I'd rather have a sustainable planet for the next generation than private e-mail

Currently, there is a blog war raging between two liberal darlings, Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann, concerning who has the right attitude about Obama's cave-in on the FISA bill. Let us stipulate, at the outset, that Barack has caved in. He is not going to take the kind of heroic stand one associates with Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. Note, however, that these front-line champions of civil liberties are not similarly slinging mud in Barack's direction. This is because, unlike Glenn Greenwald on this issue, they are maintaining perspective. Greenwald has gone so far as to start a fund to defeat the reelection of the Democratic Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland. Once you become that emotionally and intellectually invested in one issue, of course, there is a tendency to imagine that unless you win, that absolutely nothing else matters, and even the election of John McCain would be acceptable just to prove this passing point.

Personally, when it comes to national politics I believe in game theory, practicality, choosing the lesser of two evils, compromise, tactical selling out, and incremental change. That is because I recognize better than Glenn Greenwald the kind of country I actually live in. I understand that Barack Obama not only has to convince Ivy League lawyers with 140 IQs to vote for him, but also people living in trailers in rural eastern Kentucky with sixth grade educations whose main issue is safety from alien abduction. Demographically speaking, this country has become a complete mess. In a lot of the ways in which we determine what a country even is, the United States does not measure up. Politicians invoke the word "American" and "my fellow Americans" and it seems to work every four years or so, maybe during the final lap of the medley relay at the Olympics, and our hearts then swell with national pride, but that's only because we each carry around some idiosyncratic concept of what the country is to us, and in many cases that idea is based on long out-of-date memories formed about 40 or 50 years ago, if you're old enough (as I am) for that to have happened.

The country is divided along a huge number of fault lines. There is, in the first instance, the gigantic disparity in income and wealth between a tiny super-rich class and everyone else. Politics are driven by Big Money; everyone recognizes that without necessarily thinking through the consequences. The "telecoms" belong to this group; large, extremely powerful corporations who control the flow of information in this country. Big Oil dictates much of the foreign and energy policies of the United States; again, a profoundly anti-democratic influence.

Then we have the religious/secular divide. The conservatives play to their religious base by designing an agenda catering to a vast array of niggling hang-ups. Abortion; school instruction in premarital sex; birth control; stem cell research; gay marriage; gays, for that matter. The "progressives" (as they must call themselves now because "liberal" was taken away from them by the conservatives) try not to offend the religious right while steering a course right-of-center in appealing to their perceived base, the secularist well-educated. They can only go so far. Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, with his electoral base, can approve of gay marriage. Barack Obama can go as far as "civil unions" before calling it a day. Let's not get hysterical here.

Overlapping with this schism to a certain extent is the huge nativist/immigrant divide. The United States has never been more a "nation of immigrants" than it is right now, and border states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have huge Latino populations which are unassimilated to one extent or another in terms of language, culture and political agendas.

A politician in America running for our one national office has to navigate among this bewildering array of power centers, special interests, subgroups, cultures, educational levels, regional concerns and religions and yet emerge as a "consensus" candidate with enough pull to get a majority of votes in enough states to get 270 electoral votes. Such a process obviously requires him to check his "purity of conscience" at the door. The more cynical you are about manipulation and artifice, the more successful you can be. This and only this explains the successes of Karl Rove. One can feign purity of conscience; indeed, this is considered appealing, and the candidate who is better at simulating sincerity often wins the election, as George W. Bush once did (in 2004). The process, however, is about mounting a general campaign, not soliciting the votes of tiny constituencies with axes to grind, like Glenn Greenwald.

So, just to go on a bit longer, and to explain the reason for the title of the post: I agree with Glenn Greenwald's position on FISA. He's right, in my opinion. I wish I lived in a country where my preferred presidential candidate could simply agree with us and vote accordingly. But I don't. However, I do live in a world where James Hansen, testifying before Congress, said this just last week:

"The difference is that now [as opposed to 20 years ago when he first testified] we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

"Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control."

Returning to the fearless Dow forecast of the recent past

Yes, among Dow prognosticators (and from what I can see in the mass media, there are no apparent credentials necessary for entrance into the club), only I have risked setting out my algebraic "proof" that the venerable market indicator will sink to 9,100 as its "essential" level. As a quick review, my GIGO, back-of-the-envelope calculation used the Dow's high point in the summer of 2007 (14,000) and then considered the following data: Americans were borrowing equity out of their houses in the period 2001 to 2006 at a phenomenal rate. Some analytical writers put this figure at 50% of the total "income" received by Americans during this period. For the most part, this source of money has dried up as housing prices have moved south. The Case-Shiller index puts the year over year decline in home values for April 2008 at -15%, the worst performance of the "housing sector" since the Great Depression. Thus, so much for the house-as-piggy-bank economy.

Since the American economy is based on consumer spending for 70% of its action, removing half its juice results in a 35% contraction of the GNP. 14,000 x .35 = 4,900. 14,000 - 4,900 = 9,100. An oversimplification? Of course. A little arbitrary in its equation of the Dow (with its big multinational corporations to an extent insulated from strictly American woes) with the overall economy? I agree. Naive, trivial? Take it easy there. The Dow is down to 11,590 as I write this and General Motors is at its lowest point since 1955. Imagine if you had bought GM at the midpoint of the Eisenhower Administration at $11/share and held it till this morning. Subtracting out inflation for those 53 years...Is it just barely possible that General Motors was a little shortsighted in not anticipating the increasing scarcity of oil, its high cost, and the climate change scenario now bearing down upon us?

When I made my fearless call, I did not take into account oil at $140 a barrel or gas approaching $5 per gallon. Thus, I'm going to embellish my terminology with a new term, which is calling the 9,100 number the Essential Floor. Where else can you read about the Essential Floor than here, in this blog manned by one fearless jeremiah living in rustic squalor, surrounded by drought-stricken trees a mere 3,000 miles from the legendary pond which lends its name to the site? Anyway, when we get to 9,100, most of the water will have been squeezed out of the watered stock of the American financial markets and our new standard of living will begin to click into place. The Dow will then begin to wobble around this new level.

Not all bad, by a long shot. For all I know, this may have been George W. Bush's secret plan for dealing with global warming. If the American economy swirled down the toilet under his stewardship, at least his subjects would finally be forced to curtail their reckless spending and promiscuous energy wasting. If that was the plan, it's definitely working.

I remember about four years ago, I was walking the Philosopher's Trail above Heidelberg, looking down on the pretty Neckar River as it flows past the castle. And I came upon a rude sign, white letters on red cardboard: "Amerika: Climate Killers." I suppose it was placed there by the trail's side because whatever German chose the spot knew that the large American presence in and around Heidelberg (military, etc.) would encounter it on a regular basis. Indeed, here I am, spreading the word. Well, I suspect it won't be long before our per capita consumption of carbon drops from its dubious position of first in the world, and our place in that category will begin to match some of our other rankings, such as those for education, infant mortality and health care. But it will all take a lot of time. The U.S. had built up such a fantastic capital base during the good years, that we can, as in the last, desperate phase of a Monopoly game, sell off the red hotels and the green houses, and finally mortgage the deeds themselves, in an effort to stay in the game. It's just that a lot of the players around the board observing our liquidation will be wearing burnooses or speaking Mandarin.

For Whom the Bell Tolls? Could be your wake-up call, Mr. President

I commend Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut for his courageous speech on the Senate floor yesterday concerning the revamped Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spelling out his reasons for opposing the bill. Rather than limiting the basis for his objections to the telecom immunity provision of the bill, Senator Dodd listed the long "chain of abuses" (language remarkably similar to the "train of abuses" phrase employed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence) of the Bush Administration. The speech is worth reading in its reasonably long entirety, linked here. Senator Dodd conducts a survey course in the unconstitutional actions of the Bush Presidency since September 11, 2001. It's the sort of speech, in its tone and and radical language (from the Latin, radix, of the root) I used to hear on a daily basis from the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley a few decades back. Live long enough, I suppose, and you'll see everything happen, including radical speeches from Senators who look as if they would be comfortable on the back nine at the Westchester Country Club.

A surprising trend seems to be underway these days. I would have surmised that as the Bush Presidency wound down, the American commoners and Beltway insiders alike would have been so relieved to see him leave that a spirit of reconciliation and letting bygones-be-bygones would have become the ruling zeitgeist. This does not seem to be what's happening. Rather, the criticism of Bush, particularly in Congress, has grown increasingly shrill and, for want of a better word, more fundamental. Repesentative Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment are a further case in point. These are an extremely detailed list of charging allegations against virtually every aspect of Bush's unconstitutional, extra-constitutional and felonious activities while he's been in office.

Bush's entire defense to such charges, boiled down to its essence, rests on a very slender reed. Bush, who is not a deep or nuanced thinker, was seduced by the blandishments of a group of executive power extremists who convinced him that Article II of the Constitution in a "time of war" confers almost limitless power on the President. This was a dangerous concept to sell to a man as emotionally insecure as Bush, who overcompensates for his sense of inadequacy with a megalomaniacal assertion of self. So: 9/11 provided the war, and the first Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) gave him his charter to ignore the Constitution and any federal statutes which were seen by his bellicose advisers as contrary to free use of his power.

The theory has never been used successfully in court. One way or another the concept that the United States is a government of laws and not of men has been confirmed by all cases which have considered the issue. Bush relied too much on the counsel of intellectual lightweights like Alberto Gonzales in going down this path. When Gonzales attempted to justify all of the FISA violations on the basis of the AUMF, he was laughed out of the hearing room, and eventually out of Bush's administration. Bush's other mistake was listening to the extreme views of ideologues such as David Addington, Cheney's Chief of Staff, who is responsible for outlandish claims such as the Vice Presidency's exclusion from the Executive Branch. You add them up - Gonzales arguing that habeas corpus is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, the free-floating Vice Presidency, that certain Arabs are not human beings for Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the signing statements which selectively ignore Congressional enactments that don't comport with the SuperSized Presidency -- and an unmistakable picture forms of an Executive Branch which has gone completely out of control.

It's an ominous sign for Bush that the chorus is swelling, not diminishing. I would be very nervous in his situation. James Hansen, the climate scientist who at one time had his communiques edited by a Bushie corporate lawyer with no background in atmospheric science, testified to Congress and wrote an Op-Ed in which he suggested that trials for "crimes against humanity" might be appropriate for those who knowingly stood in the way of remedial action on climate change. He mentioned the CEO of Exxon, by specific name, but the principle obviously has broader application. This is Bush's Achilles Heel, ultimately; his presidency is confined to a certain finite period (mercifully), but the downstream effects of many of his actions will clearly extend well beyond January, 2009. The American people are going to be reminded of Bush next year, each and every day, by reports of continuing casualties in Iraq, by the crushing burden of the national debt, by the declining dollar, by the skyrocketing cost of fuel as the country sinks deeper into recession. And there will be no Bush Administration around for message control. Many of the secret proceedings and communications will be divulged, and the courts will be clogged with habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo prisoners detailing their treatment.

Maybe there's something to the idea that Bush's third term will be twenty to life.

The victory lap of the neocons

Now that the surge has worked and everything is fine in Iraq, we are beginning to see the first tentative signs of gloating from previously much-maligned war cheerleaders such as David Brooks, William Kristol and other members of the brave commentariat who have fearlessly encouraged, from the safety of their air-conditioned Manhattan offices, our "brave troops" to keep up the good fight. They were in a terrible dilemma for several years there. Their entire ethos, their whole Weltanschauung, is premised on the idea of sounding like tough realists who are willing to pay the price, to do the hard thing even if it's not pleasant, and to risk everything, even the deaths of anyone but themselves. They also put on the line their most precious commodity: the perception of others that they're always right. Or, in Kristol's case, the illusion that he's ever right. Take this latest from David Brooks, for example:

"The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one."

Here's a question which you might find difficult to answer right now because of the virtual black-out on war coverage by major media. In the first two months of the war, during the actual invasion of Iraq and just before George W. Bush, our astute leader, declared Mission Accomplished, how many American soldiers died? And while you're thinking about that, here's another question: during a period when we can all completely agree that the surge has been a triumph, say during the first six months of 2008 (with about a week to go), how many American soldiers have died?

These are the answers: in the invasion of Iraq, the actual subduing of the country and conquering of Baghdad, the U.S. sustained 119 fatalities (during the latter part of March and all of April, 2003). In the first six months of 2008, 130 American soldiers have died (so far). This seems to be a point that Brooks and other brave, laptop-totin' journalist-soldiers don't necessarily take into account while they extol Bush's astute escalation of his endless war of occupation. Guys are still getting shot and blown up on a very regular basis.

It's also noteworthy that during the recent uprising in southern Iraq in April, when Muqtada al-Sadr ceased his cease-fire, American deaths rose to 52 for the month, a number very typical of pre-surge mayhem. Close to two body-bags per diem, two flag-draped coffins secreted aboard a cargo plane for the clandestine off-load in Dover, Delaware, every single day. That was a couple of months ago.

This is the triumph that David Brooks and William Kristol are celebrating, and I admit that it could be worse and it has been worse. But here's another question: I have never understood how the calculus of win/lose in Iraq degenerated into a consideration of whether there is more or less violence on the streets of Baghdad. The consciousness of the nation is centered on this far-off conflict, it dictates and constrains so many choices, the opportunity costs are sky-high -- and yet the question remains: what are we doing there? It isn't like a basketball game which is played solely to see who scores more points. We aren't in Iraq, I hope, to find out whether the people who used the word "civil war" were right versus those who said it wasn't a civil war.

And yet I think that's exactly what it's degenerated into. After all his screw-ups, and leaving the United States of America in much worse shape than he found it, George W. Bush was not going to admit that Iraq was also a total fiasco. Conditions in Iraq were going to improve, dammit, no matter what it took. So they sent in Petraeus. And Petraeus built blast walls to carve Baghdad into sectarian enclaves and installed checkpoints everywhere to thwart the movement of suicide bombers. These ideas, obviously, were borrowed from Israeli practices in the West Bank, which have had similar successes in decreasing random explosions. Yet there's a critical difference: everyone acknowledges the de facto separation of the Palestinian state from Israel, which awaits a de jure treaty. Iraq is supposed to be one country. Gimmicks such as dividing Shia from Sunni with blast walls, and flooding the streets of Baghdad with occupying troops, and metering the movement of Iraqis from one neighborhood to another with harassing checkpoints, appears to produce a "win" for George W. Bush, because he's ahead in the game of reducing violence in Iraq. So he can leave office with the situation "under control."

Yet what good does that do? Note the careful use of the words "tenuous" and "fragile" in the David Brooks column. It's tenuous and fragile because unless we're willing to go bankrupt by maintaining an occupying force for one hundred years, as McCain urges, as soon as we leave Iraq is going to dissolve into chaos. There's no serious doubt about that. If Iraq can't really get it together politically while we're patrolling the streets with 150,000 soldiers, what are the odds things will hold together as we withdraw?

It's nice to see an American oil company (Exxon) join BNP, Total and Shell in securing no-bid contracts for oil exploration and development in Iraq. Now maybe Bush can harrumph about pushing the Russians aside in the great Iraqi oil rush. Maybe he'll feel vindicated enough to give up the rest of the violence up/down game. Would it help if we say he was right all along? Just tell us what to say so he'll end this thing.

Okay, so Barack is not a "LightWorker"

It's not my phrase, actually. I read the term "LightWorker" in a Mark Morford column on SFGate, and it seemed kinda twee, really, but that's life on the West Coast. A "LightWorker," I take it, is some sort of avatar of enlightened beings who visits us and leads us away from darkness and despair, dispatched by The Force when It sees we're in over our heads. I don't know if a LightWorker is actually armed with a LightSaber, for example, but one can hope, if only for ease of identification. When I read Morford's column, I thought maybe the canonization of Barry had ventured into dangerous, unsustainable territory. Lest we forget, Obama is the official nominee of the Democratic Party, that stained, compromised and completely co-opted political organization which also features Nancy Pelosi at the top of the org chart.

Obama has put matters to rest on the LightWorker front; we can now regard him as a canny political player who shows increasing signs of knowing, at least, what it takes to get elected in this sound-bitten society. Barack has backed off an earlier promise to filibuster the House-approved FISA rewrite in favor of "trying to amend" that part of the 4th Amendment Abolishment Bill which grants the big telecoms immunity for past illegal conduct. Otherwise, Barry is on board with the rest of the "compromise" legislation which essentially grants the Executive Branch unfettered access to all e-mail and telephone communication of Americans while...well, while using the Internet or the phone. The "restrictions" and "court review" built into the new FISA process are essentially meaningless. It's way too much to call them "warrants," that good ol' fashioned Fourth Amendment word. If the President, the Attorney General or a fourteen year old hacker in Beijing thinks he needs to read your e-mail to see if you're planning to blow something up, that's good enough. Be forewarned: the concept of a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in your heretofore private communications is about to be repealed.

Thomas Jefferson had this to say in 1799: "Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence . . . . Let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitutions." Wise Tom was telling us that we should never forgo a freedom on the promise of a well-intentioned man or woman who tells us they have our best interests at heart and won't abuse the license. Keep your freedom and demand that the elected official do his best with the latitude he has left. And, as a specific, historical example, no one has ever demonstrated that the attacks of 9/11 resulted from the exercise of civil liberties by the American people. Indeed, the rough outlines of the plot were exposed while respecting these rights. It was a question of Executive Branch competence, not of restraints upon its freedom of action.

Some commentators, such as Glenn Greenwald linked over on your right, have been very, very hard on Obama for this lapse in "principle." I can't go quite as far as he does. Barack Obama is trying to get elected President in a country which elected George W. Bush President for a second term less than four years ago. Think about that for a moment. A vote against the FISA bill approved by the Democratic leadership will expose Barry to charges of "radicalism" and worse by the always-scrupulous John Sidney McCain. And then from the vast trailer parks of Florida to the lean-to shacks of Appalachia to the tent cities of Ontario, California, will issue the cry, "Barack can't keep us safe because he really is a Muslim!"

So what the hell's he supposed to do? Listen to civil libertarian eggheads like Glenn Greenwald and yours truly? Or get elected and use his new, unConstitutional powers responsibly, that is, until with a new majority on the Supreme Court made possible by his LightWorker appointments, the Court strikes down the FISA bill he supported on grounds it violates the Fourth Amendment? That's about as good as it gets in this, our 232nd year.

Post No. 400: Another Milestone

I only wish I had something highly significant to say. I could talk about the Boumediene decision again (establishing habeas corpus for Guantanamo prisoners), and how John McCain's reaction to the decision ("the worst in U.S. history") convinced me that he's (a) preposterously ignorant about American judicial history, (b) a racist and (c) disturbingly similar to Joe McCarthy in his xenophobia.

Actually, it's not a bad topic for a post, but I don't know...how much can you say? Dred Scott vs. Sandford established that an erstwhile freed American slave (Dred Scott) could be returned to his "owner" because an African-American slave was not actually a person at all, but property. Because it undermined the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision has been cited by many historians as a precipitating cause of the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history. Could that have been, maybe, a worse decision than a case holding prisoners held indefinitely without charges in a concentration camp can file a piece of paper in a federal court asking, why am I here?

How about Korematsu vs. United States, which affirmed President Franklin Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast during World War II, and to deny them due process rights to (a) challenge their detention or to (b) recover all of their confiscated real and personal property, leaving them penniless, although not a single instance of disloyalty or sabotage was ever committed by a Japanese-American during the entire war?

Here's my guess: John Sidney McCain would approve of the Dred Scott decision (if he knew about it, a huge assumption) for the same reason he voted against the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday. Korematsu? They looked like the enemy. Boumediene? They're Arabs. It's simple, really, once you get the hang of the decision-making process.

I like what the great Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter had to say about due process and civil liberties. The greatness of a nation is measured by the justice it affords its enemies, not just its friends. That's a concept that is lost on John McCain for the same reason it's lost on George W. Bush. They don't really know how to think. They can't make elementary distinctions between situations which are presented as analogous.

Take the Guantanamo situation, for example. Contrary to popular belief, many of the inmates who have cycled through there, or are incarcerated there now, were not captured by U.S. forces on foreign battlefields. In fact, only a small percentage of them were. Most were turned over by foreign bounty hunters, police or military forces. They're not just "Taliban" or "al-Qaeda," either. Many of them deny an affiliation to any terrorist organization. Thus, if the argument is made that the United States has not historically granted the right of habeas corpus to enemy soldiers captured during war (an argument made by Justice Antonin Scalia in his willfully stupid dissent), one can rejoin that this "war" bears no resemblance to the wars it is being compared to. And the first rule of distinguishing putatively analogous situations is to note differences in the facts of each case.

So follow along, John Sidney, as well as you can with your class rank #894 out of 899 at Annapolis (Barack has already finished the test, nailing it, and his pen lies atop his blue book). In World War II, for example, the United States fought Germany and captured German soldiers who were held in POW camps in the United States. There was no reason to grant them the right of habeas corpus because they were uniformed soldiers captured on the field of battle and served a nation-state which could, when the war concluded, sign a treaty covering such matters as the repatriation of POWs. And that's what happened.

Contrast that situation to Lakhdar Boumediene. He's a Bosnian. The United States is not in a state of war with Bosnia. He's not a uniformed soldier in the Bosnian army, and there is no treaty between the U.S. and Bosnia on the horizon which will deal with his fate. The United States "says" that he is a foot solider in the "war on terror." The war on terror has no end-date and no clearly defined parameters. We do not identify any particular nationality as the enemy (if we did, Congress would have declared war on Saudi Arabia in September, 2001). Someone thrown into Guantanamo, as Boumediene was, thus has to "hope" that he's "tried" before a Military Commission and is exonerated. But he's never been charged with anything, the same situation which pertains to hundreds of other Guantanamo prisoners, now and in the past.

This is completely unjust, particularly when we know from empirical data that the United States has wrongly imprisoned many Guantanamo inmates and released them without ever charging them. So there cannot be any reasonable claim that an infallible system exists for holding men in a concentration camp without recourse (other than the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which do not allow a full factual exploration on the merits, and deny the effective assistance of counsel). In other words, the Guantanamo inmates are denied a fair hearing, even though they may be completely innocent.

Mouth-breathing simpletons like George W. Bush and John Sidney McCain equate the existence of detention with proof of guilt. When you think about it, so many of the problems they cause stem from this style of a priori thinking. It is a profoundly unscientific and undisciplined way of analyzing situations. A Guantanamo inmate who files a writ in federal court demanding to know the basis of his incarceration has not been set free. The jailer is simply required to demonstrate that probable cause exists for detention, meaning, would a reasonable person believe that it is more likely than not that this person has committed a crime on the facts presented? Why is the Bush Administration afraid of such a right? Why is the "creation" of such a right (which has only been around since Magna Carta) the result of the "worst case in U.S. history"?

It's regarded as the worst case in United States history by someone who wants to succeed the worst president in U.S. history and become the new worst president in U.S. history. We really ought to deny him the opportunity.

Let's Check in with the Dow!

This is not a blog about Eastern Mysticism or I would simply ask, "What is the Dao?" When I ask about the Dow, you know that I'm into something equally mysterious yet less, how shall we say, spiritually rejuvenating.

I generally start the day, now with sunrise so eerily early with Daylight Saving, by turning on CNBC about the time of the opening bell on Wall Street. 6:30 am PDT. And there she is, Erin Burnett, with that perky, Katie Holmes-like crooked grin and luxuriant dark hair, next to the old puffy guy with the comb-over and sour disposition. Mark, I think his name is. Quite a couple. Erin is the real star, of course, because what these cable channels are selling now are pretty young women. The information is useless because the market is stagnant and the only people making money are the players, the short-sellers, the commodities manipulators, the arbitrage wizards.

The Dow is hovering around 12,000 now. This is a new "psychological resistance point." It dips a little below 12K once in a while, but it's almost too embarrassing for it to remain there. You see, when Bill Clinton was president, the Dow achieved an all-time high of 11,500. Bill inherited a Dow of 3,500 and proceeded to more than triple it. Ah, those were the days! I wish the Dow would simply revert to 11,500, instead of levitating 500 meaningless points above it, in order to simplify the math which follows, but there's that psychological resistance point...Bill's zenith was achieved in December 1999, more than eight years ago. In the 8.5 years since, the Dow has "gained" about 500 points. So you see the difficulties I face now. If the Dow were simply flat, I could use some reasonable discount rate for inflation and tell you how much poorer we are (measured by the Dow) today versus December 1999. Now I have to figure out...hell, do I even want to do this?

Okay. George W. Bush is too intellectually lazy to do this kind of number crunching, but someone has to carry on the great American tradition of scholastic rigor. Why not me? Let's first figure out the percentage increase by calculating the ratio of 500 to 11,500. So: 500/11,500 = 4%. (Notice that I show my work. Would W do that?) Let's divide 4 by 8.5, = .47%. So the yearly average of increase is less than 1/2 of one percent. It feels like that out there, doesn't it? I thought W was the CEO President? Oh that's right. He's being a CEO as he was always a CEO.

Now that we've got some basic numbers, we really should adjust them to reflect inflation. We can't accept flat numbers. Just for the hell of it, and to give the Bush Administration a break, and since it doesn't really matter because these numbers suck no matter how you look at them, let's use 2% per year, something like the CPI number, a contrived statistic to keep Social Security recipients on the verge of starvation, while we carry on the real business of government, wars of foreign conquest. So we have to discount the Dow by 17%. Here we go, W, follow along now! 12,000 x .83 = 9,960. That's pretty generous too, since it incorporates Alan (Let Them Eat Cat Food) Greenspan's "substitution" principle for inflation. So the Dow has lost about 13% over the last 8.5 years.

To have more fun with this number, however, let's consider an alternative way of looking at the Dow. Suppose we hypothesize a German investor who decided to invest euros in the American stock market in December 1999. Let's call him Klaus Fuchs, because he's going to get fuched at the end of this. (I apologize to anyone who finds him/herself on this site because you Googled "atomic espionage," but to make it up to you, I'll throw in a fun fact at the end about Klaus.) Klaus is tired of German investments and German life generally, with its universal health care, 8-week vacations, superb beer, great cars, smooth roads, clean bullet trains and the rest of that tedium and wants some real action, the kind you find in America. I realize that in December 1999 the euro was sort of a notional currency and didn't become paper currency for a couple of years, but the principle is sound nonetheless.

At the point of his investment (let's say Klaus puts in 100,000 euros) the dollar and euro are at rough parity. Klaus buys into a Dow Index Fund to track the overall market. The market is at 11,700 when he puts his money down. 8.5 years later, wie geht es ihnen, Klaus? Schade, nicht so gut.

Nicht so gut at all. Klaus' investment was denominated in dollars, of course, just as the vast majority of Dick Cheney's investments are denominated in currencies other than the dollar (don't you wish you were an insider?). The first of many haircuts which Klaus must endure is that his dollars are now worth 64% of the original euros, leaving him with $64,000. Which we now must reduce by 13%, the real loss over that 8.5 year period, leaving him with $64,000 x .87 = $55,860 in constant dollars. Ach du Lieber. With what Klaus lost, he could have bought a new 530i.

This may suggest why the United States may have increasing difficulty convincing foreign governments to balance our budget for us in the immediate future. It is also an object lesson in another uncomfortable fact: the U.S. economy is moribund, the banks are broke and Americans are having an extremely difficult time affording not just the cost of living, but something more basic - living.

Oh, when Richard Feynman's wife was sick during World War II, he had to leave Los Alamos to visit her in a nearby hospital. He didn't have a car of his own, so he borrowed one. It belonged to Klaus Fuchs. Professor Feynman had no idea Klaus was a spy.

Coastal Reefs versus Taking a Walk

On average adult Americans are 24 pounds heavier per person today than they were in 1960. If we were to take this additional avoirdupois and use it to construct 1960-size American people, we would increase the current U.S. population by 42 million. It should be pointed out that 42 million people constructed entirely out of reclaimed American fat would look a great deal like many contemporary Americans.

The laws of basic physics tell us that more energy is required to move obese people from Point A to Point B than would otherwise be the case. Additional force is necessary to displace a more massive ass than a toned, tight ass on which one can bounce a quarter. Thus, the huge engine in the Escalade must do more work to transport the 5'4", 185-lb. American mother of four equally gargantuan children to McDonald's than her 1960 counterpart, who smoked and popped Dexedrine while her husband in the Gray Flannel Suit went off to work for Acme Corporation, all as God intended.

But I digress. One salutary approach to America's crises of health and energy is to decrease the total human mass that we ask our cars, planes, trains and buses to displace over distance. Our toned, fit and increasingly Green-oriented President, George W. Bush, spoke in the Rose Garden today about the problem of high gasoline prices (the Dow went from -80 to -100 while he spoke) and urged the "Democrat Congress" to open up the Alaskan wilderness and American offshore sites to oil exploration and to move ahead with new refinery capacity. These were his principal recommendations. These are, of course, long-term approaches to the problem and will do nothing for years to ameliorate the energy crisis. W said nothing about asking his tubby subjects to drop a few pounds as a more immediate solution. Doesn't he care about the airline industry? Not only do our carriers have to pay exorbitant prices for jet fuel, once they fuel up they have to lift Americans seven miles into the air.

One can't blame President Bush for the prevalence of auto overuse in the United States, and I make no such accusation. Certain perceptive researchers, such as Professor Richard McKenzie of the University of California at Irvine, have noted a positive correlation between a decreasing real cost of gasoline during the 1990's and the growth of two other American social phenomena, the sale of large sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and the gut/ass/upper thigh complexes of American citizens. The SUV problem is taking care of itself as both the new and used markets for these gas-guzzling dinosaurs fall through the floor. The other positively-correlated artifact, obesity, is obviously more intractable.

High gasoline prices, however, will obviously serve as a goad to walking and biking places instead of driving, and the long-term approaches suggested by President Bush will do nothing over the next few years to alter the price of gasoline; indeed, it seems more likely that demand/supply/speculation dynamics will continue to put upward pressure on the price of oil. At a certain point, Americans in economic distress will be reduced to using cars (if they still own them) for absolutely essential purposes and returning to more primitive forms of ambulation for everything else.

Two-thirds of all Americans are overweight and one-third are obese (defined as a Body Mass Index higher than 30). The unaffordability of gasoline will probably begin immediately to affect these statistics, while any ameliorative proposals which either Congress or President Bush can suggest for the price of gasoline cannot work for perhaps a decade, at which point it is doubtful that the gasoline-powered vehicle will actually be the prime mode of transportation in this country anyway. Which is another way of saying that the politics being played by George W. Bush and John McCain have as their real object the very short-term economic advantage of American oil and oil field equipment companies, such as Halliburton and other usual subjects. And that is another way of saying that nothing at all has changed and that the President remains committed solely to the welfare of Big Business, first, last and always.

But for his cellulite-encased subjects, deprived of any help whatsoever from their president or Congress (as always), a means of waddling through has been presented. This is a chance to shed 42 million people we are currently carrying around on our backsides. It may feel so good we decide to go swimming at those beaches instead of turning them back into oil-soaked strands, as Santa Barbara was in 1969. We can leave ANWR to the great moose and caribou herds as our svelte loins carry us to the local Safeway to load up on soy substitute for the meat we can no longer afford. Forget Congress. Forget Bush. They have no answers. They work for someone else, not you. Inside all that jiggling fat resides an American Rebel who, setting out on an unfamiliar trail, will stride fearlessly onward to a new, leaner American Arcadia.

Bush's Rules of the Game

Bush's London press conference, June 16, 2008:

Q: "Mr. President, in his last major speech, Tony Blair said on Iraq, 'Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. But if I got it wrong, I'm sorry.' Is it possible you got it wrong? Would you share at this point those slightly more reflective sentiments? And in particular, should you, in retrospect, perhaps have concentrated a little more on Afghanistan?"

A: (President Bush): "History will judge the tactics. History will judge whether or not, you know, more troops were needed earlier, troops could have been positioned here better or not. Removing Saddam Hussein was not wrong. It was the right thing to do."

From numerous accounts I have read of Bush's early life, he had the disconcerting habit of changing the rules of contests as he went. If the basketball game was supposed to end at 20 points, he demanded his opponent play to 30 if he was behind when the game was over. A baseball game that was supposed to end in 9 innings would extend as far as Bush needed to catch up, or if that didn't happen, until the other players simply quit out of boredom or disgust. Many of his boyhood friends attested to this quality. He had to win, perhaps one of the earlier signs of serious emotional insecurity.

The boy is father to the man. Now that it is 2008, and we have been in Iraq more than five years after Bush himself said the game was over, that the mission had been accomplished, Bush has changed all of the rules of a game once again. If we can dimly recall, the only rationale that Bush really sold the American people in the run-up to the Iraq war was the defense of the United States. In point of fact, this is the only principle under international law or the Charter of the United Nations which would permit an attack on a sovereign nation. Bush called it "preemptive defense." Saddam's advanced nuclear program would soon announce itself over America in the form of a mushroom cloud. Saddam was going to run a Big Box store for terrorists called "Anthrax, Nerve Gas & Beyond." We were in grave peril, in danger so great that the negative findings by Hans Blix and the UN inspectors were clearly meaningless, the result simply of Saddam's treachery; the inspectors needed to go home so the real inspection by the Third Army Division could begin.

This was the reason that Bush gave for removing Saddam from power in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was not undertaken as a social studies experiment in spreading democracy in the Middle East.

From the same press conference, here is Bush's snide rejoinder to the naive who believe that democracy cannot flourish in Iraq:

"Now, there are many doubters. I understand that, because there is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal. Maybe it's only Western people that can self-govern. Maybe it's only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self government. I reject that notion. I think that's the ultimate form of political elitism."

Trying to ignore the awful grammar for a moment, and concentrating on the "substance:" no one is really saying anything of the kind; however, you can see the completion of the rules-changing trick in his comment. Bush now has set up a game in which the winner will be decided based on who's right about the following propositions:

Bush's Argument: I believe that it's good to overthrow Saddam Hussein, although many others think it's not a good idea. Also, I believe that Arabs can govern themselves in a democracy even if they're not white-guy Methodists, unlike there is some people who aren't smart like me who doesn't believe that. Also, if we said the war might cost $2 billion, we would be welcomed as liberators and the whole thing would be over fast, which we did, we now need the judgment of "history" to tell us whether we've made any tactical errors.

Bush's Straw Man: We think Saddam is a good guy, and it's better that he remain tyrannically in power, oppressing, torturing and gassing his own people. Also, we don't think Arabs can have a democracy, because we're stupid.

Well, the results are in, and Bush has won the game, except for the parts where it's too soon to call, because history can't be written yet. Not surprising, because only Bush was smart enough to set it up so he couldn't lose. Unless, of course, you're like one of those annoying friends of George the Boy, down in Midland, who's ahead 6-3 in the tennis set he just won from Jr., only to learn that he must play on and win 8 games, or 12 or 327, or whatever number Bush needs to come out ahead. In which case you might point out:

There are many tyrants in the world, many despotic governments. North Korea, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, the People's Republic of China. It would be "good" to get rid of all of them. It would be the "right thing" to do. No doubt the homo sapiens living in all of these countries could respond to the idea of self-rule in one form or another, Methodist or not. But the United States cannot undertake wars of invasion against all of these countries, and as the Iraq war has conclusively shown, against even one such country, unless we essentially have no choice. It's way too expensive, it's too destructive, we don't have the resources, we have too many pressing needs of our own, and it doesn't even work. If Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist from Columbia, is mostly right and this war will eventually cost $2 to 3 trillion, and if the military has been severely damaged, and if we have in fact killed 4,000 + American soldiers, and mutilated another 30,000, and killed somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens, and blown the country apart, then it's obvious that this colossal blunder needs to be one of a kind. We need to admit it was a huge mistake and cut our losses.

He'll never see it that way. It's getting dark out, we're hungry, we've been having these dumb arguments for more than seven years, and we're just worn out by a Man-Boy who cannot admit the game is over and he lost. So okay, George, you win. Now please take your ball and go home.

Iowa Drowns While the MSM Mourns

It was epic bad timing for Eastern Iowa to disappear beneath the Cedar River around the same time as Tim Russert threw a coronary clot. I mean no disrespect; Mr. Russert seemed like a jolly enough soul, and his death is a tragedy to his family. I did not think he was a particularly great journalist, but increasingly there is no such thing. One would never know this from the nonstop electronic keening which has gone on over the weekend while the Cedar River crested at 31 feet during a 500-year flood.

Tim Russert was part of the mainstream apparatus which "manufactures consent," in the irreplaceable term coined by Noam Chomsky. It was Noam's sharp insight that the media tend to cluster around some median ideological point, wheresoever it is pushed by social and political processes. This point becomes the New Normal, and over the last thirty years in the United States, the New Normal is the New Capitalist Right. Mainstream, respectable journalists cannot stray outside the limits of a tiny bandwidth left or right of this point. So, for example, if the President sets up a regime which disregards the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens, through felonious spying in contravention of the FISA law; or which breaches the norms of human decency in torturing prisoners in violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, TV guys like Tim Russert voice small but carefully inoffensive complaints in the form of "hard-hitting" questions of their Sunday morning guests. These questions are often directed to the miscreants directly responsible for the outrage at issue. Yet at the end of the interview, Big Tim (for years I thought he was Randy Quaid) would smile and thank Karl Rove or Dick Cheney for "comin' on the show," and we all felt better because the issue had been "aired out."

Herr Russert of Das Reich TV: Herr Eichmann, you've taken some real heat for setting up this train system for transporting all these European Jews to the gas chambers. I want to show you a quote from 1943 [shows quote]. Isn't that a little inconsistent with your claim now that you thought they were all headed to banking conventions in Poland?

Herr Eichmann: Tim, we can play these gotcha games all morning, if you want to. Both sides obviously have arguments they can make. At the end of the day, what me and the others in the High Command are all about is doing the work of the German Volk.

Herr Russert: I just wanna thank you, Adolf, for comin' on Das Show.

If Tim Russert had been such a "giant" of the Fourth Estate, why did he casually enable, like the rest of his colleagues in the MSM, the shredding of the United States Constitution and the entanglement of the country in a disastrous war of choice? So what's all this public display of grief about? What I think: it's another show, and it's self-aggrandizement. I would delicately point out that not long after Mr. Russert's heart went into fibrillation, he lost consciousness. From that point forward, he was unaware of anything Tom Brokaw or Barbara Walters or Chris Matthews had to say about him. So what these people were really doing in their orgy of hagiography was reminding us of what important honchos they are, because really, they're just like Tim, and this sort of tasteless, 24/7 oversaturated coverage (like the soils of Iowa) is what they do. They talk up, under and around any topic which comes into their cross-hairs, and they talk it to death. They even talk death to death. And the purpose of their talking is never to have a distinct or subversive point of view, but only to mouth over and over whatever consensus opinion fits within the Chomsky Bandwidth; in this case, that Russert was a Giant, A Unique Voice, The Indispensable Conscience of a Nation.

Probably not. He was a well-paid employee of NBC and MSNBC. He was the host of "Meet the Press." He went along to get along and played the fake controversy game to perfection, shot the breeze with both "sides" which are positioned about two nanometers left and right of the MSNBC midpoint. His family will miss him. The country will move on to the next manufactured hero.

The Tenuous Victory of Liberty in Boumeddiene vs. Bush

"The [habeas corpus Suspension] Clause protects the rights of the detained by a means consistent with the essential design of the Constitution. It ensures that, except during periods of formal suspension, the Judiciary will have a time-tested device, the writ, to maintain the 'delicate balance of governance' that is itself the surest safeguard of liberty. See Hamdi, 542 U. S., at 536 (plurality opinion). The Clause protects the rights of the detained by affirming the duty and authority of the Judiciary to call the jailer to account."

So wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the (slim) majority in Boumeddiene vs. Bush, the latest of many cases with Bush (or Rumsfeld) designated as the losing party in a civil liberties case. Bush loses all these cases because he opposes Constitutional liberties, and the U.S. Supreme Court, with its current membership, feels a responsibility to uphold them. At issue was whether Guantanamo inmates have the right to challenge the basis of their detention through a writ of habeas corpus. It is a demand to the detaining authority (the jailer) to produce the facts justifying the incarceration, or, in simpler language, to answer this question from a prisoner: why am I here?

Led by Bush's Senate errand boy, Lindsey Graham (R, South Carolina), the Congress passed a Military Commissions Act which deprived the federal courts of habeas jurisdiction. As I have written before, there were numerous Senators, including Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who voiced their concern on the record that the MCA was unconstitutional because of this provision and yet voted for it anyway. I don't see how such a vote can be consistent with the oath of office these guys take. Specter and others should have listened to themselves. The Supreme Court just told them that their reading was right; the MCA is unconstitutional.

The majority prevailed 5-4. If John McCain is elected, there won't be any more victories for those who support the United States Constitution for a long time. Justices Ginsberg and Stevens have held on about as long as they can. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned, and when you open up the Supreme Court Reports in future years, this is the kind of shit you're going to be reading as the majority opinion:

"America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60-61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed."

Justice Scalia, in dissent. Now, I know he's supposed to be real smart and everything. But I ask you: in what sense is this a legal argument? It is true that there are terrorists in the world who practice the Muslim religion. There have also been Catholic terrorists in Ireland, Protestant terrorists in America, Jewish terrorists in Israel, Zoroastrian terrorists in Iran, Buddhist terrorists, Hindu terrorists and atheist terrorists. It is true that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo are Muslims. But Scalia makes the same illegal, pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment, bigoted, biased, and stupid argument that Bush makes. He assumes that because a Muslim is locked up in Guantanamo, that he's part of the "It" described above. He's the "Enemy." Go back and read Scalia's statement again. Boumeddiene himself is not even from any of these places. He's from what we used to call Yugoslavia. Whether Scalia, this fearless duck hunting buddy of Dick Cheney (they shoot caged birds together) realizes it or not, he's making exactly the same argument which justified the internment of the Japanese during World War II. Muslims attacked us (as the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor). You're a Muslim (or a Japanese). Go to jail and wait for the war to be over.

Except the "war" on terror will never be over. Many of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been there for six years without charges ever being filed. A lot of them have been held in solitary confinement and have lost their minds. And we don't know whether they should even be there because Bush has never allowed any factual test of the basis of their incarceration.

"Major General Jay Hood, commander at Guantanamo, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that '[s]ometimes we just didn't get the right folks,' but innocents remain at the base because '[n]obody wants to be the one to sign the release papers. ... there's no muscle in the system.' The federal courts are supposed to be that muscle. Today's decision ensures that they will be." Shayana Kadidal writing on the Huffington Post; Kadidal is an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyers for many of the Guantanamo prisoners.

The Guantanamo concentration camp will, in the eyes of history, represent one of the darkest chapters in the American experience, and it will come to epitomize everything that was wrong with George W. Bush's approach to leadership: cowardly, sneaky, weak, unfair, discriminatory, and oblivious to the basic concept of human decency.

This Bud's for Belgium

I suppose the sale of the Chrysler Building, that Midtown Manhattan landmark on Lexington Avenue, to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund is a foregone conclusion. Nothing to be done. The sheikhs are being cool about it; the American management group (Tishman) will still hold a 25% stake in the building and the Arabs are content, for now, with being "silent partners." I suppose that's a distinction between them and someone like The Donald, who would feel compelled because of his own insecurities to begin throwing his weight around immediately, yelling "You're fired!" at everyone currently working there. The Abu Dhabi folks will bide their time. No rush; they've got all the time, and money, in the world. When oil sells at $135/barrel, and the United States imports 14 million barrels a day, we're floating $1.9 billion per diem to give the countries who want to buy us up the wherewithal to do so. Don't think for a moment they're not grateful. It's astounding, in the sense of proportion, how much time some Americans of a conservative stripe spend worrying about whether Barack Obama is a "Muslim mole" when we are auctioning off our key assets, like the Chrysler Building, to these same countries they fear so much. If the Sunni Arabs of Abu Dhabi want to cooperate with "activist" brethren in launching another attack on some other part of Manhattan, couldn't they simply now use the Chrysler Building as conspiracy headquarters instead of those fetid caves in Afghanistan? Although maybe that's the thinking in selling to them; it's proactive defense. The Muslims now have a stake in the "ownership society" that Bush created. It's just that other countries now own this society.

But that is as nothing compared to the brew-ha-hah (I know you read this site for the clever wordplay; you can get information anywhere) currently brewing (I'm pushing it now) over the pitch by InBev to buy out Anheuser-Busch. Oh, the humanity! InBev is a Belgian holding company which owns the Beck's and Stella Artois brands, but now wants to add Budweiser, Bud Light and Michelob to its (Clydesdale) stable. Belgium? Yep. Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, Hercule Poirot. Belgium. They've got a $64 billion bid up, all cash, to take over the company. Sounds like a lot of money, but look at it from the euro perspective. Not so long ago, when the dollar and the euro were at parity, the price would have been 64 billion euros. Now that the dollar is worth 65% of a euro, on a good day, the Belgians can buy Bud at a steep discount.

Various American players are mobilizing against this buy-out, including the governor of Missouri, where Anheuser-Busch is headquartered. A lot of other American forces, such as the arbitrage departments at hedge funds, are cheering it along, since AB's stock has been surging lately on news of the deal, after years of stagnation. Sales have been flat in recent years, while the price of barley and hops has shot skyward. Americans, maybe needing something stronger these days, have moved on to wine and cocktails, and anyway, that horse piss Budweiser calls beer is just awful. I can't figure out why the Belgians would want it.

Unless it has something to do with its big distributor, Hensley & Co. Could the crafty Poirots over in Brussels have seen the possibility of an opening wedge here? Hensley is headed up by former USC cheerleader and Vicodin addict Cindy McCain (the former Cindy Hensley), whose personal fortune is estimated as at least One Texas Unit ($100 million, or 65 million euros). Hensley & Co. is Budweiser's go-to wholesaler. That's what Cindy's company does, it sells beer for Budweiser. Imagine what a coup that could be for InBev. Their wholesale beer distributor would be the First Lady of the United States of America. Guess who's in the driver's seat of that relationship? I mean sure, a distributor has a list of customers, contracts with supermarket chains, restaurants, 7-11's, trucks, refrigerated warehouses, a network designed to get the swill you manufacture from the vats at AB to the guts of American men watching the Packer-Cowboy game on the Chinese flat-screen. But InBev doesn't need Hensley like Hensley needs the brewer. Under John McCain's much-beloved NAFTA arrangements, InBev could in a trice wipe out the Hensley deal and replace it with a Mexican outfit who could run all that beer out where it needs to go for probably half the price that Hensley pays its Mexicans.

When America's such a bargain, these big foreign outfits can take flyers like these and see how it works out. This Chrysler Building is kind of nice; wonder what they want for the Empire State Building? Budweiser's okay, but I'm a Miller man myself. Oops, our South African competitor already bought them. Well, wait a while. The White House itself might come on the market.

Handicapping Obama-McCain

First, a word from my current favorite Outside Observer, Dmitry Orlov:

"The United States has traditionally been a very racist country...It was founded on the exploitation of African slaves and the extermination of the natives. Over its formative years, there was no formal intermarriage between the Europeans and the Africans or the Europeans and the Indians. This stands in stark contrast to other American continent nations such as Brazil. To this day in the U.S. there remains a disdainful attitude toward any tribe other than the Anglo-Saxon." Reinventing Collapse, p. 98.

Well, undoubtedly true, Dmitry; but what's your point? Although when he mentions Brazil...is that what's going on down in Ipanema? You mean we could have looked like that? This must be part of the high price of emerging from British stock, people who really look like hell but think their genes are too precious to mingle.

Speaking of which, we now have a real horse race, with the Scots-Irish McCain (meaning: he's British, a descendant of the Ulster colonists) versus a man who can trace his connections to Africa more immediately than most of the rest of us can.

Certain auguries tilt toward Barry. Number one, I note that the country is beginning an orgy of self-congratulation. Even George W. Bush gushed that he thought it was great that a "major political party" had nominated an African-American. He then quickly reaffirmed his support for John McCain, but who's buying that? Bush is an Obama supporter, we both know it, and good for him. Besides, McCain treats W more or less as one might the albatross-accessorized Ancient Mariner. My guess is that those two guys hate each other. Two snobby Anglo-Saxons from the old ruling class, inbred toward middling intelligence, united solely by membership in an obsolete party.

So I think it will be hip to support Obama, and in a country as susceptible to trendiness as this one, that counts for a lot. Barry's a cool guy, after all, and it will be cool to support him. He speaketh with the tongues of angels and he hath charity in his heart.

McCain, meanwhile, is a true dogmeat candidate. Boring, cranky, unpleasant, corny, tiresome to look at in all his monochromatic blahness. He's got one thing going for him, and one thing only: he was a prisoner of war. If he had flown his missions without getting shot down, he would have been another nameless Vietnam War aviator, one whose dad and grandpa were big cheeses in the Navy and got him into Annapolis. But without the Hanoi Hilton back story, a group of fat cats from Phoenix would not have made him into an Arizonan and inflicted him on the country. He would not have ditched his crippled first wife and married the trophy wife/ beer heiress. (Well, he would have ditched his first wife anyway, but I doubt the rest of it would have fallen into place.)

Under these conditions, Dmitry's assessment can be put to a modern, definitive test. There is no reason for anyone, anywhere, to vote for John McCain other than from racist motivations. It's that simple. Barack is very smart, quick on the uptake, inspirational, and tuned in to modern technology. These qualities will be absolutely essential if we're going to surmount a staggering list of serious economic and environmental problems. McCain, on the other hand (and this is not a joke), does not know how to use a computer.

It's 2008, the world runs on electronic communications, and McCain does not know how to use a computer. So far, then, McCain has admitted that he doesn't know anything about economics and he doesn't know how to use a computer. And he wants to be President of the United States in times like these.

The table is set. I am hoping that there have been huge changes in attitude among my fellow citizens over the last forty years or so. I know, from seeing those election returns from Appalachia, and from listening to wackos like Geraldine Ferraro (who has so internalized her racism that she can't even see it for what it is), and from long personal acquaintance (and even blood relation) with many dyed-in-the-wool racists from the Old South, that a huge discriminatory tide in this nation must be overcome for Obama to win. Hillary Clinton counseled the party elders that it could not be overcome, and she and Bill make political book for a living. Hillary, however, was hardly an objective observer, and even Hill & Bill may be somewhat behind the power curve when it comes to modern sociology. Those of Obama's generation and younger don't really see dermatological melanin percentages as defining criteria of personal worth. That's a hang-up for those who are old at heart and for losers, and if they want to remain hung-up and keep losing, they can vote for that pasty old fraud with the nasty temper. Their choice.

Interesting times, and we'll see just how much they've been a-changin'.

Moe, Larry & Curly Put the Screws to the Witness

So Scott McClellan, whose term of derision I shall no longer employ out of a newfound respect for his valiant crusade of self-rehabilitation through political penance, will testify to the House Judiciary Committee on June 20. Early word has it that McClellan's testimony will naturally focus on the Valerie Plame matter, which formed the thematic center of his book What Happened. Congressional hearings, like other forms of entertainment, need unifying motifs, and it was apparently the counter-propaganda conspiracy of White House operatives against Joe Wilson, after all, which sent Scott into a spasm of introspection. Or so I've heard; I haven't read the book, and I'm not going to. Maybe I have newfound respect but I'm not that big a sucker.

Still, it's difficult to see what new thing could possibly be disclosed in a Congressional hearing, which is unfortunate, since what is publicly available at this point is not enough to indict Bush and Cheney. There is a line of questioning, which I at one point attempted to sketch out on this very site, which could force the issue into the open once and for all. To wit, if we remember way back when, the summer of 2003, when the Plame disclosure first became news, Bush took the consistent position that he did not know who disclosed Valerie Plame's CIA connections to the press. He held this position from July, 2003 until at least the end of September, 2003, and it was during this period that he made his various pledges to "get to the bottom of the leak," "fire anyone involved," etc., which transmuted over time into a lame promise to fire anyone "convicted of a crime" in connection with the leak. Obviously, the shift in tone, the relocation of culpability from "involved in the leak" to actual "conviction" for something connected to Plame resulted from Bush getting the word. All the main players in this treasonous cabal were direct assistants to the President. So Bush "moved the goal posts," in the argot of our cliche-ridden day.

I suspect the White House was pretty certain this standard insulated them from the need to take any punitive action against one of their own. Their Ashcroft-picked prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was not going to indict anyone for a violation of the so-called "Identities Act," although the prima facie case for such a prosecution was always there. Fitzgerald, however, was a reliably obsessive fussbudget who wasn't going to take any chances. When he finally indicted Libby on five counts of "non-substantive" criminal activity (not direct violations of the Identities Act), he had mountains of corroborating evidence which he had obtained through a truly farcical overuse of the grand jury mechanism. He allowed Rove's attorney to "talk him out of" indicting Karl. Even with all that, Fitzgerald managed to lose on one of his five counts against Libby. So Scooter became the one thrown to the mob, all on the understanding that Bush would take care of him, come what may.

Still, even now a skilled questioner could find out from Scottie whether it ever occurred to anyone that it was pretty weird for the President to roam around the United States in an information blackout, talking about his "search" for the leakers, when in some instances they were standing right behind him while he railed about them. This point is so obvious that I thought even the brain-dead American press would figure it out. But I also thought that l'affaire Plame would prove Bush's undoing; it was when it did not so prove that I realized I and most of my fellow Americans had entered uncharted territory. The era of Watergate-style investigations, even of Iran-Contra hearings, were definitively over. A skilled news-cycle management team (and Rove & Cheney are definitely that) could spin and deceive their way out of even so perilous a predicament.

And, if you're old enough to recall, you might notice another major difference twixt now and 1973 concerning how such investigative hearings are held. The lessons of Watergate were not lost on Congressional committee members. You could become a star, like Sam Ervin and Howard Baker. And allowing skilled attorneys like Sam Dash (the majority counsel) to ask the questions of people like Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy and John Dean might advance the case, but it did not advance the career of the incompetent popinjays elected to Congress. So they took over. We now have "rounds" of questioning by 12 or 15 Senators or Representatives, each with about six minutes, which they fill with grandiloquent testimonials to the majesty of, well, mainly themselves. Then they start asking "questions," which never get anywhere, because these people are not trained in interrogation, follow-up, trapping with a hidden premise, boxing in, or any of the other finely-honed tricks of the cross-examiner's art. There are a few exceptions, such as Arlen Specter, Sheldon Whitehouse and Carl Levin, who remember enough of their attorney skills to bore in when they need to. Most of these career poseurs, however, are hopeless.

John Conyers of Michigan heads up the House Judiciary Committee. Thus, I don't expect any miracles; his folksy, avuncular, imprecise style defines the approach that doesn't work when crucial matters are at stake. The hearing will turn into a morality play, where Conyers will muse, "How in the world could high-ranking members of the White House staff get themselves involved in outing a brave member of our intelligence community?" And that will be that. The air will go out of the proceeding as Scott, the prodigal son now on the side of all that's good and decent, will cluck along with John, shaking his head in sad agreement.

Bush will look at the TV replay later, the money shot where his fate hung in the balance, and laugh it off. Moe, Larry & Curly will take their turns fecklessly "grilling" the witness, Scott will sell some more books, and somewhere in the darkness of Dick Cheney's office we will hear that hollow report: yuk yuk yuk.

The Discussion Industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changed Conditions Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

An experiment in Bush/Dow coefficients of correlation

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

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

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

The Bushed Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In defense of my assessment of GWB's intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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