has tried to have it both ways. Identifying himself strongly with the United Church of Christ in Chicago, even writing up and quoting Rev. Jeremiah Wright in chapters of his book, Dreams of my Father. I've been told I'm wrong, that Barack's faith is real and I'm simply idealizing him as an atheist on the basis of one passing remark. It doesn't matter now, because from here on out Barack is going to spend increasing amounts of his time dealing with the random declamations of a decidedly loose cannon. Bummer for Barry.

I see Rev. Wright as a kind of African-American Noam Chomsksy. He likes wallowing in American iniquity. Here's the main part of the "God damn America" sermon in context: "And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America!"

There's a lot in this speech which is pretty uncontroversial. It all depends on whether you're in the mood to walk down a Nightmare Memory Lane; the United States did effect a genocide and massive displacement of American Indians. The United States, during World War II, did intern Japanese citizens unfairly. The United States did maintain the "peculiar institution" of slavery for over two hundred years, and then supported systematic discrimination for about another one hundred years beyond the Emancipation Proclamation. But after you repeat all of this, where are you? It's too late to do anything for the Native Americans we essentially wiped from the face of the Earth, but we did acknowledge the error with respect to the Japanese in a series of Supreme Court cases (although not with full restoration of property rights) and, in the case of African-Americans with the Civil Rights Act, we codified societal progress in the field of race relations.

Is the point that the United States should get over itself? Sign me up; I think that's the essential problem, often unacknowledged in the controversy. Those like Noam Chomsky and Jeremiah Wright gain a great deal of notoriety because there's something deliciously, refreshingly seditious about forcing the U.S. to acknowledge that it behaves more or less exactly like other great powers which consolidate and extend their material advantages. The war in Iraq is simply a case of using American military might (our remaining hole card) to gain advantages in the largest remaining (mostly) untapped oil field. This doesn't play well in the diner down in Pasacougla, so
we turn everything into a debate about flag lapel pins. Young men are dying, after all; what are we supposed to do, insist that people wear the ExxonMobil logo on their lapels? But for Barack, a guy who has to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of Main Street America and navigate through a blizzard of sound bites, a guy like Wright is a nightmare, especially because Wright obviously venerates the outspoken anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan (if you don't think Farrakhan is an anti-Semite, just read his own words helpfully collected on the website of the Anti-Defamation League - his main beef seems to be that Jewish agents in Hollywood have figured out how to keep black entertainers and athletes in chains. Very ugly stuff, whatever he's saying.).

Do I think Obama is responsible for everything Wright says? Hell no, not at all. Nor do I think the more arrantly loony pronouncements of Wright actually affect Obama's outlook. Barack is too smart and too canny for that; however, the Faustian bargain these nationwide pols have to make with organized religion often come back to haunt them, and this one is biting Obama mighty hard in the ass.

Captain McQueeg, Probably the Wrong Man for this Typhoon, Too

"Ah, but the strawberries! That's, that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with, with geometric logic, that, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist."

In the penultimate scene of "The Caine Mutiny" Captain Queeg breaks down under the clever cross-examination of Officer Maryk's defense attorney and reveals himself a combat-fatigued emotional basket case who, in fact, did pose a risk to the Caine during the typhoon where he was relieved of his duty. In the highly choreographed theatre of presidential politics, we're unlikely to see our own Captain McQueeq, John McCain, undergo a similar dissolution. True, he has a bad temper and a querulous personality generally, his inconsistency on key issues looks a lot like mental instability, and he's hiding his medical records, which is ominous given his history of recurrent melanoma and his age. Nevertheless, we would have to wait for the equivalent of a national typhoon to see how Johnny Mac would respond to a crisis, and one thing is certain: between the Januaries of 2009 and 2013, there are going to be a whole bunch of crises.

As far as I can see, McCain's popularity rests on his now legendary ordeal as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Any reference to McCain must be preceded or immediately followed by the honorific "war hero." It is bad form, except in the "radical" precincts of the Internet, to mention that McCain was shot down over Hanoi while dropping bombs on the civilian population in a war that, in retrospect, is now regarded as useless at best or immoral at worst. Had he not been captured and imprisoned, then his war service record would be vulnerable to Swift Boat tactics of Rovian operators. The North Vietnamese apparently found out McCain was the son and grandson of John Sidney McCains I&II, who were both four star admirals in the Navy, and that they had on their hands John Sidney McCain III. They wanted to release him as a publicity stunt but McCain demurred. His canonization followed.

McCain apparently graduated in the bottom five of his class at Annapolis. His appointment to the Academy was naturally a forgone conclusion, given his lineage. I'm inclined to think that the squandering of his opportunity derived more from native incompetence than a lack of diligence. He just doesn't seem very smart at all. For all the hoopla that surrounds his "maverick" imago, I've never actually heard him say anything particularly intelligent. His questioning of Rumsfeld and the military during Abu Ghraib and the military budget hearings for Iraq was dull, clumsy and feckless, even by Senate standards, and that's saying a lot. He tried for a photo op type moment in his questions ("What were the instructions to the guards?," as if that would trap someone) and he got nowhere. If I had to guess, I'd say he's got less going upstairs than the present resident of the White House, a chilling thought indeed. Other than flying jets and being a fairly easily corrupted Congress guy, he doesn't seem to have had any real life experiences that would equip him to oversee the economy or redirect our technological future. This American infatuation with dumb guys as president seems like a luxury we just can't afford anymore.

There are jarring contradictions between the folksy persona he cultivates and his real life. While he plays the part of a populist, in reality he's rich by way of his second wife, the beer distribution heiress. (I thought beer distributorships were given exclusively to former NFL linemen after retirement.) He travels around in her private jet and bunks down in one of her eight homes, depending on his mood. He rails against corporate influence in Washington while maintaining a campaign staff full of lobbyists. He denies any impropriety in his relationship with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, but she has disappeared into some sort of private witness protection program arranged by "her" lawyer, Robert Bennett. McCain is the big "campaign reform guy," lending his name to McCain-Feingold, but he was one of the slimeballs caught up in the dirty racket of the Keating Five, going to bat for the serial fleecer Charles Keating during the S&L crisis. His multi-hued positions on the torture question, which was supposed to be one of his signature issues given his background, are nearly impossible to follow. He appeared to acquiesce in Bush's signing statement vitiating the whole purpose of restricting non-military interrogators to the rules of the Army Field Manual. He's called the Evangelical Right "agents of intolerance," but avidly seeks the endorsement of End Times nut jobs like John Hagee. He now characterizes his previous opposition to the Iraq war as simply a disapproval of Donald Rumsfeld's leadership style, and is probably the most hawkish Washington pol found outside Dick Cheney's office.

His economic program, especially the tax cuts, are reminiscent of Captain Queeg's refusal to right the ship during the typhoon. McCain's fundamental dishonesty in calling a scheduled sundowning of the Bush tax cuts a "Democratic tax increase" was highlighted recently in Paul Krugman's column. Bush's Congress lowered the top marginal income rate to 35% from the Clinton era 39.6% and also lowered the effective estate tax. The tax cutting, as passed, was intended to be temporary, expiring in 2011. McCain now says that if the Democratically controlled House does not pass a new bill to make the tax cuts permanent that they are "passing a tax increase." This is fraudulent; Congress is under no obligation to pass new legislation to enable Bush (and now McQueeg) to pretend that temporary legislation was in fact permanent from the get-go, and that, therefore, a failure to change Bush's plan amounts to a bill to repeal the tax cuts. The repeal was built into the original amendment of the tax code. Anyway, if McCain is such a populist, why doesn't he ruffle the feathers of the hedge fund industry and subject their billionaire managers to ordinary income tax rates instead of allowing them to use the capital gains rate?

Everything about McCain's platform is essentially rooted in the failures of the past, and the country can't afford that approach. His strategy will deepen the financial quagmire of the national debt and the Iraq war at a point where we're running out of international creditors to float our boat. The dollar is faltering because its petro-dollar stability is now undermined by global competition for oil. McCain wants to increase military spending at a point where we already outspend all potential threats combined; other nations are moving on to dealing with what is called outside U.S. borders "objective reality."

Just go back to the Senate and roll your ball bearings, McQueeg. The country really can't afford another experiment in faked personality.

Living in the Future

I am indebted to Kevin Phillips for another brilliantly insightful work on the current state of the union (the real one), this time out in a book called Bad Money, which deals with the long-term consequences of a number of converging crises, including the collapse of the housing market, federal debt and trade imbalance, peak oil, and global warming. It's a tour de force.

I've been reading books about the dangers which lie just up the road for as long as I can remember. Paul Erlich's 1968 Population Bomb, for example, which predicted that world population would double every 37.5 years, and that mass starvation would set in within 20 years or so. Erlich was right about population growth for the first forty-year period (3 billion to 6 billion people), but the so-called "Green Revolution" managed to keep pace with the food needs for a rapidly expanding population. It's not surprising that he took a lot of heat from the Pope and from Libertarians such as Julian Simon, who both argued that more humans were a good thing, not a problem.

I first read about CO2 build-up in the atmosphere in Robert Rienow's 1969 Moment in the Sun, who wrote about a 6% increase in greenhouse gases in the troposphere over pre-Industrial Revolution levels (280 ppm). We're now at 380 parts per million, or a 36% rise over such levels.

There have been numerous books about the rapidly increasing national debt and trade imbalances, and lots of others about the phenomenon of "peak oil," that hypothesized level where half the available petroleum has been extracted and the amounts remaining will be increasingly difficult to pump and refine. I've read a bunch of them, too.

Reading the news these days, it becomes apparent we've begun to live in that "future." It's different in many ways from the predictions. The mass starvation hypothesis in the 1980's did not come to pass, but now we're facing serious food shortages worldwide, mainly involving wheat, rice and corn at the moment, but the problem will spread. It would be fatuous to deny that these shortages are related to explosive population growth. The effects of global warming become more patent with shrinking Arctic sea ice, melting glaciers, acidification of the oceans, die-off of marine species and salt water intrusion from rising sea levels. The problem of peak oil is exacerbated tremendously by the emerging (and overpopulated) economy in China, which is now using the wealth transmitted to it by the United States to secure oil access from formerly reliable partners of the U.S., such as Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The sovereign wealth funds and state-owned oil companies, such as those in the Gulf Arab states, Venezuela and Iran, have eclipsed the former "Seven Sisters" of the American oil heyday and the big investment banks of Wall Street. These titanic business entities (which we have done so much to empower) now threaten our own financial sovereignty.

All of these developments are different in their details from the prognosticators' doomsaying, and in most cases that's because it was perhaps impossible to foresee the interplay between one set of problems (food production, e.g.) and another development such as oil shortages. The writers in the 60's and 70's could not have foreseen Reaganism (a cowboy actor as President?) and his foolhardy decision to run huge deficits while over-investing in the military. Indeed, going back to the era of Erlich's book, 1968, and moving forward, and passing through the Vietnam War and Gulf I&II, along with forays into Panama, Grenada and ten other places -- a serious argument could be made that the huge standing army and conventional armament maintained by the U.S. has been a positive hindrance, with no return whatsoever on money invested, and this misallocation accounts for a large part of the inability to deal with the looming enviromental and energy crises which have gained force. But always, the huge number of variables involved, and the feedback loops among them, leave anyone trying to make an educated guess about what will happen in twenty years vulnerable to large variances in actual outcome.

Those who do not want to change the status quo seize on this inherent and unavoidable inaccuracy as an argument for denying the validity of the futurist's main point. Some technological or "political" fix will solve the problem when it shows up, so calm down. The difficulty is that when the problem finally does manifest itself in all its awful living color, it's not only different, it's almost always a whole lot worse. The "fantasy" bias lulled mankind into thinking the incipient problems would evolve along the gentlest possible path.

So, as Kevin Phillips masterfully demonstrates, here we are. Living in the "future." The United States is seriously broke; we've popped the last bubble remaining to us (housing); the Big Money countries, such as China and the Gulf States, are losing interest in supporting our government or using the dollar as the benchmark for crude oil purchasing; countries which don't necessarily have our best interests at heart (China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran) are forming cooperative alliances; and the U.S.'s one play to carve out a reliable oil supply all to ourselves, the war in Iraq, has turned into a gigantic bust with no payout, while making the problem of insolvency significantly worse.

I'm not even going to mention that we have to deal with all of this while George W. Bush is the President. There's a limit to how many of my own fantasies I care to disabuse.

Falling for the Dazzling Head Fake of the NBC Peacock

As I think I've written before, I do regard Democratic Party politics as only a semi-democratic process; meaning, it is not reasonable to hold a political party, in its internal deliberations, to the same standards which (used to) guide the constitutional voting system for the country itself. Which is to say, the Dems can have rules which don't necessarily conform to general election requirements. Surfing around various blogs, and the comments which follow posts therein (a Bugs Bunnyism), a pervasive confusion seems to center around this point. The Democrats can't "snatch" the nomination away from Barack Obama and give it to someone else, you know, like Hillary, right? Actually, so long as they're operating within their rules, they can. And they just might. If they can figure which of two wrong decisions they ought to make this time out.

As I wrote yesterday, they're in a terrible quandary now. Big Media have fallen out of love with Barack Obama. He was fun for a while, a nice, substantive diversion from missing blond co-eds in Aruba, but they're beginning to vainly fight, as Cole Porter sang and wrote, the old ennui. Barack and his glorious oratory, Chris & Tim & Wolf & The Boyz at Fox are beginning to grumble, are kind of yesterday. They sort of wish a former Playboy centerfold would swell to twice her original size, marry a nonagenarian billionaire, write an ambiguous will, take an overdose, and lie in a morgue while a bunch of former lovers litigate in the court of a crying judge looking for a TV gig about who gets an outsized haul of the spoils + custody of the bodacious corpse. Like old times, in other words.

I mean, it was real, Barry or Hossein or whatever the hell your name was, but we're corporate networks and this G--D--- America stuff, and the Weatherman you knew when you were eight years old, it's just kind of not us, see, it makes the suits in the mahogany conference room nervous and btw where's your G--D--- flag lapel pin? Sorry it had to end like this. Hillary, now Hillary, see, that's what we're talking about. Obliterate Iran! (Boffo!) Rocky! (You go, girl.) Beer and a shot! (Nice visual.) And...New York! (QED). Plus, her 3 am home invasion ad, where the nice white family with the little boy and the rape-age girl are trying to get some sleep and the father's away...it's a little uncomfortable, you know? Look, after you go back to being a Senator, we've still got to sell insurance using cavemen as spokeshominids. And we know we led you on, and we're sorry about that. We thought we could do it, support a, you know, but the time's not right.

So Harry "Mumbles" Reid and Nancy "La Diva" Pelosi are of course gradually waking up to the realization the media rug has been snatched out from underneath them, and as usual they're like a couple of screw-up management trainees, arriving in the Big Apple from Searchlight, Nevada and San Francisco, oversleeping and then taking the 9:15 am train for a 7:30 am meeting, marveling at all the tall buildings downtown as their heads loll back and their tongues hang out, and Nancy breaks a heel and Harry steps on an untied shoelace, and when they finally rush into the room they can only think of one question -- "wha, wha jus' happen?"

This: the five companies who own all significant means of communicating in the United States are in turn owned by huge multinational corporations who do not thrill to the prospect of a sorta liberal woman or an African-American with too much charisma for their good suddenly barging in on the financial free-for-all which has made a microscopically thin stratum of the big rich enormously richer. They might want to regulate. They might want transparency. They might want the SEC to actually protect the public.

This is regressive. Wall Street and the Bush Administration, using the Patriot Act, just got rid of the biggest pain in their butt, Eliot Spitzer, and they're not signing up for another crusading reformer. So they have maneuvered the Democrats into an absolute, no-win, box canyon. No matter who they choose, they lose. (I know it's "whom;" I'm on a roll here.) Reid/Pelosi/Dean now think Hillary can "fight" McCain better, but if they finagle the nomination for her, all the Barack people stay home, and anyway Hillary's negatives, which are not just the highest of any candidate in the U.S., not just in North America or the Western Hemisphere, not just in the world or the solar system, but in any of those putative entities which may exist in the many-universe model of cosmology, mean McCain wins in a walk. The manna from heaven which Big Business did not expect, felt they had no right to expect, was that Hillary would be the agent of undoing the other prospect which threatened them.

Whew! How close was that? they're thinking over cocktails at that trendy spot in Battery Park, laughing with relief over their coup at the meeting with Mumbles & Diva.

I think their margin of error was greater than they might imagine. All they had to do was beat the Democrats. Again. It looks like they'll have their boy, a guy who gives the idea of getting in bed with the lobbyists a whole new wrinkle, as it were.

The Hobson's Choice of the Democrats

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party means well, and they've proposed some very fine Americans over the years as presidential nominees. Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and so forth. In a British parliamentary system, these forward-thinkers would have risen to the top of a Labour or Liberal Party and, as its titular leader, have become Prime Minister. They could have used their terms as Prime Minister to ameliorate some of the excesses of a constant suzerainty of far Right ideologues like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush: restoration of civil liberties, attention to the needs of the lower and middle classes, a reining in of excessive military spending in favor of domestic needs.

Unfortunately, these guys had to run for President in the United States, and none of them (with the possible exception of Bobby Kennedy) had a chance. The reason for this is painfully clear, although it's hard for the American Left to accept. The electoral college system, installed by the Founders so long ago as a compromise between federalist liberals and the states'-rights conservatives, destroys the one-person, one-vote concept, awarding a disproportionate value to the vote in very conservative but sparsely populated Red States. For one example, California has 36 million residents and 55 electoral votes, equal to one vote for every 654,000 residents. Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi have a combined population of about 12 million but 30 electoral votes, or about one vote for every 400,000 residents. What happened to those disenfranchised quarter million people? Didn't the Sons of Liberty say something about taxation without representation? As a direct result of the Electoral College, George W. Bush was able to lose the popular vote by over one-half million votes yet place himself in position for appointment to President by a conservative Supreme Court. After his appointment, he was able to run as an incumbent. Since Al Gore was never President, America went bankrupt, sold itself to foreign creditors and destroyed the Earth's atmosphere. These little words in the Constitution sometimes mean a lot.

Presidential candidates don't waste much time in California. It leans Democratic, at about a 55-45% angle, and all its votes go for the Democrat, year after year. But a cluster of hard Red states in the Dixiecrat South easily cancels that out. States that are waaaaaaay over-represented by electoral votes (such as Wyoming, 515,000 population, 3 electoral votes = 1:171,000) add to the Republican haul. So elections get decided by Ohio and Florida. That's actually what the American presidential elections are about now, these two purplish states that tend to be Republican but might go Dem if things get really shitty in the U.S. and A (as Borat said).

Barack Obama obviously has problems with states like Florida and Ohio. For one thing, there's the crypto-racist vote, or "Bradley effect," named for Tom Bradley, the African-American candidate for California governor, who led in the polls on election day but lost handily to George Deukmeijan, an uninspiring Republican who had the distinct advantage of paler skin. Racists responding to pollsters say one thing in answering questions and another in voting in the booth. This effect was clearly at work in Ohio and Pennsylvania; a fortiori, in the Dixiecrat states, the usual Republican Southern Strategy will be given a boost if Obama is the candidate in the fall, and Ohio and Pennsylvania have already shown they prefer a white person. In addition, Obama will have a peculiar problem in Florida because of his Muslim middle name and indirect, several-degrees-of-separation connection to Louis Farrakhan, which will cause him to lose some of Florida's otherwise Democratic-reliable Jewish vote. If Barack can't win Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida (and he probably can't), then he can't be president.

(Okay, maybe we're a racist country which tortures people for no reason, but we're a country also with a very rich, very thin slice of plutocrats who wear flag lapel pins while investing heavily in hedge funds which make their money by betting against American currency and short-selling the ability of average Americans to make their mortgage payments, thus reaping billions when all those Ohioans and Floridians are turned out onto the street. Where they will have no health coverage and the public transportation, naturally, sucks. But I will brook no criticism of this, the greatest country on Google Earth.)

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has a Karl Rove-like grasp of the nuances of the American electoral scene and has chopped, stuffed and contorted her psyche and very soul to appeal to just enough electoral votes, she thinks, to win the general election. She voted for the Iraq war when she thought that was the way to go, for free trade when free tradewinds were blowing, and managed to be the one Senator who skipped the Bankruptcy Reform vote, thus preserving her embrace of Big New York Banking while retaining deniability with the "little people" she says she champions, when she and Bill are not hanging with their true peeps out on Martha's Vineyard and in the Hamptons. Her absolute phoniness is so palpable, so patent, that the Bosnian sniper story gained traction precisely because the citizenry was so poised to believe she'll say and do anything to embellish what is, after all, a pretty mediocre record as a populist. Her forced, 24/7 toothy smile, her dissociative lurches into fabulism, all grate on the common people. When the Republicans go to work on her more serious characterological lapse, her cashiering from the Watergate committee because she hid relevant precedents in her office and concocted a brief pretending that no such precedent existed (which a lifelong Democrat, who fired her, will attest to), then John McCain, who isn't very honest either, will look like Honest Abe.

The real, underlying problem, which Democratic activists tending toward the liberal side (the Kucinich partisans, the Great Society people) don't like to admit, is that the American electoral system does not work in the one nationwide election we hold in this country, the choice of a President and Vice President. This is the reason that Republicans have held the White House for about 20 of the last 28 years, with the exception of a preternaturally talented Democrat who ruled from the center right, Bill Clinton, and he was put in office by Ross Perot, who drained away 19% of the conservative vote (Clinton won in 1992 with 43% of the popular vote). The Southern Strategy took hold as soon as Lyndon Johnson put the finishing touches on the Civil Rights bill. Nixon exploited it, Reagan and George W. Bush perfected it, and it's going to persist for a long time to come.

I have to get my head around the idea of John McCain choosing two more Supreme Court judges. That will finish off the high court as an instrument of justice, and access to abortions will become a matter of state elections. The regressive, strictly-pro-business approach of the current Court will gather force.

As Jack Balkin writes, America needs a Constitutional Convention to revamp the electoral system and to convert our present, fractured method into a parliamentary/prime minister approach. This would encourage the development of numerous political parties which could form governing coalitions, and break the dualistic gridlock of modern Congress and President-With-A-Veto. The problem, of course, is that wholesale amendment to the Constitution requires the agreement of all those same, over-represented Red states, and what are the odds of that? If you lived in Wyoming and knew you could cancel out all those crazy West Coasters with a vote worth about four times as much, would you give up your leverage? It's not an optimistic thing to acknowledge, but this is the most fascinating aspect of the American political system: It cannot work and it cannot change. Although I talk about it, I also realize, at a deep level, there's no point in talking about it anymore. Only awful, unprincipled, cynical candidates can possibly thrive in such a situation. Did Jefferson & John Adams see that one coming?

Amerikanisches Ministerium der Propaganda

It just sounds more sinister in German, and anyway Pravda doesn't quite get the idea across. America is Right Wing, not Left, and our propaganda ideas rest more on the techniques and legacy of Joseph Goebbels than Josef Stalin.

For those who missed it, David Barstow in yesterday's (Sunday) New York Times wrote a very long article (11 pp. online) concerning the "military analysts" you've perhaps been watching over the last five years or so on network and cable news shows. Men like Barry McCaffrey, Ken Allard, Thomas McInerney et al., who appear as a head and shoulders on Chris Matthews and give us the real story about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or progress in the American occupation. It turns out that very little of this stuff was actually "objective." In my own American, patriotic naivete, I simply assumed that these uniformed talking heads were gung-ho because they're lifers; if the U.S. military is doing it, then it's the right thing to do. Depressingly enough, not in modern Bushian America.

After a Freedom of Information lawsuit and two years of investigation, the Times came up with about 8,000 pages of documents demonstrating that these retired opinionators for hire were part of an orchestrated program directed by Donald Rumsfeld and his propaganda minister, Victoria Clarke (now gracing us with her insider dope via "panel" discussions on Sunday mornings). It worked this way: the retired brass made about $500 to $1,000 a pop by talking about Iraq or Guantanamo or whatever for a couple of minutes. This, however, was (is, because it's still going on) not where the action was (is). These guys tend to sit on the boards of lots of defense contractors who want "access" to the Pentagon's very lucrative contracting biz. So the "influentials," as Victoria Clarke called them (the favored brass), attended meetings with Rumsfeld, flew to Iraq and Cuba at Pentagon expense, were made to feel important and still relevant, and given talking points (or a script) to recite as they appeared with Chris or Sean Hannity or Wolf Blitzer, etc. The meetings served as a means of delivering the Party Line to the generals (who are, after all, very comfortable in hierarchical situations) and also acquainting the brass with current military needs, such as up-armoring Humvees or the latest night-vision requirements. The generals took the contracting info back to the board room, appeared on Hardball to spout official propaganda, and the only loser was the American public who were duped by their own government.

A general, colonel, admiral or whatever rank was monitored closely by the Pentagon's propaganda department (with the assistance of a private company specializing in tracking public appearances - paid for by the taxpayer, of course) to determine how closely they hewed to the Official Story. Serious variances were punished by denial of future access.

The networks and cable shows did very little to ascertain whether their paid experts had serious conflicts, such as a vested interest in guaranteeing that their corporate clients remained on the government procurement list. And with all that taxpayer money shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan via supersonic conveyor belt, there was clearly a lot at stake. After all, in modern America, only about 12% of its GDP is still attributable to any kind of manufacturing. In a dwindling market, the merchants of death look for any angle to maintain a competitive edge.

I don't think there will ever be any end, or bottom, to the corruption in the Bush Administration. This is a sideshow, one of many variations on hiding the truth which have become the modus operandi of the Bush years. Reporters like David Barstow still labor to get at the facts, against a government that fights tooth and nail to hide what are, after all, public documents paid for and owned by the American citizenry. And by the time the Times or some other still semi-independent media company can write up the story (delayed by official obstruction), Bush&Co. have moved on to the next outrage.

One thing is clear: next time you see an "influential" on Hardball or The Situation Room, remember that he's just selling the company line so he can keep his client plugged into the Pentagon disbursement office. That's become his high calling. And don't believe a word he says.

War Crimes Prosecution of the Bush Administration - Removing the "Good Faith Reliance on Counsel" Dodge

First, the money shot from the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005:

a) Protection of United States Government Personnel- In any civil action or criminal prosecution against an officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States Government who is a United States person, arising out of the officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent's engaging in specific operational practices, that involve detention and interrogation of aliens who the President or his designees have determined are believed to be engaged in or associated with international terrorist activity that poses a serious, continuing threat to the United States, its interests, or its allies, and that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time that they were conducted, it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful. Good faith reliance on advice of counsel should be an important factor, among others, to consider in assessing whether a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the practices to be unlawful.

Baretta thought you shouldn't do the crime if you can't do the time. In the Bush era, this moral stringency has been visibly relaxed. Now it's okay to do the crime, even a war crime, provided you relied in good faith on Bruce Bybee, John Yoo, David Addington and Alberto Gonzalez. The exoneration clause quoted above was incorporated and extended in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, specifically referring to prosecutions for war crimes, and, for good measure, reinterpreting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as used by the American War Crimes Act. And, for better measure yet, allowing that paragon of humane sensibility, George W. Bush, to have the last word on what the hell torture even is, by publishing his gory fantasies in the Federal Register as a list of "approved techniques."

I hope Congress also offered to fluff George's pillow while they were at it. Nevertheless, one can faintly, oh so subtly, descry a baseline fear among the top Bushocrats about what they've been doing to Arab prisoners for the last six years or so. These elaborate noose-slipping phrases are unprecedented, as far as I can tell, and I've read a lot (way too many) statutes over the last 30 years. I think the guys and gals stuffing the rags down Mohammed and Khalid's throats and pouring water over their faces and into their lungs, or just beating the crap out of them, or sticking them in a freezing cell naked for days at a time, have nothing to worry about. Congress has let all that go. They certainly did not want to look soft on terrorism, and Harry (Mr. Mumbles) Reid did not use the famous "60-vote rule" to block the Detainee Treatment Act, or the Military Commissions Act, from reaching the floor for a vote with their get-out-of-jail free cards intact. The "60-vote rule" is only used by hardball players, that is, by Republicans who aren't, after all, afraid to be in the minority because they can still push the wussy Democrats around.

No, the line officer with the CIA, the Army interrogator, if they were told everything they were doing was okay with the guys (and gal) upstairs, then it's pretty clear they're not going to be prosecuted, unless Congress gets tough and repeals these exonerations (excuse me, coffee just splurted out of my nose). However....editorial boards from New York to Washington, and over the great American heartland too, have lately been taking Bush&Co. to task upon the revelation that the Torture Team meeting in the Situation Room of the White House specifically approved all these Torquemada torts while sitting in plenary session. Take this unmodulated language from the Gray Lady of Manhattan, published today ("The Torture Sessions"):

"We have read the memos from the Justice Department redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and offering a blueprint for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners.

"The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life."

Amazing, isn't it? The same newspaper that brings you the pissy whimpering of David Brooks and William Kristol on a weekly basis also writes this very good stuff. The New York Times is calling George W. Bush a criminal. Since I want to encourage such salutary opinionating (and this accounts for the somewhat clunky title of this thing, for ease in Googling), I offer this angle, which may amount to an insight: Note that Bush's exoneration drafters used the phrase quoted in red in the DTA: "Good faith reliance on advice of counsel." Now I know what they were trying to do. Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld et alia were trying to put their best feet forward. The unctuous phrasing, in this case, was to cast them in the most sympathetic light possible. Just humble terror-fighters thinkin' what their learned attorneys were sayin' must be okay. They'd already seen the District Court opinion in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld by this point, that quirky case that inexplicably equated Arabs with homo sapiens; and they were none too sanguine about their chances with even their Supreme Court. So they needed a way out. If what they were ordering the guys down at the dungeon to do seemed a little too far out to pass as humane under the Geneva Conventions, then their "good faith" belief that the incredible bullshit written by John Yoo (he went to Yale!) was nevertheless true could maybe do the trick. But the recent revelations concerning the Torture Sessions, where John Ashcroft, the main lawyer at the Sessions, wondered aloud about the wisdom of discussing Inquisition tactics in the White House, and opining that history "would not judge us kindly," call into question the good faith nature of this reliance.

Couple this with the slowly unraveling story about just how "independent" the opinions from Yoo, Bybee and the rest of the torture lawyers were, and you have a whole new way of assessing "good faith." The opinion from Yoo in particular (as detailed by the estimable Jack Balkin) were "stovepiped" to the White House, bypassing the usual review process in the Department of Justice. Helpfully, Bush has thrown his lot in with the Torture Session honchos, so the question can be asked of all of them: if you want to torture, and you tell your lawyers to write memos that bend and distort plain language in order to allow you to torture and which invent new interpretations of the powers of the Commander in Chief in wartime to further your ability to torture; and you set up special rules which allow this junior member of the Office of Legal Counsel to get his "anything goes" memo to the Oval Office without any meddling from more experienced (and perhaps saner) minds at the Justice Department; just what in the hell is "good" about the faith you place in these legal opinions? So while they might work for the guys further down the line, they certainly should not work for Bush and his cronies who ordered up the opinions in the first place.

So, Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse of the Obama Administration, I offer this single brick for the edifice of justice, in the spirit of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, you may one day construct.

The Jerk

As I've written before, the single best compendium for all things anti-Bush is Dan Froomkin's daily blog "White House Watch" in the Washington Post, which I've been reading regularly (religiously, you could say -- I cling to it) for about a year. The blog is always 5 pages long, yet the astounding thing is that Dan never lacks material. A lot of the blog consists of excerpts and quotes from other writing and newspaper accounts, but he uses a great deal of original source material as well. Today, for example, he includes citations to a National Defense University study which concluded that the Iraq war has been a "debacle," the sort of "deep" research you almost never see in the mainstream press anymore.

Indeed, Bush has been such a terrible failure on every front that Froomkin's major difficulty is probably the process of exclusion; there is so much negative news to deal with on a daily basis that inevitably a lot of Bush's destructive activity must go unremarked. I've written about this before, the President's protean capacity for generating bad news, his Bizarro-Midas Touch.

Froomkin today quotes Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister for the Environment (their equivalent of our Environmental Destruction Agency), on Bush's recent Rose Garden "initiative" on global warming. Herr Gabriel called Bush's speech "Neanderthal," but perhaps that's an insult to proto-humans everywhere, including those in GEICO commercials. Bush proposed a regime in which the United States would stop the growth in greenhouse emissions by U.S. polluters (particularly power-generating plants) by the year 2025. If I understand him correctly, Bush is saying that the amount of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere may continue to increase every year between now and 2025, at which point, presumably, the emissions would be "forced" to level off at whatever toxic level they had achieved in the interim.

Bush, in 2025, will be about 80 years old and completely irrelevant to American life except as a footnote for historians seeking presidencies comparable in disastrous consequences to James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover. His "idea" seems to have nothing to do with dealing with climate change. Why did he say anything at all, let alone something this insultingly stupid? I think the answer may be simpler than we think. Bush enjoys being a jerk. It doesn't go a lot deeper than that. It's his form of a sick practical joke. We should never forget that he's capable of joking about things that are deadly serious for other people. He joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example, and yet since that was the putative reason for the invasion, his little pantomime (which was corny and dumb, at that) amounts to laughing off 4,000 American deaths, 30,000+ wounded soldiers, many with very serious injuries, and an untold (because his Administration won't bother to count) number of Iraqi lives destroyed, probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Bush doesn't care about global warming. He doesn't believe in it, he doesn't take it seriously, and he's spent his whole presidency dodging a real response to it. Way back in 2000 I recall thinking that his election could bring on a disaster of unprecedented scope because we risked eight years of inaction on the critical issue facing the human race. Bush was much worse than I thought he would be, than I thought he could be. The reason he proposed something so ridiculous is because it amuses him to find an "initiative" so far removed from anything effective that it's like proposing absolutely nothing. He's saying: see, you want me to react to this ridiculous crisis made up by liberal scientists, so I'm going to propose that the U.S. increase its CO2 for the next 18 years. Get it? His utterly delights in being so contrary. And despite the devastating effects, God help us all, he thinks it's funny.

Neo-Nihilism

In its essential elements, the American political scene has come to resemble professional wrestling. The Republicans, naturally, have assumed the role of the heavy, the guy wearing a black hood with eye- and mouth-holes, named something like The Masked Avenger or Darth Raider. Menacing, in other words. The Avenger is out of shape, with a big gut hanging over his long tight pants, but he stays in the match by always fighting dirty. No matter how many times the ref tells him to stop using a closed fist, he keeps rabbit punching away, knee-dropping on his opponent's Adam's apple, anything, so long as it does damage and heightens the drama.

The Democrats are the goody twoshoes, someone like Cowboy Bob Ellis, in fabulous condition and looking buff in a red, white and blue Speedo. Scrupulous about the rules, the good guy takes the Avenger's worst; and while Cowboy Bob's chances often look grim, he throws off a couple of last-minute pins to pull a dazzling reversal that wins the match.

The suckers in the audience are unaware that the Avenger and Bob, just before entering the ring, have met and worked out the elaborate choreography of their match in detail, so that no one gets hurt but the crowd gets a good show. In essence, that's where we are now in American politics, except for the part about no one getting hurt. The Avenger and Bob, through their Professional Wrestlers Union, have guaranteed health care, a well-paid sinecure and a bounteous pension. They're famous and taken care of. The rubes out in the crowd have to shift for themselves.

Books such as David Sirota's Inside Job or Greg Palast's The Best Congress Money Can Buy provide the fine-grained detail on the more or less complete corruption of Congress and the federal government in general. The two parties have worked out the division of labor so that the Republicans do the dirtier work in exchange for the more lucrative graft. For example, the awful bankruptcy bill passed a few years ago was, naturally, introduced by Republicans and written by credit card lobbyists. (This is how it works now; the blow-dried solons are of such low quality intellectually that they rely on lawyers for the industries in question to draft the bills, in this case the American Bankers Association.) No one even pretended that such legislation could possibly benefit the individual "consumer," or what we used to call "Americans." The bankers who wrote the bill were looking for a way to cut their losses on credit card debt which they encouraged in the first place, by mass-mailing solicitations to millions of cash-hungry Americans. The arguments in favor of the bill, from both sides of the aisle, were of course dressed up in the usual finery of homespun virtue, of thrift and "honesty" in paying one's debts. The Democrats voting for the bill, including Joe Biden of Delaware and Harry Reid of Nevada (of course), found ways to justify voting for the bill even after an amendment was killed that would have protected the residence of Americans filing bankruptcy because of medical bills. What the hell. They have insurance. Why didn't Reid use the "60-vote" rule to corral support among the Democratic caucus to prevent this corporate dreck from entering the Bankruptcy Code? Now that the Dems are in the majority, Reid always cites the rule as the reason he can't stop Iraq funding; how come it didn't stop the Republicans from passing this bill? (Hint: Reid liked the bill; it supported his true constituency.)

And why do hedge fund managers, such as John Paulson and George Soros, who make over $3 billion per year (the average among the top 25 hedge fund managers is $775 million per year), continue to pay capital gains rates on their income? Because of the principled advocacy of Democrats such as Chuck Schumer of New York, that's why; it would be tragic indeed if these visionary entrepreneurs were forced to pay the same marginal rate as the secretaries out in the typing pool.

The Iraq war voting, of course, is an old story. Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan, subjected us to a nauseating analogy between his decision to continue "supporting the troops" by voting "yea" on funding for Iraq with comments Lincoln made about the Civil War. I wonder how much Googling his staff had to do to come up with that claptrap. And despite the open, indeed cocky, admission by the highest officials in the Bush Administration that they committed systematic war crimes, the Democrats will not lift a finger to exercise the Constitutionally mandated remedy of impeachment. You see, "impeachment" is what the Masked Avenger does; Cowboy Bob fights clean and wins the elections. These are required elements in the dramatic form; the handsome lead actor wins the girl in the final scene because he's such a good guy, not because he turned in his rival to the cops.

Gradually I think even the rubes of the American Booboisie have come to the realization they're being taken for a ride by the choreography of the two-party system. It seems to my somewhat acute ear that a rising clamor for an end to the monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans is gaining force. Right now it takes the form of Neo-Nihilism, the utter disgust and contempt of Americans for their elected representatives reflected in sub-20% approval ratings, but maybe it will transmogrify into something more positive in the coming years. Grass-roots movements in which new parties choose candidates from a "bottom up" process. Right now, through processes they don't completely understand, the electorate is presented with choices made by Big Media based on narrative potential. An African-American man; a woman; a war hero, in the present case. We are instructed to get excited about one of these, even if these candidates are completely constrained, by the rules of the Professional Wrestling Union, from ever talking about a problem in practical terms leading to a practical solution. That's not what the Avenger and Cowboy Bob do. They take money from Big Money to represent their interests, then put on a violent show in the center of the caged ring involving flips and body slams and clothesline shots to the throat, and a mesmerized populace votes for their favorite actor. While outside the arena, the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

No way out, Barack

Barack Obama realizes now that he made a huge mistake, in an unguarded moment before an "elitist" group of Democratic supporters in San Francisco, in describing distressed members of America's vanishing middle class as bitterly "clinging to guns and religion." Let's face it, he committed the politician's cardinal sin: he spoke his mind. Now he's in the impossible position of explaining away an accurate comment as a "misstatement" because it's political suicide to delve deeper into the reasons for his assessment. For example, he can't say that the burgeoning religiosity and theocratic tendencies which have been ascendant in the U.S. over the last several decades are a sure sign of radical social decay. He's about as likely to add Richard Dawkins to his council of advisors as he is to cite the following 2005 study from Creighton University's Journal of Society & Religion:

"Among the developed democracies absolute belief in God, attendance of religious services and Bible literalism vary over a dozenfold, atheists and agnostics fivefold, prayer rates fourfold, and acceptance of evolution almost twofold. Japan, Scandinavia, and France are the most secular nations in the West, the United States is the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity otherwise limited to the second and third worlds (Bishop; PEW)...There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). "

Reading this thorough and well-resourced study, one is left with the impression that conditions in the United States today are somewhat analogous to those immediately before the Civil War, except that the South and Midwest (remember the Missouri Compromise?) have been deprived of the advantages of slavery. Ironic, in some ways, that it took a man of partly African-American descent to point out the obvious: the rural folks first lost their plantations, now they've lost their manufacturing base and their jobs. As Barack said, those jobs have now been gone for a generation, and the "bitterness" does indeed incite fear and loathing of "the other," in modern times, the illegal immigrants who are perceived as taking their jobs (although the quality jobs have been lost for everyone). Part of the reaction is in reasserting the superiority of the dominant whites, battered and bruised as they might be by changing times. So naturally there is a great cry of defiance when this cheeky black man points out the obvious, and the unscrupulous Hillary, a panderer to the last, starts slamming beers-and-shots and rising to their defense. Didn't our newest Pulitzer honoree, Bob Dylan, write about just this tendency in "Only a Pawn in Their Game"?

"A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game."

So Barack must pass up the opportunity to talk about what is really going on in this country. Instead, like any Presidential candidate, Obama must praise and adore the very traits in America, its extreme religiosity, its obscurantism and anti-intellectual tendencies, its armed-to-the-teeth nuttiness, which most strongly correlate with its "dysfunctionality" across a broad array of indicators of societal health. Guns & God do go together, as demonstrated by America's astonishing "outlier" status as the homicide capital of the world's developed nations.

I'm sure you've learned by now, Barack, it is audacious indeed in this country to indulge in hope.

Primer on Social Studies in the Bush Administration

President Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley appeared on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos and repeatedly confused Nepal and Tibet.

Discussing how Bush has "no reason not to go" to this summer's Olympic games in Beijing and how boycotting them would be wrong, Hadley discussed the outcry over Tibet and the US response, only he kept saying Nepal.

"If countries are really concerned about Nepal, we shouldn't have this sort of non-issue of opening ceremonies or not. They should do the hard work of quiet diplomacy to urge the Chinese government -- in their interest -- to take advantage of this opportunity to do something," Hadley said.

Well, who am I to criticize? There have been times in my life (it's been years, I confess) when I wasn't sure about the difference between Tibet and Nepal. I knew they were somewhere in the Himalayas; when friends went trekking in the high mountains, they talked about going to Nepal, not Tibet. That was a clue. Nepal was in some sense more accessible than Tibet. Over time I realized this was because China overran Tibet a long time ago. Which is why Bob Seger, if he ever got out of here, was going to Kathmandu. He had no interest in going to Red China. The ancient Nepalese monarchy, that was the place for him.

It was probably in the 1970's, during the spirituality boom in the U.S., that I grokked the connection between Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The Dalai was a Tibetan, and the capital of Tibet was Lhasa, not Kathmandu. This is why the Dalai is the head man of "Tibetan Buddhism" (that's a good mnemonic device for Hadley -- not the head of "Nepalese Buddhism"). If he ever gets out of here, Bob Seger is not going to Lhasa. Lhasa is an "autonomous region" of the People's Republic of China, but I think you can guess just how autonomous it is (even if Stephen Hadley can't). The Dalai, for instance, can't even live there. He lives in India (but some of his best friends are Tibetans). Nepal (for Mr. Hadley's ease of reference) shares a border with Tibet but is not actually Tibet. There's a question, however, how much longer Nepal is going to remain a monarchy, because good King Gyanendra is currently under siege by Nepalese Maoists, who want to take over. "Mao" was Chinese, and Mr. Hadley may see a pattern here.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Stephen Hadley served as one of George W. Bush's "senior foreign policy advisors." This may explain why Bush had a problem naming the capital of France, for example. Not to get too personal, but Hadley looks as if he lives in a crypt most of the time and only comes out to appear on talk shows and display his mastery of Himalayan geography. It does seem amazing that Hadley, aware that a big whoop currently in the news is whether George W. will or will not attend the opening ceremonies of the Smog Games in Beijing, would not have checked Wikipedia or something to figure out the difference between Nepal and Tibet. He's the national security advisor. As I freely admitted a minute ago, I acquired my flawless command over high-elevation South Asian principalities over the course of several decades, but then again, my job wasn't really about that.

It's possible, you know, that these people in the Bush Administration are just really, really stupid. If you think the question is whether the Chinese government is oppressing the Dalai Lama in Nepal, then maybe that's a clue to other puzzling decisions the Bush team has made. On September 11, 2001, the U.S. gets attacked by 15 Saudis, a Yemeni, an Egyptian, a Lebanese, a guy from the UAE, all coordinated by a Saudi living in Afghanistan along with his Man Friday from Egypt and the Brain from Kuwait. Bush, consulting Hadley, wants to find out who attacked us. "Arabs," says Stephen. So we attack the Arabs in Arabia. It's beginning to make sense. That's what Bush meant when he said that it was intolerable to have Saddam as a troublemaker in the "same part of the world" where the 9/11 hijackers were from. ArabLand, he meant.

If I ever get out of here, I'm going to Kathmandu.

Hillary Clinton, Drunk, Shoots Up Church in Rural Pennsylvania

April 13, 2008 (AP) -- The neck-and-neck primary race between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama escalated in tension and drama last night on reports that Senator Clinton, apparently wasted on Crown Royal boilermakers slammed down in a western Pennsylvania tavern, grabbed her 12 gauge, blasted the locks off a nearby Assembly of God church, and proceeded to shoot out all the stained glass windows. A reportedly blotto Clinton was finally wrestled to the floor of the church by Pennsylvania state troopers who were called to the scene by a witness outside the church who saw shards of the Virgin Mary fly into the street.

Members of Clinton's drinking party at Shorty's Tavern said the Senator, clearly angry over Obama's elitist maundering about "desperate" and "bitter" rural Americans turning to "guns & God" to assuage their feelings of hopelessness (remarks which Obama apparently made while traveling outside the United States, at a Democratic party function in San Francisco), went over the line with whiskey and Schlitz chasers and vowed to show "that skinny-ass punk a thing or two about being an American." Bill Schuilhorn, who was with Clinton at Shorty's, said she repeated this threat "20 or 30 times" in increasingly slurred language before jamming her red plaid hunting cap (with Elmer Fudd ear flaps) down on her short 'do and staggering out of the bar. The men drinking with her (who were also drunk) said they were powerless to stop the Senator from grabbing her Remington and making good on her pledge.

Fortunately, no one else was in the church at the time of Clinton's shooting spree. Hillary was, however, booked and locked up overnight in the town jail, held on charges of aggravated vandalism and overdoing the political pandering. An obviously hung-over and abashed Clinton said this morning that while she apologized for "shooting the shit" out of the church, she would step up her tireless fight for the common people of the U.S., a group which the "elitist Senator from Illinois doesn't know zilch about."

In the latest Gallup poll, Senator Clinton lurched ahead by 25 points in advance of next week's Pennsylvania primary.

As Tax Day Approaches, Iraq's Cost by the Numbers

A little perspective: suppose you owe $5,000 in income taxes on your 1040. The Iraq war will use your contribution in 1 second. Like a drop of water hitting a red-hot skillet: pffsssst! Gone. Here's the interesting part: it did no good whatsoever. The $5,000 you just paid in will do absolutely no good. Indeed, it is a down payment on future calamity, as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz tells us in predicting the total cost of the Iraq war will be $3 trillion. Your $5,000 ante simply maintains soldiers in the field, who will be shot, blinded, blown up, traumatically amputated, massively burned, and driven insane. Those soldiers will then bring all their problems home to a country which is unequipped to handle them.

I've been writing this post now for about 180 seconds. During that time the United States spent $900,000. Half of our urban high schoolers no longer graduate from public high school, so the next question is tricky for them maybe: how long till we get to $1 million? That's right, we're there. It took 20 more seconds. We're now past $1 million, and still spending. Actually, I don't know anyone who owes $1 million in taxes personally, so a lot of us around here must be pitching in.

Well, actually we're not paying for it. We just provide the money used to pay interest on the loans used to pay for it. To finance the Iraq war, BushCo borrows the money from foreign sources. We can't actually afford to pay for the war. The Chinese, the Japanese, the British, the Gulf States, they're the ones lending us the money to pay for the war. Let's figure out how much we spend a minute so we can keep up with the cost of this blog post. 60 x $5,000 = ? $300,000 per minute. $18 million per hour. $432 million per day. $3 billion per week. $12 billion per month. $144 billion per year. Here's the other thing: the Iraq war keeps getting more expensive as we go. I suppose that's because we've worn everything out over there, and keep hiring more and more mercenaries and contractors to replace fully-depreciated soldiers, and the guns-for-higher cost a lot more than the patriotic grunts sold a bill of goods by their government. The guys at Blackwater aren't going to put their asses on the line in exchange for George W. Bush's tear-stained mumbles of gratitude.

Besides, we must have plenty of money if we can afford to spend $432 million per day on just one war. Right? No, not really. We're over $9 trillion in debt and the economy is in recession. We're becoming like everybody's drunk brother-in-law who keeps borrowing money from relatives till they pretend not to be home when he knocks on the door. "Shhhh! It's the United States at the door! Act like we're not here!"

It's going to be hard to get around in the USA anymore since all the airlines are now collapsing. They can't afford to buy jet fuel. ATA went belly up because they couldn't afford the $25,000 it takes to fly one-way from San Francisco to Honolulu. The Iraq war apparently didn't do much to control the price of oil. People think twice before driving anywhere now. Consumer confidence is in the toilet. Housing prices are slumping, depriving the US of A of its regular adrenaline fix of re-fi and line o' credit moolah to keep Target and Best Buy humming. No dough, no go.

So this is what it looks like when you put a career screw-up, a guy who took every business placed at his mercy and ran it into the ground, in charge of the United States of America. He couldn't handle relatively simple businesses, so we thought, in our collective wisdom, we would put him in charge of the most complicated economic-social organism on Earth and see how that would work. Surprised? Why? It should confirm your sense of the natural order of things. He can't prioritize; he can't adapt to changing circumstances; he can't think creatively to find another way out. He resorts always to one principle: if he said he was going to do something, he'll keep doing it even when it proves to be the wrong thing. That is his one value: to remain obstinately dedicated to the error of his ways.

Took 30 minutes here. $9 million down the tube in Baghdad. We'll soon be following it down the chute.

That's Some Catch

There was only one Catch and it was Catch-22, which stipulated that if things were okay in Iraq, then we couldn't withdraw our troops because if we did things wouldn't be okay and we would need them; and if things weren't okay, we couldn't withdraw our troops because we would need them until things were okay, at which point we couldn't withdraw them because if we did things wouldn't be okay and we would need them.

Senator Carl Levin whistled in appreciation. "That's some catch, that Catch-22."

"It's the best there is," agreed Doc Petraeus.

Our troops were there and so things were okay and we didn't need them anymore; but if we withdrew them, things wouldn't be okay, so we couldn't leave because we would need them.

"I'm still trying to understand this," said Levin.

"Take your time," said Doc Petraeus. "It's confusing for everybody at first."

"Let me ask this," said Levin. "Aren't we wearing out our troops?"

"Yes indeed," said Petraeus. "That's why we're shortening tours of duty."

"For the troops in the field?" asked Levin.

"No," said Petraeus. "Not for the troops who are there. Only for the ones who are not there."

"We're shortening tours of duty for troops who are not in Iraq?"

"Yes," grinned Doc Petraeus. "Exactly. Those troops who arrive in August will only serve one year."

"What does that do for the troops who are already there?"

"Nothing," said Petraeus amiably, "but it does everything for President Bush, because his tour of duty ends on January 20, 2009."

"So that means..."Levin began.

"That no one will really be able to leave while Bush is still President. Right, exactly. But it looks like troops will be leaving sooner while he's in office even though they aren't."

"That's why you chose August," said Levin.

"Right, Senator."

"Even though that does nothing for the troops who are already worn out," said Levin dourly.

"The idea was never to help the troops who were already worn out," said Doc Petraeus. "It was to help the troops who aren't worn out."

"Not that anyone can really leave anyway because of Catch-22," said Levin.

"Bingo," said Doc Petraeus.

"Is there any way around Catch-22?" said Levin.

"I think we've plugged most of the holes," said Petraeus. "We don't think it can be beat."

Levin slumped in his chair. "How did we get to such a crazy impasse?" he asked quietly.

"I don't make the Catches," said Petraeus, with a big smile. "I just enforce them."

Barack Exposes the Bush Fallacy in Iraq

In truth, I find it hard to work up a head of steam against General David Petraeus. I tuned in yesterday to watch a little of his testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee, and there he was in his usual formation sitting next to the other Siamese Twin of the Surge, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They both seem like decent guys. Petraeus is smart, wily, adept, and clearly very competent. I think he was given a fairly simple mission, at least in its verbal formulation if not in its execution: get the violence in Iraq under control. Despite liberal wishing that the situation were much worse, bloodier, than it currently is, it's not. That's because Petraeus is a task-oriented, can-do man in the great tradition of Yankee ingenuity. Bush told him to calm things down and Petraeus went to work. He did whatever he had to do. He arranged to put the Sunni insurgents on the U.S. payroll, and now there are well-armed "Sons of Iraq" rousting al-Qaeda remnants in Anbar province and elsewhere. He built walls between warring neighborhoods in Baghdad. He based U.S. soldiers out in the boonies, like police stations. He beefed up the Iraqi army and police. While a lot of credit for the comparative peace is often given to Muqtada al-Sadr for arranging a truce and stand-down for the Mahdi Army, who's to say Petraeus wasn't instrumental in making that happen? He works 24/7 over there; he knows what's going on.

He was honest in acknowledging that Nouri al-Maliki went off the reservation when he impetuously decided to attack Sadr's militia in Basra. Professionally, it must have appalled Petraeus; that's not how you plan a military operation. Yikes, he probably thought; right before I testify to Congress, this shmendrick pulls a stunt like this. Petraeus was also candid in admitting that Iran's influence in Shia-controlled Iraq is pervasive, exactly as one would expect when two Shia-controlled countries exist side by side, and the ruling personnel of Iraq used to hide in Iran during the Saddam years. So what?, Petraeus in effect said. All of his many three-color charts prove that the death rate, the hostile-incident rate, the general-mayhem rate is down, down, down. It isn't Petraeus's fault that the debate about Iraq has been so dumbed-down that the infusion of $12 billion a month, the expenditure of American lives (whether in a trickle or a torrent), the breaking of the once-proud U.S. military all hinge on a simple calculus: is it more or less violent in Iraq? He didn't set the terms of the political debate. If it's less violent, we have to stay to keep it that way; if it's more violent, we have to stay so it doesn't get worse.

The Democrats let it get that stupid. Instead of going deeper, asking more fundamental questions, they have often chosen to fight the facts. It is not less violent!, they thunder, even though it is. We are not safer at home because of this war!, even though no one, of course, can tell, as Petraeus smilingly admits.

There was one electrifying exception to the parade of fatuous interrogators at yesterday's session: Barack Obama. What a mind this man has. I can see why the other Senators, in a sort of paternal way, marvel at his skill. Using his brief six-minute window, he asked short, leading questions which completely knocked Petraeus off his well-rehearsed game.

It went this way. Suppose, mused Barack, the idea is to allow us to bring the troops home. Everyone agrees that's the goal. So you, General, have referred to certain "metrics" as determinant of that possibility. Violence; Iranian meddling and interference; government cohesion and reconciliation; elimination of terrorist nests. He then posed a series of easy hypotheticals. Suppose that we reach the point where violence is about like it is now, or less, and Iranian influence is no worse, the government is functional, with some corruption but generally in control, and the Iraqis are keeping the lid on al-Qaeda. Can we begin withdrawing? Petraeus didn't know. So Obama kept pushing Petraeus to refine the "parameters" of success. Do we have to reach the point of zero violence? Zero Iranian influence? Zero al-Qaeda insurgence? Zero corruption? Of course not, the General said. Then how much above zero is tolerable? He didn't know that either. He doesn't know how "fragile" things are in Iraq, what its tolerance for chaos really is. It must be less than it is now, because Petraeus thinks we need to stay and to stop withdrawing soldiers in July. How much less? Who knows? Maybe we'll just be able to tell when we get there.

There you have it: the central Bush Fallacy neatly exposed. We don't know when we can leave because there's no way to tell, at any point in time, if the situation we've created is stable enough to remain in place after our departure. We'll never know in a place as volatile, as sectarian, as inherently unstable as Iraq, with its ethnic and religious forces always exerting centrifugal forces on cohesion. This is what happens when an ambitious, competent, bright man like Petraeus goes to work for a menial intellect like Bush. He's working on a dumb project. He's doing what he's supposed to do, follow orders and get the violence under control, all to conform to the terms of a stupid political debate, but it leads nowhere. Indeed, it leads to ruin.

I think, on the whole, General David Petraeus would a helluva lot prefer to be working for Barack Obama.

Don't Worry, China!

Waldenswimmer, a blog with a Luddite name but with a progressive, hip attitude, goes with the flow. It's part of our can-do attitude here at the Pond, a recognition that with access to plug-and-play technology, you're dumb not to stay oh so au courant tech-wise. We, in other words and IMHO, can dig it. And I'm there, baby. Just as one example among many, we've got a hit counter which can map where the readers are, down to street level. Some, ahem, appear to be in Washington, D.C. Ha! ha! Although I know the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup spooks don't run software that tells where they're spying from. I'm sure they encrypt and mask...don't they? Sure they do.

But anyway, what I wanted to say was that the map shows an address in Beijing. This goes out to you, brother in China! Welcome aboard. And congratulations on your bravery, because this site is run by Google, an American company with a pretty chummy relationship with the Chinese government. Unless, of course, you are the government...Well, so much the better, because you're the one I wanted to talk to anyway.

It's about this palaver going on here Stateside about "boycotting" the opening ceremonies at the Olympics this summer. Senator Hillary Clinton, who's running for President, is all over this one. You probably read about the problems the French are having just getting the damn torch across town. Look, they tend toward hysterics in Paris. Aux barricades! and all that crap. What a load. Everybody is posturing about the ongoing Chinese crackdown in Tibet and the Chinese support for the oppressive Sudan government. Darfur, blah, blah, blah. I notice that when Hillary was living in the White House, the wholesale slaughter going on in Rwanda didn't make her lose any sleep, and I doubt that Bill Clinton paused between bone-waxings to even think about it. Hillary's just trying to grab some headlines about her "principled" stand. That, and she wants to embarrass Bush. See, George W. is chief baton twirler for the Freedom's on the March-ing Band, way out there in front high-stepping in his Coldstream Guard bearskin hat. Never mind if you don't get all those references. Because it's bullshit anyway. George's Freedom Agenda won't conflict with China's Tyranny Agenda because Tibet, so far as I know, doesn't have any more oil than Darfur does.

We don't mean any of it. It's all P.R. for domestic consumption. Look, we know where our bread is buttered, and who butters it. You guys own an absolute ton of U.S. Treasuries, and we borrow money like crazy from everybody to keep this shaky operation going. We've noticed you've already sort of slacked off with recycling the cash. There's not a big problem, is there? That's good to hear. I mean, you're not going to dump all those T-Bills and start doing business in euros, right? Whew!! Had us going there.

So don't worry about the Olympics. It's going to be fun! Especially the opening ceremonies. George'll be there. Count on it. It's not going to be like that dumbass boycott of the whole Moscow Olys back in 1980. All we did was screw up a bunch of American athletes who had devoted their whole lives to getting there -- and then it turned out that Carter's man Zbig had manipulated the Russkies into invading in the first place. So have fun in Tibet. Knock yourselves out. And Darfur, Schmarfur -- it's a judgment call, just like we made about Rwanda. Or didn't make. So oppress away, we're just messing with you! See you at the finish line.

Yours,
Waldenswimmer

Maybe Petraeus Should Count the Iraqi Dead

Here's a novel idea for a Q&A topic during General Petraeus's testimony before Congress this week: how about an estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths?

It is nothing short of astounding that this question is officially ignored by the Bush Administration. When the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study was published, indicating an estimate through 2006 of 600,000 violent deaths, Bush dismissed the estimate as the product of "flawed methodology," without, however, offering an estimate of his own. It's the official position of the Pentagon that they "don't do body counts." This does not stop other organizations from trying, such as the World Health Organization's recent effort which will be published later this month in the New England Journal of Medicine (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/index.html). Using the same cluster sampling approach as the Lancet study, but with greater access to households (interviewing 23 times as many), the WHO study estimated 151,000 violent deaths and an overall death rate from all causes (illness, etc.) twice as high as before the invasion. As with the earlier Lancet study, the mortality figures covered only the first three years of the five-year occupation, and allowed the possibility that the true figure could be as high as 223,000, citing the difficulty posed by the refugee situation in Iraq. To wit, many families may have left Iraq (there are presently two million such refugees) after a violent death without responding to any survey. Since most of 2007 was also extremely violent, a fair extrapolation of the median figure of 151,000 would produce a current death count of about 200,000.

The Iraq Body Count (IBC) places the death toll for civilians at about 90,000 to date. The methodology used does not rely on statistical extrapolation but on morgue and medical records, and other official sources, and the IBC admits this probably results in an underestimate in a fractured and disorganized country like present-day Iraq. But here's the deal: no responsible group has ever come up with a figure as low as the Bush Administration's self-serving, wild-eyed guess of 50,000 (given when they have actually been pressed to come up with something "unofficial"), a number it apparently consoles itself with. How, indeed, can the Bushies credibly cling to their lowball number in the face of a count of actual dead people by the IBC? The utter contempt for the consequences of occupation is probably among the factors that support the popularity of anti-U.S. figures like Muqtada al-Sadr. We should have the common decency to figure out how many people are dead because we're there.

So maybe some "maverick," like John McCain, should simply pose the question to General Petraeus. What do you think of these various studies that place the death toll at figures no less than twice the Pentagon's guess, and in other cases four to twelve times higher? If one of the arguments for staying is that a "blood bath" will ensue if we leave "irresponsibly," shouldn't we try to determine whether a blood bath is already underway by virtue of being there? Is it actually going to get a lot worse if we leave? And how do we know if we never bother to count? It does seem, at the very least, like a data point essential to figuring the question out.

Clinton Blather, Israeli Accomplishment

The Clintons have published their tax returns for years 2000 through 2006, and have provided the estimate for 2007's income as well. They're an American success story. Over the period in question, they've earned about $110 million. Virtually all of their income is attributable to the celebrity of Bill Clinton's charismatic presidency. $50 million for Bill's speeches, $30 million from Bill's exciting autobiography (I never read it; don't know anyone who has), another $10 mil for Hill's autobiography (ditto, re: readership), something north of $1 million for Hillary's Senate salary (she would not have been elected without Bill's presidency), and then a lot of vague income from Bill's connections to Demo high rollers like Ron Burkle and his Yucaipa Co., and its connections to Dubai, from whence (increasingly) all blessings flow. The only income item you would not connect to the fact of Bill's fame & adulation is his presidential pension, which accounted for only about $1 million during those years.

I think the Clintons always wanted to be rich. It's why, long ago, they got involved in the Whitewater investment, why Hillary dabbled in commodities trading. When Bill was President, I think the Clintons were among the least wealthy inhabitants of the White House in recent memory, just a couple of bright kids from modest backgrounds who yearned, more than anything, to be a power couple. Hillary's tolerance for Bill's sexual antics is not really that surprising. Fidelity was subservient to ambition, even, as Shakespeare said, to a "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself and falls upon another." The Clintons had no desire to remain commoners; I think the troubles they've gotten into with matters like Whitewater and now Bill's dealings with Ron Burkle and Dubai (which will inevitably get messier as the facts are revealed) arose primarily from their naivete about sophisticated business dealings. The fatcats saw their potential and usefulness and ingratiated themselves with the callow Clintons, who have tended to be smarter than they are wise.

When the Clintons went on vacation, lacking a Western White House or Rancho Cielo or Prairie Chapel Ranch like the Republican plutocrats, they went to Martha's Vineyard and hung with the beautiful people. This is where and how they wanted to be; to be Big Rich like their increasingly rich friends, with a Texas Unit of $100 million. Bill got up from his quintuple bypass in 2004 to resume his dogged pursuit of cash. He didn't slow down at all really. In the seven years covered by the tax returns of 2001 to 2006 and the 2007 estimate, Bill made about $7 million a year, on average, from speaking. That's about $135,000 a week. I imagine that each speech is a variant on a standard template; I would surmise that whatever trade group or conference he's speaking to, his speech is full of standard Renaissance Weekend phrases. Lots of "challenges," and "integrated solutions," and doing things that "scale." Sort of like reading a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times, in other words, when Friedman dons his "geo-green" outfit. (I hereby bet myself $100 that the book Friedman is working on right now while on leave from the Times contains his pet coinage "Geo-green" in the title. He's been test-marketing the phrase in his columns for about a year now, and he's really pleased with himself.) The growing ranks of Clinton detractors muse that all these groups buying his speeches are seeking "access" to a new Clinton White House. While that might be true to a very limited extent in some cases, it's stretching things in my opinion to generalize across the board. Most people just like that feel-good Clinton blather.

As in his presidency, nothing gets solved by all this jargoneering. The period between 1992-2000 was a critical period for the United States to move toward self-sufficiency in renewable energy, securing water supplies and dealing with climate change. As Al Gore has proudly told us, he knew about these things way, way back in his Harvard undergrad days, and he was in the Administration for eight years with Clinton. The Kyoto Treaty was defeated 95-0 while Clinton was President and Gore was VP. The 1990's were also the heyday of SUV development in the U.S., probably the most retrograde environmental action we could have taken short of burning coal outdoors for no reason at all, including power production. This set the stage for the ruinous deficits of oil importing, the trade imbalances and now the runaway inflation of gasoline prices. All of this usually gets laid at the door of George W. Bush, of course, but it took a long time to get to where we are.

The state of Israel, the American Left's favorite whipping-nation, has been faced with even more intractable environmental problems. While liberal America beats up on Israel for displacing Palestinians in 1947, without, I notice, offering to cede back all of the present United States to the Native Americans, the Israelis have ambitiously undertaken real fixes to the same problems. Israel is building 500,000 recharging stations for electric cars that are being built by a Renault-Nissan consortium. The cars will have a range of 120 miles and operate with the power of a 1.6 liter gasoline engine. The recharging stations, in turn, will be powered by wind turbines and by a giant photovoltaic array being built in the Negev. The electric cars will become the basis of Israeli private transportation, and the system will be in place by 2011. And recognizing that an eventual two-state solution will increase pressure on water supplies for a growing population, Israel has become a world leader in seawater desalination using the reverse osmosis system. Desalinated water now accounts for 15% of all water use in Israel, and this water is also supplied by the Israelis to the Jordanians and Palestinians. The price has been reduced to about 60 cents per cubic yard, a price reaching competitive levels with fresh water supplies.

Israel's response to environmental problems seems to consist of three parts. 1. Figure out what the problem is. 2. Research how to deal with it. 3. Deal with it. The United States, by contrast, is almost good at step 1, does a little of step 2, but never bothers with #3. I think the Clintons (and soon George W. Bush, who wants to do a little speaking himself, to "replenish the ol' coffers" after his term ends) are prime examples of how this process of stagnation happens. We don't deal with pressing environmental problems because, increasingly, the "leaders" see their trajectory as leveraging their public careers into private wealth which will insulate them from -- well, I guess, the natural world and all its problems.

Israel's response to the same dilemmas we face stands as a rebuke to the flaccid inertia of American leadership. Maybe the difference arises from something very fundamental: Israel shares an attitude of common purpose, reinforced by its worldwide pariah status, which no longer exists in the United States. Celebrities like Bill and Hillary Clinton are very good at pandering to the sentimental fiction that such commonality of interest still exists here in America, but it's simply a marketing gimmick, as their private lives demonstrate.