Imus in his mourning

When you're at a wedding reception, or cocktail party, or bar mitzvah, you experienced the phenomenon. You find yourself gradually raising your voice to be heard, until you begin to strain your vocal cords with the effort. If you are, like your humble essayist, someone who relies primarily on irony and subtle nuance for his conversational contributions, you find yourself out of your element, and the latter stages of the soiree are given over to silent gestures: nods of the head, a smile frozen on your face like the rictus of death, shrugs. Trying to be heard over the din is aggravating, even pointless.

Those who study such things, social psychologists, audiologists, whoever, conclude that what's going on is a positive feedback loop of volume escalation. As each person raises his or her voice to be heard, others do likewise, until everyone in the room is shouting like a lunatic on the wrong medication. If we were more interested in intelligible conversation, we would probably occasionally shout out "reset!" and everyone would lower their voices to half-volume, from which position on the dial it would again begin to rise. But then, that would spoil the party; the idea is not to have conversations in the first place.

In the Big Conversational Pit of America, the world of talk radio, simulcast TV-radio (such as Imus's erstwhile show), talking head cable "news" shows, et cetera, the conversation has gotten very loud indeed. The proliferation of venues brought on by FM and satellite radio, cable TV channels, in addition to the preexisting world of AM talk radio, means that anyone interested in talk formats about current events, including the shenanigans of "celebrity" culture, has many choices. Reasonable, measured voices tend not to attract attention or to hold an audience; witness the decline and disappearance of Aaron Brown from CNN. To attract a following, those inclined to be the loudest, "edgiest," and most outrageous gradually increase their volume and their offensiveness until they become prominent and can command a following of American listeners who like this sort of thing, and, by and large, they are most of the listening public. Thus, we have the mutant evolution of the "shock jocks" like Howard Stern, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly and, of course, Don Imus, as well as the cadres of cutthroat "commentators" like Ann Coulter. Their shtick is that they will say anything, particularly something very offensive and deeply personal about anyone who gets lined up in their crosshairs. Their audiences expect this; it's why they tune in. The best known radio psychologist was Dr. Laura, who perfected a kind of non-therapeutic attack psychology.

Inevitably, the pressure to maintain this kind of outrageous imbalance leads these weird individuals, who by a process of self-selection were never very stable to begin with (despite the money, who would want to live like that?), over a line of "acceptability." It isn't what Imus said, after all, that did him in. The problem was his choice of target. He was cheered on when he was merely being anti-Semitic or generally unfair; that's why, to repeat, people were interested in listening in the first place. But he picked on a group of dedicated women athletes, African-Americans, who had done nothing to earn his scorn or ridicule. Psychologically, I think what happens at a moment like that is that the American audience feels deeply ashamed that they made such an asshole famous and rich in the first place. They're appalled at their own vulgarity, at their role in elevating such a jerk to a position of power and influence. So, as Freud would instruct us, they "displace" their anger on to the shock jock in an orgy of sanctimonious bullshit. How dare he? Doesn't he know what's fair?

Of course he doesn't. Or does, but that's not the point. Imus was deeply confused by the reaction to words he considered part of his modus operandi. His bread and butter. How could people turn on him like that?

Ultimately, these stories have little to do with the "content" of what these people say, and everything to do with a steady coarsening and debasement of American public discourse. There is a declining market for civil, respectful and thoughtful conversation. The barbarians have crashed the party, and the only ones we can hear are those shouting the loudest.

So long, Kurt

I came to Kurt Vonnegut's writing later in life. It's a self-defeating habit at times, my resistance to reading a popular writer because of a contempt for popularity. At other times, it's served me well; for example, I delayed reading John Irving for a long time, and then about 50 pages of "The World According to Garp" convinced me I'd been "right" all along.

But I wish I'd read Kurt Vonnegut when he first made a splash back in the late 60's. "Slaughterhouse Five" was a mesmerizing book. It's amazing what a talented writer who endured World War II can come up with. Think of them, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. All brilliant writers. Their youths had been seared by the most cataclysmic drama of modern times, and it colored everything they wrote.

Kurt had a style that was instantly recognizable and sui generis. A sort of fantasy realism. Stories and characters that were both familiar and essentially alien. They were a vehicle for his desire to express his disappointment with the unsatisfactory character of the human race, its penchant for cruelty and selfishness, its essential short-sightedness. It would have been difficult for him to have a different view. A depressive who, as a young POW, was on corpse patrol after the firebombing of Dresden. That would do it.

Kurt, in his later years, became as bitter as the aging and raging Mark Twain, to whom he often referred. He called the human race a disease of Mother Earth, and archly suggested that global warming was her "fever," by which she meant to burn us out of existence. I think that's the depression talking. Humans are what they are, and if we say we're flawed, a "disease," it's because we're mammals with the capacity to imagine ourselves otherwise. Kurt also knew, like the Dalai Lama, that the only true palliative for all that war, destruction, disappointment, sadness and death was human kindness, which he promoted as his only true religious impulse. Another thing I like about him.

Prescient artists, part 2

In his comic anti-war classic, Catch-22, Joseph Heller painted a soul-lacerating picture of a group of American flyboys trapped on a Mediterranean Island in the middle of World War II by the career ambitions of a dimwitted commanding officer. Colonel Cathcart, who kept an actual ledger of "feathers in his cap" and "black eyes" in his office, routinely raised the number of missions required before transfer to non-combat status, so the crews in his squadron watched hopelessly as the horizon of safety retreated forever before them, from 25 to 35 to 45 to 55, etc., ad infinitum. John Yossarian, the anti-hero of the anti-war novel, rationally concluded that Colonel Cathcart was as much an enemy to him as the German batteries trying to blast him out of the sky. Anyone trying to kill him, he said, was his enemy.

Cathcart was from a privileged background and had sawdust for brains. He overrated himself massively, but his stupidity was mitigated by the crafty behind-the-scenes manipulations of Colonel Korn, the bald, efficient, ruthless aide who used Cathcart to promote his own ambitions. Yossarian, up against this pair, resorts to increasingly dangerous and insubordinate strategems to break free of certain death in the sky. One can't be sure at the end whether he succeeds, but no one who reads this book can fail to appreciate the ways that lower echelon soldiers are used by higher-ups for self-aggrandizement, even when it means that men will die for the sake of vanity.

In today's news we see that the "lack of funding" (and a lack of replacement troops) for the Iraq war may "lead" to extension of the tours of duty for all 145,000 troops in theatre. Nothing much has changed since those harrowing days on the Isle of Pianosa in 1943. Soldiers are still being used by higher-ups for political ends, even when it means they will die. By this point, even Cathcart-Bush would have to conclude, after talking it through with Cheney-Korn, that the question of "winning" in Iraq has been answered. By analogy, Yossarian knew the Allies had defeated the Germans even as Cathcart kept asking him to risk his life by flying missions. In Iraq, the American soldiers know that no matter how long they stay, Iraq is not going to stabilize into a secure democracy with its three principal factions living in joyous harmony, able to "defend itself," holding regular "elections," sharing power and revenue and all the rest. They're in Iraq not because success is near but because they're not allowed to come home, and Bush will ratchet up the pressure on them, sacrifice their lives, so he does not have to back down before a hostile Congress. The soldiers in Iraq know they face two enemies, the murky cadres of insurgents who detonate bombs and fire RPG rounds at them while they patrol the streets, and George W. Bush, who will wear them out and get them killed so that his colossal failure can remain a "work in progress" instead of a fait accompli. I doubt that literary analogies will be much comfort to American grunts in Iraq. With or without funding, they will remain in Iraq so that Bush does not have to make yet another, final entry in the black-eye column of the ledger.

Prescient artists

Colonel Turgidson (reading):
"...My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.

Muffley:
There's nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.

Turgidson:
Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

The above is one of many brilliant snatches of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's black humor masterpiece, "Dr. Strangelove." Till the very end, Kubrick indulges our hope the world can be saved from nuclear annihilation. The foolproof safety features of mutually assured destruction, however, are undone by one crazy commanding officer in the state of Washington, who is motivated to start World War III by a single incident of sexual impotence, which he attributes to a Commie plot to poison the water supply with flouride. He games the system, initiating "Plan R," which permits a lower echelon officer to give the go-code on nuclear retaliation. It looks hopeless until Captain Mandrake, the British adjutant to the mad General Jack Ripper, deciphers the recall code and the B-52s are turned back. Except for one, piloted by the dedicated and extremely competent Major Kong, who gets through and delivers his fatal payload. The world ends to the strains of "We'll Meet Again."

"Dr. Strangelove" was set in the most frigid period of the Cold War. The plot devices are simple, in a way; General Ripper's scheme is based upon a thorough understanding of Air Force procedures. He figures out a loophole, Plan R, that will allow him to seize the initiative from the civilians who have neither "the time, nor the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought."

The peculiar dynamics of the USA-USSR standoff do not exist in their original form today. The nuclear threat, however, is more dangerous than ever because the variables have been multiplied, and unlike the clash of secular ideologies involved in the old Cold War, the conflicts today are fueled by the inherent irrationality of religious zealotry. When I heard George Bush liken the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to a new "crusade," I thought we had entered a new phase of world history that would make the mad logic of Dr. Strangelove look simple by comparison. Like General Ripper's explanation for ending the world, George Bush's rationale for invading Iraq, at bottom, is that it was "the right thing to do." When he has been pressed in the few lengthy interviews he has ever given on the subject, that is where he returns. He isn't going to explain it because he doesn't think he needs to. He becomes agitated and impatient with anyone who could think otherwise. He shares General Ripper's complacent self-satisfaction. With just the right arrangement of power, we're always at the mercy of such people.

Thus, we have stirred up regional instability and antagonism in the most unstable and antagonistic region in the world today. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and is willing to share, and has shared, nuclear technology with countries such as Iran and North Korea. Iran is embarked on a program to enrich uranium to 97% U-235 with "thousands of centrifuges" (or so its demented, Holocaust-denying leader claims). Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt want the bomb. Israel is armed to the teeth with hundreds of atom bombs and probably thermonuclear bombs. Israel has the missiles, land- and submarine-based, to deliver them to Damascus, Cairo, Riyadh and Tehran. Also to Natanz, where Iran is enriching uranium. Iran wants to enrich uranium to a weapons-grade isotope because U-235, unlike plutonium, can be used to build "gun-type" A-bombs, the Little Man model used on Hiroshima. It's the simplest design, far less complicated than the Fat Man implosion device dropped on Nagasaki. Little Boy was so reliable it was never tested before deployment.

By invading Iraq, Bush both empowered and atagonized Iran. He encouraged Iran to become bellicose and to accelerate its "self-defensive" nuclear program, just as Bush did with North Korea. One of the great ironies is that to the extent the invasion of Iraq was designed to protect Israel, to "pacify" the region by democratizing it, the invasion has had more the effect of swatting a hornets' nest with a Louisville Slugger.

I think ultimately Israel will "pacify" the region along lines General Ripper would have approved. But let us not forget that General Ripper's scheme was finally undone because of an X-factor he knew nothing about: the Soviet Doomsday Machine, which kicked into retaliation automatically, and inexorably, upon the American attack. And Bush's strategy was undone by the simpler fact that he had no idea what the hell he was doing.

Monday, Monday, can't trust that day

I live in a nice neighborhood, which in the typical American sense means a zone of well-maintained private residences, upscale shops and places to eat, suburban office parks and malls, and abundant greenery. Public schools, for the most part, look like medium-security prisons, inside and out, and all public amenities are indifferently maintained, again in the quintessential American style. I buy coffee out at the local boutique grocery store every morning, and as I drive home I use my outstretched arm holding the cup as a shock absorber to keep from spilling the rich, oily brew (again, it's how we do it in America now). The beverage holders won't work because the streets are seamed, rutted and potholed. If you pay attention as you drive, it can get to you, the rhythmic lurches and bone-jarring bumps of your car's suspension as you crash along the road.

I was watching Jeff Sessions, Republican Senator from Alabama, on C-SPAN the other day extolling the sense of "private enterprise" in the U.S.A. versus the socialist approaches of the Western European nations. He pointed out that we take care of the "truly needy" in America, but do not provide the "coddling" welfare state of the Nordic nations, or even France and Germany. The spirit of individual initiative is alive and well in America, Jeff proudly asserted to an empty Senate chamber, and it's why our economy is the envy of the world. Sessions sees himself as a kind of bipartisan fence-mender, I think, and laments the lack of cooperation in Congress, by which I think he means the unwillingness of liberals to see things in his practical, common sense way.

What Sessions leaves out, I think, is that the United States does operate a welfare state as surely as the Netherlands or Sweden. It just has different beneficiaries. It's true the effective taxation rates are higher in Western Europe, but we have to remember that taxation provides such essentials as comprehensive medical coverage, which in the United States has to be purchased individually, at higher and higher costs. The Europeans ride around on serviceable public transportation, such as commuter and long-haul passenger trains, and on highly useful metro and subway systems, and when they drive, it's on roads that are smooth and well-built. Entering a train station or airport in Europe is not an exercise in soul-killing depression, as it often is in the USA, because value is placed on public spaces, and such places are often bright and cheery.

So the Europeans receive a bang for the tax buck. Americans pay taxes too, but it's for the sake of the military establishment. That's the forest which Jeff Sessions cannot see because of his American boosterism. As Chalmers Johnson describes in his "blowback" trilogy (particularly Nemesis), if you add it all up, the U.S.A. spends three-fourths of a trillion dollars every year on defense, including the military and intelligence, and taking into account the budgets of the Department of Energy and State, for example, for nuclear weapons and diplomatic spying, respectively. This is one-half of the discretionary budget of the federal government. $1.5 trillion is the cash-in, cash-out system of Social Security and Medicare. Social Security runs a slight "surplus" which the federal government "borrows" and spends on "general" expenses, such as defense. The social entitlements, in effect, have their own tax system which the federal government administers and undermines by stealing its necessary reserves.

European nations have tiny budgets for defense compared to the American colossus. That's why they can afford nice trains, smooth roads and well-maintained parks, and can make sure their citizens don't have to die prematurely because they have to choose between going to the doctor or becoming homeless. Servicing the military-industrial complex with American tax dollars has become so ingrained in the minds of solons like Jeff Sessions that they no longer see it for what it obviously is. Spending money on war and materiel is the American emphasis, and has been ever since the early 1940's. As a publicly-supported enterprise, the military is socialist to its core, but it is socialism of the kind the late, not-so-great U.S.S.R. practiced. The Congress is so locked into the inexorable logic of military spending, with its positive feedback loops of defense contractors and bought-and-paid-for legislators, that no internal force can now dislodge its stranglehold on American priorities. As Johnson describes, external forces will, in time, break the system apart, but it will be a disintegration no smoother than that ride home from the boutique coffee bar.

The desperate search for silver linings

In a conversation recently, I remarked that Bush's 8 years in office constituted 1/9th of what we used to think of as a typical American life span of 72 years. It was a depressing thought: for many Americans, about 11% of their entire lives will have been spent enduring the consequences of this terrible mistake. For those who don't reach even this modest milestone, for those whose lives are cut tragically short (say by a roadside bomb in Anbar province), the fraction is larger. For thousands of those soldiers, in fact, the ratio might be one year of Bush for every three years spent on Earth. The lesson is stark: electing someone this bad as President has a tremendously powerful impact on the course of your life. The effects are not something you shoo away with a flick of the hand. We live with them, and we'll live with them a long time after (finally, mercifully) he gets the hell out of the White House.

Can any good come out of it? I remember that practically the very day he seemed to have been "elected" in 2000, my very first thought was that the world had just lost its last opportunity to deal effectively with global warming. I've written before that my familiarity with the subject of CO2 concentrations in the troposphere began with reading I did in Hawaii in the late 1960's. It struck me then as it strikes me now that of all the environmental imperatives, climate change because of CO2 build-up was the most inexorable, the most dangerous, the least impossible to ignore safely. Yet Bush ignored it, in favor of temporal, venal considerations, with a myopic (and evil) callousness that exceeded even the pessimistic predictions of how indifferent he would be. So any hope has to be tempered by the realization the window of opportunity may have closed. When the largest polluter (and "moral" leader) on Earth increases its CO2 production for eight years, and fights tooth and nail against international cooperation as a reflection of the anti-social tendencies of one small man in charge of that polluting machine, it's hard to be sanguine. You can't just keep throwing away long stretches of time where you do nothing. The IPCC report yesterday was devastating. It should make you sick to read it. The living world is in mortal peril, and the danger zone keeps getting advanced as the evidence around us keeps popping into sudden view.

Yin and yang. After eight years of Bush, maybe the United States will become a constructive force again simply because his presence forced us to take honestly into account the "shadow side" of our national personality. You can't really miss it now, unless you're an empathy-deprived jerk like the guy in the Oval Office. Jung would counsel us to perform a countrywide integration. We don't have a good-intentioned, freedom-loving democracy to "export" anymore. Get serious. We invaded a country and set in motion 650,000 deaths by violence, and then fought all serious attempts to count the number so the damage could be assessed. We take innocent people from countries we happen to be invading, peasants sold to us by bounty hunters, and deliberately lock them up at the eastern end of Cuba so they'll have no Constitutional rights. We torture them and drive them crazy, for no reason at all. We tell their lawyers the people we've tortured confessions out of can't testify about the torture because it's a "state secret." We lock up Americans in American military dungeons and hold them without charges on the basis of Presidential fiat. The central government spies on Americans without warrants. We pull people off the streets and send them to foreign countries because we know they'll be tortured and abused. We piss on the Kyoto protocol and every other decent international attempt to save life on Earth, then lie about substituting something else in its place.

If we honestly come to terms with all of this, we may start getting over ourselves. That could be the silver lining. Bush will go on forever with his particularly rancid form of megalomania, but we don't have to do that, too. Instead of spending $2 trillion on a war that is not only not necessary but will result in massive blowback, all under the delusion of "doing something good," we can find the $1.5 trillion deemed necessary to rebuild the American infrastructure of roads, public transportation, bridges and schools. We can cooperate with the international community and ask for its help with rogue terrorist elements. We can submit ourselves to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (sorry Bush, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld - if you want to read some history, try the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution). We can dispense with the deranging notion of American Exceptionalism and accept ourselves for what we really are -- humans like other humans, with good and bad parts, who must examine their intentions to discover their true purpose, and proceed with the humility appropriate to the precariousness of life.

Einstein's Joke

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was so comprehensible. I would not presume to think I could get inside Einstein's brain, even for a moment, and figure out what he meant. There is simply too much room in there, and I would quickly get lost. Maybe something that is incomprehensible is the idea there have been human beings so smart they could imagine new rules governing all of reality, while holding down an unrelated day job, and then proceed to prove, mathematically and rigorously, that the rules are right. Such minds, so very few in number, exist at the far, far, far right extreme of the bell curve of human intelligence. I have been amused at times by the efforts of others to explain to me how smart Einstein was. I think such efforts simply demonstrate that we're uncomfortable with the incomprehensible; the only person who could even approximately explain how smart Einstein was is Einstein himself. Because everyone else must explain Einstein's intelligence in terms which they understand, and their explanations are subsumed in the greater set of Einstein's own understandings, which include subtleties and connections which only he could comprehend. After Einstein, physics veered increasingly toward the heuristic, into quantum physics, for example, which presents many fun paradoxes without actually describing phenomena that humans can understand or explain convincingly. A fortiori the quasi-mystical formulations of string theory.

This is only a hunch, but I think Einstein intended his comment as a cosmic joke. I have never heard anyone else say that, although his comment is widely quoted. It's taken at face value, and usually in terms that suggest humans should congratulate themselves on their mastery of the basic laws that govern all physical phenomena, at least at the macro- (larger than subatomic) scale. A mastery adumbrated by Richard Feynman's very subtle observation that it is remarkable that the real world can be expressed in the abstract symbolism of mathematics: why can we quantify reality?

It's overused, the idea that there is a deep and subtle connection between "Western" physics and Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen subjectivity. But I think that's the heuristic (the word is handy today) approach best suited to getting Einstein's joke. We think there is an essential congruence between the reality conveyed to us by our sensory apparatus and the rules for comprehension we have devised because we mistake our perceptions for reality. Einstein was saying, if you ask me, that it is impossible for humans to surmount this essential limitation in our conception of the universe; thus, our comprehension is itself the main obstacle. We cannot get beyond that comprehension. Of course our highly-developed ideas about the workings of the universe strike us a complete understanding of everything; those ideas simply reduce to mathematical formulations what we're able to see, which isn't the same as reality at all. Einstein was not saying humans should congratulate themselves on their epic discovery of the true nature of reality. He was hinting that we're the eternal prisoners of illusion.

Einstein's Joke: no setup, no premise, no punch line. I guess he was a genius comedian, too.

A lesson from the Bard

"who steals my purse steals trash, . . . But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed." Shakespeare, Othello.

Thinking way back, most of us can probably remember Bush in his 2000 campaign, wherein he presented himself as an honest cowpoke on his way to Washington to restore honesty and decency, a kind of prep school Matt Dillon who would make short work of all this Clinton-era lying and politicking. A mere six years and two months after his inauguration, the charlatan disgracing the Oval Office is barely recognizable as that simulacrum of common decency created by Rove's PR machine. Such startling reversals ought to make us deeply distrust a couple of things.

One is that bane of the McLuhan Age, the media artifact constructed from sound bites and imagery. For many Americans (though never for me), Bush's affected pose as a no-nonsense executive with a constructive agenda, and a low tolerance for partisan bullshit, closed the sale. Even his inability to speak grammatically correct English was seen in endearingly positive terms.

The second thing to worry about is not so technology-dependent. The Shakespeare quote above is from Iago, the arch-villain of Shakespeare's great tragic meditation on the nature of duplicity and jealousy. Iago - the liar, the manipulator, the wounded narcissist, the false friend, the betrayer - goes so far as to defend his "reputation" for integrity as his most valuable personal asset. Thus, to further his evil designs, Iago dons the cloak of the righteous as part of his scheme of ingratiation and betrayal, and the vain (and vulnerable) Othello buys it hook, line and sinker.

I suppose humans are simply genetically programmed to accept, at the conscious level, the superficial portrayal of probity and noble purpose. We want to believe it, and the pathological personality relies upon this human gullibility for the success of his schemes, which depend upon the manipulations of emotion where other, normal people use the honest attachments of emotion to fulfill their own needs. Good people do not want to live their lives in a state of guarded anticipation that some new acquaintance, a man seemingly so honest, so forthright, so well-intentioned, is actually a mendacious, cold, merciless, soul-dead conniver, with an anti-human and anti-Earth agenda, who takes pleasure in the infliction of torturous pain on humiliated enemies, who loves the sulfurous stench and bloody carnage of battle. How could half the American people get this guy so wrong? How could 30% of the American people continue to do so?

Well, it really did happen, right here in the United States. There's a line from another exceptional piece of art that's brought to mind as the end of the Bush nightmare hoves into view. In "The Lives of Others," the German film about the Stasi of pre-Glasnost East Germany, the persecuted playwright Georg Dreyer can at last confront, after the fall of the Wall, a Stasi minister who ruined Dreyer's relationship with the love of his life. After the minister callously brags about the power he once enjoyed, Dreyer walks away with the line, "And to think that a man like you once ruled a country."

Veto This, L'il Georgie!

President Bush and Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin appear to be on a collision course that seemed always fated to be, ever since Feingold's commendable attempt to censure Bush for his systematic violation of the Fourth Amendment (and for Bush's routine commission of felonies connected therewith) arising from the warrantless spying conducted by the National Security Agency. Senator Russ was able to corral only three other senators to take this principled stand along with him (Leahy, Harkin and Boxer). With the success of the 2006 elections, certainly other senators would join him now, such as Bernie Sanders of Vermont and probably Sherrod Brown of Ohio. It is in the nature of principled leadership to await the arrival of stragglers who take principled stands as soon as it seems safe to do so. Thus, Hillary Clinton, et alia, will be along as soon as the public opinion polls tell them it's time to be a hero.

Not so Russ. He has always done things his own quirky way, a way which would have appealed to other troublemakers like John Adams, Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It would be difficult to find someone with a past history more different from our spoiled, petulant, lazy President. The grandson of Jewish Russian immigrants, Feingold grew up in Wisconsin, attended public high school, earned a B.A. at UW-Madison along with admission to Phi Beta Kappa and a Rhodes Scholarship, earned a second bachelor's degree at Oxford, and then graduated from Harvard Law School. While Bush pretends, in his usual fraudulent way, to be an American success story, Feingold is the real thing. Feingold has always played by the rules, and then some. His successful legislative campaigns have, in the main, been supported only by individual contributions from Wisconsin residents. It must disturb him profoundly to watch a man like Bush, who casually disgraces the Constitution, the rule of law, and America's good name, carry on as if he were a real President.

Bush is now threatening to veto the Iraq bill-in-waiting from Congress. Full of his customary bombast and tempestuous bullshit, Bush pretends that his concern is for the troops he has stranded in Iraq, on a suicide mission, for the last 4+ years. Without funding, he storms, the troops will have to remain in Iraq on longer tours, with substandard armor, etc. This is Rove & Cheney whispering in his ear, of course. Bush must never, never, never say the obvious thing, which is that running out of money means his new job is to get all the troops home safely with the cash on hand.

Enter Senator Feingold, who is ready with new legislation to help Bush focus on the obvious. His follow-on bill to the one Bush says he will veto is a model of elegant concision:

(c) Prohibition on Use of Funds - No funds appropriated or otherwise made available under any provision of law may be obligated or expended to continue the deployment in Iraq of members of the United States Armed Forces after March 31, 2008.

There you have it, Georgie. The end of the line. You argue that the American people will know "who to blame" for the predicament of the U.S. soldier in Iraq, in that steely manner that represents your best impersonation of a tough guy. Part of your shtick, maybe, is to be intentionally ungrammatical, just to sound tougher. Although with you, how would we know?

Eventually, Robert Gates, General Petraeus, other military leaders with their heads screwed on a lot straighter are going to break ranks with W and begin to utter the obvious. No money means no war. It doesn't mean the soldiers are "stranded." It means the stupid misadventure in Iraq comes to an end, and Bush's presidency with it. Harry Reid has signed on with Feingold, as have Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders. This is the real deal; if they see it through, they'll stuff this punk once and for all.

Santo, Ma Non Troppo

I'm concerned about the alacrity with which the Vatican is pursuing the canonization of John Paul II. It appears that Benedict and the Cardinals are falling prey to that modern malaise of cheapening time-honored awards of distinction by succumbing to society's inability to delay gratification. You see it everywhere these days, from the habit of awarding Oscars for life-time achievement to directors still in the active phase of their careers to the recent spectacle of the near-canonization of Ronald Reagan, where his celebrants counted on a mass collective amnesia to make us forget Reagan had wood chips where the human brain is supposed to be. People just can't wait anymore. Everything is rushed, even in something as timeless as religion, thus robbing even sainthood of its divine luster.

"Santo subito!" the delirious crowds outside St. Peter's Basilica shout. JP2 needs sainthood, right now, say his Catholic fans. The Vatican hastens to comply. They're putting the finishing touches on an "investigation" of his life, something you think they might have worked on, you know, before he became Pope. But you can't be too careful when you're talking about making someone a saint, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as "a person officially recognized, esp. by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable of interceding for people on Earth." They don't want JP2 up there in the Sanctified Hall of Fame and then discover some bastard son living in the suburbs of Krakow, or maybe a previously overlooked letter from JP2 to an SS commandant letting him know where the local shul is meeting. That would never do. But when they take extraordinary steps like waiving the "five-year requirement" (that's where it does sound like a Hall of Fame) and beating the bushes for miracles, they invite this kind of disaster. They've got one miracle in the hopper already. Sister Marie Simon-Pierre of France (really now: Sister Mary Simon Peter - was that ordered up from central casting or what?) claims her Parkinson's cleared up two months after John Paul II, also a Parkinson's sufferer, expired. They need one more, since there can hardly be any doubt about that first one. I mean, come on: Sister Marie's Parkinson's clears up two months after JP2, who just happened to have the same disease, died? If you've got a problem with that, I don't want to hear about it, and neither do the Cardinals.

Although: maybe they've done enough to fast-track JP's installation and ought to take their time. Delve into this Sister Marie thing a little more penetratingly, and make sure she's on the level. Publicity seekers are everywhere, and surely if the last decade or so has taught us anything, it's that Catholics sometimes yield to the most human of vices. Cynical as it may seem, a thorough investigation could reveal some alternative interpretations, such as: Sister Marie never had Parkinson's; it's a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose and is often confused with other motor neuron maladies. Or: maybe the L-Dopa kicked in. Or: maybe the idea of JP2 interceding on her behalf gave her a temporary dopamine rush that got her motor neurons working again. Uncharitably, this last might be called a placebo effect. Maybe her disease, blessedly, is in a state of remission. Sticking with the five-year rule would allow us to make sure, and not have to go through the embarrassing process of canceling the miracle and opening up the application process again.

But I must admit it: JP2, as one of his first gigs on the Other Side, may have put in a good word for Marie Soeur. I mean, why the hell not? In which case, His Holiness is halfway home. Given the standards of rigorous proof required, the Cardinals will soon shake another miracle out of those voluminous sleeves. I still think, all things considered, that the honor would mean more, the canonization would be more Canonical, if they waited the five years and looked for miracles with a little more star power. You know, as they say in the Biz, "legs." I'm dubious, of course, that such a salutary course will be followed, that the Cardinals will set the tempo at allegro, ma non troppo. Santo, molto prestissimo, it is. A world hungry for heroes, even mythological ones, demands no less.

Iraq Catastrophe Index, Revisited

" As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The deaths from all causes—violent and non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion." Guardian, March 28, 2007

The study was originally published in the Lancet last summer, not exactly a fly-by-night medical journal, and it is back in the news now because it was recently confirmed as methodologically sound by a group of British government scientists who undertook a thorough review of its sampling and analytical approach. George W. Bush, as you may recall, dismissed the study out of hand as "methodologically flawed," or his words to that effect. Presumably this followed an all-night session in the Oval Office in which Bush, armed only with pencil, paper, a pocket calculator and his own keenly honed skills in statistics and probability theory, deconstructed the study and found major errors in the cluster sampling (he would have preferred a stratified mode) and covariance approach of the Johns Hopkins and Iraqi experts.

Okay, that last part is a joke. Actually, Bush pulled his objection to the study out of his asshole. He had no idea what he was talking about, and wouldn't know a covariance from an oversized Texas belt buckle. However, the reemergence of the study seems to come at a dicey time for L'il George, who is already throwing tantrums about Congress's insistence on playing its Constitutional role in budgeting federal expenditures. In the good old days, he got "emergency funding" whenever he asked for it, even though after four years of fighting the same war, it ought to be pretty obvious in advance that the Pentagon is going to need $100 billion or so every 12 months to keep the Humvees humming and the soldiers dying.

If we add to the 650,000 "surplus" Iraqi deaths, which appears now to be a real number which policy makers ought to use as the real number, the flight of 2 million Iraqis out of the country because of the violence (often estimated as about 40% of the middle class - in other words, the stable Iraqis), we reach a number equal to about 10% of the entire Iraqi population before the invasion. Imagine if the United States underwent the death or displacement of 30 million Americans as the result of a foreign incursion. No one would be seriously discussing the "stabilization" of the United States following such a catastrophe, certainly not for a long time. The U.S.A. would break up regionally or fall under martial law, and it would be every man, woman and child for himself.

More or less exactly like Iraq, in other words. But it is beyond bizarre there is such a fundamental variance between the Iraq which is talked about in American politics and commentary and the real Iraq described in the Lancet study. Which is it? The difference between the Bush "estimate" of 50,000 Iraqi deaths and 650,000 deaths (a factor of 13) is brushed off as if it were a simple difference of opinion. 650,000 deaths. That is a different world, a different frame of reference, presenting a completely different order of reality. How can Congress and the mass media treat the Lancet study as if it were some arcane academic exercise without relevance to policy? If the Lancet study is accurate, we have destroyed the country. The approach we take to a country in which 650,000 people have died violently as a direct result of an invasion to "liberate" them is very different from an approach based on 50,000 deaths assumed to be the unfortunate collateral damage of an otherwise worthwile enterprise. But the huge uncertainty itself strongly indicates we have no idea what the hell is going on in Iraq day-by-day; and it escapes me how "policy makers" can talk about rational approaches when no agreement even exists about so fundamental a fact.

Scandal Train now leaving on Track 1

Bush recently passed the 666 days-to-go mark, and with April's approach now has about 22 months remaining in his second term. At the current pace of scandal investigation, it seems unlikely that there will ever be a day when some part of Bush's Administration is not under Congressional assault from a House or Senate Committee. The U.S. Attorney fiasco demonstrates how fecund the Bushies are in producing specimens for dissection. No one even thought of that one before the ascendancy of the Democrats to two-house rule, which means the traffic jam of prior high crimes and misdemeanors from Bush's first six years will have to wait till the road up ahead is cleared.

Ordinarily a President would have a credible argument that all this investigation interrupts the orderly flow of governmental business; Bush's problem with this argument is that the American public, in overwhelming numbers have already seen what happens when Bush is allowed a free hand, and that's the last thing they want to give him again. If he never gets another unobstructed moment to do what he wants, so much the better. He is the fount from which all screw-ups flow. I think the United States is still waiting for just one thing from Bush he can call an accomplishment.

After the AG flap, I would expect the Congress to delve into the startling revelations from Waxman's oversight committee regarding Valerie Plame; to wit, the admission by the White House security director James Knodell that the White House never did any of its own investigation after her CIA cover was blown. When that one gains traction on the front pages and on the nightly news, Bush is going to have nowhere to hide, since it will become apparent that he must have known from the outset who leaked her identity. That's the reason no investigation was done.

After Gonzales is canned, the new AG will have to deal with the NSA/FISA spying crimes, and Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter will probably at last get to the bottom of how extensive the illegality became. The current revelations concerning the Patriot Act national security letters (and their wholesale abuse) are a preview of that coming attraction. Then on to a reprise of Abu Ghraib, when the more sordid and horrifying pictures and documents, previously suppressed by Republican inaction, are at last released, which will open the gateway to a recrudescence of the CIA prison/torture nightmare, which will probably lead to an amendment of the exoneration provisions in the Detainee Treatment Act and Military Commissions Act, leading to...

Bush's one way out is to initiate a war with Iran, and I'm sure Karl Rove, who sees his own fat butt increasingly in a sling, is whispering just such a suggestion to Georgie over their nightly Bourbon&7's.

Aragoto or Wagoto?

"Kabuki theatre" is now used so often to describe political discourse that I was forced to look it up. I always have the sneaking suspicion that a term which comes into general usage by the unlettered boobs populating the legislature and pundit class loses its original meaning, and the talking heads employing the word have only a foggy notion of what they are trying to say. It just sounds hip and au courant to say "Kabuki theatre."

Kabuki theatre is a form of highly stylized, traditional Japanese drama, and comes in two varieties, "rough" (aragoto) and "soft" (wagoto). Of the two, aragoto is the more stylized and mannered, using outlandish costumes, exaggerated gestures and histrionics and bombastic forms of speech. Wagoto is more realistic and natural.

My guess is that politicians and the usual experts mean aragoto, if they mean anything at all, and that their implication is that whatever political maneuver they are denigrating was not in good faith and was solely for dramatic effect. So I think I was right: they don't know what they really mean by "Kabuki theatre," and they would be better off borrowing a term, say, from shadow plays from the Czech tradition, or that weird Indonesian puppet thing that I remember from "The Year of Living Dangerously." Some of that, if I recall correctly, involved the shadows of puppets. Now we're getting somewhere.

Rushing to the podium yesterday to discharge his latest load of unbearable anxiety, President Bush accused the Democrats of "political theatre" in passing a military funding bill laden with deadlines and troop-readiness and veterans' care baggage (not to mention spinach and shrimp). Unfortunately, he didn't use the term "Kabuki theatre;" that's disappointing, because I would just love to hear him attempt the Japanese word. What Bush wanted was the money. He was not interested in all these carps and codicils which La Diva Pelosi presented to him after her massive exercise in cat-herding with the Democratic Mob in the House. So Bush engaged in some aragoto of his own, claiming that the Democrats were endangering the troops with their off-Broadway shtick, and that they ought to close after one night.

Face twitching, eyes downcast, upper lip stuck to his front teeth (the surest sign of Bush's anxiety-caused dry mouth), Bush warned that he would never take this $124 billion unless he got it his way, neat and clean, so that he would be free to squander it as he wished. It was his second tantrum in the space of four days. It's comical that Bush cannot control himself for even an hour when he feels thwarted; he has to rush out right now, whereas more artful and effective negotiation requires a sang-froid which is beyond him. What W doesn't get is that thwarting and taunting him is getting to be something of a blood sport among his opponents. They enjoy seeing him bug-eyed, twitchy and spitting his words. It's a fun kind of aragoto.

Especially when he can't do anything about it. Bush demanded that the Democrats reverse course and give him his $100 billion with no strings attached, so the troops will have the resources they need to roll around Baghdad and Anbar until they hit a roadside bomb and die. The Democrats aren't going to do that. Bush's veto means that he will decline to accept the money that would keep him rolling in war-cash until September 2008, nearly the end of his era of misrule, but that's not good enough for W. War Profiteering 'R Us in Bushland. Do we all realize that every time Bush demands another $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that he is asking for another 3.3% of the entire $3 trillion federal budget? Well, he is.

Bush now faces this awful prospect. His duty as the Commander in Chief means that he has to plan for the safe and orderly extraction of the American military from Iraq with the money on hand. Bush never plans anything. He just does the next stupid thing and then asks for more money to keep the stupid thing going. That was another curious feature of Bush's appearance at the podium yesterday, backlit with the beatific smiles of the military mannequins behind him. He showed absolutely no cognizance of the reality that this Iraq madness has already been underway for four solid years, and that all the reasons for the dumb thing have proved nonexistent. Yet not a flicker of shame or remorse in those haunted, angry eyes. In some ways, a bravura piece of aragoto all in itself.

The Desk Murderer

Paul Slansky, who writes occasionally on the Huffington Post, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker, is one of the more colorful and devastating of the Bush-bashers I've read. He really hates Bush, and you can feel it in such passages as the following from the Post:

"What's obvious to all but the willfully blind is that Bush truly enjoys hurting people. His every action is designed to inflict pain, from that loathsome habit of giving people nicknames - hey, media suck-ups, it's not cute, it's contemptuous, a bully-boy saying, "I think so little of you that I'm not gonna call you by your name, I'm gonna call you what I want to call you" - to the cavalier decimation of a nation. Bush's utter heartlessness is breathtaking, though no more so than the mainstream media's craven refusal to even acknowledge it, let alone to truly do its job and relentlessly point out every instance of his wanton malice."

Over the top? I think it's possible it is. I'm not emotionally inclined to give Bush the benefit of any doubt at this point; I simply think such descriptions, in a perverse way, give Bush too much credit. It ascribes a purposefulness and over-arching design to Bush's malfeasance that I simply don't think is there. The language describes a monster in the Hitler or Stalin mode, and Bush lacks the discipline and vision to operate in such a league. I think it would be fair to say about Hitler, for example, that "his every action [was] designed to inflict pain." A human being who establishes a goal of exterminating an entire race of innocent (and ethical, humane and unusually productive) people is a person of "breathtaking heartlessness." Hitler's decimation of the Jewish people was "cavalier," to say the very least; so was Stalin's liquidation of intellectuals, the religious and his political opponents.

I think Bush's "wanton malice" arises from an interpretation of the results of his carelessness and incompetence, and his general indifference to his performance and effectiveness, rather than from Bush's personal motivation to sow destruction. I don't think he cares enough to cause the damage attributed to his intentions. Hannah Arendt, in her consideration of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined an apt phrase for the "banal evil" flowing from the actions of a morally indifferent human. She called such a functionary, whose quotidian actions relating to matters of career or ambition inflict human devastation, a "Desk Murderer." She could not find in Eichmann the malignant heart she was expecting to discover. He was a man of limited intellect and vision who simply did what he was told, which was to work on the logistics of killing Jews, and gave the matter very little additional thought.

Bush strikes me as just such a morally vacuous and emotionally empty human being. His main career goal was to get elected President and to settle old Freudian scores about his wastrel young life, the failure to fulfill the promise vouchsafed by his manifold advantages of family and fortune. The actual "content" of his presidency (spreading American democracy in the Middle East, protecting Israel, whatever else he pays lip service to) does not matter to him. He demonstrates this indifference on a daily basis, such as his casual abandonment of the Mideast peace process. The true meaning of the Walter Reed scandal, where Bush "heartlessly" allowed returning veterans to be dumped in a mold-ridden hovel, is related to this carelessness, as is his "response" to the Katrina aftermath or to the looming criticality of climate change.

Bush is a trembling mass of anxieties with almost no internal resources for dealing with them. His psychological functions are devoted to maintaining his sobriety and sanity, and there is nothing left for dealing with "externalities." He doesn't know how to grasp a problem, dissect its details and formulate a solution. He's an empty suit and a Desk Murderer. Whatever their motivations, writers like Slansky make Bush, in a paradoxical way, much more interesting than he really is. It would be difficult to imagine a man with less on the ball than Bush. As far as I know, he never says anything interesting or funny. He doesn't write anything. I'm not aware of any intellectual interests in his life (classical music or drama, e.g.) or of any personal talents in the arts he has developed (painting, playing a musical instrument, woodwork). He occasionally talks about reading through a syllabus (Camus's L'Etranger, for example) that is usually covered in first-year university literature classes. There is no evidence that any of the "disciplines" he actually "studied" at Harvard or Yale ever inform any of his decisions, or assisted him in any way in his private sector "career."

The overreaction to Bush which we see in Slansky and many others is the conditioned revulsion which decent humans feel after too much exposure to an irritating personality. Without question, Bush is an uncouth, intellectually gauche, defensively smug jerk. Almost all Americans are very, very sick of him, but this is no reason to install him among the pantheon of great heartless tyrants of the modern age.

The deal with executive privilege: a short primer

"However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide. [418 U.S. 683, 707] " United States vs. Nixon (1974) 8-0 vote, with Rehnquist abstaining.

A privilege, in the law of evidence, relates to matters which are assumed to be relevant or "probative" of some fact in dispute (tending to prove or disprove the issue, in other words), but for reasons of public policy are suppressed or excluded from public disclosure in a trial. A common example is the attorney-client privilege. No one doubts that information passed along from the perp in a robbery case to his mouthpiece might be "probative" as all get-out; nevertheless, to promote the "effective representation of counsel" we permit these conversations to remain private.

The Constitution does not actually provide the Executive Branch with an "executive privilege." By contrast, state and federal rules of evidence specifically enumerate the privileges (attorney-client, priest-penitent, etc.) by statute. One would think that Alberto Gonzales, who doesn't even concede the existence of habeas corpus despite its explicit reference in the Constitution, would dismiss the idea of executive privilege out of hand (one wouldn't actually think that - it depends on whether it serves the purposes of his career sponsor, George W. Bush).

President Bush, in his usual unlettered, Cliff-Notes manner, has made the "broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations," which the Supreme Court said, ordering Nixon in 1974 to turn over the tapes to Leon Jaworski, deos not get the job done. In his brief statement and Q&A on Tuesday, Mr. Bush did not claim that his conversations with Rove and Harriet Miers, among others, involved "military, diplomatic or sensitive national security matters." There might be two reasons for this. One is the usual explanation, that Bush doesn't know what he's doing; the second is that the White House has figured out the brouhaha about U.S. Attorneys doesn't involve such sensitive matters, for the same reason that Nixon's tapes related to nothing more than the "bunch of burglars" described by Senator Sam Ervin in the Watergate hearings.

On the other hand, Bush's real counsel on this one, Fred Fielding, has been around this block before, including the Watergate claims of executive privilege. Notice that the Supreme Court was not talking about turning over witnesses and e-mails (blessedly, there were no e-mails in 1974) to Congress. Chief Judge Warren Burger was discussing production of tapes to the district court under the protection of a preliminary "in camera" (secretly, in chambers) review by a federal judge. These may prove crucial distinctions. The Senate "lawyers" (Chuck Schumer, et al.) are painting with the same broad brush as George W. Bush. United States vs. Nixon is not exactly in point, and it's probable that the wily Fielding, recognizing that he will have home field advantage with the anti-democratic Supreme Court packed by his own client , has chosen his conditions (private interview, no transcript, no oath) carefully to play to his intended audience. Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas can be expected to jump on the distinction between an in camera inspection by a district court judge and the "show trial" for which Schumer and the Democratic Gang are salivating, and Fielding has established conditions parallel to a judge's in camera review. While it's an open question who will prevail, I am always pessimistic these days when the ultimate outcome is dependent on this particular Supreme Court acting in the interests of the people.

A failure to communicate

The popular cable news shows, like "Hardball" and Tucker Carlson's show, are having a hard time finding a conceptual niche for the issue du jour, the firing of 8 United States Attorneys by the Justice Department. They keep tripping over the concept of presidential discretion; the President, they say, can fire U.S. attorneys for a good reason or for no reason; therefore, they argue, the only problem Gonzales has is that he didn't quite state things accurately before Congressional committees when he described the reaons for their cashiering. He said they were performance-related. This turns out not to be true.

Since polls demonstrate that most Americans get their information, and the bases for their "opinions," from such cable news shows (more than from networks or newspapers), it is small wonder that the public gets so confused about political issues. If 74% of the American populace believed that there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq before the March, 2003 invasion (as appears to be the case), then the inability of the mass media to explain or educate the public on such fundamental facts must bear a heavy responsibility for their ignorance. Something simply doesn't happen, something important is completely lost in the process of video images speaking words in the rectangular box about huge issues of the day. What we have here, as the chain gang boss said in "Cool Hand Luke," is a failure to communicate.

The U.S. Attorney "scandal" can actually be exlained with an economy of verbiage. Succinctly, you might say. While it is true that U.S. Attorneys can be "terminated at will," such latitude is limited by the rule that they may not be terminated for an improper reason, such as the unwillingness of a given U.S. Attorney to hew to a partisan political program. That constitutes an unethical and unconstitutional intrusion into the judicial process. A parallel concept is found in discrimination law, where a job (or housing) may be denied for "any" reason (employment "terminable at will"), but not for a racist reason (for example). People like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson simply cannot enunciate such a principle. It isn't actually that difficult, but it is beyond them. Their broadcasting imperatives are driven by the "entertainment" principle, and so the focus must be on whether Alberto Gonzales "lied" to Congress. Of course he lied, just as he lied earlier about the extent of NSA spying on Americans. The more important issue behind his lying, however, is why he lied, and this, as I say, is beyond the pundits.

In part I think this is because the style of television reporting requires (in the view of network execs) the repetition of certain superficial catchwords ("lying," "scandal," or [omigod] "prosecutorgate") and any attempt at "depth" is frowned upon as non-entertaining and "technical." Thus, the principle (analogous to discrimination law) described above cannot be used because of its "complicated" form. It is a true statement, it is the actual issue, but it is not infotainment, so it is rarely articulated.

Since the proper functioning of a democracy depends upon informed choices by an enlightened electorate, you begin to wonder how much longer this whole enterprise can go on. The connections and networks in the "organic society" (in Max Weber's phrase) become ever more intricate and technical as electronic communications and data storage, among other scientific frontiers, push forward. Feeling the hopelessness of trying to explain the political and economic artifacts engendered by this complexity, the information is dumbed down to generalized descriptions for mass consumption, but the "generalizations" are often not even related to the underlying factual matrix, as the above case in point illustrates. The decision-makers, such as Congress members and the President, recognize that the battle for public opinion is actually fought on the virtual terrain of this substituted "reality," and thus simplify and distort the issues they are dealing with to conform to the characterizations of the mass media, so that a congruence with public "opinion" can be achieved. Thus, Bush yesterday in his press conference emphasized the "resignations" of the attorneys and the "discretion" he enjoys to hire and fire "at will." Chris Matthews reacted in a telling way: he admired the President's "toughness" but caviled at the the President's "insincerity" in praising attorneys he had terminated. The real issue, as noted, was not even part of the discussion.

The Strange Moral Calculus of the Democratic Leadership

In essence, this is the oft-cited "power of the purse" in Article I of the United States Constitution:

Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Without money, George W. Bush cannot prosecute his war in Iraq. He's asked for another $100 billion or so for Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming year. Only Congress can give it to him. If Congress says no, the war will soon be over.

Senator Russ Feingold sees this issue clearly. So do Representatives Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters of California. It is not really a complicated issue at all. It takes close to $2 billion a week to run the Iraq war. Unless Congress exercises another Article I power and borrows the money from the Chinese and Japanese and then gives the money under Section 8 to Bush, the President will have to close down his failed war once and for all and bring the troops home.

Either house of Congress can shut Bush down on this point. All they have to do is say no. Nonbinding resolutions opposing the "surge," bombast and thundering oratory, even of the over-the-top Joe Biden variety, will not make the slightest difference, will not dissuade Bush for a moment, so long as Congress writes the check Bush is asking for. He will take the money and go about his gruesome business, oblivious to the meretricious outrage of the Democratic leadership.

The Democrats prefer to make the issue bewilderingly complex, speaking of "benchmarks" or "performance standards," or "reporting schedules" on progress in Iraq. This micromanagement is probably indeed violative of the President's powers as Commander in Chief, and the timidity of the Democrats in forgoing their real power sets them up for this telling objection from the other side.

Or they engage in the duplicity of buying into Republican talking points about "abandoning the troops in the field," even though they know this makes no sense. The Democratic leadership insults the intelligence of the Americans who restored their majority by pretending the cash-flush Pentagon cannot possibly fly the American military out of Iraq with the billions already on hand.

Considering only the Americans in theatre, and leaving aside the Iraqi casualties which the presence of American soldiers enhances and exacerbates, there are over 150,000 American soldiers currently in danger of being shot, blown up, captured and mutilated, or grievously wounded in ways which will make their future lives an awful ordeal. These soldiers constitute one side of the equation we are considering. The other side of the equation is comprised of the political calculations by which Democrats determine which of their modes of evasion will make them look good in '08, will allow them to escape responsibility for a bloody aftermath in Iraq, or will serve some other, strictly political end.

And while they play these political games, tomorrow and every day that this war goes on, American soldiers will have to suit up, mount their vehicles and roll down bomb-infested streets, or walk the neighborhoods of Baghdad and Anbar province door to door, and wonder if this is the last day on Earth they will see the sun in the sky. Their calculations are primal and basic: will I survive this war for as long as they keep sending the money that makes me stay here?

Eenspector Georges W. Clouseau Wahs Naht On Zee Case!

"To assist the Committee in its investigation into these issues, I request that you provide the Committee with a complete account of the steps that the White House took following the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity (1) to investigate how the leak occurred; (2) to review the security clearances of the White House officials implicated in the leak; (3) to impose administrative or disciplinary sanctions on the officials involved in the leak; and (4) to review and revise existing White House security procedures to prevent future breaches of national security." Text of part of letter dated March 16, 2007 from Henry Waxman, U.S. Rep., (D-Los Angeles) to Joshua Bolten, White House Chief of Staff following yesterday's "Plame" hearings.


George W. Bush must have great fun at Henry Waxman's expense. Behind closed doors, of course, with the other Administration bullies around to regale, Bush must search his meager vocabulary for the stinging words of derision appropriate to this bald, diminutive, buck-toothed, bespectacled Jewish son of a Los Angeles pharmacist who represents his native city in the House of Representatives. It is true that Waxman, who does indeed look like a rabid chipmunk wearing a pair of magnifying glasses, is not possessed of movie star looks.

However, after watching Mr. Waxman preside over the Valerie Plame hearings yesterday morning, televised in their entirety on C-Span, I think Georgie Boy had better laugh while he can. He is in deep, deep trouble. Of course, Bush is always in trouble, but this is different. Not to be excessively dramatic, not that I would say something corny like "mark my words." But -- mark my words. In the Watergate scandal, it was the almost incidental disclosure by Alexander Butterfield, a White House subordinate, that Nixon taped everything said in the Oval Office that led to Nixon's disgraceful departure. Bush may just have had his "Butterfield Moment." Friday morning, we heard from Dr. James Knodell, Director of the White House's Security Office. Dr. Knodell clearly did not want to be there. I would describe his facial expression as that of a man who has been severely constipated for two weeks and felt, just before being sworn in, the sudden and extreme urge to go. He apparently did not know he would be appearing before the Committee until Thursday, when the White House must have concluded they had to send somebody to answer questions about the White House's "response" to leaks of classified information (Waxman would not take no for an answer), and sent this mild-mannered bureaucrat who used to think he had one of those enviable government jobs. Good pay, no responsibility.

Dr. Knodell had an awful morning, because he saw, after a few game evasions, that he was going to have to tell the truth. Fortunately for him, he's a career civil servant with, no doubt, a secure pension. He's going to be unpopular back at the White House, where loyalty always trumps honesty and ethics. It was, he admitted, standard procedure to investigate leaks of classified information from the White House. Executive Orders required that anyone involved in the leak of classified information report himself to Knodell's office. It was also standard procedure to initiate an investigation where it was suspected that White House personnel were involved; since Novak's column of July 14, 2003, identified "two Administration officials" as his sources, and since the Washington Post followed soon after with a description of "two top White House" aides talking to about six reporters, this was not exactly a leap of faith.

Knodell grimly admitted that there was never any investigation whatsoever. No one turned himself in. No one lost his security clearance except Scooter Libby, upon indictment. Not a single piece of paper exists in any investigatory file, because there is no file. The Director of White House Security, charged with protecting classified information from unauthorized disclosure, has not done anything about the gravest breach of security of the Bush Administration to date.

For a while, Dr. Knodell halfheartedly tried to hide behind the White House's standard evasion, that there was "an ongoing criminal investigation" and it was not the practice of the Security Office to run "collateral investigations." Unfortunately, his co-panelist, Bill Leonard, head of something called the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records, contradicted this easy out. There is no such practice, he authoritatively said. The primary responsibility for determining the ongoing propriety of giving security clearances to White House personnel lies with Dr. Knodell's office. As one would assume. (Mr. Leonard, indeed, appeared so genuinely outraged by what the White House had covered up that he fell all over himself to help the Committee get to the true, fetid bottom of this mess.)

So when Inspector Georges promised in 2003 to "get to [that same] bottom" of the Plame leak, how did he intend to go about it? Ah, I think I just figured it out. At the moment he made his specious pledge, as he impersonated once again a man with the faintest trace of moral probity, he had already gotten to the bottom of it. He knew who had done it, because he was in on it. Zoot alors! Eye haff zahlved zee case!

Bush's Hombre de la Bolsa

Alberto had a good run. I think it is true, as argued forcefully by Sen. Charles Schumer, that the Attorney General's basic problem is that he fundamentally misconstrues his role as the head of the Department of Justice. Instead, Gonzales has always seen himself as Bush's mouthpiece, a wily, malleable and often devious advocate for Bush's bad idea-of-the-week. Such jobs have a built-in short life expectancy, as many Bush loyalists are learning, one by one.

In 1996 George W. Bush, then recently elected Governor of Texas, was summoned to jury duty on a drunk driving case. This presented, of course, a matter of extreme delicacy for Bush, as indeed almost anything which requires Bush to disclose something about his early life inevitably does. Bush went to the court house with Alberto, his chief counsel. Prospective jurors do not usually report for duty with a lawyer in tow, it should be noted. Accounts vary, but the most likely scenario is that Alberto called for a meeting in chambers with the judge and lawyers and advanced a novel argument. It was possible, said Gonzales, that Bush, as governor, might someday be called upon to consider a pardon request from the DUI defendant; thus, Bush's service as a juror presented a possible conflict of interest. Again, in the most believable scenario, the defense lawyer did not want Governor Bush, a "law and order" type, on the jury anyway, and Bush was excused.

The questionnaire Bush was required to complete in connection with his jury duty also posed some ticklish dilemmas. Among other uncomfortable questions, the form wanted Bush to disclose whether he had ever been a defendant in a criminal matter. Actually, he had. In 1976 he was arrested and convicted of a drunk driving charge in Maine. This part of the form was left blank. In his confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Alberto explained to the Administration's nemesis, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, that this was a "frequent practice" on such questionnaires.

Both arguments that Gonzales was willing to make for his single client were, of course, utterly absurd. It is characteristic of Alberto that he will say any fool thing Bush needs him to say to get Bush out of a tight corner. Since Bush spends most of his life in tight corners, this is an exceedingly valuable quality in a Bush retainer. It has led Alberto, for example, to argue for Bush's rights to walk all over the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law, restricting (indeed, criminalizing) warrantless wiretaps. Alberto led the way on torture, lining up a posse of similarly ethically-compromised lawyers to sign off on violations of the Geneva Conventions, which Alberto called "quaint."

Alberto gained further notoriety recently in Senate testimony by advancing the head-scratching argument that the Suspension Clause of the Constitution did not imply the existence of a preexisting right to the "ancient" writ of habeas corpus. The Suspension Clause reads as follows:

"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Reacting to my own patriotic impulses, I have considered how I might assist George Bush's reactionary agenda of eliminating American freedoms. My first target begins at the beginning, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. This "quaint" provision reads like this:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Notice that this weakly-worded amendment does not positively state that freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly or petition actually exist. It just says Congress can't abridge them. But that hardly means the government has to recognize or protect them, any more than it has to recognize or protect the writ of habeas corpus.

Pienso que yo puedo ser un hombre de la bolsa tambien. Not that I want to brag. It's just clear that my extension of Alberto's argument is far more powerful than his puny abolition of the writ of habeas corpus. Hell, that just wipes out any hope for foreigners. Mine strikes at the true enemies of the Administration, the American people.

A funny thing happened after getting to the Forum 2,051 years ago today

I wonder if the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 B.C., would have been viewed differently were it not for the plays of William Shakespeare. Not to mention Dick and Liz. After all, Marc Antony's "friends, Romans and countrymen" speech is difficult to counter. The delicious irony of the refrain, "but Brutus is an honorable man," outclasses any prosaic recitation of Caesar's self-aggrandizing moves to consolidate power after he crossed the Rubicon. It's worth bearing in mind, however, that Brutus, Cassius & Co. viewed themselves as the ancient Roman equivalent of the German generals who tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb; that is, as engaged in tyrannicide, not a coup.

It's 2,051 years later and the imperial pretender who walks all over the American Constitution and violates statutes (or signs "statements" vitiating the effect of new ones which inconvenience his autocratic designs) is in no similar danger from his own Senate. For one thing the Star System of the old Hollywood studios is gone; who would play Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid) and La Diva (Nancy Pelosi)? Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston? I don't think so either. The modern American Senate is full of the Boy Emperor's (in Chalmers Johnson's descriptive term) enablers who are aware of Bush's numerous outlandish high crimes and misdemeanors but consider it impolitic to do anything about it. I have thought since November 2006 that the importance of impeaching George W. Bush is less about the immediate benefits of removing a dangerously incompetent leader with totalitarian instincts from office than it is about the cleansing and expiatory effect of reaffirming the Constitutional rule of law. If we tolerate, for example, the wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA law by Bush and his cronies, and allow them to cloak the true extent of their invasions in secrecy; if we permit Bush to maintain a vast gulag of CIA prisons in foreign countries where "terrorist suspects" are routinely tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions; if we buy into the patent nonsense that "enemy combatants" can be jailed indefinitely without judicial recourse by a specious analogy to the treatment of Japanese and German soldiers during a conventional war with a finite duration; if we aid and abet the continuation of a war started on false pretenses under the color of an "authorization" that is clearly no longer even putatively applicable; if we do all this, and considerably more, then we are saying that from now on we will tolerate the concept that Presidents can act illegally without any consequences other than pointless "criticism" or the occasional demand that some subservient official be symbolically canned by the Administration.

I do not understand why Nancy Pelosi believes that impeachment must be "off the table." The clearest case ever presented for impeachment now exists. The House Judiciary Committee would probably need five or six months to air out all the misprision and illegality in which Bush & Co. have engaged during their first six sordid years.

Yet I suppose the Democrats are going to let it ride. They are so enmeshed in Beltway politics and personal careerism that they have lost sight (with a few blessed exceptions, such as Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold) of the big picture. If this neglect persists, I am concerned a terrible price will be paid down the road. The original idea that no President is above the law will be lost as the "precedents" established during the Bush Administration cohere into fixed tradition. Exceptions to Constitutional principles for "national emergencies" and "dire threats" will be seen as routine and tolerable, and Americans will get used to the idea of police state tactics and "necessary" curtailment of liberties. A terrible mistake, anticipated many times in history. Brutus and Cassius saw it coming in their own day. They just needed someone writing better lines to vindicate their legacy.