The McCain Mutiny

If John McCain had won the Republican primary in 2000, I probably would have voted for him. I think quite a few "independents" and "swing voters" also would have, given McCain's backstory, his earnestly maverick posturing, and Al Gore's mendacious fundraising and dog-ate-my-homework excuses. It all seems very different in retrospect, but at the time, McCain seemed like a decent option (though, as a card-carrying member of the infamous Keating Five, he too had his share of backroom baggage).

Still, McCain should and could have beaten a mildly retarded transplanted Texan, were it not for the nefarious push-polling by so-called Christians in South Carolina, working at the behest of Marion "Watch Me Leg-Press A Tractor!" Robertson. It was all very sordid and despicable, and of course it worked, and the rest is ugly history, repeating and rhyming in Oedipus Tex' own peculiar meter.

In the intervening years, McCain has made something of a fool of himself, letting his slavering preznitential ambitions get the best of his principles. He has publicly hugged the miserable fucks who slandered his wife and daughter, and begged for more. He has gone to the well and drawn on his admirable service to pimp a two-ply torture bill for Dick Cheney to wipe his ass with. He glad-hands on The Daily Show, then runs straight for Bob Jones "University" to strap on the kneepads for the theocrats.

Even worse, McCain's actual politics have drifted steadily to the right, to the point that he has outflanked the Cheney administration quite handily. His current fetish is the idea that with another 20-30,000 troops and a Friedman Unit or two, this thing can be turned around in Iraq. The bad guys will be killed, captured, or scattered, and the good and thankful citizens of Baghdad will finally pull out those Whitman's Samplers they've been hiding for four years, and welcome us with open arms.

Also, as they say, ponies. Everybody enjoys a nice pony.

And because our media sock puppets are largely callow and one-dimensional, they are stuck on the Straight Talkin' McCain narrative from six years ago. The maverick, the renegade Republican, el solo lobo. He's stickin' it to Whitey, not takin' no shit from The Man, unlike those candy-tucking feminized dhimmicrats. It's a stock line from a jaded profession that also endures its share of effeminized slurs from the closet-case Limbaugh wing, and doesn't have the balls or the sense to just pimp-slap them already. It's projected pronoia on the part of the useful media idiots who keep replaying the stock narrative, and McCain plays it to the hilt. None of them seem to actually listen to the guy long enough to realize that Iraq is about the only thing McCain talks about with any regularity, and on that subject, he's even worse than the current bunch of idiots.

So finally Bill Richardson of all people comes along to start setting the record a little bit straighter, 'cause right now it's all brokeback and shit:

"The leading advocate for escalating the war is Senator John McCain. I have served with John in Congress and I respect him. But John McCain is wrong, dead wrong to think that we can solve Iraq's political crisis through military escalation."

That's it in a nutshell. The time for a strictly military resolution is done; that window, whether we like it or not, has closed. That is not desire, not at all, it is simply fact. What's the solution? If I knew definitively, I'd be making six figures at a think tank, and making googly eyes at Paula Zahn while I explain important shit to her. (Paula: Call me anyway. I will rock you, as they say, like a hurricane.)

But I know enough to understand that McCain is simply trying to position himself as being the toughest hombre of the bunch. That's great, when it has a chance of working, but this is not a John Wayne movie. Iraq is well on the way to becoming a failed state with an emasculated council of powerless figureheads in the Green Zone, and its neighbors licking their chops over the spoils. Twenty or thirty thousand troops will not solve that situation, anymore than they will be able to secure a mixed, chaotic city of seven million people without a lot of dead civilians.

It's sad to watch a guy like McCain decline to this sort of standing. I'd have had a lot more respect for him -- even if his politics were exactly the same as they are -- if he had just had the balls to tell those who wronged him to go fuck themselves. Dick Cheney does it; there's no reason McCain can't do it.

But it's the worst of both worlds. He ingratiated himself to his tormentors, which is the absolute worst punk-ass move you can do in an alpha-male world, and he swung too far to the right long after it was even notionally cool. For the better part of this dreadful year, a clear majority of Americans have consistently registered their opinions that this administration has screwed this thing up royally, and they don't think the solution is more troops. McCain, in his earnest plea for yet another Hail Mary, doesn't seem to get this. Hopefully Richardson has set the stage for more Democrats to help him understand.

Bonus Plan

If I were some hacky financial reporter oohing and aahing over the doings of suited swells (and for all you know, I am), I'd headline this story with some obvious cliché such as "Big Mack Attack".

NEW YORK - Morgan Stanley Inc., the second-largest U.S. investment house, gave chief executive John Mack $40 million in stock and options for 2006, reflecting the largest bonus awarded to a Wall Street CEO.

Mack, 62, was awarded 461,821 stock units valued at $36.2 million on December 12, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday. He was also awarded 178,945 options to buy Morgan Stanley shares, valued at about $4 million.

Morgan Stanley is expected to report its best year ever on Tuesday, buoyed by a record run in the stock market and an unprecedented level of takeover activity. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. turned in record profit reports this week.

I don't mean to get all Marxist or anything, folks, but perhaps we need to start at least teaching Thorstein Veblen in the schools. There is a very serious and unhealthy reconcentration of wealth, that began in the Reagan years, and continued unabated through Clinton and now Fredo Corleone. It is unhealthy and unconscionable that many people have to work two jobs just to survive, while people who juggle derivatives and produce phantom profits get eight-figure bonuses.

Mack's compensation eclipses the $38.3 million former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson received in 2005.

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that Paulson is the current Secretary of the Treasury. That factoid may not be implicit or contingent upon anything in particular, but it would seem to be at least relevant. Apparently not. That would be like pointing out that Halliburton's value and portfolio has skyrocketed -- along with Dick Cheney's pocketbook -- since Cheney slithered into office. Everything is always purely coincidental.

Paul Krugman gets it:

The reason most Americans think the economy is fair to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they were in 2000.

But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger -- how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year -- eighty percent of America -- will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on the rise.

Rising inequality isn't new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth -- and they know it.

The middle class is being squeezed dry. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies have rendered the health care system an expensive, useless joke, making affordable care available only to the wealthy and the destitute. HMO providers are frequently little more than pushers for the latest $150/month drug, that may or may not even work, not to mention the potential side effects. There is plenty of lip service paid to the benefits of preventive medicine, but everything in the American health care system is channeled toward treatment, and the revenue model amply reflects that. And it is going to reach a real crisis point as the baby boomers start retiring.

So you have real wages stagnant, but costs for everything from fuel to food to housing to health care rise inexorably. CEOs write their own performance tickets that translate on the average to over 300 times what their average worker makes. Our elected leaders try much harder to help out Paris Hilton with yet another tax cut for doing nothing, than to help Joe Six-Pack keep his house, or help him avoid bankruptcy and utter destitution.

I don't understand why people so reflexively shy away from the term "class warfare". I think we need a Sun Tzu of class warfare at this point. This is not about "fair" or "unfair", this is about the health and continued sustainability of a society, the notion that a bunch of Wall Street bookies fucking around with percentage points all day live in a completely different world than people who work like dogs until the day they drop. We need to have a public conversation about the reward system in this country, and divorce it from the lottery mentality that the diddlers of lucky percentage points have foisted on the financially illiterate.

Wingnut Welfare Queens

John Miller headlines a post with the question that burns hotter than Dick Cheney's hemorrhoids:

How Effective is Conservative Philanthropy?

Effective enough to keep people like Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldbleg from having to work for a living. Taking people with no marketable skill whatsoever, and not only saving them from pushing a shopping cart, but actually putting disposable income in their pockets and granting them a soapbox for their utter stupidity -- that's practically an economic miracle.

Doubling Down

Something else I found interesting from the very end of Froomkin's Friday column was this little bit about Bush's sleep habits, which maybe lends some insight into the thought processes (or lack of) at work:

"People's interviewer also mentioned that readers had asked if he takes sleep aids. Bush said generally not, but he does occasionally when he travels.

"'I must tell you, I'm sleeping a lot better than people would assume,' he said."

I don't even know what to make of this anymore. I know he needs his naps and bike rides for all these good, crisp decisions the rest of us have to live with, but jeebus. At some point you have to take the guy at his word, and figure he means precisely what he is saying. Bush will eternally be infamous for his oratorical imprecision, but that's his problem. Eventually people have to quit trying to divine "what he meant" and decide that, as a graduate of Harvard and Yale, he meant exactly what he said.

And what he said, it appears, is that he can live with the decisions that he has made, and by association the consequences. He thinks this is a blip, a comma in the inevitable narrative of history, and that future events will vindicate him. He thinks he is Truman, even though Truman, flawed as he was, got where he got with street smarts, muscle, and gall, rather than a bunch of daddy's rich friends buying him a political Porsche to wrap around a telephone pole.

This is positively delusional, and very dangerously so. By absolving himself thusly from his inept courses of action, he in turn escapes responsibility for future decisions that turn out to be catastrophic for everyone but himself. That is why he is so blithe about his review of the (flawed, but at least a step in the right direction, as opposed to the current strategery) ISG Report. That is why he is so unconcerned about addressing constant rumors of attacking Syria or Iran, neither of which is feasible without a lot of the usual collateral damage (and probably not even then).

Iraq Study Group member Leon E. Panetta believed that his panel's unanimous bipartisan recommendations about a new way forward in Iraq would give President Bush the political cover needed for a dramatic policy shift. So the former chief of staff to President Clinton has watched with alarm as Bush this week signaled that he may reject suggestions about diplomacy and withdrawing most US troops from Iraq by 2008.

Bush has even criticized the idea that the group was providing a "graceful exit" from the war -- which is what Panetta and other panel members figured Bush most wanted.

"I think he has been trapped by his own rhetoric," Panetta said in a telephone interview from his California office. Referring to a recent poll suggesting that 70 percent of those surveyed disapprove of Bush's handling of the war, Panetta said, "His ratings are so low now that he has got to do something to pull this country together."

"Pull this country together". I do not think that phrase means what Panetta seems to think it means. Seventy percent of Americans have consistently voiced their disapproval of Bush's handling of things. That sounds fairly unified to me. That sounds like a constituency which has "pulled together" just fine. That they have pulled together in opposition to Bush is a different matter, and one which might be better framed in terms of competence and vision, and the aforementioned emotional compartmentalization of what sensible people understand to be horrendously expensive and deadly mistakes that will take a generation to undo, if indeed they can even be undone.

It's nice that Panetta is trying to as diplomatic and ecumenical about this subject as he can muster, but it has been clear for some time that what Bush and his insular cadre have long needed is an intervention. The electoral drubbing they took last month was precisely that, and Bush has chosen to ignore it like he does everything else. So the Serious Thinkamators put on their Serious Centrist Face, and natter on about "graceful exits" and "peace with honor" and "pulling the country together" and such, as if any of those things appeared viable without about a dozen boilermakers under one's belt.

But to those who know Bush best, the president's approach is not surprising. Bush's former chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. , who was by Bush's side as he formulated many of his key decisions on the war, said Bush hears many opinions and thus believes that "his knowledge is more complete than anyone who is advising him."

Bush will still be "The Decider," to use the president's description of himself. Bush's aides said this week that he is listening to many opinions and is still deciding what to do. After initially saying Bush would make a speech to the nation before Christmas about his Iraq plan, the White House this week said the address would be put off until after New Year's Day because Bush doesn't want to be rushed into making a decision.

But the decision to reject some of the Iraq Study Group's 79 recommendations already seems clear, notwithstanding a comment from panel co chairman James A. Baker III that, "I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad, saying, 'I like this, but I don't like that.' "

Yeah, I know. He "doesn't want to be rushed into making a decision". This has been a certifiable clusterfuck for about three years, and he doesn't want anyone "rushing" him. And when Baker of all people is voicing concerns about Mister Man cherry-picking this thing like a Chinese take-out menu, taking one from column A and one from column B and so on, that oughta be a pretty strong signal that that's exactly what's going to happen.

The metaphor has been played out to cliché level, but it is still inescapably true -- Bush is the proverbial bad gambler. His supporters in the base look at that as a good thing, that he's "laying it all on the table", as it were. He's "taking a calculated risk", with a "huge potential payoff", blah blah blah.

It would be bad enough if he was just an ordinary dipshit putting the deed to his house on 33-Black. Sure, the payoff is 35:1, but so are the odds. You hate to see people lose their houses, savings, marriages, families, etc., on stupid shit, but what are ya gonna do if they refuse to go to Gamblers Anonymous and confront their problem?

Now imagine that the same moron is insisting on putting your house on 33-Black, and he only wants to listen to people who think that 33-Black is the best available number on the wheel. How do you like them odds now?

Snow Balls

Via Froomkin we see an interesting little rhetorical turnaround at one of Tony Snow's daily circle-jerks, aka the White House press conference.

First is Snow's apparent contrition for his reflexive baiting of NBC pit poodle David Gregory:

Okay, before I get to that, I want to address something else, because you and I had a conversation last week that got a whole lot of play in a lot of places where I used the term "partisan" in describing one of your questions. And I've thought a lot about that, and I was wrong. So I want to apologize and tell you I'm sorry for it. And the reason I do that is not only because it's the right thing to do, because I want people in this room and also people who watch these to understand that the relations in this room are professional and collegial. And if I expect you to do right by us, you have every right to expect that I'll do right by you.

So, in any event, I just want to say I'm sorry for that.

And then they held hands and sang "Kumbaya", and now share the same menstrual cycle, right? Not so fast. Just a few minutes later, Helen Thomas gets in Snow's grille about the old notion of habeas corpus, and massages his prostate a bit too forcefully, judging from Snow's instant reversion to form.

Q Who are we to keep meddling in Iraq itself? You talk about meddling and adventuresome? And who are we to give orders to Syria and every other country?

MR. SNOW: We're not giving orders to anybody, Helen. They've got their choices to make. As far as the Iraqis, they made it clear --

Q Recommendations, constantly -- they're taking in a thousand refugees every day -- every month from Iraq.

MR. SNOW: And many of the refugees in Iraq are there because acts of terror have been perpetrated against them. The Syrians certainly have not been helpful in securing a more peaceful Iraq. The Syrians are under suspicion --

Q -- them shelter --

MR. SNOW: The Syrians are under suspicion of having some involvement in the assassinations of Rafiq Hariri and Pierre Gemayel. They have been fighting mightily against an open tribunal to figure out what happened. And again, our commitment is to democracy and we think that people in the region are going to be better off living in free democracies rather than under the sway of governments that deny their rights and use such things as murder and terror as ways of imposing their will.

Q That's such a broad accusation. How many people do we have that we have accused and held in confinement in limbo for four years without any trial without any trial, without any charge?

MR. SNOW: We have provided for the civil rights -- notice that you've completely jumped off of the topic now of the behavior of the Lebanese. What we are doing is that we have passed a law with regard to the Hamdan legislation that guarantees the civil rights of people who have been pulled off battlefields. We have a reasonable suspicion they're trying to kill --

Q Four years without a charge or a trial --

MR. SNOW: -- who we have reasonable suspicion to believe have been trying to kill Americans. And I don't know about you, but I think that's a bad thing. And I think you do, too.

He tries to cover his tracks with that final half-hearted caveat, but that's all it is. He threw the usual trope out there, and it did what he needed it to do -- momentarily deflected the argument just long enough to put Thomas on the defensive, allowing Snow to get off the schneid and do more open-field dodging, which is really all he does anyway.

Look, it's simple -- if these people are trying to kill Americans, and we presumably have actual evidence of this, then let's do this thing. Even a military kangaroo court would be marginally better than keeping them locked up without even charging them, submitting them to rather nasty treatment (yes, we torture "nice", as they say, but just because we don't power-drill people in the neck and gouge their eyes out doesn't mean that water-boarding, force-feeding, and sensory deprivation is humane treament), and eventually letting them go in the dead of night, now radicalized more than ever.

Sixteen more Saudis were released from Guantanamo, and are being "interrogated" by the Saudi authorities to now determine any possible terrorist ties. Which means that they're either being tortured more, since the Americans couldn't crack them, or they're being released with a wink and a nod. There's no real middle ground there -- either they're hardcore bastards, and we should have stepped up and proven our case, or they were innocent, and now they're understandably pissed off. Take your pick.

I referred to Dave Gregory as a "pit poodle", but I suppose that's a qualified assessment. Compared to the rest of the gutless lot covering this beat, Gregory is actually one of the more contentious members of the WH press corpse. He at least makes a game effort. But that's like being the best ice skater in Costa Rica.

In terms of what I would consider truly serious journamalism, I'm genuinely puzzled by the press' continuing willingness to be treated like fools and patsies, especially by what is easily the most overtly, buffoonishly partisan administration in my lifetime. I don't get why these people line up day after day to take shit from an unabashed shill like Tony Snow.

That's not even really a slam at Snow, per se; he's very good at what he does, which is to make a shit sandwich seem almost palatable. If I was in the business of taking huge, heaping piles of steamy shit, putting it between two slices of bread, and convincing people to give me money for it, I'd want someone like Tony Snow to be my sales manager. I bet this fucking guy can walk past a mirror without casting a reflection.

But crowding around the buffet table day after miserable day, and replaying this mendicant exercise in professional cringing over and over again -- who needs it? It informs no one; it illuminates nothing. It is merely there to allow the Serious Professionals and the Elected Leaders to look like they're doing something. It gets characterized as a sparring of ideas between professional adversaries, but the jousting is about as real as what you might find at one of those Medieval Times restaurants.

Now, if they want to keep up that charade, hey, whatever floats your boat, folks. But don't expect everyone to squint and pretend that a mead wench is a knight in shining armor. It's just a sad state of affairs when your bravest warrior is an 85-year-old woman.

The End Of An Error

Today is Rummy's last day, and what better way to send the old buzzard off to his vacation pad in Santo Domingo than to go through the motions and have ponderous changing-of-the-guard ceremonies that cloud the fact that this guy screwed the pooch from the get-go?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Architect of the unpopular war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is no stranger to harsh criticism. But Friday was planned as a day of praise, pageantry and testimonials for the outgoing Pentagon chief.

Three days before he steps down, the Defense Department was ready to salute Rumsfeld's nearly six years of service in the Bush administration with a full honor review by the armed forces. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were to be the lead speakers.

....

And despite his half century in public service, he is being sized up not by the long reach of his career but by its ending — the body slam of Iraq.

With an eye on his legacy, Rumsfeld asked to be judged by the extraordinary nature of today's threat, like none that has come before.

"There's no road map, no guidebook," he said. "The hope has to be — not perfection — but that most decisions, with the perspective of time, will turn out to be the right ones and that the perspective of history will judge the overwhelming majority of those decisions favorably."

He's right. Everything depends on perspective. If your perspective is that Rumsfeld's (and Cheney's, and Bush's) decisions were carried out as planned, then it was a success. They meant to do this shit. They just refused to listen to the people who repeatedly tried to warn them of the likely consequences.

And that is how history will judge them. They're not going to be naming schools after these idiots, not here and not in Iraq. Get used to it, and don't go away mad, boys -- just go away.

A Modest Pantloadal

Please, o great and omniscient Flying Spaghetti Monster, please for the love of You give us a sign that this legacy moron You created in a drunken stupor Your infinite wisdom is only trying out some inept Swiftian schtick he thinks might get him a piece of half-blind Goucher ass.

I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an Iraqi Pinochet would be even better than an Iraqi Castro.

I think all people paying attention can agree: any one of us has taken at least one dump in our lives with as much common sense as your average Jonah Goldberg column. In fact, I usually find that it expedites the process to drop a deuce while thinking about what passes for thought between Pantload's ears.

But it is something to hear one of the "we gotsta lib'rate these poor downtrodden peoples from their vicious strongman that we useta support" choir suddenly change his tune, and lament the apparent unavailability of another strongman. But this time one we can control, right? One that will assuredly only kill bad people. Like, um, that Saddam fella that Donald Rumsfeld never met. That worked out swell.

Pantload has heard the thing about the golem, hasn't he?

But there are measures besides body counts. Castro took Cuba, once among the most prosperous nations in Latin America and destined for First World status, and rendered it poorer than nearby Jamaica and heading Haiti-ward. The island is a prison, and trying to leave can be a capital crime.

See, this isn't really about what's best for Iraq at all. It's about people who inexplicably get paid to bleg for information with which to form hasty, ridiculous opinions on subjects about which they know precious little. The question has never been whether or not Castro was a bad guy, a hoarder of power and an abuser of his people. He was, no two ways about it. But we have generally found ways to work with such people, at least under the pretense of bringing them around, and we never even tried with Castro. Fifty years of unproductive nonsense has been the result.

So spare us the fake moralizing, smart guy. I'll be goddamned if I've seen anyone on the left, "mainstream" or otherwise, defending Castro or bemoaning his impending demise. This is nothing more than someone who has been consistently, irredeemably wrong in his judgment, grasping at the thinnest of straws, and attempting to build the proverbial man out of them.

I bring all this up because in the wake of Pinochet's death (and Jeane Kirkpatrick's), the old debate over conservative indulgence of Pinochet has elicited shrieking from many on the left claiming that any toleration of Pinochet was inherently immoral — their own tolerance of Castro notwithstanding.

But these days, there's a newfound love for precisely this sort of realpolitik. Consider Jonathan Chait, who recently floated a Swiftian proposal that we put Saddam Hussein back in power in Iraq because, given his track record of maintaining stability and recognizing how terrible things could get in Iraq, Hussein might actually represent the least-bad option. Even discounting his sarcasm, this was morally myopic. But it seems to me, if you can contemplate reinstalling a Hussein, you'd count yourself lucky to have a Pinochet.

And that's exactly what all these Serious Thinkers are going to end up doing. Hell, they'll settle for an Idi Amin, so long as he doesn't interfere with the oil production.

A Man, A Plan, A Game Of Stratego

Via Kevin Drum, I am still trying in vain to digest a remarkable foreign policy proposal from a self-described "Jacksonian".

I say "remarkable" because it is written at very high levels of both literacy and utter cluelessness. It is unusual to see high-functioning core competencies utilized in the service of completely unworkable ideas. It's like reading the resume and master plan of the world's most dedicated Civilization player. Twenty-point game plans, with no realistic chance of succeeding. Plenty of gentlemanly bluster about how treating people with honor is all, yet no apparent knowledge or care about how they may feel about how we treated them, both in the past and now. To talk to these self-serving goons, you'd seriously think that every problem with Iran started in 1979, that history before that year just didn't exist.

And I'm not going to poke at a guy for any physical issues he might have, even as he volubly exhorts the hale to expend their physical attributes for The Decider's clear intemellectual shortcomings. But for Christ's sake, pal, if you feel that strongly about this Noble Cause, then I'm sure that there are many intel agencies that need a good desk analyst. Apply to the DLI; they're chronically short of Arabic linguists because of the whole ix-nay on the omo-hay deal. Hell, I even seriously considered applying to the DLI after I left my last job in 2004, just to maybe help offset one small iota of Dear Cheerleader's chronic incompetence somewhere along the line. And I think by now I've made myself pretty clear as to how I feel about Fredo's Folly in general.

Really, people. Either man up or shut up, already. We don't want to hear about how you can't "afford" to pitch in, or the stress on your family. There are several hundred thousands of your fellow citizens currently enduring all that and worse, because a bunch of damned fools think they can expiate their murky consciences with some furry rhetoric and regurgitated Clausewitz. It's pathetic enough in a bunch of pimply-faced fifteen-year-olds playing Warcrack (or, in my day, Dungeons & Dragons). But goddammit, enough. Either find a way to help -- even if it hurts -- or quit badgering the rest of us about what a great idea this will all turn out to be if "we" just stick it out for a couple more Friedmans.

I understand that they don't have the balls to simply admit they fucked up royally. But it's just an abuse of everyone's patience and intelligence to maintain this abhorrent pretense that one can vociferously and proactively "support" something -- and continue to pester the ever-growing majority of people who are seeing more clearly -- by merely ranting about it. I would think that at some point some of the 82nd Chairborne would take a look at themselves and their master plans, and maybe try to find even a low-rent scrivening desk job, if they're serious about helping the cause. That might require them taking a leave of absence from their gravy white-collar sinecures, but such is the sacrifice freedom requires, right?

Waving the virtual pom-poms, of course, is much easier. The world and the country will move on without them, around them, even as it is now starting to do the same to Fredo himself. Foreign policy's loss will be their moms' basements' gain.

Vultures

Jesus. Even though Tim Johnson's prognosis looks fair to good, they're already picking over the corpse:

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) is at George Washington University hospital, recovering from brain surgery.

Meanwhile, Fox News is speculating how the balance of power could shift in the Senate, even if Sen. Johnson survived. Fox’s Steve Doocy said that although “the issue of incapacitation is not spelled out in the state law,” there “would be a precedent of the federal level.”

Another Fox anchor added, “We’ll have to see what happens in terms of what exactly his condition is and who’s going to weigh in on whether it’s an incapacitation or whether that’s just clear from the facts.”

Right. "Incapacitation". Like wheeling Strom Thurmond in for a good 10-12 years after he was about as sentient as the grandfather in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, just a glassy-eyed, dribbling sack of flesh, completely incapacitated both physically and mentally.

I dunno. I'm sure their prayers are with Johnson, I'm just not so sure about the specific nature of those prayers. "Please Lord, turn him into a rutabaga so's Dick Cheney can have final say over everything" doesn't count as a "prayer", no matter how hard you squint, or try to couch things in the fascinating terms of succession in South Dakota's state constitution.

Consumption Junction

I believe I alluded to this story last week, but it seems to be gaining traction:

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back the Sunnis if the United States pulls out of Iraq, according to a senior American official.

The official said the king "read the riot act" to the vice president when the two met last month in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

The New York Times first reported the conversation Wednesday, saying Saudi support would include financial backing for minority Sunnis in the event of a civil war between them and Iraq's Shiite majority.

Asked about the meeting, a senior Saudi official -- who spoke on condition he not be named -- ruled out using terminology such as "warning" or "threatening." He said, "I believe the Saudi position was clear, that things might deteriorate or drift in Iraq, and then the kingdom will find itself forced to interfere."

The official also added: "This is not only expected from Saudi Arabia, but also Jordan and a lot of other Arab countries can't stand still and see things going that direction."

Tony Snow, neck-deep in bullshit as always, had only this to say about any of it:

The White House dismissed the report.

"That's not Saudi government policy," press secretary Tony Snow said in Washington, according to The Associated Press.

"The Saudis have made it clear that they're committed to the same goals we are, which is a self-sustaining Iraq that can sustain, govern and defend itself, that will recognize and protect the rights of all, regardless of sect or religion," Snow said, the AP reported.

If anything, that sounds like a confirmation to me. It is entirely believable -- and even sensible, from the Saudis' point of view, that if we leave Iraq, they and other Sunni states will interfere in various ways to protect their sectarian cousins. That is orthogonal to whether or not the Saudis desire a nice stable trading partner next door. Snow is an idiot just for seriously thinking that a slow third-grader couldn't parse his mealy-mouthed non-response.

In completely unrelated news, gasoline prices jumped 10¢ overnight here in California.

Israel Nukes

It made sense at first, but nowadays the rote denial of Israel's nuclear capacity seems like just another stupid diplomatic pas de deux. Everyone knows, and pretends not to know. Where's the upside?

JERUSALEM — Israel's prime minister spent Tuesday trying to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, after a slip of the tongue in an interview was interpreted as confirming Israel has atomic weapons — widely assumed to be true, but never officially acknowledged.

In an interview with a German television station broadcast Monday, Ehud Olmert appeared to list Israel among the world's nuclear powers.

Asked by the interviewer about Iran's calls for the destruction of Israel, Olmert replied that Israel has never threatened to annihilate anyone.

"Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map," Olmert said. "Can you say that this is the same level, when you are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

Speaking in Germany, Olmert denied Tuesday that he had outed his nation's nuclear program.

"Israel has said many times — and I also said this to German television in an interview — that we will not be the first country that introduces nuclear weapons to the Middle East," Olmert said. "That was our position, that is our position — nothing has changed."

I mean, we all get that even a tacit admission by Israel would seem to provide cover to insane mullahs seeking to legitimize their own nefarious ends. But they're already doing exactly that.

"Israel has said many times — and I also said this to German television in an interview — that we will not be the first country that introduces nuclear weapons to the Middle East," Olmert said. "That was our position, that is our position — nothing has changed."

Interesting choice of phrase on Israel's part, and a none-too-subtle warning that maybe some of the jerkier autocrats in that area would do well to pay heed to, if they're actually interested in de-escalating the violence. They can detach their misgivings about Palestine policy from whether or not the world need medieval loons with nukes, if they're serious about it.

Payback

Looks like SecDef Superb Job found a sweet spot for a parting jab:

He's not even gone, and already Don Rumsfeld has his knives out for his soon-to-be former boss. First, he tells an interviewer that he was fired because of the "outcome of the election" even though Bush said the opposite. Then, he says that the phrase "'war on terror' is a problem for me." What's next? That Iraq was a mistake?

Wouldn't bet against it. Even though Rummy was always lumped in with Bush and Cheney as the central architects of this mess, the thing is that Rummy has always seemed a bit cagier than his cohorts. Cheney has always been about simply consolidating power and money for himself, and Bush, despite everyone's cynical assumptions, apparently actually believes much of what crawls out of his cakehole.

But Rummy disarms with his weird, perfunctory exclamations of "golly" and "goodness gracious", and his incredibly irritating habit of deflecting questions by asking himself more questions. He believes in nothing more than staying below the radar and shifting blame. So yeah, I'd say the over/under for some sort of tell-all "these assholes had no clue and I just did what I was told" self-serving memoir (or at least the announcement of plans for one) is next May.

I know it's an exercise in futility, but I hope at least of few of the remaining doofuses in the vaunted base have enough of a clue to follow the more recent Bush-Rumsfeld timeline. Bush practically had a press conference temper tantrum barely six months ago over keeping Rumsfeld, and even up to the final hours of campaign stops, kept reiterating his commitment to keeping Rumsfeld on board. And the day after the election, Rummy is tossed under the bus, and it's supposed to be for strategic reasons. Sure. And Bush is actually listening to what other people have to say, and not just trying to find excuses around it all.

A lot of people have been saying for a very long time that policy has been decided and run directly from the political arm of this administration, and the Rummy soap opera is a perfect example of that very syndrome.

Listening Tour

How exactly can you tell when Fredo is listening, anyway? His cocked head and perked ears? His attentive gaze, resplendent in its fixity of purpose, awaiting nothing more than the sound of his own name, either to take credit or deflect blame?

Or is he really just waiting for James Baker to throw the tennis ball and scoop up his shit for him while he fetches?

Crazy Bastards

If you're looking for an even more toxic convention of loons than the CPAC -- and really, who among us isn't looking for such a thing? -- look no further than Crazy Mahmoud's Holocaust Denial Super Extravaganza.

An international cast of established Holocaust deniers and implacable foes of Israel were given an open forum by Iran yesterday to support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contention that the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis was a "myth".
The foreign ministry opened a two-day conference, Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision - which senior officials portrayed as scientific scholarship but which Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, denounced as a "sick phenomenon". Visiting Berlin, Mr Olmert urged Germany to sever diplomatic ties with Iran.

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, insisted the event was necessary to counter an alleged lack of free speech in the west about the Holocaust, which Iranian officials argue is used to justify Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.

"Today people who claim to be against Nazism have a record of colonialism and racism," he said. "The objective for organising this conference is to create an atmosphere to raise various opinions about a historical issue. We are not seeking to deny or prove the Holocaust."

No, we don't want to "deny or prove" the Holocaust, we just want to get together and talk about how we're not supposed to talk about our hare-brained notions regarding the most notorious genocide in human history. Anyone else follow that treasure trail of logic?

So, what sort of jet-setting douchebags travel all the way to Tehran to discuss the bamboozlement the cunning Israelites pulled on the other 98% of humanity?

But pretensions to scholastic objectivity were undermined by the background of some among the 67 foreign visitors from 30 countries, including Britain. They included David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; Robert Faurisson, a French lecturer stripped of his academic tenure for his anti-Holocaust opinions; and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the British author David Irving. Irving is currently serving a jail sentence for Holocaust denial in Austria.

A group of radical anti-Zionist rabbis, Jews United Against Israel, who oppose a Jewish state on religious grounds, were given a prominent role. Among them was Rabbi Ahron Cohen, a retired former lecturer at the Jewish religious college in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Rabbi Cohen acknowledged that the Holocaust had happened but said he saw nothing anti-semitic in Mr Ahmadinejad's comments.

Does the rabbi understand the utterly insane contradiction inherent in his very own words? Apparently not. Evidently there's nothing at all anti-semitic about contending that an entire religion deliberately perpetrated an impossibly elaborate hoax on the rest of the world, in order to....retain a tenuous toehold on a besieged sliver of desert and artifacts. Nope, that's a perfectly rational and unhateful thing to accuse people of.

Look, you crazy fuckers, we get that you're upset about the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians. Pretty much everyone is, even many Israelis. But to conflate a pattern of over-reaction and maltreatment with a loony consipracy of perpetuating a vile hoax -- at the very least you'd think they could understand how such nonsense irredeemably undermines the legitimate aspects of their political arguments.

Few visitors were apologetic. Mr Duke praised the event as an exercise in free speech. "It's a shame that Iran, a country we often call oppressive, has to give this opportunity for free speech," he said. "I think Israel is a terrorist state. It is the number one terrorist state in the world."

Iran is oppressive. They imprison political dissidents at the drop of a hat. They hang homosexuals from cranes in the public square. Their religious police will fuck your shit up if you even think about a nice pork chop.

Duke oughta know better than to spout stupid shit like that -- before he decided to fester on the fringe of cracker politics, he held plenty of Klan rallies where no doubt he expounded at length on many a wild-eyed racial theory regarding Jews, blacks, whoever. Anyone but his own perfect lineage, one assumes.

The difference is that here the government -- even a crappy one -- knows better than to be caught within 1000 miles of such twisted shit. Duke doesn't even seem to get that he's just one of a group of patsies. On the one hand, Ahmadinejad seems like he watched Borat and took it literally; on the other, it occurs that Ahmadinejad is also crazier like a fox, and that he understands that provocative schtick like this hootenanny of batshit assholes ramps up the unstable-goofball factor here in the West.

Ahmadinejad would probably like nothing more than to goad someone into doing something stupid, whether it's us or Israel. At such a point, Russia and China would be at odds with us on some level, protecting their considerable financial investments in Iran.

Top Ten Other Taliban Rules

Psych. I can't really come up with one. It's hard to top the real rules, especially this one:

Rule 19 says that mujahedeen may not take young boys without facial hair onto the battlefield - or into their private quarters, an attempt to stamp out the sexual abuse of young boys, a problem that is widely known in southern Afghanistan but seldom discussed.

Yeah, it sounds like they run a pretty tight ship there. I despise these Taliban bastards, and it's just too bad we couldn't have exterminated the lot of them when we had the chance. They are a metastasizing tumor on a religion, a culture, a society, the planet. They're nothing but thugs and parasites. Hopefully they'll be reincarnated as female teachers. [added per comments -- or congressional pages.]

It would be nice if maybe the douchebags who are keeping these jerkoffs in AK-47's and cell phones would just stop sending them money and recruits, but then, it would be nice if the Taliban didn't actually have to make formal rules about buggering young boys.

Who do they think they are, priests?

Britney Spears' Pussy

According to The Rude Pundit, just uttering the phrase is like SiteMeter Viagra. Let's find out.


[Update -- Sunday, Dec. 17, 6:45 PM PST: It's worked pretty well, especially today, which is odd, since I figured the story was played out by now. Now I feel a bit guilty, like I oughta post a pic of the infamous taco, so's I'm not pulling a fast one on these poor searchers just looking for a shot of celebrity hair-pie (though the one in question is a Kojak).

I dunno, I'm pretty agnostic on the question of Spears' hotness. There was a point in time when she was very cute, good body and all, but I see that beaver and all I can think is that she let fucking K-Fed in there. And if I had gotten there before him, it would have been like throwing a hot dog down a hallway for the poor bastard. But her utter cluelessness completely offsets the magnetism of her sweater fruit.

Anyway, sorry Googloids, I'm still debating whether I want to be posting beaver shots on my blog. There are worse things, I suppose, but it sets a precedent. If you have an opinion on the subject, let me know in comments.]

Props

[Caution: NFL/esoteric football arcana post. Don't say I didn't warn you.]

To LaDainian Tomlinson, who broke the single-season rushing TD record in 13 games. For years, as the record has been broken repeatedly, old-school purists kept going on and on about how Gale Sayers had to do it in 14 games, or Jim Brown in a 12-game season. No more. Tomlinson is averaging over 100 yards and 2 touchdowns per game. San Diego's a division rival to my hapless Raiduhs and even I find it pretty damned impressive. Nicely done, LT.

I assume he now has to take his O-line out for a celebratory feast, and especially fullback Lorenzo Neal, probably the best pure blocking FB in the game. The guy routinely chips defenders at the second level, opening up additional 10-yard holes for Tomlinson. The consistency and execution would be emulated by every team if they had that kind of 1-2 talent in the backfield.

Also, in pigskin prognostication updates, I don't think anyone saw such a preciptious collapse of the first-rank teams coming so quickly. Both the Colts and Patriots got blown out in Florida road trips, by the resurgent Jaguars and Dolphins respectively. The Colts especially, since they along with the Chicago Bears were odds-on Super Bowl opponents at midseason, have stumbled hard, losing three of the last four games.

The Bears are not much better, leading the conference and securing the division, but with mediocre, turnover-prone offense. Critics are calling for QB Rex Grossman to be pulled, and backup Brian Griese to replace him so Chicago can gear up for a playoff run. That is no solution; Griese is not that much better, not enough to risk gutting Grossman's long-term morale for someone who only has a 50-50 chance of making a bigger dent in the first place. Chicago's good fortune is being in a shitty conference. There's no reason for them to panic.

With three games left to play in the regular season, Tomlinson's Chargers are looking like the team to beat in the AFC. Their only serious competition is one of the two teams to beat them so far, Baltimore, who share Indianapolis' 10-3 record in the quest for home-field advantage, or at least a bye week. The Colts have the toughest remaining schedule out of the three teams, and as good as their regular season records have been in the Peyton Manning era, the playoff history indicates that without home-field, they're dead in the water soon as they go on the road.

As for the much weaker NFC, until this evening Dallas was looking like the one team that could sneak up on the Bears. New Orleans' pimp-slapping of the Cowboys complicates the scenario a great deal, and Chicago's slam-dunk remaining schedule should -- poor QB play or no -- secure home advantage for them. Still, the Saints have been romping over their opponents, racking up massive yards. Drew Brees is leading the league in passing, and Reggie Bush is performing as advertised. A Saints-Bears matchup in the NFC title game could go either way, even in Chicago.

So, because it's been a slow news day, and I'm still winding down from the season finale of The Wire, and because no one else is dumb enough to do playoff picks in Week 14, here's my humble predictions:

AFC playoff seeds

1. San Diego


2. Baltimore


3. Indianapolis


4. New England


5. Cincinnati


6. Jacksonville

Colts and Pats beat Jaguars and Bengals in the wild card, respectively, then lose in San Diego and Baltimore in divisionals.

AFC Championship Game: Baltimore at San Diego. SD should win that matchup, even considering Marty Schottenheimer's interminable streak of playoff chokes. He's finally got a horse he can ride all the way to the Kentucky Derby.

NFC playoff seeds

1. Chicago


2. New Orleans


3. Dallas


4. Seattle


5. Giants


6. Philadelphia

Wild cards are really too close to call in the weak-ass NFC; the Giants and Eagles, even though they play each other next week, look like the best of a bad lot. I think home field rules here as well, through wild card and divisional games.

NFC Championship Game: New Orleans at Chicago. I think it all comes down to the weather at that point -- snow would give the Bears' punishing defense the chance to shut the Saints' potent offensive machine completely down. But the Saints put on a clinic in a very tough stadium tonight, and it's certainly a feel-good story for New Orleans. In the end, though, Chicago probably has a slight edge.

Which is too bad, because a San Diego-New Orleans matchup in the Super Bowl would be a better game. Against Chicago, there won't be nearly as many offensive fireworks, but San Diego should still prevail.

Unless, of course, they choke on their first playoff game.

Death To Dictators

[I wrote most of this post about a week ago. Pinochet's death this morning spurred me to finally go back and wind it up.]

Perhaps it's fate's little joke, the possibility of a simultaneous demise of two ideologically opposed tyrants, Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet. As just about every country between Brownsville and Ushuaia has veered left (or at least much more left than we would have liked), it might be instructive to reflect on the opportunity cost of our support of one tyrant, and our disproportionate rage at the other.

How different would the course of policy in this hemisphere had been if we hadn't clipped Allende, and/or if we had found a way to work with Castro? It's something to consider, as the actual course of things set a lot of nasty dominoes in motion. The argument against Castro has been that we don't work with regimes which violently repress dissent, and keep and execute political prisoners. This is so patently ridiculous it is not even worth the bother to rebut.

As for Chile, the argument has been made that after the initial "growing pains" -- you know, the torture and murder of dissidents, including several Americans -- Pinochet set Chile on a course of privatization and prosperity. But there is no reason to believe that Allende, not unlike da Silva of Brazil, would not have done the same things anyway, given the opportunity and our cooperation, or at least the lack of our interference.

And that's really at the heart of what's at stake here, and the reason behind all the animosity in Central and South America these days. When a European country elects a leader who is perceived as a cheap populist demagogue, we find a way to deal with it. When China rounds up Christians or Tibetans and beats them to death, we look the other way. When Russia elects a former KGB colonel who has been accused of everything from false-flag terrorism to pedophilia, we look into his eyes and assay his soul as 24-karat gold.

But this has rarely been the case in former colonial areas, in South America, Africa, the Middle East. We seem to think they don't understand what's going on, or else we just don't care whether they do or not. But they rightly understand the situation. Only a reliable strongman, beholden to our commercial extraction interests, can be trusted to oversee the teeming masses. And if they happen to feel differently about the course their lives and country should take, we intervene to set the record straight.

Would we put up with that shit from anyone else? Of course not. So what makes us think they will?

Assholes like Castro and Pinochet were effective because they understood how to harness peoples' worst instincts to their best abilities. One hopes that in both cases, the people who were and are subject to their respective regimes and policies can separate those policies from the personalities. It's the cult of personality paradigm that allowed each of them to accede to and retain excessive power in the first place.

[Update: TBogg has a nicely detailed rundown of Pinochet's terrorist activities including, it can never be reiterated too often or strongly enough, the car-bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington DC. Castro was a bad guy, but Pinochet was pure vicious scum. It's only a very small sense of justice that he was more or less legally hounded to the very end. Strapping him to a chair in the bowels of a soccer stadium and juicing up his nutsack would have been better.]

Still Haven't Found What I'm Searching For

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd point out a rather strange little factoid. I check the site meter pretty regularly; while I've learned to temper my stat-whore inclinations, and just not worry about raw numbers so much, I still find myself interested in the geographic locations of visitors.

Or, as the case may be, referrals, especially search engine referrals. I'm guessing off-hand, but I'm pretty sure it's been at least six months since I didn't get at least a couple hits per day from people looking for "Arnold Schwarzenegger gay porn" or some close variant (because of an old top ten list).

What is the deal with you people, anyway? Who's surfing the 'nets for that shit? Just one of life's funny little oddities, I guess.

Friends To The End

Do we even need to ask whether Junior will even bother publicly addressing this "surprise" from the ISG report?

Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.

Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of 96 [sic] because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zaqat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.

Wonder if this has anything to do with Big Time's recent visit to KSA, the scale of which was said to be largely unprecedented. Naturally, nobody's sayin' nothin'.

But consider. Perhaps you recall those controversial commercials from a few years ago, spoofing the lurid anti-drug campaign, showing quite clearly how our need to fill our bottomless fuck-you-mobiles was only enabling the terrorists. It was a reasonable proposition then, and makes only more sense now.

Of course, it was shouted down at the time, as an unpatriotic campaign designed to make Americans feel bad about their god-given right to flagrantly waste a scarce, volatile resource, instead of simply rethinking their priorities and using it more sensibly.

It was never an all-or-nothing equation; I don't think that even the most hectoring of anti-gas-guzzler Cassandras were saying that we all had to live in hemp communes and ride our bicycles everywhere, man. It was simply modest, sensible goals -- re-establish and improve CAFE standards; utilize "smart growth" techniques to counter suburban/exurban sprawl and waste; rethink the hub-and-spoke distribution network that practically guarantees that the average American's food travels almost 1500 miles before it is consumed.

But now those dirty fucking hippies in the Iraq Study Group, James "Abbie Hoffman" Baker and Lee "Jerry Rubin" Hamilton, are trying to shove their yippie Trotskyite revolution down your throat, man, and fill you in on the consequences of your penis compensation on wheels. It's pretty simple math -- Saudi Arabia produces nothing but oil. Period. That's their entire source of income, disposable and otherwise. And how -- put on your Econ 101 thinkin' caps here, Hummeristas -- can we help take at least some of that disposable zaqat away? By consuming less, maybe?

Of course they have production stop-flow mechanisms to counter that, but eventually the market re-stabilizes at a lower price point equilibrium, even taking into account the current risk premium that keeps the price of oil six times what it was six years ago. At the very least, it could not hurt to conserve. I do not see how that argument can be seriously countered. We all have to get to work; we all have to live our lives; we all should enjoy our lives and recreate and travel. But we don't have to do all those things in 7 mpg monstrosities which leave outsized footprints and have a host of needless externalities.

And as the Sunni/Wahhabi/Salafi drumbeat increases for Saudi intervention, in the name of sectarian protection, we need to consider those consequences as well, in light of our personal and aggregate consumption choices.

Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and thwart Iranian influence there. Senior Iraqi tribal and religious figures, along with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries, have petitioned the Saudi leadership to provide Iraqi Sunnis with weapons and financial support. Moreover, domestic pressure to intervene is intense. Major Saudi tribal confederations, which have extremely close historical and communal ties with their counterparts in Iraq, are demanding action. They are supported by a new generation of Saudi royals in strategic government positions who are eager to see the kingdom play a more muscular role in the region.

Because King Abdullah has been working to minimize sectarian tensions in Iraq and reconcile Sunni and Shiite communities, because he gave President Bush his word that he wouldn't meddle in Iraq (and because it would be impossible to ensure that Saudi-funded militias wouldn't attack U.S. troops), these requests have all been refused. They will, however, be heeded if American troops begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq. As the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene.

It's simple -- it's a drug, we're the junkies, and they're the pushers. This problem will not be alleviated solely by blast-excavating and slant-drilling every national park and beach. There has to be a sea change in thought, in how we approach our lives and our consumption patterns. This is a problem that is actually at least somewhat within our power to control; the question is whether enough of us are willing to do just one or two little things that will add up in the aggregate, or if we continue to scoff and sneer, while we waste a quarter-billion dollars per day in an increasingly futile effort to power our toys.

It's only going to get worse; the problem is not going to magically disappear just because we ignore it. As John Robb has been astutely pointing out, while we dicker and speculate as to the mental capacity of our elected "leader" to face reality and adapt to it, reality keeps evolving, or in some cases devolving. We are still figuring out the nomenclature and response mechanisms to fourth-generation warfare, while the hot spots are transitioning into the systempunkt and enforced primary loyalties of fifth-generation. It's outpacing our ability to even outline it, much less assess it comprehensively. That's not even on Junior's table; he's just trying to find some straw to clutch at this point.

Infrastructural capacity and institutional loyalty will continue to devolve in these countries, as gangs who profit from smuggling drugs, people -- and yes, oil -- decentralize their tactical patterns to achieve unthinkable ROI ratios, causing millions or even billions of dollars in physical, financial, and economic damage for maybe tens of thousands of dollars invested in weapons acquired through black-market methods in the first place.

The Saudis, in the end, are just looking after their own interests. We may want to begin understanding that there's more than one way that we can set about doing the same. The application of blunt force is no longer a primary or even a tertiary option; the democratized, decentralized level of accessibility to powerful weapons and technology has re-aligned that scenario, as we have seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Really, the lesson of the Soviet Union's demise should have served as a warning in that regard. The Cold War was indeed won without firing a direct shot between us and them, but it was accomplished by an endless series of proxy wars and strategic feints, and ultimately by forcing the Soviets to ramp up their weapons program to a financially unsustainable level. They dropped the accelerator until the engine simply blew up.

Or ran out of gas. Neither one really qualifies as much of a strategy, does it?