Rogue States

After the seeming rapprochement between North and South Korea the other day, a few thoughts occurred, mostly in the realm of cautious optimism. I'd say LGM's Robert Farley pretty much captures my observations on what's happened so far, and what's likely to happen.

When Kim Jong Un says "denuclearization" and Mike Pompeo or Emperor Snowflake says the same word, there's a very good chance that two different meanings are being conveyed. It seems incredibly unlikely that Kim would surrender weapons that he and his father spent decades developing and building. At best he might agree to a cessation of testing and production, but in exchange for what? Farley is absolutely correct that on the off chance that NK completely disarms, with or without major concessions in return, Snowflake actually would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bu Snowflake is who he is, and at heart he is a loudmouth, a fuckup, a loser who manages to escape accountability. He'll find a way to fuck this up, and it's because he thinks that the outcome of Korea will serve as a warning to the Iranian mullahs. It doesn't occur to him that maybe North Korea -- and South Korea, for that matter -- observe his bad-faith dealing with Iran, the constant overt attempts to derail and abrogate the JCPOA, and assume that we'll deal with them the same way.

Analysts continually try to assess Kim Jong Un and determine whether he's a "rational" or "irrational" actor. A truly rational actor would do exactly what Kim's been doing, and be sure to cover his ass going into this "summit" that's supposed to resolve things. Even before the current escalation in hostilities with NK, as much as it pains me to say, Kim seems to have been a rational actor for most or all of his time at the helm, certainly more so than Snowflake in his tenure so far.

Although NK is as much a cult as a country, the fact is that the Kim regime has to balance dynamic internal tensions as well as fend off potential attacks from the US, as well as the cynical game China and Japan and Russia (who have various practical historic and strategic reasons to want Korea to remain divided) are playing. His reaching out to his counterpart across the DMZ may actually have a small core of sincerity (Kim was educated in Switzerland, and is obviously much more westernized than his father), but the clear strategic goal for him right now is peeling South Korea away from our orbit, maybe driving a wedge with them on continuing sanctions.

The US' strategic goal with Iran seems to be whatever the Saudis and Israelis want. It's pretty clear that the Snowflake administration's short-term goal is to either provoke or contrive Iran into a war, further entrenching US troops in a region where they've been stuck for more than a quarter-century now, with no end in sight.

For someone who claimed to have wondrous prescience and profound insight into the folly of conflicts in that region -- without, of course, being able to articulate any of those observations even on a retroactive basis -- Snowflake sure seems eager to stoke that region's eternal grievances.

At least there's this -- once we've invaded Iran, there should be logistical continuity from Afghanistan to Syria, thus hopefully simplifying supply chains and movement of troops and materiel.

Useful Idiots

Fortunately for the world, Princess Snowflake's hypocrisy junket to the Magic Kingdom is nothing but a meeting wrapped around an arms deal. Snowflake reads a good game on combating terrorism, but nobody who knows anything about radical Islamic terrorism and its origins takes this guff seriously, not when the speech is coming from the blackened, beating heart of -- wait for it -- radical Islamic terrorism.

Hey, I'm fine with the aggro "drive 'em out of this earth" rhetoric of the speech. In fact, I don't have any real problem with the content of the speech itself -- except it denies most of the reality of where radicalized Islamic terrorists come from, who bankrolls them, and it seems to take sides in a 1,300-year conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, a fight in which we really have no dog to speak of.

And the practical reality is that our coddling of the Saudis takes actual sides in the wholesale carnage of SA's barbaric war in Yemen. Snowflake is too dumb to know that putting his comically small thumb on the scale will have unintended consequences. You'd think that since he has interests in a hotel in Baku that's financed in part by the Revolutionary Guard, he'd be more careful about that sort of thing, but maybe someone needs to slap his name on a place in Tehran for him to get the picture.

AmCon's Daniel Larison has written knowledgably and passionately on this subject, and places Snowflake's empty words and promises in their proper context. This is nothing new; every American administration since FDR has been guilty of this nasty open hypocrisy. This is the unfortunate price we have collectively chosen to pay for our shameless oil addiction.

The difference here is that past administrations have not (at least as far as we know) pocketed money for themselves for such deals. As Larison point out, the idea that Saudi Arabia -- where, as Snowflake's christofascist goon followers never tire of pointing out, it is illegal to possess a Christian bible -- belongs to a group of "nations of conscience" is hilarious at best, but mostly just disturbing.

Of course, as with everything else he does, it is all too easy to find any number of tweets from a couple years ago featuring Snowflake's trolling of Obama doing exactly what Snowflake and his entourage are doing right now. It was some sort of high crime that Michelle Obama refused to wear a headscarf, but totally fine for Melanoma and Joanie to do the same thing. Toby Keith playing a concert that only men are allowed to attend (little known fact:  Toby Keith is in Saudi Arabia what David Hasselhoff is in Germany. Go figure.). As the first commenter in the Balloon Juice link notes, it's all worth it to see Steve Bannon surrounded by towelheads, with no booze in sight.

In the end, this is just the first stop on a trip that goes next to Jerusalem, where the Israelis are already pissed at Snowflake burning an intel asset whilst showing off to his Russian masters, and then to the Vatican to visit a pontiff that he, Snowflake, has repeatedly insulted. Good luck, fatboy.

So nothing new to see here, but this is less about the administration in particular than the US' ongoing geopolitical strategy in general. A practical strategy balances potential regional hegemons against each other, if neither one is favorable to the superpower's strategic interests in that region. And in this case, since our operational strategy in terms of money and foreign policy effort expended, is Israel, which both Saudi Arabia and Iran propagandize against routinely.

Beyond the ME prism of Israel's interests, there is of course the strategic interest of preserving our access to oil, and now in containing the burgeoning displacement and refugee crisis, which again has been exacerbated greatly by the meddling of Saudi Arabia and Turkey at least much as by Iran.

The corporate media don't even bother reporting on these issues anymore, since for one, they are owned and operated by conglomerates which have vested interests in these imperial adventures, and for another, most 'murkins couldn't find these countries on a map, much less keep them straight in a discussion of geopolitical strategies of past, present, and future.

Perhaps if someone could spell it out for them how much a gallon of gasoline really costs once all the externalities are factored in, they might pay more attention, but probably not. All they care about is the imagined optics of this thing, but the reality is that Princess Snowflake was every bit as empty and obsequious as Chocolate Hussein Thunder, or any other figurehead who goes to pay tribute to the keepers of the holy spigot. Snowflake's speech might meet the lowered expectations that he seems entitled to on every goddamned thing, but that's about it.

Israeli Gears

It's nice that Joe Lieberman thinks his role as Asshole Emeritus entitles him to have a say in how the government should be run, even though he, you know, retired a few years ago. The beauty of being a professional buttinski is that you no longer have to go through all the expensive, ritualized bullshit of running for office, you just pen an op-ed or become a Fixed Noise common-tater, start your own agony column for fellow birdbrains, what have you. This is the beauty of the perpetual campaign industry -- pretty much everyone gets a voice, if they holler loud enough.

So it's Lieberman's turn to ring the bell and stump for a political leader he actually believes in. Now, Netanyahu and his nation are in a pretty tough pickle right now, with virtually every country east and west of them for at least a thousand miles blowing the hell up. Chances are Netanyahu, if he had his druthers, would just start a bombing run due east, through Iraq and into Iran, before swinging back around through a Saudi Arabia that is about to get real weird, and on to Libya. And there's a roughly equal chance that the usual yahoos in Congress would be happy to throw in with him.

Israel certainly has a lot to answer for with its ongoing abuse of Palestinians. They struck a devil's bargain with the settlers and the ultra-conservatives, and they're continuing to reap the whirlwind on all that. But the bottom line here is that this is just a foreign leader using this opportunity as a PR prop, and our federal legislature using the same opportunity to further embarrass and obstruct the administration.

There are still some Nader-baiters out there, cooling their jets for the inevitable "you must vote for Hillary or else" campaign we'll all be subjected to next year. Make sure you remind them of what they wanted for vice-president that fateful election. Lieberman would have been better than the Cheney shit sandwich we all got, but only by a matter of degree.

Qualifications

Can someone kindly explain why, in a job market where thousands of people holding master's degrees are either looking for work or holding jobs way beneath their skill levels, David Brooks is still employed? Seriously, if one were to sit down and scrutinize each individual player in the professional pundit industry, they'd come away completely perplexed.

Or, you know, with a deeper understanding of why utter morons are entrusted with the important job of manufacturing acceptable opinion and consent. It is neither accident nor mere circumstance that you'll see someone like Bobo on your teevee a hundred times for every occasion that, say, Noam Chomsky is allowed anywhere near a corporate media newsotainment program.

By now, Bobo should have massive arms, from carrying water for his dark overlords lo these many decades. Strangely, he still looks like he's made of pipe cleaners and broken dreams.

All Poodles Are Dogs, But Not All Dogs Are Poodles

I've seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a number of interview and panel segments over the years, and I get where this writer is coming from, in that Hirsi Ali is one of the more caustic critics of Islam in general, and militant Islamists in particular. I suppose having one's clitoris forcibly removed, and having a friend murdered in the street, with a death threat to oneself attached to said murder victim, will sort of do that to a person.

That said, it is a crude comparison at best to categorize the collective lumping of over a billion individuals in with the few thousand most violent practitioners, with anti-Semitic or anti-gay criticisms. It shouldn't even need to be said that, while perhaps Jews and gays no longer face the horrors of genocide or systematic violence, it really hasn't been all that long since they did face those things (and in fact still do in many countries -- how are gays faring these days in, say, Uganda or Iran?).

It is not fair to insinuate that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of a small but virulent percentage of lunatics, but when seemingly nothing at all is said or done in that regard, it doesn't absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever to address the issue. The experiences Hirsi Ali has endured in her life, both from outdated "cultural" traditions and from ideological fanatics, are real, and for many areas in the world, still normative. I mean, ten bucks to the first person who can guess the religion of the folks behind this, or this.

I don't know what to make of people who emigrate to other countries that already have long-established legal systems, and expect those new places to conform to the female-hating third-world holes they left behind. It can be difficult to parse cultural norms from religious precepts in many instances, but uh, I can assure you that as a decadent, hedonistic westerner, I am a great deal more offended by the consistent treatment of women as illiterate chattel, than they are by a satirical drawing of the prophet (PBUH). But since I am a rational person, and not guided and goaded by this or that collection of Levantine folk tales and regressive sky-buddy whispering, I can fight their bad ideas with better ideas, and still express my resentment at my own gubmint thinking that it can and should handle the situation with a fleet of killbots raining hell on villages. Some of these folks seem not to have made that seemingly modest intemellectual leap.

It might be more productive for concerned Muslims to address the fanatics in their attic already, instead of raising false equivalences about what sort of speech is offensive, as if the typical respective reactions to being offended were remotely the same -- someone maybe losing their job for talking shit about Jews or gays, versus riots and violence over comic strips and movies.

Off-topic but still fun, given the post title:  the one and only Ken Ham discourses on poodles.

Shoe Fetish

A moron simply cannot conceive of his being anything less than perfectly intelligent, any more than a lunatic can conceive of his being less than perfectly sane. -- H. Beam Piper, Day of the Moron

A protester disrupts Himself's would-be "victory" lap in Baghdad, adding much-needed hijinks to the final days of an epic failure.

The Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 28, a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi television station, stood up about 12 feet from Mr. Bush and shouted in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” He then threw a shoe at Mr. Bush, who ducked and narrowly avoided it.

As stunned security agents and guards, officials and journalists watched, Mr. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” That shoe also narrowly missed Mr. Bush as Prime Minister Maliki stuck a hand in front of the president’s face to help shield him.

Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.

Other Iraqi journalists in the front row apologized to Mr. Bush, who was uninjured and tried to brush off the incident by making a joke. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.

Really, ya just gotta love Junior. He takes a break from pardonin' turkeys and avoiding even the appearance of giving a shit about the death-spiral of the economy, for a last-minute "legacy" stunt. Al-Zaidi basically lobbed the most grievous insults imaginable in that culture, essentially saying, "Fuck you, you wrecked my country."

And what's Bush's response? He cracks a lame joke and goes right into the Freedomocracy™ boilerplate unfazed, even while everyone can hear the poor sap getting the shit kicked out of him. He dismisses the man's assertions by characterizing it as attention-seeking behavior, just another empty narcissist from some reality show. He should know.

Lost Horizons

Oy. So now it's "time horizon" instead of "timetable". Setting a goal is bad, see, because then the bad guys know they just have to wait out the deadline. Which I guess is what they have been doing then. People can call it a "time bench" or a "time sandwich" or a "time buttplug" if it makes them feel better, it's just old wine in dusted-off bottles that kinda look new if they don't look too closely.

The expectations placed on the candidates are unrealistic and moronic. McCain is expected to bray about staying the course and not fixing what isn't broken, even if he knows better. Obama is expected to walk some imaginary fine line between setting public benchmarks for leaving, and making sure the bad guys know he's "committed" to "finishing the task". Of course, what and how to accomplish is never quite defined with any clarity.

The shadows we've been chasing do not particularly care if we stay or go, I wager; in fact, they probably prefer we stay on, assuring them of an endless supply of recruits and generous oil profiteering. And certainly the oil companies aren't bothered by the fat risk and speculation premiums driving prices. But as long as we are able to cobble together yet another useless catchphrase to avoid figuring out exactly what we're doing and when we might be done, I guess it's still mission accomplished.

Kicking the Can

Sounds like more of that successmanship we've come to expect from the current gang of knuckleheads:

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have abandoned efforts to conclude a comprehensive agreement governing the long-term status of U.S troops in Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency, according to senior U.S. officials, effectively leaving talks over an extended U.S. military presence there to the next administration.

Just one of many Fredo messes the next office-holder gets to clean up. Put it in a pile with the Taliban resurgence in the Afghan/Pakistan border areas, escalating food and fuel prices, tanking economy, crumbling infrastructure.

Indeed, I've been wondering for a while if perhaps McCain is being set up by his own party to lose. Why would they want the gig? It would be easier to plan on spending the next four years ankle-biting and obstructing Obama wherever possible (and the Democrats' own utter incompetence will impede Obama as well), not that four years is quite enough to fix everything in the first place, and then swoop in come 2012 with some Romney/Rudy ticket from the netherworld.

Chairman of the Freedomboard

Hitchens at least deserves some small credit for acknowledging that the circumstances of his own staged waterboarding were not preceded by, say, being force-fed (which is also torture), blindered, ball-gagged, and/or chained in an excruciating position for eighteen hours in a freezing room while being blasted with Slayer. (Although there is some modest attempts at creating an element of sensory deprivation and disorientation.) Extra points also for attesting to his own status as a "wheezing, paunchy scribbler". Indeed.

One can't help but feel that Hitch might have met his contrived fate with more customary brio if he were being boarded with Johnnie Walker Black instead of mere water. Either way, in spite of his averral of the potency of the method -- to get the person to capitulate, mind you, not necessarily to usefully cooperate -- Hitch still finds himself on the proverbial fence.

It's morally exhausting to hear the thirdhand retellings of the frustrations of the rough men entrusted to guard us while we sleep, as the saying goes. Had the matter been approached with somewhat less opacity, who knows? Hell, you could probably put the matter to an open referendum and have a decent chance of a majority approving any means necessary. Ignorance and fear have never had to walk alone for any meaningful period of time, here or anywhere else.

But they just went ahead and did it, and some are apparently angry that we're not appreciative enough now that we are finally finding out what's been done in our name. Sorry, but some of us feel no obligation to help pave the road to hell. If the incidents are aberrations, then the perpetrators need to be brought to justice; if (as seems far more likely) they are systemic, then the operators of that system need to be excised from their posts, even if the system itself has supposedly been revised since then.

Many Americans seem genuinely besieged and infuriated when their oil and food entitlements go up a tick, while a good chunk of the rest of the planet figures out how to live on less than ten bucks a month in dirt-road military dictatorships. These resentments inform much of their worldview, since they are otherwise largely disengaged from even fundamental aspects of policy that directly affect their lives.

The ease with which people convinced themselves that Jack Bauer techniques girded by purity and righteousness against certain evil are absolutely necessary -- preferable, even -- well, that ease is nothing short of striking. I suppose it helps to convince oneself that it is, again, in the context of a startlingly cheesy potboiler of a teevee show, one in which the person being tortured is never some illiterate shepherd sold to the Americans by a corrupt warlord, or a cab driver yanked off the street for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We're going to look back at this period in our history with embarrassment, if we can force ourselves to remember long enough. These are techniques for which Germans and Japanese were executed in WW2, techniques which we now discover had been cribbed in part from the Chinese Communists' brutal interrogations of dissidents.

The idea that it's somehow intrinsically different when we do those things is at the root of our moral unraveling. Say my neighbor's house gets robbed by heroin addicts for drug money. Say that after my neighbor replaces all his shit, I decide to rob his house, but with the goal of giving every dime from fencing the stolen property to a children's hospital. I don't have any moral standing over the drug addicts just because my stated intentions for the ill-gotten gain are more ethical. This continuing attempt to render ourselves as exempt from basic morality is already biting us in the ass, and will continue to do so for some time to come.

Pants Afire

Looks like Doughbob broke out the industrial shovel for this one.

Breaking news! The ultimate White House insider plans a tell-all book about the Bush years. Boasting unprecedented access to the president's thinking, it will run counter to almost everything we've been told about Bush's radical presidency.

Who will be the latest to break the code of silence after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan? George W. Bush.

At least that's what went through my mind listening to the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists in the Oval Office on Monday. The session, maddeningly and often foolishly punctuated by long, off-the-record musings and soliloquies, mostly dealt with foreign policy.

I despise smirky tropes and devices like the one above. It doesn't even qualify as "clever" or "deceptive"; it's just an empty, weird attention grabber. "Breaking news! Gas prices back to $1.00/gallon! Heh, at least that's what went through my mind the last time I used half my Cheeto per diem to fill up my hooptie." Unprecedented access to Junior's thinkamatin' sounds about as inviting as watching Tony Blankley assault a defenseless ham hock.

Seriously, from an operational standpoint, this has been the most deliberately opaque administration since Nixon. Here's the thing if you fancy yourself a "journalist": if a prominent figure -- and I don't care of it's Dubya Bush, B. Hussein Obama, or whoever -- convenes a gaggle of you and your colleagues behind closed doors and tells you everything is off the record, you are being used. You are not reporting anything, you're just a PR stooge, nothing more. It's a circle jerk.

As for why Bush's maddening foolishness (to use Goldberg's own descriptives) focused on foreign policy, what the fuck else is he going to talk about? How completely, catastrophically ineffectual he has been in having an economic policy that benefits anyone but the top of the pyramid? How we have to start drilling and perforating every square inch of federal land so's the oil can come online in six years, when gas is seven bucks a gallon? I don't know what's worse, that Goldberg knows better, or that he might actually believe what he writes.

"When I write my book," the president teased, people will understand how much behind-the-scenes diplomacy went on during this administration.

I'm sure he's right. In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition.

Riiiight. Look, fool, if/when he writes his book, only two things will be notable about it -- one, nothing in it will be remotely true nor accurate (nor, for that matter, controversial), and two, people may idly wonder who actually wrote the damned thing for him. We've heard about the "behind-the-scenes diplomacy" plenty, the stovepiping of bullshit information, the secret meetings to force facts into preconceived conclusions, the Iranians quietly reaching out in 2003 only to be smacked down by "diplomats", etc. If someone wants to plunk down thirty bucks for tissue-thin rationales and shopworn, self-serving homilies, they're probably not working hard enough for their money.

Indeed, President Bush's reputation is not as solidified as his detractors and fans think.

If Iraq becomes a stable and democratizing nation, his presidency will look much better than it does today. But if Iraq Balkanizes or Lebanon-izes, then Democratic rhetoric about the "worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history" will gain descriptive heft. Only time will tell.

Ah, the old "if" gambit, tethered to the usual cheap open-ended timeline. Awesome. See, if we check in five or ten years hence, and Iraq is still a sectarian charnel house, we just haven't let the Gumbo O' Freedomocracy™ simmer quite long enough. No matter how bad it continues to get, it will never be quite long enough to know for sure. If Doughboy's aunt had balls, she'd be his uncle. Or his mama.

On the other hand, if the country has exhausted itself into some semblance of stability, it won't be because the sectarian cleansers ran out of people to slaughter, or that Baghdad has been walled into a lockdown Habitrail, or that the Iranians are puppeteering whatever passes for a central government. It'll automatically be because of Dear Cheerleader's singular vision and resolve, his patience in staying the course, no matter how many people had to get butchered in the process, and how much it cost.

Having principles is a tough gig, as you can see by all of Pantload's sacrifices. Why, he braved a trip into the Oval Office, kneepads and all, for the chance to come away with vivid descriptions of Fredo's wardrobe, and impossibly vague "impressions" of what the man actually said. Again, even celebrity journalists have higher standards than this. Jesus, I'm embarrassed for this clown at this point. He's so far in the tank he has to wear scuba gear.

The Jonanism continues on to its inevitable climax, a torrent of flop sweat and Funyun crumbs:

Many of its supposedly radical features fit neatly in the mainstream of American presidential history. Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.

Yeah, I'm sure you heard about all those Haitians Clinton had holed up in Gitmo for half a decade, unable to communicate with anyone in the outside world or have representation, subjected to humiliation and aggressive interrogation tactics. You know, all those Haitians that were waterboarded and force-fed and stuck in sensory deprivation holes until they lost their minds? And as loathsome a practice as extraordinary rendition is, Clinton used it exclusively against perpetrators and suspects of the 1993 WTC attack. They weren't kidnapping German and Canadian citizens who had the wrong name and shipping them to black sites to be broken.

Indeed, this administration and its surrogates have brought a heavy-handed glee to these extralegal ops that would normally be associated with banana republics and communist dictators. They've literally pulled innocent people off the street, chained them to a dungeon ceiling, and beat their legs until they died in agony. They let the Chinese visit Gitmo to turn the screws on a Uighur prisoner. They turned Saddam's most notorious hellhole into a playground for a bunch of inbred psychopaths. And that's the shit we know about. Put that in your fuckin' memoir, son.

Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, and irresponsibly heated, rhetoric about "immediate" withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.

Oh, so it's Obama's "ideological leanings and inexperience" that would leave him room for mistakes. Fat fucking chance. Should Obama actually win the election (a dubious assumption considering the insatiable need for a certain portion of the citizenry to stick their thumbs in their asses and call it good), Goldberg and his ilk will be all over him the second the final vote is tallied. Any missteps, no matter how small, real or contrived, will be blown to monumental proportion to the same degree they were willing to overlook the ones their boy made every step of the way.

Make no mistake. Any successes Obama has regarding Iraq will be in spite of what these eternally damned buffoons have wrought. He is in the running because he has promised to clean up Fredo's mess, not extend it or endorse it. To the extent he actually does continue any of the current policies, chances are it will be primarily because the lame-duck termites are working furiously to lock the successor in.

It's just too bad that neither Bush, his associates, nor his florid defenders will ever face a fraction of the karma they've earned, for their smug indifference to the misery they've inflicted here and abroad. Absent actual justice, the sooner these weasels are repudiated, the sooner they can be marginalized and blessedly ignored.

Fear and Loathing

Holy Joe makes the rounds on the Sunday morning rubber-chicken circuit. This just in -- he thinks the Democrats are pussies. Since they continue to let him caucus with them, maybe they are.

In describing the reasons he believes the Republicans' presumptive nominee for president would be better prepared than the Democrats' to lead the nation next January, Sen. Joe Lieberman said that history shows the United States would likely face a terrorist attack in 2009.

"Our enemies will test the new president early," Lieberman, I-Conn., told Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer. "Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration."

Yep. And when the first WTC bombing happened, without warning, the perpetrators were rounded up, brought to trial, and dispatched to Club Fed. Done and done. Compare and contrast to this administration's responses, after Fredo had been duly warned by an eerily prescient memo, but could not be bothered to interrupt his vacation.

Preparedness is only part of the equation; knowledge and judgment are equally important. McCain makes jokes about starting yet another war, and cannot be bothered to know basic differences between Sunni and Shi'a that every third DFH blogger knows by now. These are only questions of "preparedness" if you think that the appropriate response to a strange noise in your yard is to immediately strafe it with an assault weapon, rather than flip on the light or, god forbid, call the cops.

Also, I think there is a very strong case -- which I have yet to see in our esteemed media -- to point out that Obama is much more likely to know his limitations and stock his cabinet accordingly, whereas McCain is notorious for not playing well with others and has become an all-too-willing butt-boy for an administration that positively drips with contempt for any remotely dissenting piece of advice.

Lieberman also assailed Obama and fellow Senators who called for a timetable of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and opposed the "surge" of additional U.S. forces pushed forth by President Bush.

"It's now working," Lieberman told Schieffer. "If we had done what Senator Obama asked us to do for the last couple of years, today Iran and al Qaeda would be in control of Iraq. It would be a terrible defeat for us and our allies in the Middle East and throughout the world. Instead, we've got a country that's defending itself, that's growing economically, where there's been genuine political reconciliation, and where Iran and al Qaeda are on the run. And that's the way it ought to be."

Setting aside the fact that the region -- and the U.S. -- would be much better off if we had done what Obama had said in the first place and not invaded Iraq, Lieberman's assessment is truly bizarre. Not one of those assertions appears to be true -- the country's government cannot even defend itself from internal strife, insurgents are ramping back up in Afghanistan, and Iran indisputably has come out ahead in all this. The only way they'll get the Iranian war they crave is if Israel initiates a bombing run on facilities, at which point the inevitable retaliation becomes a pretext for more death and, to use a metric that seems paramount to the American heart, higher gas prices.

A couple days ago I saw yet another one of these ridiculous "news" pieces showing reg'lar folks at gas stations, ranting that Congress is not doing enough to counter the financial impact on their blessed entitlement. Whether this is in fact a common sentiment (and of course it probably is), it was presented as if it were. Coupled with both McCain and Obama recently making the usual "if I had a magic wand" trope on the stump, it appears that there are too many people who need a crash course in what's going on here.

The main thing is that no single entity -- not Congress, not Obama, not McCain, not Bush -- can swoop in and right this situation with a single solution. There are simply too many extenuating factors, too many externalities. Perhaps if were weren't treated like children, and were permitted to view what took place in Big Time's Energy Task Farce back in the day, we'd have some more clues as to what the hell's going on. In the meantime, the factors that we have some control over -- fuel economy standards; demand, consumption, and waste; investment in alternative energy sources -- should be identified and made the focus of a comprehensive policy. Instead, we are treated to stupid people saying ignorant things, like a "gas tax holiday" or some such will solve anything. This is retarded.

And because it's retarded, there's a better-than-decent chance that escalating gas prices will become part of a late-summer marketing campaign to start a war with Iran, even though that would send barrel prices over $200 overnight, and gas probably to $6/gallon. But hey, as long as Joe Lieberman's doing a solid for his good buddy, rather than for his former party or his country, I guess it's all good. It's what we've come to expect.

For added entertainment value, do check out the comments on the CBS News link. It's a wonder and a shame that some of these yahoos are allowed to breed.

History's Mysteries

Fredo, currently in Europe on whatever the opposite of a victory lap is, engages in what he seems to think is introspection:

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq.

....

“I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”.

Yeah, whatever could have given anyone that idea? Flimsy attempts to paper over past comments are only part of the problem. More disturbing is Bush's utter refusal to admit that Iraq, the U.S., and the world would be better off without his ham-fisted interference. Along with his tiresome insistence that history will vindicate him, it bespeaks a startling lack of basic empathy and intellectual honesty.

Despite his supposed Yale history degree, Bush has never shown even the slightest interest in or familiarity with that subject, nor its ancillary subjects, such as geography or economics. Really, beyond "free trade good" and "democracies never start wars with each other", it's just even more muddled boilerplate.

The history excuse is really just a way for him to punt culpability until long after he's dead. The notion that it would take twenty to forty years or more to figure out that this has been catastrophic for millions of people and is destroying our own economy is ridiculous. If Iraq were to turn around it would be in spite of, rather than because of, any of the bright ideas from this crew. They decided on a snappy marketing campaign for their invasion, on their timetable, of a country they knew nothing about and cared even less. They sent administrative peckerwoods whose priorities for rebuilding the country were political reliability, rather than say, knowing the language or having some familiarity with the culture.

Even if one were to propose that there was a "right" way to pull this off, there is no indication that any of the planners even tried to get it right. They did exactly everything that knowledgeable military and strategic advisors told them not to.

The most offensive thing about Bush's puling excuses is not his failure to see himself and the events he personally drove as they really are, but his total disinterest in even bothering with such a task. He thought it was more important to tell people how often he dropped to his knees on that stupid rug and prayed. Prayer, whether you think it works or not, is the expression of hope over events that are beyond one's control. But Bush was always in control of events; that's kinda part of the job description. They bullied and rolled and intimidated and calumniated all who objected, and got to do what they wanted in the way they wanted. To blame the failure for all that on the tone of the marketing campaign is so far past missing the forest for the trees, it beggars belief.

Which makes it par for the course for these guys. And all the revisionist mea culpas by all the no-longer-gruntled former waterboys won't change that.

Like a Surgin'

This must be more of that sweet-ass successmanship we keep hearing about:

The authorities in Baghdad say they are preparing for an exodus of thousands of people from eastern parts of the city.

Fighting between government and US troops on one side, and Shia militia on the other, has intensified recently.

Two football stadiums are on stand-by to receive residents from two neighbourhoods in the Sadr City area.

The government has warned of an imminent push to clear the areas of members of the Mehdi Army, loyal to the anti-American cleric, Moqtada Sadr.

In the last seven weeks around 1,000 people have died, and more than 2,500 others have been injured, most of them civilians.

If only someone could have foreseen this.

Double Secret Probation

At least when they declare martial law in third-world dictatorships (whether nominally communist or just the usual oligarchic kleptocrat we can do bidness with), they make sure you fucking well know it:

A legal brief that exempted the US military from criminal laws following the 9/11 attacks was improperly kept classified for years, the former head of the US government agency in charge of document secrecy said today.

The March 2003 brief, which allowed Pentagon interrogators to claim self-defence in sidestepping laws against torture, was made public earlier this month.

J William Leonard, who directed George Bush's information security oversight office until last year, today told Congress that the document never should have been classified in the first place.

"To learn that such a document was classified had the same effect on me as waking up one morning and learning that after all these years, there is a 'secret' article to the constitution that the American people do not even know about," Leonard said.

It is taken as an article of faith that, beyond all the policy promises and rhetorical head-fakes, the most vital reason to put a Democrat in the White House this time around is to protect what integrity remains of the Supreme Court, since two or three non-authoritarians will probably retire during the next term. Clearly Cheney has used executive firewalls and legal trickery to obscure his own little shadow fiefdom, through which the administration has decided which laws it feels like obeying or not, installing or not. You're on a need-to-know basis, pal, which means you never need to know.

Characterizing the timing of the brief as "post-9/11" is a cheap dodge; the timeline is obviously concurrent with the invasion of Iraq. There's a reason for that, and many reasons why it is critical that the next president must make at least some attempt to tear down these behind-the-scenes maneuvers. It may take a while; clearly these people have managed to infest the very workings of government with ideological termites, who couldn't give less than a shit that they are subverting what used to be at least nominally a government by and for the people. It's now just for their people.

Back Door Man

The bozos are up to their usual tricks:

As if to offer denial in the face of disaster -- and commit the U.S. to losing many more soldiers and Marines -- the Bush administration has begun negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades, after President George W. Bush leaves office.

The negotiation, set to conclude this summer, will establish the basis for a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to the Bush administration, the Iraqi government requested a bilateral agreement to replace the expiring U.N. mandate for the occupation, which offended Iraqi sovereignty. Asked if there was any irony in preparing a plan to keep thousands of foreign soldiers in Iraq in the name of Iraqi sovereignty, a National Security Council official, who requested anonymity, replied, "Sure, but we plan to negotiate that aspect" of the agreement.

....

The Bush administration has less than a year in office, yet it is now negotiating a deal that will commit the U.S. to an open-ended continuation of its most momentous, and controversial, foreign-policy decision. At the very least, the accord will prove a thorny issue for any successor Democratic administration that wins election on a promise to end the war.

Which was probably the point -- if McCain wins, the country has lost its mind anyway, and endorsed Cheneyism after supposedly repudiating it for several years; if Clinton or Obama wins, they will be hemmed in from day one by an eleventh-hour agreement. Of course, that can be augmented or even circumvented with more mercenary units, and rotating regular troops home.

But the most glaring aspect of all this is that after five years, they're still making this up as they go along. There's scarcely a semblance of a plan, certainly not a proactive one, and not even a reactive or much of an adaptive one. It's just stick people in as needed, take credit and deflect or ignore blame. When Clausewitz declared that war was politics by other means, I guess the Bushies took him as literally as they possibly could.

Five Years On

I don't know why the mediots persist in pestering Bush and his claque every time a "milestone" is "reached", implicitly saying that the 4000th troop killed is more or less notable than the 2197th, or that any of them are more or less valuable than a civilian child perforated by random fire. This is the business of death, and that business is wholly indiscriminate.

But to the matter at hand, Bush per usual displays an astounding capacity for the sort of magical thinking that has typically set American exceptionalists apart from most sentient bipeds:

President Bush today marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war with the message: "The world is better, and the US is safer."

....

He also claimed that the surge into Iraq, launched last year, had been a success in reducing attacks against US troops, restoring order, and opening the door to "a major strategic victory in the broader war" on extremism.

This is true only to the extent that the residents of the occupied country allow it to be so, and everyone, including Bush, knows this. The rest is simply wishful thinking, a vain attempt at saving face long after that face is gone.

There is no way a person can rationally defend Bush's preamble, and tellingly, Bush himself declines to do so, preferring instead to wallow in the more obvious refrains of "Saddam was an asshole!" that has spiced his stubbed-toe oratory almost since day one.

Last Throe Update

Looks like the welcoming committee came out for Big Time's surprise visit:

A female suicide bomber apparently targeting Shiite worshippers killed at least 33 people and wounded at least 50 in Karbala on Monday, according to an Interior Ministry official.

....

Also Monday, two American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, officials said.

The incident occurred about 12:20 p.m. as the soldiers were "conducting a route-clearance combat operation north of Baghdad," according to a news release.

The names of the soldiers were not immediately released.

Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in the Iraqi capital Monday on an unannounced visit.

Cheney told reporters that the five years in Iraq since the war's start has been "well worth the effort."

I'm sure Cheney's financial advisor would be happy to confirm that.

The Straight Talk Express also paid a surprise visit, because nothing says "success" like having to skulk in unannounced.

McCain traveled there with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, both of whom serve on the Armed Services Committee with McCain, the committee's ranking member.

You have to give these people credit -- at least you know exactly where they stand. There is no room for any confusion on this, and the harmonic convergence of Cheney and the Straight Talk posse says it all. Any bullshit about disaffected apostate Democrats not clearly understanding that POST openly promises more of the same should be slapped down instantly. Your wittle feelings about Clinton or Obama, distasteful as either or both may seem at times, do not matter. Either you want to prolong the current regime's efforts, or you don't. It's that simple.

The Torture Never Stops

Haven't read Kristof (or any of them, really; less volatile emetics and laxatives can be had over the counter) in some time, but he effectively puts a face on all the abstract talk and fake hand-wringing over torture:

The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

....

After Mr. Hajj was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2001, he was beaten, starved, frozen and subjected to anal searches in public to humiliate him, his lawyers say. The U.S. government initially seems to have confused him with another cameraman, and then offered vague accusations that he had been a financial courier and otherwise assisted extremist groups.

....

Military officials did acknowledge that Mr. Hajj was not considered a potential suicide bomber and probably would have been released long ago if he had just “come clean” by responding in greater detail to the allegations and showing remorse.

Mr. Hajj’s lawyers contend that he has already responded in great detail to every allegation. One indication that the government doesn’t take its own charges seriously, the lawyers say, is that the U.S. offered Mr. Hajj a deal: immediate freedom if he would spy on Al Jazeera. Mr. Hajj refused.

Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest.

Some were aid workers who were kidnapped by armed Afghan groups and sold to the C.I.A. as extremists. One longtime Sudanese aid worker employed by an international charity, Adel Hamad, was just released by the U.S. in December after five years in captivity. A U.S. Army major reviewing his case called it “unconscionable.”

Mr. Hajj began his hunger strike more than a year ago, so twice daily he is strapped down and a tube is wound up his nose and down his throat to his stomach. Sometimes a lubricant is used, and sometimes it isn’t, so his throat and nose have been rubbed raw. Sometimes a tube still bloody from another hunger striker is used, his lawyers say.

In the parlance of current bien pensant activism, I don't think we've "had enough", nor are we insisting on "change", at least not in the conventional senses of those ideas. Maybe if Arlen Specter thought Bill Belichick had taped some of the goings-on in al-Hajj's dungeon existence, he might care enough to grandstand. Anything's possible.

Semper Fried

Here's something the Code Pink bozos need to get through their thick-ass skulls -- your half-witted attempts at street theater are unwelcome, and indeed profoundly counterproductive. These antics are reminiscent of nothing so much as right-wing fringetards such as Operation Rescue and Fred Phelps' Caravan O' Incest. Standing outside with signs and slogans is one thing; chaining yourselves to the door is quite another. These idiots curiously seem to only hold their own rights to free speech sacred.

This is an unpopular war led by an unpopular preznit. And yes, recruiters have been known to use some fairly unscrupulous methods to make their sales quotas. Look, if you are somehow not adequately apprised of what exactly the Marines do, then maybe you deserve to get roped into action. In the meantime, a lot of serious people have made a lot of serious efforts to address this war in a coherent fashion.

I am not opposed to genuine revolutionary tactics, but this is just a sideshow that ends up minimizing serious, principled opposition to a tragically failed policy. It perpetuates useless hippie stereotypes, and further hardens the antidisestablishmentarian bent of the dead-end supporters. They don't have to support the war overtly; all they have to do is point at the Code Pink goofball chained to the door of a recruiting center, calling people "baby killers", and state their case against that. And it doesn't matter if there's only six or seven goofballs at any given moment. It might as well be a thousand, though if it actually were a thousand, someone who could actually do something might pay some attention.

Sometimes people need to think beyond their own individual antics and realize how they can galvanize the very people they're trying to oppose. I'm just saying.

Last Throe Update

Second verse....

More than 70 people have been killed by two bombs in Baghdad, attached to two mentally disabled women and detonated remotely, says a security official.

"The al-Qaeda terrorists and criminals are proud of this method," Brig Qassem Ata al-Moussawi told the BBC.

The death toll in Friday morning's attacks at two animal markets was the highest in months in Baghdad.

(Jesus Christ, now they're strapping up retarded people.)

....same as the first.

Nine bodies and 10 severed heads have been discovered near Miqdadiya, north-east of Baghdad, Iraqi police say.

It's going to take a lot more than just bribing Iraqi MPs to vote our way on the oil contracts. What's the over/under on estimated American troop levels by 2012? At least 60,000.