Thinking about the Beats

The first time I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road was at the suggestion of some guy I hung out with in Honolulu during one of those summers, way back when, when I used to spend the breaks between Berkeley school terms in the Islands. A family thing, and not really part of the story. This guy was over there doing the same kind of thing, killing time between semesters in the most dissolute way he could find, with a buddy from San Francisco State. They were self-styled intellectuals of a sort, and had the kind of buddy chemistry which necessitated that both of them act like pretentious assholes most of the time. I was a sucker in those days for that kind of thing, or maybe it was just homesickness for conversation different from the simplified talk, often in pidgin, that went on between me and the locals, who probably resented (justifiably) my presence in the Islands in the first place. Anyway, one of these guys was working his way through Kerouac's classic novel, also a kind of buddy story. He talked about it a lot while I was driving them around Oahu. It occurred to me after a while that the car I had access to was the whole point of the "friendship" from their perspective. He (the shorter and more self-consciously intellectual of the two) talked mainly about the hipster language in the book, the "gone chicks," everything being "way cool," everyone needing to "split" all the time. In some ways he was making fun of the style, I suppose, the way he made fun of everything. One dull Sunday they finagled me into driving them to a polo match on the windward side of Oahu, which I grudgingly did, but then when they began getting drunk and snotty, as always happened, I excused myself by saying I needed to use the outhouse, then got in the car and drove back to Honolulu. They must have had a hell of a time trying to get back to Honolulu themselves, which they tried to tell me about not long after in an angry telephone call. I just laughed and hung up. I wasn't actually afraid of two fake intellectuals from San Francisco State. The locals? Sure, often. But not those two guys.

But I've found, as you have, that even out of disappointing liaisons in life you learn things, you pick up things of value. And so after a few years I bought a copy of Kerouac's book myself. That was my introduction to the Beats. Unconsciously if unwillingly influenced by the wise guy of a few years back, I focused at first on the colloquial and disheveled style of Kerouac's writing, which led me away from the point. I was a little too formalistic and doctrinaire in my approach to art in those days. My cousin, the ace novelist from Santa Cruz (via common ancestors from the Cumberland Gap), straightened me out on the significance of the Beats. My cousin was about the same age in 1955 as I attained in 1970, so while my reference points were Hippie, his were Beat. He explained his admiration for Kerouac (and he really would not brook my trivial carping about writing style) by talking about what it meant to hear dissenting voices during the Eisenhower Era, how all of society talked about the perfection of modern (increasingly suburban) American life, when just under the surface, a sensitive soul (like Kerouac) could plainly see that things were going terribly, terribly wrong. He wasn't the only one. Lewis Mumford, writing in The City in History in 1961, described an America where post World War II development left an "end product [as] an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set." So deranging was this forming lifestyle, in fact, that Mumford blamed it for the insanity which led to the nuclear arms race. Nuclear annihilation, indeed, could be seen as a suicidal escape from the oppressions of Modern America.

As is my habit when encountering something new and interesting, I read lots of the Beats after that. My first run-through of Tropic of Cancer impressed me as the best novel I'd ever read. It was almost miraculous in its evocation of time and place. And then Miller's dark counterpart to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, Henry's own book about touring America called The Air Conditioned Nightmare. For one thing, the title could simply not be improved upon. I realized my cousin had been influenced by these writers in his satirical vignettes about modern America, in his Charlie Bates stories. "Gas Mask" concerns Charlie's encounter with the Ultimate Traffic Jam on an unnamed Los Angeles freeway, a gridlock so final, so finished, that he eventually abandons his car, lowers himself by rope from the freeway, rents an apartment in a nearby high-rise, and watches his immobile car through binoculars. A new life, a love interest, also come about while he lives in this state of deracinated anomie. Indeed, how can you better describe the rootless nature of American life than through such a brilliant parody?

In My Dinner with Andre there is a riveting moment in the long conversation when Andre talks about the Sixties as the final convulsion of a society rebelling against the forces of standardization and commercialization, the reduction of the landscape to a tacky "crapscape" (Jim Kunstler's matchless epithet) of chain stores, fast food joints, big box outlets, the whole American Trail of Sorrows. The rebellion failed, as Andre noted, and eventually Americans "became the keepers of their own prisons." We became collaborators in our captivity, a kind of cultural Stockholm Syndrome. Almost all of us do it now: consume too much, pay too much attention to celebrity, fill the seas, the skies, our minds with garbage (as Pete Seeger sang), encourage our kids, above all, to "make it" in American society. We live in a country which is dominated completely by Big Business which owes its primary (only) loyalty to the global network of trade. The sense of a commons is so attenuated that we sit complacently by as more and more Americans fall into poverty and out of the medical system. A mercenary army fights endless wars, and their deaths are significant only as political footballs for parties competing for the plum jobs available at the public trough. Calls to patriotism have turned to ashes in the mouths of hypocritical legislators who are simply looking for manipulative angles.

One might say that it is those who stand at the cusp, at the interface, between eras who see things most clearly. There is a moment, a twinkling, when the horror can be appreciated because the culture being abandoned is still visible, still around, as its evil successor begins to materialize. Such were the Beats. Eisenhower himself, now a kind of patron saint of America's conformist age, became something of a Beat in his final warning about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex. It is here now, in force and in all its menacing glory. A charter member of the corporate ruling class received 53% of the popular vote in the last presidential election. The government is now in the full-time business of spying on its own citizens, compiling dossiers, subjecting them to "mathematical algorithms" by an elite and secret class of apparatchiks with no accountability. No amount of money spent on defense or in ongoing wars seems too great for Congress, even if Social Security, Medicare and the federal government itself are headed toward bankruptcy. Instead of making decisions (the nominal reason for their election), the legislative freeloaders idle away their hours passing nonbinding resolutions.

The Beats, in fact, were on to something. But now there is really no one left to Howl, to go On the Road, to point out the Nightmarish tenuousness of our decadent life. No one, at least, who can influence matters decisively. I suggested to my able cousin at one point that Charlie Bates make a comeback, that he turn his satirical gifts to the vexations of the Bush Era. Plausible, it might have seemed, as a suggestion. But not really possible. The broad audience is gone; it exists only as an illusion in the minds of those who remember that golden era of American dissent. Change in these United States will not come about through peaceful evolution or through hortatory satire. The body politic will fall apart through degenerative processes already well underway. "A throe, an eschatological heave," said another quasi-Beat, Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night.

Copy + paste = blog

Sometimes a blog can write itself:

"The European Union and the United States were at similar greenhouse-gas emission levels in 1990, but between 1990 and 2004, the EU economy grew by 32 percent and the greenhouse gas emissions went down by almost 1 percent compared to 1990 levels. By contrast, the U.S. economy grew by 52.6 percent between 1990 and 2004, but its emissions grew by 15.8 percent and are projected to increase to 32.4 percent above 1990 levels by 2010."

John Bruton, European Union Ambassador to the United States, February 28, 2007, special to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Researchers say [narcissism] scores have risen steadily since 1982 when the first of some 16,475 college students across the United States completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). The survey asks for responses to such statements as 'If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,' 'I think I am a special person,'and 'I can live my life any way I want.'"

"Twenge said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favour self-promotion over helping others. In addition, the study says narcissists 'are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviours.'"

"Researchers cite the 'self-esteem movement' of the 1980s, saying self-confidence building has gone too far."

Associated Press, February 27, 2007.

Any questions?

Das Leben des Anderes

"The Lives of Others" deserved to win Best Foreign Picture, if you ask me (and you didn't). Set mainly in the pre-Glasnost days of East Germany, the movie tells the chilling story of Stasi (State Security) instrusion into the lives of a group of talented artists and intellectuals in an unnamed East German city before the fall of the Wall, and of the destructive effect of surveillance on sanity and human happiness. A fascinating character study, and a timely reminder of the dangers of trading freedom of speech and association for an illusory "state security."

Which brings me, as so often, to the question of America's move to the Right. Joe Conason is out with a book called "It Can Happen Here," a play on the title of Sinclair Lewis's (unreadable) old novel "It Can't Happen Here," (meaning also that It Can Happen Here), which is about the slide toward Fascism under Bush. I think we're at the point, actually, where we can say with some confidence that American liberal democracy will outlast Bush, and the "photo finish" I talked about the other day (liberal democracy versus January 2009) comes out of my own despair over the unnecessary destruction of American institutions that Bush introduced as part of a disorganized and hapless approach to seizing power for the "Unitary Executive."

Conason organizes familiar material using a Sinclair Lewis outline, trotting out the Lewis line about "Fascism coming to America wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross." I think books like his are part of a vital and healthy dissent, and essential to preserving the ideas of the Founding Fathers so that when Bush at long last leaves town, we can remember what we used to be about. It's interesting, however, to contrast what a finished totalitarian state, as depicted in "Das Leben," looks like compared to Bush's fumbling attempt to undermine American liberty. In the GDR (East Germany) an astonishing 200,000 citizens were offical informants for the Stasi, out of a population of about 15 million. That's penetration; that's serious intrusion. People were routinely arrested and imprisoned for saying things that sounded anti-state. The East German apparatus grew, naturally, out of Nazi practices as supplemented and made more "humane" by Soviet security techniques. These people were deadly serious about repression.

Bush is sometimes compared to Fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini, and this is of course the most immediate historical parallel that comes to mind. The situations are distinguishable, however. Hitler came to power out of an intense, personal and monomaniacal desire to rule supreme. He had unquestionable gifts of organization and motivation, and he was animated by a malignant ideology of hate and violence. He had been imprisoned; he had been debased and made a political pariah after the Beer Hall Putsch; he had fought and been wounded in World War I; he had come out of a difficult Austrian background of failure and marginalization, and was attempting to seize power on the big stage of German resurgence.

Bush, on the other hand (and it's our saving grace), is not really like that at all. Instead of a fire-breathing, highly ambitious ideologue armed with ruthless motivation, he's a homegrown product of America's decadent period. He came out of privilege and limitless money. He had no ambition for 40 years except to get drunk and deranged on booze and coke. By the time Hitler was 43, he was Chancellor of Germany and head of the Nazi Party, and he achieved this lofty pinnacle beginning from rural poverty and without political connections. Bush's father had been, among other things, President of the United States. Bush is not talented, except as a content-free vehicle in the service of corporate interests. He has no idea what he's doing. He's not charismatic and he doesn't motivate anybody. Unlike Hitler's Germany, America under Bush continues to lose ground economically and in its relative standing in the world. If he's a Fascist, he's the laziest and most disorganized Fascist in the history of the movement. But as I say, we are fortunate that it is so.

I recall after 9/11 that British citizens, in particular, sometimes sounded skeptical about America's over-the-top reaction to this single event of invasion. They were, of course, prudent and circumspect in their grumbling, but the idea was simple: America needed to get over itself. Britain had been bombed nonstop by the Luftwaffe from 1940 until Hitler finally turned his attention to the East. Night after night, all the major British cities took a pounding, thousands and thousands of civilians died. Day and night, the whole country was engulfed in flames for nearly a year. And when the Russian invasion failed, Hitler experimented with his V-2 rockets on those same British Isles with devastating lethality.

A group of Saudi and Egyptian nut cases flew commerical airliners into office buildings in New York and into the Pentagon. We had clear warnings that it was coming, but the federal government was too lazy and incompetent to react. Bush, seeing a political opportunity for reelection, seized on the attacks and immediately divided American history into "before" and "after" 9/11. "Everything changed." The American electorate, ignoring the inconvenient observation that this inarticulate faker was the one who failed to react to the warnings in the first place, bought into the story line. This is typical of American hysteria. In a similar way, the changes wrought by the "Mayberry Machiavellis" are hyped and exaggerated. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales - they love pushing people around for political effect, such as Guantanamo detainees and Abu Ghraib prisoners, but with occasional notable exceptions early in their reign, such as Jose Padilla, they lay off American citizens. East Germany, as a police state, was the real deal, run with characteristic German efficiency. Its purpose was to perpetuate power. Bush, Cheney and the gang piss all over America's noble traditions without anything, really, to show for it. All the violations of due process, the intrusion of NSA spying, the squalor of the signing statements, invading Iraq, the elimination of habeas corpus for the helpless, the torture -- all of it, it's for nothing. Bush & Cheney's sole agenda is to redistribute tax dollars of ordinary Americans to big business with military connections, and they do this through exaggerating nonexistent threats from irrelevant countries.

In some ways, our overreaction to this, the comparison to great Fascist regimes of recent history, parallels the hysterical overreaction to 9/11. We take ourselves, our precious selves, oh so seriously. America does face serious external threats, such as the danger of a terrorist nuke, but about those threats we do almost nothing. It's boring, unglamorous work. Who cares about port security, or X-ray machines for cargo holds, or enforcement of Nunn-Lugar? How can that thrive on the front page? When Bush leaves office, the blogosphere will contract by 50% and we'll be left with all those niggling, real problems that were neglected during our orgy of Fascism Envy. A spoiled, indolent and seriously overweight populace will have to look then for the Next Big Thing to distract them.

Apocalypse How?

"These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States ... and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves." -- Michael Scheuer, former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, February 19, 2007.

That isn't really news; it's sensational and au courant, but not really news. The Nunn-Lugar Act was passed years ago to deal with the very real threat of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorists, and many experts, such as Graham Allison at the Kennedy School at Harvard, have offered in Senate testimony the probability estimates of an actual detonation. In late 2004, the guess was that the chance of a nuclear explosion somewhere in the world was 70% over the coming decade.

It's difficult to be more precise, of course, or even to know what to do with a probability estimate such as that. We could usefully contrast it with survival statistics in cancer research, for example. If we say that the five-year survival rate for a given type of cancer is 70%, then we can test the estimate by seeing how many survivors are around five years later. With sufficient numbers in the sample and standard scientific controls, the guesstimate can be affirmed or refuted. With a single, discrete event like a terrorist nuke, it's difficult to quantify, refute or affirm in the same way. Logically, any probability greater than zero during a given 10-year period would be affirmed by the actual event. Only if the prognosticator said the chances were, on one hand, zero; or at the other extreme, 100%, could we definitively say whether the guess was right or wrong.

So the purpose of such a probability estimate is to give us a general feeling. Should we be scared shitless, or is it just a Hollywood scenario pitch? If scientists with lots of data at their disposal start throwing around numbers like 70%, what do you think? In terms of my own street cred, I was, a long time ago, lead counsel for the intervenor in the Diablo Canyon licensing proceedings, through which Pacific Gas & Electric sought from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a green light to operate twin megawatt reactors built on an active earthquake fault in Avila Beach, California. Part of the proceedings required me to execute an Affidavit of Nondisclosure forbidding me to divulge any information acquired through my review of classified information in the clean rooms maintained on site at PG&E. That's been easy, and the silly nature of hyped-up classification was one of the two lessons I learned from the litigation. The other was that the NRC provides no real oversight of the nuclear industry because the appointees to the Commission are all industry hacks calling in political favors. As it was then, so it is now; the difference is that the blogosphere now extensively covers Bush's continuation of these corrupt practices, so that we have, for example, coal industry lobbyists in charge of America's "fight" against global warming.

Those are valuable lessons to learn at the callow age of 32. The federal government is (a) thoroughly, utterly corrupt, and hides many of its mistakes through (b) abuse of the classification process. For purposes of thematic continuity: these sad factoids relate to the existential danger posed by terrorist nukes. How bad is the danger? The information is all classified. And who's in charge of protecting us? Hacks, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who don't know their ass from a hot rock.

Those who are privy to the information necessary to blow us to kingdom come include Islamic extremists, even if you, loyal American citizen, are not among the favored, in-the-know cohort. The basic information relevant to building a nuke is available now on the Internet or in public libraries, although the generalized diagrams or details are insufficient for a workable device. A terrorist would need either (1) an actual, assembled bomb, or (2) the materials to build one with, assisted by a bomb-making physicist.

If I were devising a Hollywood scenario, I would go for Door #2. One thing I learned (but not from classified sources) back in those glory days of within-the-system radicalism is that a standard commerical light-water reactor (such as those at Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, or dotting the landscape all over France) produces about 500 pounds of plutonium per year. About 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of plutonium is all you need for a good, solid, serviceable 10-kiloton bomb (in the Trinity shot ball park). In all the controversy over Iran's "nuclear program," we keep reading about Condi Rice's insistence that Iran "stop its uranium enrichment" as a condition of bilateral talks. Sometimes I actually wonder to myself: are Condi, Bush & Cheney so stupid they actually don't know? Uranium enrichment is the long way home. The United States undertook uranium enrichment as part of the Manhattan Project for one very simple reason: there were no nuclear reactors around to produce plutonium. But they undertook this extraordinarily complicated process because they had to. You can't find plutonium in a mine (except in infinitesimal quantities as the result of "natural reactor piles" sometimes found in uranium deposits). You make it in a reactor. A light water reactor uses U-238 (the plentiful kind) enriched to 3% (or more) U-235 (the highly radioactive isotope), all of it packed into long, cylindrical fuel rods. In the course of producing heat, through the neutron flux in the reactor core, the U-238 is altered (through a couple of chemical intervening steps) to Pu-239 - Plutonium. This silvery metal from Pluto's dark realm must be extracted from the spent fuel rods in a reprocessing plant by chemical means. The United States doesn't do this anymore, but France, England and (ahem) Russia do.

There's your weak link: Russia and all the former Soviet republics, particularly those with significant Muslim populations. This is where we're paying a terrible price for George Bush's anti-social personality disorder. His inability to get along with people has transmogrified into a global, existential crisis. Hate to say it, but it's true, folks. Bush's weird personal problems have succeeded in alienating Russia, which has strong connections to Iran, and the "crusade" bullshit he uses to galvanize America into unnecessary wars has polarized Muslim sentiment against us. His abrogation of the ABM treaty without bringing Russia along on a joint venture to develop a "missile shield" against rogue nation nukes; his enlisting of former Soviet Republics into NATO, and stationing new missile sites on Russia's border; and his adamant refusal to "talk" to Iran unless they cease doing something they don't need to do in order to become a nuclear threat - all this stupidity has added immeasurably to the danger.

We need the assistance of every advanced civilized nation on Earth to help us counter the threat of a terrorist nuke. We can't afford to be at odds with a country (Russia) which poses no threat to America's safety, yet which possesses not only finished nuclear weapons but tons of raw plutonium. We have to talk to everybody, all the time. There is no upside to this silly posturing, this Axis of Evil crap. It is the ultimate zero-sum game: one mushroom cloud here in the "homeland," and our days as a viable polity are over. We need to pull for that 30% chance it won't happen, and we need January 2009 to happen as soon as it can.

Hypoxic Dick Heads to his next Asian Port-of-Call

As the jury deliberates in United States vs. Libby, Dick heads to Bangkok, maybe, or Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a place he never ventured near when he was draft age in the late Sixties. Dick, head of a U.S. delegation sowing vitriol and discord among vital allies in the Far East, wants to be somewhere far, far away when his trusted aide and former bagman Scooter ("The Amnesiac") Libby learns his fate from the jury in D.C. Unrepentant, defiant and wrong as ever, Dick heads off criticism of his key role in creating the Iraq fiasco by attacking his Congressional critics. While he wouldn't question the patriotism of Democratic Quislings who are in league with Osama bin Laden, he doesn't hide his scorn for their cut-and-run attitude which validates the al-Qaeda strategy of waiting till the West caves in.

In Australia, Dick wads it all together with one summary statement: "Al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home," Cheney added. "And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al Qaeda. I said it and I meant it." Dick, head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (ex officio), Project for A New American Century, and Grand Imperial Dragon of Herpetological Monsters of Darkness, as well as the Dick who has Bush's ear, always means it when he's wrong. Will Dick head to Switzerland next, or some jurisdiction such as France which eschews extradition? Still, the Hypoxic One appeared to whiff on a few gopher balls with the quote:

1. Al-Qaeda isn't the big problem in Iraq. Liberated native Iraqis are.
2. If al-Qaeda's fundamental underlying strategy is to kill enough Americans and cause enough havoc, then keeping enough Americans in Iraq for al-Qaeda to kill also validates al-Qaeda's strategy. Leaving Iraq will make it more difficult for al-Qaeda to kill Americans and create havoc because the Americans won't be in the Arabic regions of Asia anymore.
3. What's breaking America's will is fighting a stupid goddam unnecessary war that Dick Cheney dreamed up.

Dick heads off criticism like this by his appeals to history. Historians will see that the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, by Saudis and Egyptians was definitively refuted by invading another country run by some other Arabs, which drew in other Arabic jihadis like Woodstock-on-the-Tigris. Among the groupies were al-Qaeda Arabs, who must have thought that they'd died and gone to Paradise before blowing themselves up, dying and going to Paradise, but then they probably think they're just the lucky recipients of the worst foreign policy judgment in American history. Nevertheless, Dick faces the judgment of his legacy unafraid.

The Years After Bush

It's a nice job in some ways, being President. $400,000 yearly salary, $12 million yearly budget for the White House residence, unlimited access to Camp David, a private 747, worldwide travel opportunities, access to virtually any celebrity, artist, or great thinker your heart might desire. Job security is such that only one President has been actually removed from office by impeachment (Andrew Johnson), and one other hightailed it before a posse could form (Richard Nixon). A few Presidents, of course, have been shot (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) and one other wounded (Reagan), and one other shot at (Ford, twice). Others died of cholera (Zachary Taylor) stroke (Harding), pleurisy (Harrison) and cerebral bleeding (FDR). Add it all up and you've got 4 assassinations, four deaths by natural causes and 2 Presidents removed from office, which means that 10 Presidents out of 43 didn't make it to the end of their elected terms, a figure approaching 25% (23.25%; I'm doing my part to improve American numeracy).

Still, a lot of people certainly show interest in achieving the Ultimate American Dream. For the next President who ascends to the soiled and battered throne of George W. Bush, I say, good luck, sir or madam. I have a feeling the passage from 2009 to about 2020 is going to be a parlous time indeed. Bush's lab-concocted roosters (two-headed, purple and black, oozing pus, 4 feet high, fizzing with infection) currently fluttering into America's barnyard will roost there throughout his successor's tenure, whether one term or two, and I think it will be one. For a different bird and slightly different metaphor, think of Poe's Raven, perched outside the Oval Office Door. Nevermore, the easygoing dominance of America in the world. Nevermore the free ride.

Finances. The successor's term will be about finances. How dull and dreary for, say, Obama, to work upon a midnight, weary, trying to find some way out of the morass. I commend Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, published a few years ago, for a fuller account. (A personal note: Chalmers was a prof of mine at Berkeley, decades ago, when he was conservative and optimistic instead of one of Bush's most lacerating critics.) America is broke. Considering all of Bush's moronic ineptitude, nothing is going to be as immediate and terrifying as the money problems he will leave behind. It's sad that America never figured it out. We elected a spoiled scion who had never succeeded in any financial enterprise, who in fact wrecked the companies he directly controlled, and on whom a Harvard Business education was a joke, an excuse to get drunk and fuck around. A man with no judgment, no business acumen, no sense of budgetary priorities, who was always bailed out by paternalistic figures when he bottomed out - this is the clown we made President. Why didn't people see that his life-long habits would operate in precisely the same way once he became Chief Executive, that the approach would carry over and cause a financial meltdown on the biggest stage the world has ever seen?

The next President will inherit a country more than $9 trillion in debt, probably $10 trillion by the time Bush leaves, half of it "external;" that is, owed to real people or countries. Of the external debt of $5 trillion (by the time Shrub is done), $2.5 trillion will be owed to foreign countries, most of it on short-term obligations. $2.5 trillion is nearly as large as the current operating budget of the United States government. Since only about 70% of the current budget is funded by actual revenues (the rest is borrowed), it's obvious the United States doesn't have that kind of cash lying around. Virtually all of the sales of Treasury securities to external buyers, since Bush took office, have been to foreign central banks. It amounts to an immense Ponzi scheme; America borrows money to float its economy (and to finance Bush's wars), and then borrows the money necessary to service the debt on all the money it's borrowed in the past. A rather laughably transparent aspect of this practice has been the Fed's steady ratcheting of interest rates to "control inflation." Yes, we must keep this red hot American economy under control. Everyone is doing so well. A much more reassuring excuse than admitting that China, Japan and Saudi Arabia are losing interest in the paltry return on their reinvested dollars, especially with the dollar dropping through the floor, and are already diversifying in Euros and Asian currencies. The next President may have to deal with those blood-curdling words we've been dreading: Pay up.

And, around 2017 or so, the "surplus" in FICA taxes will plunge toward the X axis, and the Social Security Administration will lack the money necessary to pay the burgeoning numbers of Baby Boomers who are retiring, and will have to resort to the "trust fund" to make up the difference. There is, of course, no trust fund. All of the surpluses since about 1982 or so have been used by the federal government as "general revenue," and the markers for the pilfered cash, the paper instruments placed in that file cabinet in West Virginia (which Bush derided), will do no good. It is money the United States owes itself, and America isn't good for it. As bad as that situation is, it is nothing compared to Medicare. The exploding costs of medical care will combine with exploding numbers of Medicare recipients, and the system will simply crash. While Social Security is dire, the Medicare crisis is terminal, so that by the year 2019, 24% of all federal tax revenues will be spent propping up Medicare and Social Security, over and above the dedicated taxes (such as FICA) which already support the system. Indeed, the projected unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems greatly exceed the total net worth of the United States of America. And all of this, of course, is in addition to the national debt, and the escalating cost of servicing that huge yearly nut.

And how to deal with global warming? And a massive, dislocating shortage of oil to run the transportation system in the United States, which in most parts of the country amounts to the wherewithal to run the economy?

Bush decided to use his time in office to kick back, fuck around, and fight unnecessary wars. He thought that was his best chance for reelection, which was his only goal. The American people, in their mindless complacency, gave it to him. He didn't know the first thing about how to run a business, and he has left a financial catastrophe for his successor to clean up. When 2015 rolls around (or much sooner), Americans are not going to be talking about which humanitarian mission is a deserving recipient of their tax dollars, which nation we ought to "build" next, which planet to explore. Things are going to be far more basic than that. America is going to feel like a couple, no longer quite young, who went off on an eight-year drunk, a binge full of parties and high-def TVs and SUVs too big for the driveway, who came home to find the car had been repossessed, the power shut off, and the house foreclosed. And, naturally, since they're Americans, they'll look around for someone to blame, which might be a reason for any politician identified with the first decade of the 21st Century to go permanently to an undisclosed location.

Back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.A.

I think it will be a photo finish: which will arrive first, the end of the national nightmare known as the Bush Presidency, or the last day of the American Republic as a constitutional democracy? Bush, certainly, is doing his part to outlast our civil liberties. Even as the media focus exclusive attention on the 2008 campaign, the monster babies spawned by earlier Bushian misprision continue their grotesque maturation. Thus, we have Boumediene vs. Bush (yes, that Bush), the case recently decided by the D.C. Court of Appeals, in which the court upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act. That brilliant coup by which Bush & Rumsfeld conspired to confine terrorists (loosely defined) caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan at the far end of Cuba, so as to deprive American courts of jurisdiction -- well, it worked. If you're an Afghan heroin farmer who happened to be near Kandahar near the end of 2001, and someone ratted you out in order to cut a deal with the U.S. military to go free; and if this train of events eventually carried you to Bagram prison, where you were interrogated and probably tortured; and if your pleas of innocence were ignored so that eventually you found yourself chained to the belly of a military transport that carried you to a rabbit warren at the dusty east end of Cuba, at Guantanamo-- well, here's some more bad news. The federal courts cannot hear your case by means of habeas corpus. The MCA says so, and the federal panel agrees.

Perhaps this terrorist was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several hundred similar "terrorists" have been discharged from Guantanamo for this very reason, after years of unnecessary imprisonment. Maybe the terrorist has a family who depends on him, children whom he has not seen in years, perhaps he was never any kind of threat to the United States at all. All of these things could be tested by habeas corpus, that salutary Latin phrase meaning "you have the body," an ancient writ under the common law which allows one detained by the government to challenge, immediately, the basis of his incarceration. But you, the terrorist, have no such rights. You're a foreigner, Rumsfeld or Bush has said you're an "enemy combatant," and thus you'll have to make your case to a Military Status Review board down there in Cuba, and if they don't like your argument, or you -- well, settle back for a few more years, or forever, in your cage. No court is ever going to listen to you.

The good and decent Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, is working to repair this abomination, one of many such gaping holes blasted in the Constitution by the Bush Administration, often with the unctuous, hypocritical help of that sniveling rat Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina. I think of Leahy as sort of Bush's night soil engineer, the guy who's making his nocturnal rounds emptying all the pots of shit filled up during the dark period when Bush had a compliant Republican Congress to help with his dirty work. If he can get past the 60 vote requirement, and over Bush's probable veto, maybe the foreigners will have a chance to demonstrate their innocence in court someday. It's worth at least starting the process; more likely, many innocent detainees in Guantanamo will have to wait until at least late 2009 before a real chance at freedom appears. By then, probably several hundred men will have spent 8 years in a kind of legal purgatory, casual victims of Bush's destructive approach to due process. For what, after all, is so terrible about allowing anyone, even an alleged terrorist, to make an argument that he's done nothing wrong? Why do we close the doors to the court house to a man who simply wants to say, "I'm innocent"?

As I've said before, Bush's weird small-mindedness pervades his thinking about legal process as it does about every other intellectual discipline, from science to economics. It is proof by declaration: I say this, so it's true. And as a complacent Congress and electorate look on, the grand structure of Constitutional rights falls like a sand castle overwhelmed by a dark tide.

Supporting the troops

I've been trying to understand why the Republicans have been successful, so far, in advancing an argument as specious and idiotic as the charge that failing to fund any budget request Bush pulls out of his ass to keep his various wars going amounts to abandoning the U.S. military (currently "in harm's way") to their fate. It simply doesn't make any sense. No one who thinks about it for even a few moments could escape the conclusion that it's complete bullshit. Suppose Bush sends some gargantuan "supplemental" up to the Hill, say for another $100 billion, as in fact he does on a regular basis. Congress, now under Democratic control, says no. You can't have any of the money you just requested. Nada, zero, zilch, bupkes. Fuggedaboutit.

What happens? The Army runs out of ammunition, fuel, food, e-mail service? No, those things don't happen. The Pentagon instead uses the humongous budget already under its control to begin an orderly and safe withdrawal of the troops from Iraq. What could be more obvious? If they need more money for that, Bush can ask for it. But as the Commander-in-Chief, it becomes his responsibility to extract the troops safely.

Yet La Diva and Mr. Mumbles seem as determined as The Decider himself that the troops will be supported by always granting Bush whatever obscene funding request he makes, while retaining the right to pass nonbinding resolutions expressing their distate for what they just did.

It is my experience in life that whenever something makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, it's the result of looking at it the wrong way. The Dimocrats do not really think that approving funding requests amounts to supporting the troops. Actually, the troops in Iraq are dropping like flies these days (another 9 since Saturday), and it's because of all that money Congress keeps giving Bush to make sure they can't come home. Congress is, in reality, killing the troops, as surely as the Sunni insurgents and the rest of the jihadis. Congress is keeping the American military in harm's way when it could easily save them.

So what is really going on? There would appear to be one possible interpretation which fits the facts. The Dimocrats want to fund the war so that the outcome remains Bush's responsibility. Once again, the Imaginary Focus Group which controls the decisions made by Congressional "leaders" dictates that any further unraveling of Iraq (if such a devolution would even be discernible) will be solely Bush's fault; thus, if he asks for money, they will give it to him. Looked at in another way, these supposedly mature adults, Dimocrats and Republicans alike, are more concerned with a generalized, fallacious impression of a hypothesized public audience than they are with the actual deaths and traumatic amputations suffered by real people in the course of riding around in vehicles in Iraq, waiting to get blown up. Through such conduct, they confirm the controlling hypothesis of C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite. Those in power will, whenever possible, make those decisions which tend to perpetuate their power, at the expense of any other consideration. In the political calculus of La Diva and Mr. Mumbles, therefore, the consequences of allowing the Iraq War to go to Hell in a handbasket while American soldiers die meaninglessly are positive so long as Bush can be blamed exclusively for the debacle. Looking ahead to 2008, they see their grip on power enhanced, with the prospects of Dimocratic succession to the White House improved. And the purpose of retaining power, of course, is to retain power.

That's where we are. There are exceptions, the "radicals" in Congress, that I will write about later. But I would contend that the analysis above holds for 95% of the Congress and all of the Executive Branch, who are embraced in a kind of Tango of Death. It is a definitive measurement of the breach between living reality and the bizarre world of illusion and imagery in which the pampered ruling class in Washington, D.C. pass their days.

The Defense of Marriage Alliance, producers of Initiative 957

I confess my hat is off to Washington's "Defense of Marriage Alliance" for an inspired piece of political theatre. The "same-sex" marriage debate suffers from an excessive seriouness, as do most cultural controversies which afford the Christian Right a chance to stand on a soap box and proclaim their unique insights into the Natural Order of Things. It is so very tiresome. In truth, the patterns of human relation evolve constantly as petty bigotries wax and wane; ultimately, I have always thought, the essential relationship is between a human being and the Planet Earth, which is, oddly, one that gets talked about very little. I think this strange human preoccupation with pronouncing normative standards for everyone else's approach to life lies at the root of our present existential crisis, which is to say, the danger that we're creating a world uninhabitable for homo sapiens. There is such a nutty emphasis on living on this Earth in ways that guarantee entrance to the next world that we fail to cooperate on the one essential enterprise that might make life better in the here and now. If we define insanity as an essential failure to adapt to life-enhancing strategies for existence, then it's fair to say that America is one of the craziest societies to arise in the history of the species.

Along comes the "Defense of Marriage Alliance," tongues thrust deeply into cheeks:
(1) All couples married in this state shall have three years from the date of solemnization of the marriage, or eighteen months from the effective date of this act, whichever is later, to have filed with the state registrar of vital statistics or designated deputy registrar at least one certificate of marital procreation as described in section 11 of this act.

"A certificate of marital procreation." That's good right there. A married couple proves they had a kid by producing a birth certificate before the deadline. Initiative 957, accepted by Washington's Secretary of State, reads just like a real statute; indeed, 957 simply amends Washington's form of the "defense of marriage" act, which states as the premise of confining marriage to one man and one woman the unassailable reality that this is where the babies come from. The Washington state Supreme Court recently enshrined this principle in the decision in Andersen v. King County, which DOMA sententiously quotes in the language of the Initiative. DOMA, like the rest of us clear thinkers, knows that the Washington Supreme Court and the Religious Right use the ability to "procreate" as a distinction precisely because it's something homosexuals can't do inter sese. Gay men need to adopt; gay women need a turkey baster or a male friend.

So, in a satirical move worthy of Bertold Brecht, DOMA calls their bluff. Straight couples have three years to produce the goods, to file a "certificate of procreation," or their marriage loses its legal cover. Simply ingenious. Ingenious because it makes everyone, straight and gay alike, a potential victim of an unthinking prejudice, and nothing focuses one's attention on a prejudice like becoming one of its victims. If heterosexuals object to 957 because it "forces" procreation on people who just want to be married and enjoy the rights of married life without having children, then they must confront an uncomfortable truth. They are denying exactly this "lifestyle" to gay people who want to do the same thing. Yet once the "certificate of procreation" requirement is removed, what is the basis for granting straight couples a right denied to gay couples? If straight couples can enjoy the legal sanctity of marriage without coming across with a kid, then why did the Washington Supreme Court rule the way it did in Andersen? Why should straight couples own the exclusive right to marriage on the basis of a potential which they do nothing with?

The Washington Supreme Court and the Religous Right have to state it plainly. They're against gay marriage because they think it's icky. That should be in their next high-sounding opinion. "We hold today, as we must, that the state sanction of marriage must be confined to those instances in which one man and one woman, having undergone solemnization of their union pursuant to lawful statute, choose to live as husband and wife, because other arrangements, like gays wanting to do it, would be too icky."

Personally, I'm beginning to think that marriages should operate under the same system as driver's licenses. Every five years or so, your marriage expires, and you have to take affirmative steps to renew it. No more coasting for anybody. Think of the legal fees it would save, the hassle of filing a court action for divorce. You simply choose not to renew. And by the way, I think I know something the Religious Right doesn't: my vision has a much greater chance of realization than that life they're counting on in the Hereafter.

When Bush is less than clear about dangerous things

The daily atrocities which Bush inflicts upon the English language should probably be the subject of an Amnesty International probe. He smiles idiotically while he's doing it, but I've never found it all that funny that the President of the United States has so much trouble with his native tongue. In his press conference today, Bush again reiterated our goal of removing nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula. I double-checked just to make sure, but the American Heritage Dictionary lists two acceptable pronunciations, peninsula and (sort of) peninsyula, but no peninchula. I've never heard anyone say peninchula besides Bush. We were always going to be stuck with nukular, but peninchula now also looks like a permanent fixture. It's unfortunate, therefore, not only that North Korea has nukular aspirations but that it's located on a peninchula. A double whammy which we don't encounter with landlocked Iran.

Whenever Bush can be the least bit technical, he's apt to reiterate the point over and over in a self-satisfied attempt to impress. He did that today with "Chapter VII resolutions" from the UN. I don't know how many times he said that, but it was a lot. Chapter VII resolutions are issued out of the Security Council in cases where a threat to world peace exists, as by an act of international aggression. Bush did not explain the reference to the assembled stenographers of the Fourth Estate; I think he enjoyed keeping them in the dark while he showcased his peerless mastery of the arcana of foreign relations. He got going once on "casus belli" in the same way; everything, for a while, was a casus belli. An impertinent question from the docile press corps might have been a casus belli in the dark days before the Iraq invasion.

Anyway, he preens when he can use this kind of insider lingo. Sometimes, however, I think he and Rove make something up just before Bush takes the podium and then the effects are less felicitous. To wit, “And I’d like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what’s worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?” I'm not sure how a question which he doesn't answer can qualify as a "point," especially since it doesn't make any sense. I do know why he and Rove cooked this one up; a day before, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, admitted the military had no evidence the Iranian government was involved in arming the Shiite militia with IEDs. Bush, who had been busy pounding the war drums, skipped a couple of beats with that one. He needed some kind of recovery, and back in the Oval Office, just before Bush made his irritated way to the podium, they came up with that beauty.

I wish I'd been there, because I know the answer. It's much worse if the top echelons of the Iranian government are ordering the Quds force to cooperate with Iraq's Shiite militias. Much worse, since that might indicate a coordinated, officially directed act of war against U.S. forces. Gen. Pace knows that, which is why he said what he said. If we're dealing with rogue elements in the Quds force, or just Iranian sympathizers (using, for example, all the Iraqi and American ordnance we left lying around unguarded after the mission was accomplished in May, 2003), then Bush should (though he won't) rethink the position. For such "rogue elements" in Iran might be analogized to the 15 Saudi hijackers of 9-11, and if I recall correctly, the national provenance of those anti-American terrorists was deemed immaterial in our subsequent dealings with Saudi Arabia. So that even though the Kingdom is located on a peninchula, we left them alone, even as we leave them alone now, although we're aware that Saudi financiers send money and materiel to Sunni insurgents in Iraq who attack American forces.

Bush is not big on what you might call logical consistency, however. If he were, he'd be more concerned than he is about the close ties between Maliki's government and Iran, which came about because of Bush's overthrow of Saddam. So Bush is trying to work up a casus belli against the non-peninchula and so far non-nukular country which most strongly supports the very same government in Iraq which Bush is bankrupting the United States and breaking the U.S. military to defend. Iran, actually, might be seen as more of an ally than a nemesis at this point, but then the 2002 SOTU speech named the starting roster for the Axis of Evil, and Bush just can't let that go. Once you're on The List, you're on The List. That was before, of course, Bush was aware that the Muslims in Iraq were overwhelmingly Shiite, just like the Iranians, and it was fairly predictable that Iran's hand would be strengthened in the region by bringing 15 million Shiites to power in Baghdad.

This may account for why Bush is lapsing more than ever into incoherence, and has taken to posing rhetorical questions which could only be meaningful if he answered them, but he doesn't because he doesn't know what the right answer is. It must make General Pace a little nervous about his new job. The only guy smiling, maniacally as always, there in the front row with his nimbus of baby hair and lunar countenance, is Rove himself, fascinated as Dr. Frankenstein must have been. Just how weird can my monster get?

The Obtuse American

I am indebted to James Kunstler, whose Clusterfuck website is linked on this page, for the observation that 80% of everything which has ever been built in the United States was thrown up in the last 50 years (The Geography of Nowhere, Knopf, 1993). My generation's sojourn through life is marked definitively by this transfiguration of the American landscape. It hardly needs mentioning that the vast majority of the stuff built is crud: ugly, inhuman, alienating, anti-nature, insane.

The Interstate Highway Act of 1957 began the final linkage of suburban metroplexes, followed by the explosive growth of chain restaurants, motels, gas stations, and shopping malls, which finally reached its apotheosis in the development of big box stores driving all local commerce to extinction. We have, during this period, become a kind of Trailer Park Sparta, a nation with a huge military establishment but without national health care or much of a social safety net for its dwindling middle class. The God-obsessed citizenry is haunted by obscurantist ideas about the value of modern science and education. The destruction of the American Bill of Rights by the current neo-Fascist government goes largely unremarked. Things have gotten so bad that in the last two national elections for President, half the voting populace, (sick, obese, poorly educated), hung their chads for George W. Bush, the dimmest bulb in the history of the American Republic.

The working class struggles to support the old and the disabled through confiscatory taxes for retirement and Medicare. What's left over is mostly given to the defense industry, so the executive branch can invade one country after another in a series of endless wars. The wars now always include a phase of "nation building," which means that we still think of ourselves as some kind of model for another country's aspiration. Either that, or we might best analogize our foreign policy to Dadaist art: Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal and called it "Fountain." We build a Taco Bell in the middle of Iraq and call it "America."

The Problem with Hillary

In January, 2003, I boarded a Golden Gate ferry and sailed across the Bay to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I joined about 100,000 other demonstrators (the Chronicle, still under the sway of the general warmongering spirit of the times, estimated the crowd at about 732). Elaine, mother of my daughter's best childhood friends, went with me, and we marched all the way to Civic Center, where a diverse group of speakers on a variety of topics, both germane and irrelevant to the Iraq War, spoke to the crowd. On the way back, Elaine, understandably exhilarated by the show of solidarity, asked me if I thought the invasion would happen anyway.

"Of course," I said. "Nothing can stop it."

My confident prediction was based on little more than my opinion of George W. Bush. He had already demonstrated his penchant for pathological lying, and I didn't believe a word he said. He had begun his systematic shredding of the Bill of Rights with his jailing of Jose Padilla and establishment of his concentration camp on Cuba. Many experts had expressed their opinion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including Scott Ritter (a former weapons inspector), William Arkin (a defense analyst) and, most notably, Hans Blix, who had been driving around Iraq for months without finding anything. The idea of a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was ridiculous on its face.

The war, therefore, was a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton, Senator from New York, voted in October, 2002, to authorize President Bush to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. This was prior to the invasion. Also prior to the invasion, I voted with my feet to oppose the invasion. Thus, our relative positions were clear and marked by overt indicators. There is no going back.

I was right and Hillary Clinton was wrong. How could I possibly vote for a politician, who is briefed by insiders all day long, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who knows less than I do? Her subsequent attempts to explain her way out of her cowardly vote have contorted her into positions that would be the envy of a Chinese acrobat troupe. She cannot say she was "wrong," although the milling throngs in New Hampshire have asked her to say just that. "Knowing what I know now," she says, "I certainly would not have authorized Bush to conduct his war." Not so fast, Hillary. A little glib. Under the War Powers Act, the Iraq War is YOUR war. You told Bush to go ahead. And as far as knowing then what you know now? You see, I knew then what you say you didn't know then.

So what the hell were you doing? You were caving in, that's all. And because it seems to you that a good offense is the best defense, you're attacking the "simplicity" of Barack Obama's get the hell out approach. "Anyone can say, 'just leave'," you sneer. But you see, Hill: Obama was against the damn thing to begin with. He doesn't think we should ever have been there.

I just love the way your handlers describe your highly nuanced position on phased withdrawal. They say your position more closely "reflects the political mainstream." So that's why you say what you do now? You looked around the Senate chamber, read the editorials in the Washington Post and New York Times, and figured out what was good to believe? Is that the same thing as the right thing to believe?

Here's a clue. The political mainstream is not the same as the opinion of the American people. That's why you're getting all those tough questions. Those rock-ribbed people in New Hampshire are on to you. They don't ask questions like Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert ask. They know you voted the way you did because your political calculations favored a "safe" approach of belligerence, and if the war was a success, whether it was the right thing to do or not, you would look like you made a smart call. When it went south, when it turned out there was no reason for the invasion at all, you started crabbing about Bush's incompetence in conducting this fiasco.

Nope, you still don't get it. You're going to have to admit you chickened out. You can't even say, "I made a mistake." When there are two boxes to check, and you know the right answer but check the other one because of your vaulting ambition, you didn't make a "mistake." You took the easy way out. That's what you have to say. You have to forgo your triangulating, calculating, outside-in approach to moral choosing. Or that vaulting ambition will not fall upon another, as the Bard said. It will fall on you.

The institutionalization of the military-industrial complex

I am indebted to Ben Cohen of Ben&Jerry's for their important work on budget priorities. I would encourage everyone to (a) go to www.benjerry.com, and analyze their "American pie" demonstration, and (b) eat Ben&Jerry's ice cream. Remember, both can be done at the same time.

George W. Bush's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2008 is a disgrace. It allocates 51% of the discretionary budget (exclusive of the cash-in/cash-out system of the entitlement programs) to the Pentagon. Bush asks for an 11% increase in the military budget exclusive of the horrendous costs of our crazy occupation of Iraq. If you wanted to see what chastening effect the 2006 elections would have on the psychology of an infantile man with a narcissistic personality disorder, there's your answer. Bush's response to his massive defeat at the polls, to his subterranean approval ratings, to his diminution in the American mind to the status of an imbecile, is to say go to Hell. In your face. Up yours.

Bush is determined to use his remaining tenure in office to enrich certain sectors of the American business community. There's really nothing else for him to do. He was never interested in governing the country as part of a disciplined effort to improve the lives of the American people as a whole. His dumb war bogged down and became an embarrassment, but also a self-renewing feeding trough for the fattest pigs in the American plutocracy. Bush's natural constituency. Bush loves doing favors for the fat cats, and it was a pretty nifty plan, he thinks, to use the American military to execute the business plan of corporate America. How many countries can do that? Probably only a country that spends more on "defense" (from...?) than the next 14 countries combined, and over half of all money spent on defense...on...the...planet Earth.

I think we can say two things for sure. Defense spending in the United States is unrelated to the "existential" threats that America faces. While we have, through the stupidity of abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, rekindled a nuclear arms race with Russia, it is also true that the Iraq War has demonstrated that a huge military apparatus, with all the latest electronic doodads, doesn't work very well against the episodic and ad hoc character of "terrorist" threats. Would anything this 11% increase will buy have stopped 9/11? No, that simply required smart people doing their jobs, and on that score, this Administration is bankrupt.

Dwight Eisenhower warned us a long time ago this would happen. He was right. Bush and his (still) compliant Congress are utterly shameless about funneling American taxpayer bucks to their friends, the merchants of death. Maybe Congress will strike back and cut the Pentagon budget in half! Maybe they'll conclude spending only 25 cents of every dollar spent on the world's militaries is enough to defend one country. Maybe Ben&Jerry's ice cream will be dispensed from the assholes of all those corporate pigs!

Don Fitz Quixote almost done tilting at windmills

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is almost done with the riveting spectacle of his public flailing of Scooter Libby in a Washington D.C. court room. Libby's excuses look ridiculous; his selective "learning," "forgetting," and "learning again" go beyond straining credulity. They make no sense whatsoever. Fitz has firmly established that Libby knew all about Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA undercover agent weeks before he claimed, under oath before a grand jury, that he first learned about it from Tim Russert on or about July 10, 2003. He was briefed on it in June, he talked about it with Cheney, with Cheney's press mouthpiece, with the President's press secretary, with several other reporters before he talked to Tim Russert. As pointed out before, his lying doesn't seem very creative. It seems desperate, and perhaps torqued by a determination to keep Dick Cheney's key role in the outing of Valerie Plame from public view.

One huge question remains. Paragraph 25 of the Libby indictment reads as follows: "On or about September 26, 2003, the Department of Justice authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") to commence a criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's affiliation with the CIA in the spring of 2003." So that was Fitz's mission too, I presume. The lying, perjury and obstruction of justice he discovered along the way were in the course of investigating what one might call the "substantive" crime of unauthorized leaking of classified information and the protected identity of a CIA undercover agent. Valerie Plame, it has been disclosed, was engaged in what is probably the most important of all clandestine activity, espionage into proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including the nuclear ambitions of that charter member of the Axis of Evil, Iran.

The question then is this: what the hell happened to that investigation? The real one? Fitzgerald's meticulous work appears to have revealed a conspiracy originating in Cheney's office and in the Oval Office itself; that is to say, on at least a prima facie basis, Bush's casual declassification of a National Intelligence Estimate to counter Joseph Wilson's claims is an overt act in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act (leaking classified information) and the Identities Act (blowing the cover of an undercover agent). As has been suggested by prosecutors with a broader view of the investigation's potential, Cheney at the least should be an unindicted co-conspirator. And Bush? The man who promised that anyone working in his Administration would be terminated if found to have participated in the leaking of classified information to the press? Why isn't that the basis of a similar charge for obstruction of justice?

The clowns hanging around the White House at public expense, obsessed with being revealed as the liars they are about the phony justification for the war in Iraq -- they undermined the meticulous work of an American spy who was working in the very field these jerks claim is the key to avoiding Armageddon. They did it knowingly, secretively, traitorously. And the Libby case is what we get at the end of the process?

I hope Fitzgerald loses. I hope the jury figures out what a dodge, what a cop-out Fitzgerald's case is. Maybe they'll think along these lines. Maybe they'll say to themselves, how can you obstruct an investigation into something where the prosecutor says, at the end, no crime was committed? How can lies about perfectly legal activity be material and consequential? Why should we care? Fitzgerald, in his zeal for a meticulous and airtight case, sliced off a tiny piece of a huge and rancid pie. A case of transparent lying where he felt certain he could not miss with a conviction. The Big Case, the one where Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby, Armitage all worked together to undermine a hardworking American spy, and in so doing gave aid and comfort to America's "existential" enemies--for such a case, Fitzgerald had no appetite. He might, after all, have lost that untried case because of its order-of-magnitude greater legal difficulties and technicalities. And in losing, he might actually have accomplished something for the United States.

Alice Encounters the Steely Resolve of the Dimocrats

The dusty yellow lane wound its way through a dark overhanging forest. Alice was a little lost, but at least she had the comfort of knowing she must surely, at last, have chosen a path that would carry her as far away from the Mad Hatter and his sidekick The Troll as possible. Up ahead and out of sight, she thought she heard loud voices clamoring, but all she could see were dust motes dancing in bright shafts of sunlight angling through the trees.

In a little while, however, Alice knew she must still be in Wonderland (for over 6 years now!). Standing at the edge of yet another clearing, Alice saw a gazebo surrounded by a milling throng of expostulating Solons, harrumphing, yelling, thrusting their fists in the air and, in general, carrying on in an excited manner. There must have been at least 50 of them, although, with a closer look, Alice thought there might be only 49-1/2. What a curious number of Solons, she thought. Up on the raised platform of the gazebo was a woman with dark hair arranged in an elaborate 'do, with startlingly large eyes, attempting to gain control of the shouting crowd.

"Come to order!" mumbled a diminutive fellow in a morning coat, standing on the first step of the gazebo. "La Diva wishes to speak."

"Fellow Dimocrats," she began. "I have come all the way from my House to speak to you about a matter of urgent importance. The Mad Hatter is expanding his war against the Eastern Spades even as we meet. We must stop him! We must! We must!"

Alice made her way closer and found herself next to a man of medium height, dark hair and a sour demeanor. "Then stop him," he muttered.

"Excuse me, but what is La Diva talking about?" she asked.

He turned to her. "The Hatter's war," he said. "He's determined to corner the market in felt."

"And who are you?" Alice asked demurely.

"Who are you?" he replied abruptly. "Are you a page? If you are, you should leave now. This is no place for little girls."

"I'm Alice, and I'm lost," she said.

"You're in the right place then," he said, returning his gaze to the platform. He looked down again. "But to answer your question, I'm Rust Goldfine, and I'm a Solon. We're meeting here to stop the Hatter's war."

"I vote that we vote!" someone in the crowd shouted. "Vote now! Vote now! Let's express our disagreement with the Mad Hatter in no uncertain terms! Let's make it clear that we disagree with him. That will show him!"

"What is he talking about?" Alice asked Rust.

"Nothing," said Rust.

"The Mad Hatter will be held accountable for his war!" La Diva attempted to shout, but it came out in a kind of refined sing-song. "We really, really disagree, and we're going to tell him so!"

"Will that stop the Hatter's war?" asked Alice hopefully. She thought wars were dreadful, in the silly way of little girls everywhere.

"Not for a moment," said Rust.

"Then why is she saying that?" asked Alice.

"She's the new head of the Caucus of Dimocrats, who represent most of the Queen's subjects. They hate the war, and want her to end it no matter what."

"But the vote won't do that?" asked Alice, beginning to experience that disorienting sense of confusion which overtook so many of her afternoons in Wonderland.

"No. Only taking away the Hatter's money could do that," said Rust.

"And she can't do that," said Alice dismally.

"Oh no. She could at once." Rust pointed to the large burlap bags grouped around a stout oak at the edge of the clearing. "Those are full of gold coins, which the Mad Hatter & The Troll must have to keep fighting the Eastern Spades."

"And La Diva can deny that to the Hatter?" Alice said, allowing herself, against her better judgment, a moment of cautious hope.

"She could," said Rust. "But then she's afraid the Dimocrats will look as if they don't care about the Hatter's troops, who will die in the field without the gold. Or so they all say."

"So the gold protects them," Alice murmured.

"Oh no," said Rust. "The Hatter's soldiers keep dying, killed by Eastern Spades in the Hatter's war."

"Which La Diva could end by keeping the gold here," said Alice glumly.

"Smart little girl," said Rust. "Are you sure you're not a page?"

"So La Diva will show she cares about the Hatter's troops by sending them the gold they need to stay in the Land of the Eastern Spades where the Spades will kill them."

"Bingo, kid. Welcome to the Realm of the Dimocrats."

"One consolation, at least," muttered Alice.

"What's that?" asked Rust.

"At least now I know the Tea Party wasn't such an aberration. Until I get out of Wonderland, nothing's ever going to make sense."

Manufacturing consent on Iraq

There are many things I disagree with Noam Chomsky about. I'll say that by way of prelude. Yet it's beyond me to devise easy ripostes to questions posed by a mind so labyrinthine, so brilliant, so retentive. I think he may be one of those geniuses who lose all sense of context when they're talking about the everyday world. In his war against hypocrisy, in his determination to apply absolutely uniform rules to any nation or people under consideration, he reaches jarring conclusions that don't seem to jibe with common sense. "The United States is the world's greatest sponsor of state-supported terrorism." That kind of thing. In the terms he discusses, accepting his definitions and the intellectually arid conditions of his analysis, you can see how he gets there. His unflinching radicalism (reminiscent of Trotsky) permits no other conclusion.

Yet his analysis suggests the creation of a world that actual humans could never sustain. He seems terribly impatient with human foibles, and rejects reality, which is that we're always accepting one evil in the hope of avoiding a greater one. Unquestionably, the United States does bad things, and shares this proclivity with other powerful nations in world history. Yet overall, it's probably true that the USA commits evil-doing in the pursuit of living standards that the world community, in general, considers desirable and good, which is why world opinion (until Bush) cut us so much slack. Much more than Noam Chomsky cuts us.

I don't know if his view is Utopian, precisely, because I've never been able to descry what he really proposes as a way people should organize themselves politically and socially. He seems to say everything is bad, all polities are flawed, but that certain places (East Timor, Nicaragua, etc.) achieve a kind of temporary virtue on their way from subjugation toward social maturity. I think what he's really saying (whether he ever says it or not) is that human beings are bad news, and in this (ultimately trivial) observation he has a great deal of philosophical company. We know that, Noam; how many more books do you need to write reminding us?

Yet on his way to describing the corrupt senescence of an old body politic like the United States, he sometimes illuminates our predicament with lightning bolt brilliance. I think it's fair to say that it was Chomsky who first pointed out the illusion of believing that the mass media were "value neutral." The mass media, which shape political discourse and set the parameters of "acceptable alternatives," are owned by large corporate organizations with a vested interest in a certain kind of pro-business status quo. There is only so much time and space to discuss the political landscape, and stories are chosen, edited and presented based on such factors as entertainment value and the ways in which they fit into a narrative which serves the business interests of the medium presenting them. Information is owned by a relative handful of large business organizations in the United States. They don't broadcast just anything. They are not dedicated in some idealistic way to the dissemination of any and all opinions, as if free speech were their first and only priority. Not at all.

The limitations of the narrative, thus defined, Chomsky called "manufacturing consent." These limitations establish the bandwidth of acceptable discourse. "Responsible" opinion-makers cannot venture outside these boundaries. In the case of Iraq, we have a playing field which has a right hand boundary defined by Bush's determination to keep pouring men and money into the middle of Iraq's disintegrating Hell. The left hand boundary is marked by Congress, which by a certain majority prefers to express its "disagreement" with Bush's ideas through "nonbinding resolutions," which is a way to do absolutely nothing while appearing to be powerful.

That's it. There's your government in action, and it makes you, really, somewhat more sympathetic to Chomsky, when you're done thinking about it, than when you began. You share his frustration and rage. Within this manufactured debate are certain "truths" which are considered self-evident, but which are not only not self-evident but are not true at all. These include the following illusions:

1. Iraq's "failure" would result from an American withdrawal.
2. The suspension of funding for the war would leave American troops helplessly trapped in Baghdad.
3. America's enemies would be emboldened by America's "defeat."

These statements are all unequivocally false. They are used by both sides of the "debate" in order to avoid discussing reality. America's presence in Iraq at this point is solely to ensure disproportionate access to Iraq's huge oil reserves, and to satisy the insatiable desire of American business for the spoils of war. This, however, cannot be openly discussed, for it is the hidden agenda of the business conglomerations who control Congress, the President and the mass media.

The truth is that the disintegration of Iraq followed immediately from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It was a tripartite schism waiting to happen, and when Bush declared "Mission Accomplished!" he was almost right. Full accomplishment had to await the capture of Saddam, at which point the deal was done. Iraq as a coherent state was finished. It had "failed." This was not foreseen by the Bush Administration because they don't read books or understand history.

Cutting off funding for the war, which is Congress's clear and immediate responsibility, would not result in U.S. casualties. It would at first reduce them, then eliminate them altogether. The oft-repeated misrepresentation to the contrary, by the likes of La Diva, Mr. Mumbles and now Dianne Feinstein, is to create the impression that their pro-war proclivities (which serve, in Feinstein's case, her military contracting constituency in California) are in some way inevitable or the result of statesmanship. For the next two years, Bush has asked for $245 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, above and beyond the basic Pentagon budget, for which he also asks an 11% increase. Say no to these supplements, Congress. Tell Bush he can use the Pentagon budget to extract the troops.

Finally, the Muslim world understands much better than the typical American viewer of "Survivor" or "American Idol" why Iraq disintegrated, because the Muslim world knows why sectarian violence exists in Iraq. The USA's persistence in believing that Iraq's factions can be held together by an army simply demonstrates that America is stupid, willfully ignorant, or completely corrupted by its lust for oil. Leaving Iraq would offer evidence that we learned something, and would tend to quell anti-American hostility caused by the presence of an occupying force.

A few Senators and Representatives who operate outside the boundaries of manufactured consent will point these things out (Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold). They will not carry the day. Bush will escalate, the Congress will "disagree," and the war will go on, while the cash registers ring and the latest abduction in Aruba occupies center stage.

Why Scooter Lied

Lawyers are trained to think in matrices, a discipline that is enforced by the actual practice of law. Facts are sorted and grouped into patterns. Indeed, what the normal public might call an "event" a practicing litigator tends to call a "fact pattern." Are the elements of a crime, a tort, a breach of contract present? It depends on how all the facts fit together. This habit of mind eventually becomes instinctual, a preconception that shapes the apprehension of reality. (It can drive you crazy, in fact; it might be a good reason to quit practicing law.)

The instinct might be most acute when the lawyer suspects, in an ass-puckering moment, that he himself might actually be in legal jeopardy. For an ethical violation, or an error or omission, or even the commission of a crime. Given that lawyers are often operating right out there at the fringe of legal permissibility (it's why they're hired, to take on a legally fraught situation where the client is in dire straits and needs a risk-taker), such moments are not as rare as the lay public might think. Every litigating lawyer, as a wise senior attorney once told me long ago, lives in his own private hell.

At such a moment, the lawyer's mind seeks frantically for the escape route, the exception within the statute, the bulletproof defense. If none seems immediately available, the legal instinct is to examine what has already happened to see if the tweaking of reality might improve things. The invention of a "new" fact, one that never happened, just might take the pressure off. A substitute matrix, a better reality than the bitter one that keeps the lawyer awake at night.

Scooter Libby is now on trial in Washington, D.C. for perjury, lying and obstruction of justice, but all the counts relate to the same central dilemma. Libby told Patrick Fitzgerald and the grand jury that he learned about Valerie Plame's CIA connection from reporters, and not the other way around. It wasn't true. At trial, Scooter now must sell the argument that he was so busy he can't remember how he first found out. This is isn't true either, and Fitzgerald knows it. Fitzgerald knows it because of Title 50, Section 421, United States Code Annotated, the Protection of Certain National Security Information, or the "Identities Act."

Here are the elements, the matrix. The perpetrator must:

1. Have authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent; and
2. Intentionally disclose information identifying such agent to an individual without classified clearance; and
3. Know that the information disclosed identifies such covert agent; and
4. Know that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States.

Those are a lot of semicolons and ands. Yet Scooter, looking down that list (after David Addington, one hears, informed him about its nasty applicability), could find little solace within it. (1) is all too easy: Scooter had high security clearance as the Vice President's chief of staff, and his knowledge of Valerie Plame's name and role were the result of a classified CIA briefing. (2) Well, he told a bunch of reporters about Valerie Plame's connection to Joe Wilson's trip, and threw in that she worked for the Agency. The reporters did not have clearance. (3) Not too tough there: he gave the reporters her name, the best kind of information for identifying a covert agent. And (4) Oops. The CIA immediately demanded an investigation after Novak's column "outed" Valerie Plame, contending it was a violation of this very Section 421 --highly suggestive of a previous intent to keep her name secret.

So Scooter, simply doing a piece of typical hatchet work for Dick Cheney, trying to please the old Side-Smiler, suddenly found himself the point man for a heavy fine and a possible ten-year stretch in the federal pen. When questioned by Fitzgerald, and while testifying before the grand jury, Scooter didn't know whether anyone was going to be charged under the Identities Act. So he came up with something. Something a little desperate and frankly unworthy of a published novelist. He decided to finesse matters by short-circuiting the very first requirement up there. Element #1. He would say that he didn't learn Valerie's name from his access to classified information. Scooter would say that the reporters told him. The bear trap of Section 421 could remain unsprung.

There were two problems with this neat evasion. First, it wasn't true. Second, it was transparent as hell, and a prosecutor as smart as Fitzgerald would immediately recognize it for the pathetic dodge it was.

But, to be fair, I have a question: so what? Patrick Fitzgerald never indicted anyone for the real crime, the real, serious damage, which was the intentional disclosure of a covert agent's name. A covert agent who worked undercover in anti-proliferation issues through the "brass plate" cover of Brewster Jennings Co., who may have run foreign agents whose lives were placed in jeopardy by the sudden disclosure of their cover by the Executive Branch of the United States of America. Fitzgerald passed on that. So if Scooter obstructed an investigation underlying a prosecution that Fitzgerald never intended to pursue, what does an incidental lie about disclosure have to do with...well, anything? Is Fitzgerald's righteous zeal about protecting the "integrity of the system?" Not worth the candle, in my opinion. Fitzgerald knew why Scooter lied, Scooter knew, and now you do if you didn't before.

Fitzgerald's case is makeweight, an excuse for pulling back from the real issue, an alibi for not pursuing Rove and Cheney, a reason to hang around the power center of Washington D.C. for a couple of years. Scooter's life is wrecked, but he never seemed like the baddest of the bad. He was doing a dirty job, as lawyers often do. And, as lawyers often do, he got too creative at the wrong moment and found there was hell to pay.

Amateur hour in Washington, D.C.

"Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense." Dr. Johnson, about 200 years ago.

I'm not so sure in W's case, although this may simply result from Bush's position outside the bell curve of normal human stupid-variation. He's always talked nonsense about Iraq. "It's the central front in the war on terror," "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," and so on. Always, always I get the sense that Bush, confined as he is to the emotional age he achieved before descending to the bottom of countless whiskey bottles, thinks like a 9 year old, and not like a precocious 9 year old. More precisely, like a 9 year old cribbing a social studies paper on Iraq from the I-J volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, circa 1955. What distinguishes the truly simple mind from the discerning mind is the inability of the former to think in terms of simultaneous complex variables, and the tendency of the simpleton to use "concepts" instead of "facts." Facts are hard to deal with, because you have to read, think and synthesize them into a pattern with other facts you have learned the same way. This is what really smart people instinctively know, and always do. They know there are never any shortcuts to understanding anything. Bush doesn't do things like that. He grabs at the broadest generalities he can find and settles there, permanently.

Bush began his Iraq war on the simple proposition that everyone in Iraq was an "Iraqi" who was a "person" just like every other person in the world, and all people like Western-style democracy because it's the best system. That's it. He started there, and he's still there. If you listen to anything he says about Iraq, that reductive nullity lies at the very root. Thus, he identifies the "enemy" in Iraq (as he did in the SOTU address) as a non-specific, freedom-hating killer. Period. The "government" in Iraq is not an Iranian-influenced coalition of Shiite parties in an opportunistic alliance with Kurdish leaders (the Kurds cooperating in order to assure their eventual complete independence in Kurdistan, with the inclusion of Kirkuk), but the "democratically elected government of Iraq." Thus, anyone not cooperating with this central government holed up in a six-mile fortress in Baghdad is the "enemy" who should be hunted down and killed, with the assistance of as many American soldiers as we can scrounge up.

I read other blogs, of course, including the big collating blogs like the Huffington Post, and where I probably part company with a lot of dissident commentary is in the ascription of cupidity to Bush, or the tendency to place him at the center of a vast criminal conspiracy with other Bushian malfeasors. I can probably be quoted to my own contradiction on this point, but I don't see Bush's awful incompetence, secrecy, and (in effect) evil-doing as primarily the result of bad intentions. Cheney, I see otherwise. There the charges of malice aforethought make sense. Cheney is an undermining force in American life with huge destructive tendencies. While not half as smart as he thinks he is, he's clever enough to engineer war-profiteering on an enormous scale and to play Bush like a badly-tuned violin.

Bush is not now, nor is he likely to become, Big Rich by Texas standards. He doesn't even have $100 million, the minimum "Unit" necessary to hang with J.R. Ewing and the boys at the Oil Barons Club. Cheney, on the other hand, has gotten very, very rich, and while he'll never live long enough to enjoy the bonanza he could have reaped after this Administration sinks beneath the oil slick of history (so many grateful CEO's would have crowded round), he loves that game of making rich people even richer, of basking in the reflected glow of other Insiders who love war and all the money it can make.

Bush is just a natural born screw-up, a guy who could never become a pro at anything. A permanent amateur, and not a talented one. I continue to think, as I have said before, that his presence in the Oval Office says something profoundly disturbing about the state of the union, and maybe what it says most of all is that the abandonment of the political arena by all the talented Americans who decided to make money instead left behind only two classes of people to run the country and take our money in taxes for their own use: fools and liars, and they're both in ascendance in Washington now.

The Pondman Wrote Us about the POTUS Giving his SOTUS

I still don't quite believe it. It's a bad dream, isn't it? George W. Bush must be the strangest political occurrence in the history of the American republic. Whenever I see him behind the podium, his thin lips pursed in that simian pout, struggling to explain how he will clear all nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula, half of me wants to believe this is all some sort of collective hallucination. This man cannot be the President of the United States of America. The system cannot be so basically flawed that it could come to this, a genuine mental defective ruling over the mightiest nation on Earth. It would be only slightly less startling if Lonny, the inbred boy banjo player in "Deliverance," were to mount the dais and deliver the same speech. Although Lonny would be a genuinely sympathetic character, and one with actual talent.

No, we've got George. It must be true, because he was on TV last night. By a fortuitous juxtaposition, I picked up Peter Galbraith's essential "The End of Iraq" the other evening at Borders, and I was halfway through it when the speech began. The book had impressed upon me the deep complexity of the political situation in Iraq. It also described the context (an Oval Office meeting between Bush and leaders of the Kurds) in which Bush betrayed, two months before the invasion he ordered, his complete ignorance about the two Muslim sects vying for power in Iraq. Yet there was Bush, struggling to pronounce words, fumbling through the text of a speech written by someone else, reducing the entire world to a Manichean duality of "us" and the "enemy," and reiterating that the "enemy" in Iraq must be defeated to complete the "mission." Willfully or haphazardly, Bush conflated the 9/11 attackers with this same "enemy," lumping them all together as terrorists who must be defeated in the "defining struggle of our age." The Congressional house went stone quiet as Bush described the dark world of his fearful imagining, one haunted every moment by an unseen, mononlithic enemy comprised of "killers" and "freedom haters."

He's so deeply weird. Taken to its logical extreme (as one must with Bush's "analysis"), Bush simply proposes to keep killing until no one is left to challenge us. We'll never be safe, no victory will ever be final, not in Iraq, not anywhere. On whose side are we fighting in Iraq? The good guys, presumably. A fussbudget like Galbraith unhelpfully points out that the "good guys" in Iraq are members of parties with names like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), spawned and supported by Shiites in Iran, or the Dawa Party of Nouri al-Maliki, organized and strengthened during the days of exile in Syria. Presumably, the "good guys" are to be propped up and supported only by Iraqi regular army and police, Sunnis and Shiites who have risen above their sectarian identification (or who desperately need a job), cooperating with the Americans. The task of this mythical alliance is to defeat all the "bad guys," who must be Sunni insurgents, Shiite death squads, Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Syrian and Iranian infiltrators, freelance Arab mercenaries and anyone else who causes trouble, such as the Kurdish separatists in the north, who have a de facto separate country already in operation. Victory will be complete when none of these groups causes any trouble anymore, and the coalition government elected by the purple-fingered masses, those who have not already fled Iraq (as 40% of the former middle class have already done) rules a serene, prosperous, democratic country.

That's the plan. It doesn't matter how long it will take. At some point, al-Maliki or some other prime minister will actually venture outside the Green Zone and take control of a united country where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds live in tranquil harmony. Would you ever grasp the slightest hint of the complexity of the undertaking from Bush's speech last night? Looked at in all its daunting ramifications, why on Earth would 20,000 more American troops (which Bush allocated to specific zones of Iraq in his speech, I suppose to save the "enemy" time in figuring out the deployment) make any difference?

Still, he must really be up there, behind the podium, his simple, vacuous mind struggling with huge, complex problems involving many layers and many moving parts which interact, one with the other to produce a kaleidoscopic mess. Congress looks on, horrified, yet politically too timid to do what they really ought to do: Use the Constitution to move Bush and Cheney out. Stop pretending anything about this is normal. Seize control before it's too late.