A reminder for gloating Republicans

Alfred E. Newman from Hell

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There seem to be a lot of Republicans walking around with familiar smirks on their faces today.

This is entirely premature.

I know that Americans are famous for their short memories and  even shorter attention spans, but only one year has passed since a great affliction  and a daily humiliation was extirpated from our "hearts and minds".

I made this video over three years ago and I am reviving it in case there are any Republicans who think that people are going to soon forget what they have inflicted on the country and mankind. DS

Assessing George W. Bush

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Thinking it over, I have come to the tentative conclusion that Bush’s greatest virtue as a two term president of the United States of America was his verbal dyslexia.

Huh?

I ask readers to imagine for a minute what it would have been like if a president with Bush’s character, values, instincts and agenda had had the silver tongue and soaring rhetoric of a Barack Obama.

Doesn’t really bear thinking about, does it?

Now we have a president with the silver tongue and soaring rhetoric of a Barack Obama: we have Barack Obama.

We still don’t have a very clear or precise idea what his character, values, instincts and agenda are yet, because he has only been in public life for a short time and during the campaign he ably triangulated his positions.

But, of course, in time, we will.

Perhaps it is just as well.

In my opinion the USA is presently in “Humpty Dumpty” mode, where “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” etc, etc. And with Barack Obama, at least this shattered mishagoss will be packaged with elegance and taste.

For it is one thing to hear Paul Anka sing, “I did it my way” and quite another to hear Frank Sinatra sing it. It’s still the same tacky song, but something of the depth and saudade of the world’s greatest saloon singer puts it over.

F’yaknowhaddamean. DS

Throwing shoes at politicians? Soon a barefoot world.

Muntazer al-Zaidi threw the shoe heard round the world

Zaidi's action won him widespread plaudits in the Arab world where Bush's policies have drawn broad hostility. The Lebanese television channel NTV, known for its opposition to Washington, went as far as offering a job to the journalist. In its evening news bulletin on Monday, it said that if he takes the job, he will be paid "from the moment the first shoe was thrown". Zaidi A manager at the channel told AFP that it had made its offer known to Zaidi and was ready to post bail on his behalf.(...) In Gaza, around 20 Palestinian gunmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, a hardline militant group that has been behind a spate of rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks, staged a demonstration in support of Zaidi. Wearing fatigues and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, they stamped on photographs of the US president and held banners in support of the journalist. Egyptian independent daily Al-Badeel carried a frontpage caricature of the US flag with the sole of a shoe replacing the stars in the top corner. Even government-owned newspapers in Cairo praised Zaidi's actions. "Pelting the American president with shoes was the best way for expressing what Iraqis and Arabs feel toward Bush," wrote Al-Gomhuria editor Mohammad Ali Ibrahim. AFP

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Bush is lucky they don't play baseball in Iraq. If Americans start throwing shoes at politicians this could get serious.

It was a beautiful moment though and I wish I knew the Arabic for "it's about bloody time"; however, with the way things are going, if this catches on, we could soon have a barefoot world. DS

The great paradox

"Forty-eight per cent of Americans did not feel the hand of history on their shoulders on Tuesday, in spite of everything." Martin Kettle - Guardian

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The great paradox surrounding Barack Obama's victory is that it would have been impossible without George W. Bush. Probably no other president in US history has been as "transformational" as Bush has.

The question that hangs over us now is whether Bush himself is the agent of this ghastly transformation, or merely history's delivery boy who has only handed over the package and stands after we have signed for it and have taken delivery... hoping for a tip.

I would lean toward a synthesis: if the chickens were straggling home to roost, Bush gave the hitchhiking chickens a lift in his SUV.

Most of us who have been little boys at one time or another remember that it is much easier to take apart a toy than to reassemble it without any pieces left over. That is now the task of the Democrats.

Right now we are enjoying the after glow, but from here on out I'm afraid it's all going to be "quod omne animal post coitum est triste". DS

"W" and post "W"

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Many (most?) people think that George W. Bush is stupid. I don't.

On the contrary, I think that he is highly intelligent, but I also think that he is seriously insane.

I wont indulge in psychobabble trying to diagnose his disease: crazy is as crazy does.

It is his intelligence that makes his particular insanity so perverse. If he were stupid, his insanity would have come to little, we would never even have heard of him. It is the rest of us that are stupid... certainly not Bush.

George W. Bush is an alcoholic who has cold turkeyed the booze and then taken the implicit self destructiveness and self hatred of alcoholism and channeled and projected it universally. Few leaders in history, drunk or sober, have had such a canvas of destruction to paint upon as he has.

Considering the power he has had and how crazily destructive he is, we have come off lightly. He hasn't used the atomic bomb... yet.

A dramatically abridged list of the damage he has done to himself, the environment and humanity follows:

He has destroyed his own reputation: from being the governor of an important state to being a universal pariah.

He has destroyed the reputation of his family name, a family that has given the United States of America senators, governors and two presidents... Now even the humble rosebush would probably like to change its name to rosesmith or rosejones.

George W. Bush has destroyed his own political party as a instrument of power: a party that is one of the two legs on which American democracy stands. He has surpassed even Nixon in leading the party that once was the home of Abraham Lincoln, Robert Taft and Dwight Eisenhower into the swamps of neofascist populism.

Iraq, Afghanistan, habeas corpus, Kyoto, New Orleans and the economy: what hasn't he withered with his touch?

The power and influence of the United States in in tatters. Its core skills, which are the heart of its rise to preeminence: its military, organizational and financial abilities, have been degraded out of recognition.

However, I maintain that George W. Bush himself is not a root cause of any of this. At bottom he is only a symptom of a systemic malfunction.

Bush is merely the product of a malfunction that begins with the political parties and how they finance themselves. This is a corrupt alchemy abetted and echoed by a media of tardo-Roman frivolity that permits that someone as damaged as Bush can be selected as a candidate and treated as a serious one in the first place.

But also, and perhaps most gravely, this is a malfunction that includes the American people themselves. It was they who finally elected George W. Bush President of the United States: basically because his first opponent was boring and sighed during debates and then reelected him, basically because his second opponent spoke French and enjoyed wind surfing.

Now this same corrupt system, this same defective process and this same air headed American electorate have selected and are preparing to entrust the atomic bomb and the keys to the skeleton closets containing America's darkest secrets... plus the enhanced executive powers that Cheney has procured for Bush... and his successors, either to an aging and disorganized torture victim or to the hero of a book, "Dreams From my Father", who, for all we know, may turn out to be a fictional character himself.

We shan't begin to know until the big piñata is finally broken open on January 20th, 2009.

The piñata is filled with poisoned sweets.

Bush leaves behind him a damaged, if not crippled economy, with a debt so huge, that it reduces his successor's options at precisely the moment when decisive action must be taken.

To give an idea of what is in store, here are two brief quotes from two important articles which I recommend reading in full. They are by Nobel Prize winning New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman and by Phillip Stephens, associate editor of the Financial Times, who is considered close to Britain's New Labour:

Krugman: If Barack Obama becomes president, he won’t have (McCain's) knee-jerk opposition to spending. But he will face a chorus of inside-the-Beltway types telling him that he has to be responsible, that the big deficits the government will run next year if it does the right thing are unacceptable. He should ignore that chorus. The responsible thing, right now, is to give the economy the help it needs. Now is not the time to worry about the deficit.

Stephens: Mr Obama’s many tax and spending pledges can scarcely be reconciled with the grim reality of the burgeoning budget deficit. The rising protectionist tone of his pledges to protect American jobs jars with the promise to restore the nation’s standing in the world. That said, his speeches carry a professional sheen applied by a phalanx of economic advisers from the Clinton years.(...) Even before the cost of the bail-out of the banks and the stimulus programmes promised by the candidates are added to the accounts, next year’s US budget deficit is forecast to top $500bn. It could turn out to be twice that very large number. I have heard supporters of Mr Obama say “no matter”. Once he has won, he can declare that things are a lot worse than they seemed. A Democratic Congress will trim its ambitions. Even putting aside the political cynicism, this misses the scale of the challenge. Fixing the economy – persuading voters to consume less and save more and redirecting spending into investment in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure – will demand a huge reservoir of moral authority. What will voters say when Mr Obama, if he wins, tells them that his health plan is unaffordable?

The need for strong, social democratic measures is clear. What to do and how to do it no mystery. As I've said before, the plans are all there, all you have to do is translate them from Swedish.

The problem is that Bush's insane binge of selfhating destruction and the implosion of the economy has bent the American political map out of shape. This could be a dangerous mirage.

Over decades, in election after election, the country has proven itself to be leaning to the right. Only four years ago the voters endorsed Bush's program and goals. They have turned against him because of the results of his disastrous execution of those policies, not because of some ideological epiphany. It could be fatally unwise to confuse a victory by default with a "movement". There is going to be no mandate, only an opportunity.

Therefore in a moment that requires swift, even radical action there will be many who urge caution.

It is dangerous to do too little, it is dangerous to do too much... it is dangerous.

If, as it now appears nearly certain, Barack Obama is elected president and is given a filibuster proof Democratic majority, in great part he will have received all this solely because Bush's binge of destruction has momentarily gelded the Republican Party.

If the economy doesn't get better very fast, the same destructive and bitter forces that Nixon called up from the depths of America's psyche can quickly turn on the Democrats; in fact this may be the only path the Republican remnant can take.

No less an authority on these forces: one of the men who most contributed to creating Nixon's racist, neofascist, Southern Strategy, Pat Buchanan, gives a venom laded version of Philip Stephens' conundrum:

This center-right country is about to vastly strengthen a liberal Congress whose approval rating is 10 percent and implant in Washington a regime further to the left than any in U.S. history.(...) Headed for the White House is the most left-wing member of the Senate, according to the National Journal. To the vice president's mansion is headed Joe Biden, third most liberal as ranked by the National Journal, ahead of No. 4, Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders. What will this mean to America? An administration that is either at war with its base or at war with the nation.(...) Obama knows Middle America harbors deep suspicions of him. Thus, he has jettisoned the rhetoric about the "fierce urgency of now," and "We are the people we've been waiting for," even as he has jettisoned position after position to make himself acceptable. Flip-flopping reveals the prime meridian of presidential politics. If an analyst will collate all the positions to which all the candidates move, he will find himself close to the true center of national politics. (...) No Democrat has ever come out of the far left of his party to win the presidency. McGovern, the furthest left, stayed true to his convictions and lost 49 states.(...) One question remains: Will a President Obama, with his party in absolute control of both Houses, revert to the politics and policies of the Left that brought him the nomination, or resist his ex-comrades' demands that he seize the hour and impose the agenda ACORN, Ayers, Jesse, and Wright have long dreamed of? Whichever way he decides, he will be at war with them, or at war with us. If Barack wins, a backlash is coming.

So this campaign, no matter who wins it, is probably only the beginning of an enormous conflict... a hopefully dry, second American Civil War.

Bush in his own tortured, private hell can be content. He has left a mess that will take decades to sort out and may tear the country apart. He has taken his revenge in full. Revenge for what? What did we ever do to him to deserve such punishment?

We will probably never know. DS

The US presidency and Harry Potter's magic invisiblity cloak

the s(h)itting president

According to the legend, the Cloak of Invisibility has the power to shield the wearer from being seen by Death. - Harry Potter - Wikipedia

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In the picture that illustrates this post, a picture which appears in all the major American media, an actor playing the current President of the United States, strikes the pose of Rodin's "Thinker", obviously engaged in having a bowel movement.

During the entire presidential campaign, primaries included, many people, both for and against, have been asking, "Can an African-American be President of the United States?"

They have been missing the whole point.

Not only can a black man be President of the United States of America; it is now a essential requirement for the job.

Until seeing the poster of Josh Brolin as Oliver Stone's "W" sitting on a toilet in cowboy boots with his pants around his ankles under the caption "Sitting president", I admit I didn't understand how essential this was either. But, on seeing the poster, I had an epiphany, a revelation, and saw the whole question clearly for the first time.

Today, after eight years of George W. Bush; as the image and the brand and the reality of American power unravels, only a black man can be president of the United States .

Why is this?

Not because, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, a brown face in the White House will make us suddenly beloved in places like Pakistan... it wont, not at all, perhaps quite the contrary.

But rather because nobody would dare to put a black person on a poster like the one advertising Oliver Stone's film, that's why.

Political caricature is ill willed and cruel and after centuries of our cruelty it is taboo for civilized white people to ridicule a person of color.

For example, Steve Bell, the Guardian's brilliant cartoonist, characterizes George W. Bush as a chimpanzee. Obviously if Bell drew Barack Obama as a chimpanzee he would be considered a vicious, racist beast.

Probably the most famous political cartoon of all time was Herblock's 1954 drawing of Richard Nixon crawling out of a sewer... Would any American cartoonist ever dare draw something similar of Obama no matter how much he disagreed with him? Would a major newspaper like Herblock's Washington Post ever dare to print such a thing?

To draw a caricature ridiculing a politician you have to cruelly exaggerate the victim's salient physical characteristics. How do you draw or represent any African-American with ill intent without crossing the line into racism?

Barack Obama pictured on a movie poster sitting in a warm bathroom, wearing comfortable cowboy boots... defecating?

Fageddaboudit!

This is what I call the "Harry Potter magic cloak of invisibility" that Americans don when they cloak themselves in Barack Obama.

By electing Barack Obama, Americans want to protect themselves from themselves and at the same time protect themselves from the world's ill will.

The political climate in America is toxic and it has been since Richard Nixon launched his Southern Strategy and caused Republicans to pause from their golf and stock coupon clipping long enough to plunge into neofascist populism and charismatic religion. Reading the traffic, commentaries, forums and blogs of the American Internet, I find myself sickened by how vindictive, petty, personal and ad hominem it is; both on the left and on the right. If it has been so in relatively good times, there is no reason to expect it to sweeten up in truly bad times.

Things are very bad and they are getting much worse.

Whoever is elected president is in deepest doo doo even before their inauguration.

The country is going to be in a bad mood and surly, but commentators, cartoonists and even most popular bloggers will walk on eggs when treating president Obama. At this time the default position for Obama supporters, when confronting anyone skeptical of Barack Obama, his personality or accomplishments, is to treat them as racist. As president Obama finally takes his bruises from reality instead of speculation, this position should harden. The taboo against racial abuse should guarantee America at least a few months of most welcome peace.

Things have gone so far that electing the untested Obama and invoking this taboo, is probably the only way Americans have of restoring, in their own eyes, the sanctity and the prestige of the center of American political life, the office of the presidency, the post of the nation's commander in chief.

And when someday a million Shiites take to the streets in Iraq shouting, "Death to America! Death to Obama!", they too can be dismissed as racists.

That is how far things may have gone. DS

Comrade Bush's "Five Year Plan"

Igor Igorevich

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism. Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government. The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system. Washington Post

The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. (...) In the rescue law passed a week ago, Congress stipulated that the Treasury must strictly limit the pay of executives in banks to which it adds capital — including provisions that ban golden parachutes and that direct the government to recover bonuses based on stated earnings that prove inaccurate. Britain’s plan also hinged on the willingness of several of the largest banks — Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC Holdings, among them — to sell preferred shares to the government. It is not clear, administration officials said, that the largest American banks would agree to this, particularly given the restrictions on executive pay. New York Times

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world's financial markets while they ``rewrite the rules of international finance.'' ``The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,'' Berlusconi said (...). A solution to the financial crisis ``can't just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.'' Bloomberg

The big lesson is that the west can no longer assume the global order will be remade in its own image. For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is ending. Philip Stephens - Financial Times

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Well, it appears that George W. Bush is going to nationalize American banks...

Holy Moly!

My inner Lenin is having the shivering fits.

My inner Ilyich is in stitches.

I sure never thought that it would be Dubya that would end up building Socialism.

Damn!

Isn't the world a wonderful place?

Isn't life fun?

What other planet can offer such horse shit? DS

Thought for the day

Mirror, mirror on the wall

"What the foreign visitor finds the most frightening, the most dangerous, is the voter who, after eight years of abject catastrophe, continues to pray "Please, please, give me a reason to vote for the person who says that things are all right, after all." Someone like Bush." Bradley Burston - Haaretz

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Counting chickens before they hatch is something most of us do all the time. Unhatched chickens are so much fatter and tastier than what finally pops out of the egg. I fear that many Democrats are succumbing to that temptation today.

Because of Bush's personal unpopularity it is easy to jump to the conclusion that voters have had an epiphany and that now their hearts and minds are in the progressive camp.

Here are a few things to mull over.

It should give pause to think what astounding levels of stumbling incompetence and how many years of it was needed to bring Bush's ratings to where they are today. It should give pause to think how much Kool-Aid was eagerly drunk before the slightest gag reflex kicked in.

It should give pause to think that Dick Cheney, who makes Richard Nixon look like Macaulay Culkin, has never, in eight years, been in danger of impeachment.

Like a monk with a Zen koan, progressives should roll around in their minds how a lifelong foul ball like Bush was ever nominated in the first place for the world's most important job and how he got reelected when all of today's disasters were easily visible.

The answer to these questions might be that the majority of Americans were always in agreement with what Bush was selling; that they were totally untroubled by the moral implications of things like invading countries that had never harmed or threatened them, or torturing prisoners or wiretapping, but have only come to detest Bush's obviously incompetent execution of those policies... never the policies themselves.

Despite having a larger proportion of university graduates than any other nation on earth Americans give most of the world the impression of not playing with a full deck. Remember that Noam Chomsky (may he live a hundred years) always says that if Americans studied politics with the same attention and sophisticated knowledge with which they study sports it would change the world.

Americans didn't used to be so stupid, once upon a time they were able to follow the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. What exactly has happened to the American brain since then must be very complex.

At the bottom, I think it is because there is a fundamental contradiction between America's republican institutions and its elite's, imperial, hegemonic, obsessions. I have the feeling that it was decided (perhaps by an unspoken consensus) that the only way to preserve America's institutions and to try to rule the world at the same time was to mentally castrate the American population.

The problem is not really Bush, we should be grateful that his abysmal incompetence has allowed us to see how our system actually works, grateful for the mirror he holds up for us. No, I'm afraid that the problem is with Americans themselves: by their fruits ye shall know them: the people themselves will or wont finally change the politics, it will never be the politicians who do it.

The future looks rather frightening, to say the least. We have seen that the American people can tolerate Dick Cheney and yet simultaneously be enchanted by the empty rhetoric of Barack Obama. It follows logically that America's future probably holds a politician who combines the heart of a Cheney and the mouth of an Obama... Hopefully he (or she) will be as incompetent as Bush. DS

Bush the Transfomer

(Obama) will have to embrace our national sense of uniqueness and give voice to what Ronald Reagan said of us: “You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” Dick Morris

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. Andrew Sullivan

Magical thinking is a common phase in child development. From the age of a toddler to early school age children will often link the outside world with their internal consciousness, e.g. "It is raining because I am sad".(...) Another form of magical thinking occurs when people believe that words can directly affect the world. This can mean avoiding talking about certain subjects ("speak of the devil and he'll appear"), using euphemisms instead of certain words, or believing that to know the "true name" of something gives one power over it, or that certain chants, prayers or mystical phrases will change things. More generally, it is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent. Wikipedia

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For a people once known for their practical, empirical approach to problem solving, today's Americans seem eager to take comfort in evading reality. Eight years of Bush have done great damage to America's inflated image of itself... but probably not enough damage for our own good.

That's why I think it's a shame that Bush can't be president for a least eight years more. In the same way that forty years of Franco's rule was the bitter aversion therapy that finally produced the peaceful, tolerant moderate, open, liberal Spain of today... in a land that had made the word "inquisition" famous; so the Bush years seem to have planted some seeds that, properly nurtured, might actually produce a lucid, practical, American left.

But, alas, I'm afraid that the temptation to continued self-hypnosis may be too great for Americans to resist. DS

Take, eat this Valium

“... I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.” Barack Obama

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I confess I cannot understand how someone who dares to use this type of language is not greeted with a shower of tomatoes -- as any horticulturist knows, it is hard to find horse manure in sufficient quantity these days -- or at least with raucous horse laughter.

To employ this tone with a straight face, one has to be either the most cynical demagogue who has ever graced our fair Republic, or bat shit crazy... or both.

People are lining up to vote for him?

No problem, we are talking about the same folks that first chose John Kerry as electable and then reelected George W. Bush.

Your honor I rest my case.

Quite logically, several of my readers have asked me, that since I think Obama is such a sinister figure, who then do I suggest voting for. I am very flattered they ask.

Look, I am just standing around here on my street corner ranting, you're on your own, but, if you really are interested in my opinion, this is how I see it.

I am always joking about my "inner Lenin" and, like Humpty Dumpty in Through a Looking Glass, "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less," however, one of the meanings could be the steady, unyielding pursuit of transformation and great tactical inventiveness and flexibility in designing the route to that goal.

What is the goal?

My goal, in any other country, would be as mild as sparkling rosé, but in the United States of America it is as corrosive as white lightening. What, in any other rich and highly developed country, would be only mild and natural reform, in the USA would rival the October Revolution. I am talking about creating a welfare state on the Scandinavian model on America's fair shores: womb to tomb, from sea to shining sea.

On the rocky road to that paradise of social justice, one figure, soon to be of blessed memory, has been been a true giant of transformation: George W. Bush.

People don't give President Bush enough credit... Nobody has ever gotten more Americans of all ages reading Noam Chomsky and his ilk and asking awkward questions about what the United States really is and what it is really doing, than George W. Bush.

Ugly though he is, Bush reeks of reality.

Obviously the empty and rhythmic strokes of Barack Obama's sterile, red-herring, Lampedusan rhetoric is the system's way of draining the life out of all that Chomskian curiosity, of siphoning off all that energy and of lobotomizing all that restlessness. Marcuse's word made flesh.

"Change we can believe in" bears the same resemblance to real change as Disneyland's "Main Street USA", has to the downtown of a real, American, rust belt village: it is just another shrink-wrapped, vacuum packed, pre-digested, pre-sanitized, 'just add water and stir', American "experience".

Real change in the United States will come from within the society itself or it will never come at all. People's heads have to change and only they can change them.

The system itself will never "heal" anything.

The system is corrupt and decadent... The trained seal performance of the candidates for the world's most powerful office, as they groveled before AIPAC, should erase any doubts in that respect.

The culture must transform itself, this is the time for artists, intellectuals and philosophers to step forward, not peddlers of vacuous drivel. A truly great novel, an essay or a film or the appearance of another MLK might change America much more than a hundred president Obamas.

What to do in November?

Irreparable hardship must be avoided, especially for women: in order to keep the Republicans from appointing the Supreme Court justices that would shoot down Roe vs. Wade, I recommend voting for Democrats straight down the line for the Congress and Senate.

The Democrats should have a majority sufficient to block those Supreme Court Neanderthals and to override a presidential veto and pass a true health care package, mandates and all.

For President, McCain. If he could work with Russ Feingold and Teddy Kennedy, he should be able to survive in such an environment

Since, sadly, the old fellow seems quite a sensible chap, I don't imagine he will lead so many Americans to reading Chomsky as Dubya has, but he may come close to that "third term" we need so badly in order to bring the goal of true social change just another step closer. DS

John Kass: Obama's mettle was forged in city's dubious furnace - Chicago Tribune Abstract: International change agent Barack Obama stood in Daley Plaza on Friday and paid public fealty to the political machine boss who holds this city in a wrought iron fist. Obama waxed happily about Chicago possibly hosting the 2016 Olympics and joked about finishing his second term as U.S. president and hanging out with the boss, Mayor Richard Daley, a fellow who doesn't mind great change in Washington, as long as Chicago remains impervious to reform. "In the interest of full disclosure, I only live two blocks away from where the Olympics are going to kick off in 2016, and so I am just going to be able to walk over there. I might have to rent my house," Obama said, meaning the house he bought when he was pals with Tony Rezko, not the White House where he'll be living. "I don't know how much it's going to be worth."(...) These days, with vague Orwellian slogans like "change" and polling and a national media obviously in thrall with him, there seems to be an effort to ignore Obama's Chicago political connections, to consider him as having been hatched, perhaps immaculately from a floating soap bubble, spotless and clean to the world. But Chicago was where he was boiled down and honed, where the community organizer was rendered, where the politically independent junior senator began cozying up to the Daleys and their machine and the new presidential Barack was formed. Illinois politics are dirty and slimy and known to all, but I'm sure Arizona politics aren't all that clean either, not when it comes to federal military land swaps for developer friends and fundraisers of Republican John McCain. McCain has the war hero record, but he's also got SunCor Development Co. hanging around his neck. USA Today reported that he helped secure millions in federal funds for a land acquisition program that benefited a developer whose executives were big-time political donors. If true, it sounds like a story that could have come out of Illinois politics, right out of our own state GOP, with the boss hog Republicans cutting deals with City Hall Democrats, everybody's head in the trough except for the taxpayers who fill it. READ IT ALL

Bush's "appeasment" remark... What is he up to?

This is and will be the great challenge for John McCain: The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush's third term. Peggy Noonan - Wall Street Journal (tip of the hat to James Wolcott)

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George Bush has made so many mistakes in the last eight years attempting to run the country, that it is easy to forget that there is something that he is actually very, very good at: campaigning.

For if Barack Obama has managed to turn a vacuum, a veritable empty space, where others have a CV filled with achievement, into a serious bid for the presidency, George W. Bush has gone much, much farther and has turned a quite nasty CV, filled with misadventures, into two terms in the White House.

The President of the United States of America may have little idea about what to do after winning an election, but he sure knows how to win elections. Democrats, having experienced this in their own flesh, would be foolish to misunderestimate George W. Bush the politician. A cornered Bush should cause them some healthy respect.

Here is the problem: Bush the President is radioactive. Peggy Noonan puts it this way,

The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush's third term.

A McCain victory will, in many senses, be a vindication of George W. Bush.

For McCain there is no way around this. There is no way that a Republican candidate can completely disown a sitting Republican president. Everybody knows that McCain is not Bush, but a McCain victory would, in a sense, be a plus for Bush's tattered, miserable legacy... in fact it would be a triumph under these circumstances.

Since Bush exists and even if McCain were Harry Potter there is no way that he could conjure him away and at the same time, without a McCain victory, Bush faces being ridden out of Washington on a rail... a pariah.. it is obvious that Bush and McCain have to work together...

Bush is going to campaign for McCain as if his life depended on it... in a sense the rest of his life does. No one has ever failed as publicly and totally as George W. Bush, this is his last chance to pull it out...

All that is standing between George W. Bush and a decent place in history is Barack Obama... Knowing what Bush is capable of, if I were Obama, this would make me very nervous.

This does not mean that the President will be out on the hustings making speeches for McCain, because having Bush speaking for you is every Republican's present nightmare. No, he will be too busy in the White House being the President of the United States.

George W. Bush is going to use the Presidency of the United States of America, with all its power to control the news cycle, to create an environment where Barack Obama's perceived weaknesses: inexperience, naiveté and strangeness, will be shown off to his greatest disadvantage. Bush will attack Obama's position with acts and words. In unscrupulous hands the White House can create an environment of unbearable tension. In this effort Bush may have the inestimable help of Osama bin Laden, who has done so well with the Republicans and would have no reason to desire a change.

The vast resources of the White House and the government of the country will be focused almost entirely on this till November.

While Bush uses the office of the President to play dirty, McCain will simply float above it all, the steady American hero, the maverick, plain speaker of vast experience... feisty, Scotch-Irish against a callow youth of uncertain background. I think he'll pick Huckabee as his VP, a great campaigner, a populist, evangelical, southerner. Here Hillary has clearly pointed the way. Neither McCain or Huckabee will stoop to any dirty stuff. That will be left to the 527s and POTUS. McCain will simply be who he is and Bush will use the power of the presidency to define Obama.

Good cop, bad cop.

I am a hundred percent sure that this is going to be the dirtiest campaign in the history of the United States. DS

Enjoy Bush while he lasts

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I'm taking some well deserved rest today, so I thought I'd goof off and just show y'all a film.

I made this thing over a year ago as a mashup. Had fun and worked off my agressions. Looking at it today, I got to thinking that a meatball like Bush is a one off. I think we'll see much worse than Bush, someone just as rotten but much more competent. A heart as worm eaten as his, but velvet tongued. So lets enjoy this scum ball while we can. We shall not live to see his like again. DS

William Pfaff: The Coup d'Etat against Bush

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I can't think of a more important topic than this. This is not the rant of some blogger in pajamas. William Pfaff is one of the most respected political commentators writing today in the English language.

Careful readers will notice a thick forest of nuances in everything he says here. DS

William Pfaff: The Coup d'Etat against Bush
Abstract: The conspicuous irrelevance of George W. Bush’s tour of the Middle East to any of the real forces and interests of the region, as well as the spooky irrelevance of nearly everything he said there about the alleged menace of Iran, Israel-Palestine peace, his fancied notions of Iraq’s democratic development, and even about oil prices and the American economy, embarrassed his Arab hosts as well as the American officials and press accompanying him. The tour – his farewell to the Middle East? -- lent weight to the judgement many abroad have already reached, that he no longer governs the United States, and indeed does not even understand its present foreign relationships. It is widely felt that what amounts to a coup d’etat has taken place in the United States, removing George Bush, without his even recognizing this (or at least admitting that it has occurred) from control over the principal issues of war and peace. This coup has taken the form of what amounts to a mutiny of the professional foreign policy services of the U.S. government, acquiesced in by the new Secretary of Defense, the service chiefs, and Director of Central Intelligence Bush has himself appointed.(...) The pathetic and pusillanimous refusal of recent American Congresses – and we are not simply speaking about the Congress now in office, but of practically every Congress since the beginning of the cold war – to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities with respect to the declaration and financing of wars, has now generated its own rebuke from within the executive branch of government. Leaders in the executive branch are unwilling to act on presidential orders that do not carry with them the constitutionally mandated authority of the representative branch of government.(...) I am perhaps taking a romantic and unjustified view of what has happened. I hope not. I believe that only grave malfeasance in government and unconstitutional conduct justify an executive ‘coup d’etat’ – however ‘postmodern’ the form that it assumes, and however elevated its motives. However I would suggest that the present election campaign demonstrates that powerful forces in the Washington political and foreign policy communities, reinforced by financial and industrial interests, are committed to suppressing all challenge to policies that already have altered the political character of the United States. The American form of government itself needs to be defended. READ IT ALL

The soft Republican underbelly: caught between Rand and the Rapture

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a Stranger and you Welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.
Jesus Christ - Matthew 25

"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."
Jesus Christ - Luke 6:43 - 45

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There is a gaping fault line within the Republican Party that few seem to have noticed and fewer to exploit. It is the abyss that runs between those who follow the teachings of Ayn Rand and the woollier followers of Jesus Christ. As the quotes above show, no two doctrines could be more incompatible. Just by reading these snippets it is evident that the gap between the two world views is greater than any other imaginable, certainly greater than any gap that ever existed between Christianity and socialism.

Those brutalized by Reaganism and the pious platitudes of Bush may think that evangelical protestantism is irremediably wedded to Neanderthalite capitalism, but they forget, if they ever knew, that the leftist traditions of our British cousins have their firmest roots in the Nonconformist chapels of England and Wales and in the Presbyterian kirks of Scotland. The history of the British Labour Party is filled with Bible beating Baptists and Methodists and the Lutheran influence on Scandinavian social democracy is clear. Certainly the answer to the question, "am I my brother's keeper" is affirmative in both social democracy and Christianity.

Examples of Randism? With Wikipedia at our fingertips, I wont take up space and bandwidth expounding on the doctrines of Ayn Rand, suffice to say that she was the greatest single influence on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, the overflow of whose heart and the fruits of whose tree -- more like the flowering orchard he planted -- we are only now beginning to taste in the fullness of their season.

The closest the GOP have ever come to the synthesis of these extremes is in the misbegotten, smirking, strut, adorned with homely pieties, of the improbable George W. Bush. It is unlikely that any successor, no matter how blighted his spirit and darkened his understanding, could long maintain such superlative cognitive dissonance or bridge that aching gap again anytime soon.

Over the last few days I have been writing frequently about Mike Huckabee and the reason is that his campaign and the reaction to it by the Republican leadership is illuminating this gap. For me it is the most interesting development, coming at a moment of military defeat and economic crisis, that I can remember.

It is clear that a path to victory is opening for progressive politics to take, but it is anything but clear that progressives are inclined to take it. I would tell them in the words of the the best loved king of France, the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre who, when he was offered the crown of France quickly became the Catholic, Henry IV or "Henry the Great", said, Paris vaut bien une messe ("Paris is well worth a Mass"). DS

Huckabee: and you thought things couldn't get worse?

"Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It's a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext -- who's the Christian in this race? -- would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear."
Charles Krauthammer

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God (any god you like, take your pick) only knows that I don't like to find myself in agreement with Charles Krauthammer about anything, but today I think he's hit the nail on the head as far as Mike Huckabee is concerned.

I would add that Huckabee, like Krauthammer, forms part of America's slide toward its own unique brand of paranoiac, whimpering, Jesus ridden, Disneyesque, something or other that we might even call "fascism", if that word hadn't lost almost all its meaning; as by now the word "Fascist" has become degraded into an all purpose term of abuse without its former precision.

In one speech, however, his CPAC "islamo-fascist" speech, Huckabee went well over the line (YouTube link) directly into classic fascism as defined by former Columbia University Professor Robert O. Paxton in Wikipedia's article on the subject:

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Paxton further defines fascism's essence as:

...a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination."

Here is an extract of the speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, some of whose phrases I have highlighted to emphasize their conformity to Paxton's definition:

We all understand we are in an unconventional war. I have said, and I believe with all my heart, we are not on the brink of; we are in the midst of a World War III. (Applause)

And the Islamic fascists who have declared enmity against us are not interested in settling the types of lines of demarcation that normally settle wars.

Because this is not a war about property. This is not a war about personalities. This is not a war even about power.

What makes this so unusual is that the radical Islamic fascists—not representative of the entire Muslim religion, but the radical Islamic fascists who have declared war on us do so not from a political perspective but from a theological perspective.

And a lot of people I don't think understand that when that is the basis, there can be no negotiation. Because while one may be able to negotiate with diplomats, one does not negotiate with God.

When they declare that their sole purpose is the destruction of Israel, the United States and anything that resembles us, let us be clear. They are not interested in detente. They are not interested in some type of peaceful co-existence.

They are not just interested; they are solely determined for one and only one thing, and that is not our decline. It is our ultimate and absolute annihilation and destruction.

This is a war we cannot and must not lose. Because it doesn't mean that we have a shrinked (ph) border. It means that we have a nonexistence.

They are not marching under the banner of a flag and wearing the uniforms of soldiers and carrying the banner of a country. It is an unconventional war.

And I am convinced it will require an unconventional response, through unconventional means, with special operations and heavy use of intelligence and a different kind of approach to fight it and to win it.

But the one thing that we must be committed to as a nation—be we liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, urban or rural—is that we understand the nature of this enemy and we understand that at stake is not simply higher taxes, changed lifestyles, but existence itself as a people and as a civilization.

We must win this war. (Applause)

Much of the Huckabee "movement" has to do with decontenting and eviscerating language. Try listening to Huckabee answering the evolution question: Youtube link. Or on Gays in the military. Youtube link. Here is my 'guru' William Pfaff on this language question:

"The debasement of language is political, due to the American electoral system, by which campaigning is entirely by unlimited paid television (or radio) advertising, imposing demagogy and simplism, frequently testing the limits of defamation and calumny. It also is due to the power of special interests in Congress and their influence on the public debate in Washington, distorting argument, cultivating euphemism, setting the media agenda, and imposing demagogy." William Pfaff

That debasement of language (in the widest sense of the meaning of "language") is at the heart of it all. Remember "compassionate conservatism"?

What we are seeing with Mike Huckabee is a post 9-11 retread of George W. Bush's year 2000, oxymoronic "compassionate conservatism": with the difference that Huckabee is much more credible than Bush was at delivering that oxymoron and it is an oxymoron that has resonated mightily with the American people and still does.

In fact "Compassionate Conservatism" is a magic phrase that holds in itself all the contradictions of contemporary America and certainly Huckabee is much better suited to deliver it than the hapless present tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Huckabee's political skills are of quite another order of magnitude than Dubya's and can only be compared to fellow Arkansan, "Slick Willy" Clinton's. (is there something in the water in Arkansas that loosens the tongue so prodigiously?)

You probably think that the United States cannot produce a worse president than George W. Bush... You are wrong. The best thing about Bush is how clumsy and inept he is. Imagine someone with Bush's ideology and Bill Clinton's political skills. Bush is only Huckabee's "John the Baptist", the "good news" is on the way. DS

Things fall apart: the National Intelligence Estimate

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Like bursting a child’s toy balloon, the latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which expresses the consensus of the 16 branches of the intelligence community, stated that Iran was not in the process of developing atomic weapons. Many observers believe that by issuing its report, the CIA, backed by the State Department and the Pentagon, has engineered a “palace coup” to keep Bush and Cheney from attacking Iran with catastrophic consequences for a US economy teetering on the brink of what appears to be a nasty recession. Simon Tisdall wrote in the Guardian, “That the CIA and others felt able to act in this manner is a measure of Bush's weakness and their own lingering anger over the Iraq WMD debacle.” Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate magazine, “If Bush were to order an attack under these circumstances, he would risk a major eruption in the chain of command, even a constitutional crisis”

The New York Times said, “Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate”. Arnaud de Borchgrave of UPI added, “The latest NIE makes tougher sanctions against Iran mission impossible.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz underlined, “However successful or flawed this report may be, there is a new, dramatic reality, in all aspects of the struggle against the Iranian bomb: The military option, American or Israeli, is off the table, indefinitely. “

Haaretz may be over optimistic. President Bush told Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Silva, “I have said Iran is dangerous, and the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary.” What Bush’s stubborn attitude reveals is that, as with Iraq, Iran’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction are merely an excuse for a project long in preparation. Helena Cobban of the of the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote in her blog, “ever since I first came to the US in 1982, I have heard US and Israeli officials and semi-official sources claiming that Iran is "just two to five years" or thereabout away from having a nuclear weapon. I note that 1982 is now 25 years into the past and it hasn't happened yet.” Vice-President Cheney, the neocons and the powerful Israel lobby want to bring down the Ayatollahs before Iran becomes the dominant power in the Middle East. Bush’s last year in power may be their last chance. Exactly like Iraq, the confrontation with Iran is not about Weapons of Mass Destruction and certainly not about democracy or human rights. Again it’s about oil and Israel. DS

Condoleezza Rice: the Republican's greatest success story

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I disagree with the conclusion of Fred Kaplan's article, reprinted below. Far from being a failure Condoleezza Rice is the one great Republican success story of the Bush years.

Condoleezza Rice has done more than any other individual to reinforce the most basic conservative Republican positions on both feminism and affirmative action. Rarely ever has anyone so advanced the Republican's key agendas. DS

Condoleezza Rice: Why Her Dreams Crashed - Washington Post
Abstract: Rice isn't used to failure, and most Americans aren't used to thinking of her as one. (...) Rice remains one of the architects of a fantasy foreign policy, and her record as secretary of state gives little hope that she'll be able to reverse that verdict in the administration's final months. The case against Condi starts with her dismal tenure as national security adviser in Bush's first term -- perhaps the worst in the office's history.(...) The problem was that, in the course of counseling George W. Bush, she fell under his tutelage much more than vice versa. Instead of informing his instincts, she formalized them into doctrine -- and came to believe in it herself. In his second inaugural address, Bush declared that his main goal would be to end tyranny and spread democracy around the world. For a few months, some wondered whether freedom might really be "on the march." Iraq held its first free elections; in Ukraine, protests and turmoil followed a rigged presidential vote; massive rallies in Beirut forced Syria to end its 30-year occupation of Lebanon. Rice took these as signs that the world was spinning on a new axis, and she took Bush's words as a mandate to spin it harder.(...) While advising Bush's son during his 2000 presidential campaign, Rice remained firmly in this mold. In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, she called "power politics" and "power balances" the key elements of national security. Yet just five years later, she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, "the fundamental character of regimes matters more today than the international distribution of power." And: "Democracy is the only assurance of lasting peace and security between states, because it is the only guarantee of freedom and justice within states." Her friends and colleagues gasped at the reversal. Cynics ascribed it to a psychological complex about powerful male tutors. The merely skeptical attributed it to a pragmatic realization that she had to adopt Bush's messianic views to keep her job.(...) At times this year, Rice seems to have returned to her realist roots, most notably in striking a quick nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea. After years of scorning Arab-Israeli diplomacy, she now hopes to assemble a last-ditch Israeli-Palestinian peace conference; but Washington's leverage has diminished, the parties know she and Bush are lame ducks, and the region's ground is burning. She is said to be locked in a face-off with Cheney over Iran policy: He wants to bomb, she wants to keep talking. But it is a sad comment on the endurance of her one great asset -- her influence with the president -- that nobody knows whose side the decider will take. Finally, there looms Iraq, where the only recent tactical successes have involved building up tribal warlords, not creating a beacon of democracy. This war has been Rice's war as much as anybody's in the administration. Long after her celebrity and charm have been forgotten, her epitaph will endure: She pursued democracy at the expense of stability, and achieved neither. READ IT ALL

Hegemony, when it goes... "be a long time gone"

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The definitive importance of what has been lost in Iraq is only just beginning to sink in. We are experiencing, at this very moment, the end of an era that began in 1945.

Western leaders feeling 'orphaned' gather and rally to Washington looking for leadership that no longer exists.

This vacuum will not be solved when a new president is elected, the vacuum is structural not personal. Bush is only a symptom, not a true cause, a symbol not the reality, the bad smell, not the mess itself.

Living so many years in Spain and studying its history has made me especially aware of the mechanisms of 'decline and fall'. Fewer people are better equipped by their history than the Spanish to understand how a brave, talented, energetic people can be led to ruin by a decadent, ruling elite. Spain also offers the example of how, even at great cost and at great pain, it is possible for a great country to finally leave aside prideful narcissism and learn the lessons that history happily teaches to those who attend her. DS

Philip Stephens: America is still indispensable but it must work with others - Financial Times
Abstract: Early next week George W. Bush will be greeting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, at the White House. A day or so later France’s Nicolas Sarkozy will pitch up in Washington. By the weekend, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, will be sharing a hamburger with the US president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Lame-duck president he may be but Mr Bush does not lack for foreign visitors.(...) If American power is still indispensable, it is no longer sufficient. America’s choices condition, often decisively, the decisions of others. But their assent cannot be taken for granted.(...) During Mr Bush’s unilateralist first term, one US official told me a little while ago, the assumption had been that “first we decide and then we tell the rest of the world”. During the second term there had been a genuine attempt to “listen before we decide”. Crucially, though, the bit that had not changed was “we decide”.(...) The common thread that runs through both sets of campaigns, though, is an assumption that the US can somehow turn back the clock to the world before Iraq. Thus Mrs Clinton tells readers of Foreign Affairs that though American leadership has been “wanting”, it is still “wanted” by the rest of the world. Mr Obama has written in the same journal that: “The American moment is not over but it must be seized anew.” To the extent that the US will remain the pre-eminent power for some decades yet, they are right. But two things are missing: recognition that the rise of other powers – notably China and India – is already diminishing America’s relative strength, and anything more than the vaguest of senses of how the US might shape this landscape. There lies the purpose for American leadership: to begin to design, as it did for the west after the second world war, an international system that puts great power co-operation rather than competition at its core. Many will say that is too much to ask of today’s candidates for the White House. They may be right. But in that case we should prepare for the new global disorder. READ IT ALL

History to Bush: quo vadis... turkey?

"As long as George Bush is commander-in-chief of the US military and he and his advisers are intent on getting the US into a shooting war with Iran, Iran is the issue." Josh Marshall

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Webster defines the word, "surreal" as, "marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream". That Bush, failed in Iraq, struggling in Afghanistan, could, may very well... in fact, probably will, start another war... very soon, has all the qualities necessary to fill Webster´s definition.

Dream? Nightmare? Why quibble?

Philip Stephens wrote in his Financial Times column that "the White House once again seems hell-bent on being outwitted in the court of global opinion; and, maybe, on making a strategic miscalculation that could make the war in Iraq look like a sideshow."

There is much speculation that all of this is to be done for Israel's benefit: Both the Israel lobby, AIPAC and Norman Podhoretz, a senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani and the "godfather of neoconservatism", beat the drum ceaslessly for a war with Iran, but according to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Israeli "Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel"

David Ignatius wrote in the Washingon Post,"Military action would be irrational for both sides. But that doesn't mean it won't happen. I wish the Bush administration could see that with each step it takes closer to conflict, it is walking toward a well-planned trap."

"Irrational", sister to "surreal" is the operative word.

As Paul Krugman said, "All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious." Fareed Zacharia wrote in Newsweek, "This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous." Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, "I think running around like a lunatic -- with a razor and waving a red banner -- isn't the best way to solve this kind of problem". And a New York Times editorial said, “With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing — or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd.”

Albert Einstein once said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Los Angeles Times columnist, Rosa Brooks has come right out and accused Bush of being clinically insane. Rosa Brooks is not only a columnist, she is also a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in international law, human rights, law of war, state failure, terrorism and rule of law issues. So this is not some bag lady shouting on a street corner. She wrote, "What's a constitutional democracy to do when the president and vice president lose their marbles? The U.S. is full of ordinary people with serious forms of mental illness -- delusional people with violent fantasies who think they're the president, or who think they get instructions from the CIA through their dental fillings. The problem with Bush is that he is the president -- and he gives instructions to the CIA and military, without having to go through his dental fillings."

Certainly the declining months of Bush's raj are reminiscent of those old Hollywood films about the Roman empire... Nero and his magic violin, Caligula and his consul horse. The world hanging on the product of a diseased brain. DS

Michael Hirsh: Another Turn of the Screw - Newsweek
Abstract: For some people, it all felt unnervingly like a lurch back to 2002—the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration's announcement of wide-ranging sanctions against Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Defense Ministry—as well as its major banks—tarred much of Tehran's officialdom as rogues, terror supporters or proliferators. Russian President Vladimir Putin, displaying his gift for anti-American metaphor, likened the Bush officials to "mad people wielding razor blades." Democratic lion Sen. Robert Byrd thundered: "Congress will not be kept out of the loop while this administration plots another march to war."(...) their new approach does seem to cut off the possibility of high-level negotiations with the current Iranian government, at least for the present. Even a key U.S. ally, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, says the sanctions alienate U.S. officials from the only real decision makers in Iran. "The Revolutionary Guards … are the ones who are running the Iranian government," Zebari said last week. While Bush administration officials insist that Tehran intends to build a bomb, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is concerned that Iran wants eventually to become a "virtual nuclear- weapons state," like Japan. That is, it wants to have the technology, industry and expertise to produce a bomb on short notice, but doesn't necessarily want to make or test one. ("Yes, that is what we are doing," a senior Iranian envoy, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told NEWSWEEK last week.) Many Iranians hint that this would be a sufficient strategic deterrent, unless the United States attacks first. READ IT ALL