Is this the end of Nixon’s Southern Strategy? (Incidentally, note the lapel pin in the photo below. Do we see a pattern emerging here? For instance, did Mussolini wear a lapel flag?)

The result in Mississippi, and what Republicans said was a surge in African-American turnout, suggested that Mr. Obama might have the effect of putting into play Southern seats that were once solidly Republican, rather than dragging down Democratic candidates.

Maureen Dowd today:

Obama breezed through West Virginia, the state he couldn’t charm even wearing a flag pin and promising to invest in “clean coal.”

Jimmy Carter was an expert at this sort of thing, too. His Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare had lately been enraging the tobacco belt by his attacks on smoking — but North Carolina’s support had been a key element in Carter’s election. So during the 1978 midterms the president visited a tobacco warehouse there and and delivered himself of this wonderful straddle: “We must find ways to make cigarettes even more safe.”

And when Carter was governor of Georgia he unveiled a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capitol and soothed the crowd with, “The time for racism is past.” The subtle beauty of this bank shot may be clearly seen by substituting “slavery” for “racism.”

As the Pigmy President and his warhogs continue to beat the drums for an attack on Iran, the need for Americans to step outside our media’s echo chamber becomes more and more desperate.

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar gives us a chance to do so, in this analysis from TomDispatch, via The Smirking Chimp. Samples:

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.” He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel…

Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as “the army of twenty million”) are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities to strengthen the country’s theocratic regime and their faction of it…

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime’s de facto number two, his quest is not only to “save” the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran’s regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran’s major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to …

Mayday is the international distress signal. We should have known what was coming, on that Mayday five years ago when the Pigmy President promised us Mission Accomplished. But instead we mostly slobbered and drooled and wagged our tails like ecstatic puppies — the fierce watchdogs of the media very much included.

Only a few habitual whiners failed to join in the general joy, and a search of the archives shows, to my relief, that I was one of them:

I just watched George W. Bush on the seven o’clock news, landing on an aircraft carrier to kick off his reelection campaign.

Here are a few paragraphs from CNN’s account of this photo op:

“ABOARD USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN — President Bush made a historic landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday, arriving in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy S-3B Viking after making two fly-bys of the carrier…

“The exterior of the four-seat Navy S-3B Viking was marked with ‘Navy 1’ in the back and ‘George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief’ just below the cockpit window…”

I tried to imagine other wartime presidents landing on an aircraft carrier, wearing a flight suit for the cameras and saluting every sailor in sight. Roosevelt? Don’t be silly. Truman? Eisenhower? JFK or LBJ? Nixon or George Herbert Walker Bush?

Of them all only Johnson, who habitually wore an unearned Silver Star ribbon in his lapel, would have been capable of a trick so cheap, so tasteless, so tacky.

And two days later, on May 3, I was writing this:

During his campaign kickoff speech Thursday aboard the USS Photo Op, President Bush used the curious phrase, “a target of American justice.”

Of course he didn’t write the words himself, but somebody did and many other somebodies reviewed and approved them. What does the oddly awkward phrase say about all these somebodies and about the president who employs them?

The full sentence is, “Any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice.”

A person can be the target of terrorists or extortionists or the police, but justice does not “target” and indeed in theory cannot. Justice is blind. That is, or once was, the whole idea of the thing.

That this is no longer so in Bush’s America may explain why nobody at the White House seems to have found the language of the speech peculiar. Targeting, after all, is integral to this administration’s concept of justice. Do profiling and preventive detention amount to anything more than targetting? Mr. Ashcroft may aim badly or indiscriminately, but he aims. He is not blind.

Mr. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war is not blind, either. Here again the target is chosen and the punishment carried out in advance of a trial. There is no longer any real need for a trial — no need, that is to say, for what Americans have long thought of as justice.

But what this president thinks of as justice is actually vengeance. They are very different things, as Abraham Lincoln well knew and George W. Bush does not.

And after four more days, this:

Senator Byrd was getting at my objections when he talked about exploiting the trappings of war and assuming the garb of a warrior. In this Mr. Bush did worse than violate some mere law of the state. The president put himself in contempt of what Albert Jay Nock once called “that court from which there is no appeal.” He violated the canons of good taste.

For which, see below:

During the Vietnam war a bootleg tape called “What the Captain Meant to Say” circulated among the press corps. It purported to be the recording of a press interview in which an Air Force pilot repeated puts his foot in it and a Public Affairs Officer repeatedly breaks in to clear up the mess. A sample from memory:

Pilot: We were trying to hit the Dim Sum Bridge, but we must have missed the son of a bitch by a good half mile at least.

P.R.O: What the captain meant to say was that his squadron cratered the approaches to the Dim Sum Bridge.

Along the same lines, here’s what our Pigmy President said five years ago tomorrow on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln:

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said at the time … The “Mission Accomplished” banner was prominently displayed above him — a move the White House came to regret as the display was mocked and became a source of controversy …

“The banner should have been much more specific and said Mission Accomplished for These Sailors Who are on This Ship on Their Mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

The Associated Press looks on the bright side:

WASHINGTON — Soldiers who need special waivers to get into the Army because of bad behavior go AWOL more often and face more courts-martial. But they also get promoted faster and re-enlist at a higher rate, according to an internal military study obtained by The Associated Press.

The Army study late last year concluded that taking a chance on a well-screened applicant with a criminal, bad driving or drug record usually pays off. And both the Army and the Marines have been bringing in more recruits with blemished records.

This will come as no surprise to those who have studied Percival Christopher Wren’s seminal works on the subject of criminal recruitment. The novice may profitably begin with Beau Geste, Soldiers of Misfortune, and Flawed Blades: Tales from the Foreign Legion.

What less can you expect from a court once headed by a GOP hack who got his start by intimidating black and Hispanic voters in Arizona? Rehnquist would be proud of today’s ruling.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud…

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

In 1884 at the age of 28 Frank Harris was hired to run the Evening News, a London daily that was losing £40,000 a year.

As the paper was sold principally on the streets, Harris went to a 12-year-old newsboy for advice on what the public was buying. The boy showed him a competing paper’s lurid “bill” — the list of the day’s stories that newsboys displayed on their corners:

“I took the boy critic and a friend of his into my office and with the paper before us sat down to get out a new and sensational bill. Then I sent for the chief sub-editor, Abbott, and showed him the difference. To my amazement he defended his quiet bill. “It’s a Conservative paper,” he said, “and doesn’t shout at you.”

“The boy critic giggled. “You come out to sell paipers,” he cried, “and you’ll soon hev’ to shout!”

The end of it was that I gave the boy ten shillings and five to his friend and made them promise to come to me each week with the bills, good and bad. Those kids taught me what the London hapenny public wanted and I went home laughing at my own high-brow notions.

The ordinary English public did not want thoughts but sensations. I had begun to edit the paper with the best in me at 28; I went back in my life, and when I edited it as a boy of 14 I began to succeed. My obsessions then were kissing and fighting: when I got one or other or both of these interests into every column, the circulation of the paper increased steadily.

The resignation of [managing editor] Marcus W. Brauchli from The Wall Street Journal was less shocking, if only because Mr. Brauchli was appointed by the previous owners of the paper. Since he bought Dow Jones in December for $5.2 billion, Mr. Murdoch has moved swiftly to remake the stately paper, calling for shorter articles and more coverage of politics, culture and even sports — and fewer business articles on the front page.

“Plus ça change,” as the fella said, “plus c’est la même Scheiss."

Here’s the latest desperation measure, stinking as usual of flop-sweat, from President Pigmy. Hey, it worked for Reagan, didn’t it? No, wait a minute…

BAGHDAD — Trying to stem the infiltration of militia fighters, American forces have begun to build a massive concrete wall that will partition Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite neighborhood in the Iraqi capital.

The construction, which began Tuesday night, is intended to turn the southern quarter of Sadr City near the international Green Zone into a protected enclave, secured by Iraqi and American forces, where the Iraqi government can undertake reconstruction efforts…

Buck’s Social Security posting, below, sent me back in the archives first to April of 2003 and from there to a post from the gray, menacing dawn of the Bush misadministration. The latter was titled, Contrary to Published Reports, Social Security is Okay. For whatever historical interest it might have, here goes:

On Monday, March 19 of the year 2001, high officials of the Bush administration made it clear that the Social Security crisis was over.

In fact, as they announced at a press conference, Social Security was in better shape than ever before in its history. And it would be on solid ground until at least 2038, when the first of the baby boomers will be 92. Medicare was in good shape, too: its main trust fund wasn’t expected to run dry until 2029.

The news would have been a huge relief to the tens of millions of Americans who believe that little or no money will be left by the time they reach retirement age. But the information never got to those worried millions, or to anyone else except a few thousand news junkies and policy wonks. Television seems to have ignored the story completely. The major papers ran it, but in such a way that for most readers it remained hidden, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight—

The Boston Globe gave it 658 words; the Chicago Tribune thought it was worth 488. The Washington Post ran it on page 5, the Los Angeles Times on page 9. The New York Times also printed it inside, under the gripping headline: “Trustees Extend Solvency Estimates for 2 Benefits.” The lead sentence in the Wall Street Journal was, “Medicare and Social Security, the big entitlement programs for elderly Americans, are still going broke, though more slowly.”

But here are some other possible leads — bearing an equivalent or greater relation to reality—that might have introduced the neglected little story:

“The public relations campaign to scare Americans into turning Social Security over to Wall Street yesterday had a dangerous and perhaps fatal collision with reality.”

Or, “The Bush administration today scrambled to discredit a report from its own officials that undermined the president’s campaign promise to ‘reform’ Social Security and Medicare. Far from needing reform, etc.”

Or, “Even after loading the dice by using what many economists consider to be overly pessimistic growth projections, the Bush Administration was nonetheless forced to conclude yesterday that both Medicare and Social Security would remain solid at least until the youngest baby boomer reaches retirement age.”

Or, “Record budget surpluses — the major justification for President Bush’s proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut — would disappear if economic predictions used by three of his top cabinet officers are accurate. So would any immediate threat to the stability of Social Security and Medicare.”

All these leads are supported by facts contained in the various stories. And all qualify as news under the dog-bites-man rule: a widespread assumption about the world turns out not to be true after all.

All of the stories were caused by a report from the secretaries of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services, joined by two outside experts. This report and the press conference called to announce it involved federal programs that touch the lives of virtually every American. Widely perceived as on the brink of bankruptcy, Social Security and Medicare prove to be in better shape than ever before — and by a considerable margin, too.

Then why did editors and reporters conclude that the report on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds deserved no better than what amounted to a collective yawn?

Might it have been because the stories were based on the fuzziest of numbers? Although the government may be obliged to pretend it can see decades into the fiscal future, does it follow that responsible journalists are obliged to take the pretense seriously? Of course not.

It would be unkind to dwell on past instances when the press regurgitated equally fuzzy figures with childlike trust, so let’s do it. For more than ten years, the press has been squawking like Chicken-Licken that the sky was about to fall on the whole baby boomer generation. Eventally “more people believed in UFOs than think they will ever receive Social Security.”

The widely-reported quote is from Peter G. Peterson, a former Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon and a leader for nearly 30 years in the campaign to destroy public confidence in Social Security. Mr. Peterson’s aim in raising his false alarm was to destroy Social Security. To do this, he proposed to gamble with the fund by diverting billions of dollars away from it and into the stock market. The suckers might win or might lose; the brokers, who would take the house cut off the top, could only win.

So successful had Peterson’s doomsaying been that it still lurks unexamined in the heads of journalists as well as most other economic illiterates. So editors and reporters were reading to believe the latest spin on the old story

After all, that spin was coming from the very people issuing the report. Most of them were members of the Bush cabinet, and it was in their interest to attack the very report they were obliged by law to issue. Like Peterson, Bush wanted Social Security to look broke so he could fix it—by putting billions of dollars from it into the stock market.

One trouble with this plan was that at the moment the thing that appeared to be the most badly broken was the stock market itself. Privatization of Social Security was starting to look about as smart as turning your life savings over to the purser on the Titanic.

Another drawback was that the president, in a striking display of cognitive dissonance, was telling us that the good times were over so we had better cut taxes. The logic was that this would allow us to pay down a little of our credit card debt, while at the same time getting rid of that pesky budget surplus that was looming over the economy. Or something.

At the same time Bush, by arguing for a tax cut spread over ten years, was implicitly predicting that the economy would remain strong enough so that lower taxes would still produce enough revenue to provide needed government services. In other words we could both have our cake and eat it, under the theory that had earlier produced President Reagan’s monumental deficits.

Anyway, Mr. Bush’s cabinet officers were in an uncomfortable position. They really thought — every true conservatives does, in the deep, secret bottom of his soul — that Social Security and Medicare were crackbrained communist schemes that should be terminated at once, and with extreme prejudice. But in a nation of fools, many of them unfortunately voters, wisdom cannot be said aloud. The rabble must be scared into doing what is best for it.

For one thing, the reports in question are an annual affair. The number of years till the projected insolvency of both funds went up last year, too, and had been going up since 1997. This year’s increase, consequently, sounded like old stuff.

In the third place, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “when the programs finally reach their insolvency dates the government likely would have to slash benefits — a 30% cut in Social Security alone, according to the report — increase taxes, or both, officials said.” In 37 years, everybody better watchout. Officials say.

And the Journal says, “Many economists believe the programs represent a burden on all Americans that in the long run is untenable.” Many editors probably believe that, too. Certainly most publishers do.

From this point of view, then, the responsible course is to downplay a story which offers only false and temporary hope. The sad but unavoidable truth is that our reckless generosity toward the old, the helpless and the sick will lead, if unchecked, only to ruin. That this hasn’t happened in the 66 years of Social Security’s existence is a miracle that, in the conservative worldview, cannot possibly continue.

John Adams (in Thoughts on Government, April, 1776) gets it all wrong:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

For fans of Howard Zinn, it’s enough to know he’s written something.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew — what we had in common was that we both read books — that he considered this “an imperialist war.” Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of “The American Century.” The time had arrived, he said, for the United States “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit.”

Mark Danner is an exceptionally useful citizen who teaches journalism at Bard College and the University of California at Berkeley. What follows are excerpts from a long piece that I hope you’ll be tempted to read in full. Professor Danner has given an explanation as intelligent and convincing as any I’ve seen of why we were dragged into Bush’s Folly in the first place. As to a plan of escape, he has none. No “peace with honor” is by now possible, any more than it was in Kennedy’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s Folly.

Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.…”

That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals: General Osama bin Laden and General George W. Bush. General bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: that is, bin Laden’s ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world — foremost among them, the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula — which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a New Caliphate.

For bin Laden, these are the “near enemies,” which rely for their existence on the vital support of the “far enemy,” the United States. By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join Al Qaeda and to weaken U.S. support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in “cutting the strings of the puppets,” eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes…

The latter perception — that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could only be confronted and defeated with a political response — strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn’t want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the United States.

We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the “Bletchley II” report drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of intellectuals close to the administration: “The general analysis,” one of its authors told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable ...”

The United States has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shiite government which is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency which is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians, and its other longtime friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf…

At this moment, the Iraq War is at a stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from those “enemies allied with its friends in the region,” the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a practical and typically American strategy: it has bought them. The Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of $300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called insurgents, we now refer to as “tribesmen” or “concerned citizens.”

Good stuff from Dennis Perrin on the MSM’s current fan-fluttering and attacks of the vapors over Obama’s pastor’s ventures into truth-telling.

In the real world, out where the flag-lapel crowd and the yellow ribbon boys never venture, 9/11 was indeed, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, the result of stupid and provocative actions taken by the United States in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel.

This is not to excuse the 9/11 attacks. They were evil, murderous and unforgivable. But so had been our own actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, over many years and many presidents. There are no good guys in this alley fight. This is essentially what Reverend Wright said, and he was right. Get over it, people.

And go read Perrin’s piece on the Reverend, from whence cometh this:

I've been pretty hard on the Obama campaign, and still am; but if anything would soften my view, it's this bullshit furor over Jeremiah Wright. If you are white and don't listen to black talk radio, now would be a good time to start.

Wright's opinions are not deemed crazy there, and you'll hear much stronger denunciations of imperialism and racism than you ever will on a white liberal's show. Sure, some dementia is present: this is America, after all.

But contrast the opinions exchanged between African-Americans to those expressed on the corporate kabuki programs, or worse, white reactionary broadcasts. Which do you think is closer to what's actually going on?

And speaking of white reactionary programs, here’s Rush Limbaugh, who is apparently back on his meds:

Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Mr. Wright in his radio program, calling him “a race-baiter and a hatemonger.”

Susan Sontag, who read books and learned from them and was in many other ways a suspicious person, wrote the following a few days after 9/11. Fools and warhogs, always in the majority, promptly called her a despicable traitor to all that America holds dear. Time has told.

The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?

And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards…

Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

Some things never change, despite what Maureen Dowd said.

In retrospect, I’m absolutely convinced that we lost the war wrong. We should have fought that war in an advisory mode and remained in that mode. When the South Vietnamese failed to come up and meet the mark at the advisory level, then we never should have committed US forces. We should have failed at the advisory effort and withdrawn. — Gen. Volney F. Warner, 1983

I’ve reached the epilogue of H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, and it’s been quite a journey. The book covers the period from the inauguration of John Kennedy in 1961 to the point in July 1965 when Lyndon Johnson’s non-decision decisions fatally committed the United States to a land war in Asia, which nearly all of his advisors believed the US could not win. To get an idea of the granularity level McMaster is working at, check the first four (of fifteen) entries in the Table of Contents:

1. The New Frontiersmen and the Old Guard
   1961–October 1962
2. Havana and Hanoi
   October 1962–November 1963
3. New War, New Leader
   November 1963–January 1964
4. Graduated Pressure
   January–March 1964

At several critical points the narrative goes day by day, occasionally even hour by hour. The endnotes require eighty-two pages. It appears McMaster has gained access to nearly every relevant document, many of them unpublished memoirs or government memos that describe in detail what the participants were thinking about.

Anyone familiar with the history of the period will not be surprised by the duplicity and heartlessness of the main manager of the war, Robert Strange McNamara. If you saw The Fog of War, you know what I mean. McNamara is the kind of liar who lies to himself first and foremost, with the result that he can be convincing because he believes the lies he tells.

Certainly the war in Vietnam is the fault of LBJ above all; he handed McNamara the reins so he could concentrate on passing his Great Society legislation. That wasn’t a surprise to me, but I was taken aback by McMaster’s conclusion that Johnson’s personal insecurity was a large part of the problem. Unlike the current occupant, the President was actually the decider; but, like Bush, he was uncomfortable with dissent, so he continually reduced the size of the group with whom he was candid. When an advisor began to express doubts about the war, he was ignored, even if he happened to be the Vice President.

As a result the Joint Chiefs of Staff were cut out of the process of generating a strategy for fighting the war. When Johnson took office on November 22, 1963, American military folks were fighting in Vietnam, but neither the Vietnamese nor the American governments admitted that. Both claimed that US personnel performed in advisory roles only, which was true in the sense that American forces were not acting alone. Ground forces were always composed of Vietnamese soldiers accompanied by a few Americans, though the opposite ratios generally held when it came to the air war.

The Secretary of Defense, so called, held the top military brass in low esteem, in part because of his lack of knowledge of the military, in part because of his experience with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and in part because he believed he was smarter than they were and his systems analysis methods would solve every problem. This led McNamara to believe that he could control the American side of the war very precisely from Washington; so when he ordered bombing raids and the combination of bad weather and restrictions on military methods produced disappointing results, he blamed the military, despite their opposition to his methods. They might have been opposed to his goals as well, had they been given a clear picture of those goals; but you can’t provide a clear picture if you don’t have one yourself. At one point the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy,

…told [Under Secretary of State George] Ball that there was no need for the United States to “follow a particular course down the road to a particular result.”

Right, we were only there killing people, and losing American lives, to see what would come of it. And to keep the profits rolling in for companies like Bell Helicopter. LBJ’s war cabinet believed, and said, that the US would be better off to fight and lose in Vietnam than to withdraw from the fight altogether.

Of course there’s plenty of blame to go around. An insecure President and a megalomaniac Defense Secretary were the main culprits, but the Joint Chiefs get some grief from McMaster too, which is probably why he’s still a Lieutenant Colonel.

The body charged with providing the president with military advice and responsible for strategic planning permitted the president to commit the United States to war without consideration of the likely costs and consequences. Comprehensive estimates of the number of troops necessary to win existed, but to conceal interservice divisions and to increase the likelihood that the president would approve the actions that they recommended, the Joint Chiefs suppressed them.

One study estimated that seven hundred thousand troops would be needed to win in Vietnam. The Army Chief of Staff thought five hundred thousand troops and five years would be required. But no one said anything, because McNamara and his allies in the administration had chosen a strategy they called graduated pressure, which severely limited the military’s ability to fight the war. The CIA was consistently reporting the difficulties faced by American strategists, but the American ambassador, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, removed the offending paragraphs before forwarding his reports to Washington. This inability to present the President with unvarnished analyses eventually led the director of the CIA to resign in frustration. But the Joint Chiefs simply buckled.

There are some striking similarities to the current war in Iraq. The ideological certainty of both administrations, though of different types, produced similar situations of willful blindness. This caused both administrations to ignore intelligence estimates that didn’t fit with what they wanted to hear. In both cases, many of the Americans making war strategy were innocent of military experience themselves. They believed passionately in the inherent superiority of American firepower, and equally strongly but less overtly in the superiority of Americans and the American way of life. These beliefs allowed both groups to retain their intentional ignorance of the objectives of those on the other side. McNamara et.al. persisted in thinking that Hanoi was playing a prestige game, and that rational calculations of cost would drive Ho Chi Minh to give up his ambitions to unify Vietnam.

William Bundy’s, [Michael] Forrestal’s, and [John] McNaughton’s education and experience in the law reinforced the analysts’ assumptions. In English common law, lawyers and judges must view human behavior through the lens of the “average reasonable man.” That theory underlay predictions of how Hanoi would respond to limited air strikes.

The problem was that all the evidence showed that Hanoi was not directed by average reasonable men. Ho told a French visitor that if they killed ten of his men for every man the Vietnamese killed, Ho would win the war. In the end, the Vietnamese were not going anywhere; the only way to beat them was to wipe them out. Graduated pressure was a strategy that clearly would not dissuade such opposition.

One is left with the impression that a good deal of the bungling of the invasion of Iraq is a replay of the disaster the US created in Vietnam. The main difference is that in the case of Iraq the Cheney administration knew exactly what it was going for. The PR was equally dishonest, but the goal was clear to the strategists: steal all the oil, even if we have to be there a hundred years to do so. American lives no longer mean more to the White House than foreign lives; dollars, and power, count.

There is a great deal about the United States that would puzzle not only a visitor from Mars, but any person with a room temperature IQ and the ability to stand back for a minute and take a good look at things as they actually are.

For instance a judge in Nebraska just ruled that the electric chair is unconstitutional there, on grounds that it causes “intense pain and agonizing suffering.” Efforts to replace the chair with lethal injection have so far failed, however, leaving the Nebraska governor wringing his unbloodied hands in frustration.

Other governors in other states are facing similar but different dilemmas, posed by death penalty opponents who argue that lethal injection is equally cruel and unusual, as it too can cause intense pain and agonizing suffering. So what is a poor governor to do? What’s the use of being a governor anyway if you can’t even kill people?

As it happens a great deal of field work has been carried out on this very problem, particularly during World War II and today in peacetime China. Over and over, the cheapest, quickest, most efficient, and most humane way to execute human beings has proven to be a bullet in the back of the head. (The guillotine is second best, but leaves a mess.)

So wake up, America. Your problem has already been solved. And if you want to tie a ribbon around the package, take the Mafia’s advice: two in the head and you know they’re dead.

Raw Story reports that a UKTV Gold television survey showed 58% of Britons think Sherlock Holmes really existed, while 23% believe Winston Churchill is a myth.

I don’t deny the mythical character of much of Churchill’s life. Anyone who’s read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review of three biographies of the irascible drunk, in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s (subscription only), knows that a huge portion of his life was made up out of whole cloth, or constructed by others under his loose supervision. (Unfortunately his racism was genuine.)

…Churchill the great writer [was] awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on the strength of a book that was largely written by others.

But he did actually live, whatever you think of him. So did Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, the Duke of Wellington (boo!), and Richard the Lionheart.

The post-literate generation may believe that watching pictures move gives them information, but the results prove otherwise.

John Edwards, sadly, is out. With him went what seemed like the only chance to end our occupation of Iraq before 2012, when a presumably Democratic president will presumably be reelected.

If Edwards had been able to end the occupation next year — Bush’s warhogs are right about this — the results would have been the shameful abandonment of our allies there, a bloody civil war killing thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a destabilized Middle East descending into God knows what new horrors.

If Clinton or Obama is elected, exactly the same things will happen, only four years later. By that time we will have lost another trillion dollars or so and thousands more American lives. In addition the Iraqis would have lost — Oh, well, who cares?

Obama or Clinton will happily pay such a price for reelection, just as Nixon did before them. The awful irony is that this time it might not even work. Bush has left his successor a far worse mess to clean up than Kennedy/Johnson did. We could wind up with a Republican president in 2012, or even a Scientologist. On the evidence so far this century, we’re dumb enough to elect anything.

The only bright spot in today’s announcement is my suspicion that Edwards has cut a deal with Obama and will wind up as vice president. This would halfway realize the advice I generously offered on December 16: “As between Edwards and Obama my considered opinion is that they should swap wives and then flip for the nomination.”

George Packer of The New Yorker has an absolutely great parody on his blog there. It’s called The Kristol Journals. It starts out:

After writing about Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., last week, I wondered: whose journals will give us a similar chronicle of conservatism in decay, ten or twenty years from now, when the cycles of American history have moved in the opposite direction?

Maybe Bill Kristol keeps a diary:

April 10, 2003—

Last night Susan and I were invited to celebrate Victory in Iraq at the Barneses’, along with the Krauthammers, the Kagans, and the Perles. Richard was in particularly good form. In my toast I declared Paul to be without question the greatest force for moral statesmanship since Churchill. Then Richard drank to Don, and Charles to Dick, and Bob to Scooter, and finally Fred reminded us all of the supreme courage and wisdom of the man who sits in the Oval and had to make this decision by himself. After that, the tone of the evening took a downward turn as we all made up choruses about the utter humiliation of Colin Powell, the Arab world, the press corps, and the liberals. Fred and I invented a jig to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune: “Left turn to Damascus! Right turn to Tehran!” Slightly under the weather today.

May 1st—

Dined today with Bill Bennett. Mission Accomplished, indeed! We agreed that Quayle is the most underrated politician of the past thirty years. We were lamenting the unfairness of the “potatoe” incident when Bill had to catch a plane to Vegas, where he apparently has some long-standing business interests …

Read the rest or—

Change the word Vietnam to Iraq and this speech is as relevant today as it was the day it was delivered.

I think I speak for all of Carter’s speechwriters (with one probable exception, a gentlewoman from Georgia) when I say I wish I had written this speech for him before The Onion did. Warning: prefrontal nudity and mild profanity.

…what the Clinton administration was really like, here’s David Morris of Alternet to remind us of such Leaden Oldies as welfare “reform,” NAFTA. the gutting of New Deal controls on Wall Street greed, a green light for telecommunications monopolies, deregulation that permitted Enron’s thefts, and the ruinous (to us, not the power companies) deregulation of Big Electric.

For eight years, Bill Clinton was a Profile in Cowardice.

Some of this is laughable. Some of it reveals the prevailing attitudes about women in an era that's fortunately largely gone by the wayside. Some of it makes me long for the good old days. However, there's one thing it proves beyond any doubt. The definition of a “journalist” needs to be redefined because the majority of them these days ain’t what they used to be.

Anybody remember this one? It’s a recording of bloggers at work back in the good old days.

From the Kansas City Star of January 3, 2008:

A law school student and former beauty queen who has posed for a racy calendar while brandishing a weapon has been accused of kidnapping, biting and threatening a former boyfriend with a handgun.

Kumari Fulbright, 25, who is midway through her second year in law school, faces a long prison term if convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery, aggravated robbery and two counts of aggravated assault.

From the Reverend Thomas B. Gregory’s letter to the New York American of April 23, 1904, protesting plans to send several Kansas City girls to a “beauty show” at the St. Louis Exposition:

Imagine a really refined and innocent young girl sitting upon a platform at a great exposition to be gazed at and ogled and discussed and commented upon by the great mixed multitude…No truly refined young girl would submit to such a thing. She would rather die than be subjected to such vulgar publicity. The bare thought of it would drive her mad.

Thanks to Avedon at The Sideshow for this fascinating look back at history:

This is from Jim Fallows. who was once Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter. Now he’s in Beijing for The Atlantic.

Yeah, yeah, anecdotes aren’t proof. But they get your attention. Two that have gotten mine:

* The truly startling one was a conversation just now with a very close family friend who, through a lifetime of voting that began in the Harry Truman era, has always and only gone Republican and still refers to G.W. Bush strictly as “The President.” The friend said: “If Obama is the nominee, I’ll vote for him. I’d never vote for her” — meaning Hillary Clinton. This friend lives in a swing state.

Speaking of Hillary Clinton, just before the Iowa results I was struck by this fact: I had come across countless people in the previous two years who assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. In fact, I can hardly think of anyone who didn’t assume that. But in all that time I have met only a handful of people who were actually for her. And in my experience, every one of these people had been part of the Greater Clinton team.

There had always been a way to explain away this paradox. Perhaps Hillary Clinton ’08 would be a version of Richard Nixon ’68 — beloved by few, but still grinding out a win. But the other possibility was that the tensions couldn’t forever be contained — if people don’t really like a candidate, in the end the candidate won’t win. The Nixon scenario isn’t looking so likely now.

And you might also be interested in Jim’s thoughts on The Essential Exchange of the New Hampshire Democrats’ Debate.

H.L. Mencken in The American Mercury of October, 1925, on the occasion of William Jennings Bryan’s death:

Bryan came very near being elected President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee.

The President of the United States doesn't believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, from Smithsville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something — by a narrow margin, but still safely.

That is, so far. The Fundamentalists continue at the wake, and sense gets a sort of reprieve… But it is too early, it seems to me, to send the firemen home; the fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment…

Heave an egg out of a Pullman window and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors, and with a saint, now, to venerate. They are thick in the mean streets behind the gasworks. They are everywhere that learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in little red schoolhouses.

They march with the Klan, with the Christian Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, with the Epworth League, with all the rococo bands that poor and unhappy folk organize to bring some light of purpose into their lives. They have had a thrill, and they are ready for more.

Such is Bryan's legacy to his country. He couldn't be President, but he could at least help magnificently in the solemn business of shutting off the Presidency from every intelligent and self-respecting man.

Back in the middle years of the last century American citizens, in other respects very similar to those of today, would dress up for an airplane flight as if they were going to a swell party. Now, however:

A rich record of the employee discontent emerges from regular question-and-answer sessions held at US Airways, which is both the worst-performing big airline in the country and a company that encourages its 36,000 workers to direct tough questions at its chief executive, W. Douglas Parker …

“Who thought it would be a good idea to have pink Pepto-Bismol ads on tray tables talking about diarrhea?” a worker wrote in July. The Pepto ads were replaced in August.

Another employee wondered in October 2006: “Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.”

Actually, fish food would appear to be too costly. “We’ve worked with our purchasing team,” management explained, “to bring in many companies to compete on our main cabin tidbit item (pretzels). To date, no one has been able to match our current cost, about 3 cents per package.”

Terrific piece at The Smirking Chimp by Ernest Partridge dissecting and discarding the excuses of those — you know who you are — who joined in Bush’s rush to war out of cowardice or good old American bloodlust.

Said in 1933, but frighteningly familiar…

Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilisation. The danger is profound and terrible; it cannot be waved aside with easy optimism.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. This was not always the case.

The following is from Sam Smith at Undernews (via Xymphora).

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over.

Our war against “terrorism” has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to.

One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerrilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.

In other words, if you define the problem as “a struggle against terrorism” you have already admitted defeat because the guerrilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours.

There is one way to deal with guerrilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.

Five years ago I posted a reminder that Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was considered slimy by Nixon aide John Ehrlichman. Being called slimy by Ehrlichman, historians willl recall, was like being called Catholic by the Pope.

Now we have historian and James Carroll, in The House of War, his new biography of the Pentagon:

And then an odd thing happened. The Senate confirmation of the nominee should have been routine, but a conservative young Republican congressman from Illinois, looking to make a mark by embarrassing the Kennedy administration, attacked Nitze from out of nowhere.

The congressman charged him with having attended a National Council of Churches meeting years before, an event at which disarmament had been advocated by some in attendance. Disarmament!

Showing his ignorance, the congressman charged the author of NSC-68 and the Gaither Report, two of the most hawkish statements ever to come out of Washington, with being “soft.” The proponent of a first strike over Berlin and an all-out air assault on Cuba was a disarmer!

It was a ludicrous charge and hardly honest. Even if the young congressman was ignorant of Nitze’s militant history going back to the Stategic Bombing Survey, he had to have known that John Foster Dulles, secretary of state at the time of the Council of Churches meeting, had also attended, had even given the keynote speech. It was hardly a gathering of pinkos. And Nitze had, in any case, publicly argued against disarmament positions.

But the attack was launched, and others in Congress picked it up, a club with which to hit the Democrats. Nitze’s nomination to a job he did not want was nearly defeated. The wound of the insult would never quite heal.

The first-term congressman who slandered him was named Donald Rumsfeld.

If you’re suffering from nostalgia about the Clinton years, take a look at Vincente Navarro’s article. He’s a professor of health and public policy at Johns Hopkins, among other things, and he remembers what really happened.

It’ll cure you.

People in this nation die due to lack of health care. The estimates vary from 18,000 to 100,000 a year, depending on how you measure preventable deaths. But even based on the most conservative number of 18,000 (from the conservative Institute of Medicine), this is six times the number of people killed on September 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda. And these deaths continue year after year. The deaths on 9/11 are rightly seen as the result of enemy action. But why do the 18,000 deaths each year go unnoticed? Why aren’t they seen as the outcome of hostile forces, whose love for their country is clearly nil?

Probably you’re not confused over why so many Democratic peace wimps cast those votes for war in Iraq which they now, as presidential candidates, so bitterly regret. (And if you think every man and woman jack of them didn’t know perfectly well that it was a vote for war, have I got a bridge for you…)

But there’s one element to this mass cowardice that you may have forgotten. This is from the February 25, 2007, New York Times Magazine:

[Georgia Democratic Senator Sam] Nunn considered running for president in 1988, and his name surfaced again after Michael Dukakis’s crushing defeat in November of that year, which further persuaded centrist Democrats that they needed a southern moderate as a candidate.

But that talk ground to a halt after Nunn opposed the first gulf war. He urged at the time that sanctions and diplomacy be given more time and, in January 1991, voted against the Senate’s war resolution.

A sign went up on a Georgia highway caling him “Saddam’s Best Friend,” and some suggested that he was cynically appealing to liberal Democratic primary voters. As it happened, however, opposing such a short and easy war probably ruined Nunn’s shot at the White House.

In Washington his vote was considered a colossal political blunder. “He got a lot of political flak,” says his friend Al From, the chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. “It probably hastened his decision to retire from politics.”

Nunn’s vote “profoundly infuenced the next generation of senators that confronted plans for the second invasion” 11 years later, says a former Clinton defense official who advises Congressional Democrats. White House officials even invoked Nunn’s “mistake” as they lobbied Congress to vote for war.

Another installment of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. (h/t Cursor)

When American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, private security and military contractors will have guarded the convoys bringing the turkey and gravy.

If not for the private security contractor (PSC) business, there would have been no Thanksgiving at all. For it was a PSC whom the Pilgrims hired in 1620 to join them on the Mayflower and provide security for what would become their new colonial settlement in Plymouth, Mass.

Oh, well that excuses the murders of all those Iraqis then. They’re not Christians anyway, and they wouldn’t be interesting in giving thanks. According to Rat Pobertson:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have to recognize that Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law. In the Quran, it says it very clearly. There are two spheres. One is the Dar al-Harb, which is the realm of war. The other is Dar al-Islam, which is that part that’s under submission to Islam. There is no middle ground. You’re either at war or you’re under submission. Now, that’s the way they think.

Which is completely different from Robertson’s view, that God punished the United States with 9/11 because we allow pornography and gays, that we should submit to his view of God rather than Muhammed’s, and that we’d better start a new Crusade posthaste. Can we say shadow projection? (Can we say President Rudy? I didn’t think so.)

Whether due to good relations with the friendly local Indians or the deterrent effect of the well-organized militia and relatively well-armed fort, Plymouth never came under direct enemy attack. But other English colonial towns would. Standish and his men volunteered to come to their aid when threatened or attacked, and in at least one case they left the invaders bloodied and dismembered. Some accounts say Standish led revenge raids and, in one case, used a medieval form of intimidation — mounting an enemy Indian’s head on a pike — to protect the colonists from further attack.

Such operations earned Standish criticism for being too harsh. But the colonists held him in high regard. They repeatedly elected him military captain of Plymouth…

It’s good to remind ourselves that the founders of our country were just as bloodthirsty as we are.

Are you pro-“War on Terror” or anti-?

That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? All the Republicans except Paul are pro-, in fact they’re for all wars, as long as we’re attacking enemies we know are too weak to resist us on the battlefield (thus 4GW). Clinton and Obama have both made it clear that they think the GWOT is a real thing, and that we face a threat from an Islamic Mussolini. To me that makes them excellent examples of the old Chomsky saw that you can’t reach a position of power in our government unless you believe that the US is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives. If there’s any conflict that we’re involved in — and there is, always, because it’s the only thing we excel at — we’re the aggrieved party. We may have been the invaders, and we may have invaded for no reason, indeed for less than no reason; but our inherent goodness and altruism prove that if we torture it’s because torture was required, and those who were tortured understand that.

Personally I agree with John Edwards that the GWOT is nothing more than a bumper sticker, a slogan used to concentrate wealth and eliminate civil liberties. Only the foolish and the power-hungry take it seriously. And the oil companies.

Which doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as terrorism. What is a B-2 if not a terror weapon? Bombing Iraqi cities has only one purpose, to terrorize. A case can be made that bombing German cities during World War II was an attempt to destroy the industrial base, thus shortening the war. I don’t personally buy it, but there’s a real argument to be made there. But flattening Fallujah, a war crime by any definition, had nothing to do with removing the insurgency’s industrial base; it was simply an attempt to terrify the population. That’s terrorism, and if we wanted it to stop we could stop doing it.

So am I saying that the US is the leading terrorist country in the world? Yes. Followed by Israel, much of whose terrorism the US funds.

The Bush administration’s double standards are as glaring as meteor impacts. When, in the summer of 2006, Israel used the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah to unleash a pre-programmed devastating war on Lebanon, destroying great swathes of the country, the Bush administration immediately gave the Israelis the green light. When 12 Turkish soldiers are killed and eight captured by PKK guerrillas based in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush administration urges Ankara to take it easy.

The “war on terror” is definitely not an equal-opportunity business.

It is a business, though. The current problem for the terrorism industry is the incompetence, indeed the idiocy, of its MBA CEO and his board. Their inability to understand the complexities of the world drives them to shrink the problem to the point where their little minds can wrap around it, the issue being that such grotesque simplification removes their ability to predict the outcome of their actions.

A reasonable view of the world allows its holder to predict results with a non-zero chance of being right. Unfortunately, a view of the world that is one hundred percent wrong can sometimes produce the same results. For instance, if someone doesn’t hate you, but you believe he does, you’ll act hatefully toward him, thus generating in him a strong distaste for you, which you will then interpret as confirmation of what you always thought, thus increasing your confidance in your misapprehension, and eventually changing it to a truism.

An oversimplified view of the world, on the other hand, regularly produces unexpected results.

US plans for Iraqi Kurdistan, stretching back to that 1990 Israeli-devised Turkish plan, are in jeopardy. And once again all because of the enemy within.

Washington played the ethnic card in Afghanistan, pitting Tajiks against Pashtuns; the result, apart from a never-ending war in Afghanistan, was that Pashtuns on both sides of the border united and are now destabilizing even further the US ally, Pakistan.

Washington played the Kurd card to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and as a beachhead for its control of the country after the invasion. Not only Iraq turned into a quagmire, Washington helped to plunge Kurdistan into the line of (Turkish) fire.

From Mary R. and Charles A. Beard’s Basic History of the United States, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1944:

“In 1893 George K. Holmes, of the United States Census Office, formulated the following estimate: ‘Twenty per cent of the wealth of the United States is owned by three-one-hundredths of one per cent of the population; seventy-one per cent is owned by nine per cent of the families, and twenty-nine per cent of the wealth is all that falls to ninety-one per cent of the population.”

Holmes was measuring the conditions that existed just before the Panic of 1893, the worst financial crisis in the nation’s history thus far. It started with a flood of railroad failures. The modern equivalent might be, oh, I don’t know, maybe a flood of subprime mortgages going down the crapper?

Suppose your life led from Harvard through trading oil for Morgan Stanley to managing a hedge fund in your late 20’s. You’re living in New Hampshire, land of no income tax, with a certain amount of disposable cash. Your interest in politics is such that you first voted in 2004. What would you splurge on?

How about a million bucks worth of ads for Mike Gravel? That’s what Gregory Chase chose.

Impressed with Gravel after seeing him in a televised debate, Chase was provoked by Gravel’s omission from the next debate to call NBC and ask why. They pointed him to Drexel University, the debate location, which pointed him to the DNC, which pointed him to NBC. In the end, he said, it was “pretty clear” that NBC was making the decision. It’s a textbook example of Chomsky’s view on how civic discussion is controlled in the United States: not by determining the outcome and forcing citizens to swear allegiance to the One Truth, but by setting the parameters of allowable debate, arguments outside of which are considered ipso facto untenable. Gravel’s arguments are, to me, actual and factual and in many cases satisfactual as well, but they’re certainly beyond the pale for the Imperial War Machine.

So what does the young multimillionaire with a newfound political will and a heartfelt cause to celebrate do about it? He contacts NBC and tells them that if money is an issue, he would be willing to pony up the dough himself. Today Chase sent this letter to five executives at NBC, DNC chairman Howard Dean, the President of Drexel University, and also published it as an advertisement in four newspapers. In it, he said this:

If it would help get Senator Gravel back into the debate, I offer to purchase $1 million of advertising from NBC, or simply pay NBC $1 million in exchange for the service of allowing Senator Gravel to participate in your debate.

He also made a public offer of $25,000 for the YouTube video on Mike Gravel that gets the most views between now and December 31. And he’s buying ads in the three most important New Hampshire newspapers every day for the rest of 2007.

These ads are all entirely funded by Mr. Chase, they are not connected to the campaign, and touch on issues ranging from decreasing military spending to repealing the Federal Income Tax in favor of a national sales tax and imposing a carbon tax. There is even one advocating lowering the drinking age to 18, the same age at which one can join the military. All of them match Sen. Gravel’s positions and hint at Mr. Chase’s passion.

I admire Chase’s commitment and activity. If everyone could contribute to the debate that way, it would be great. I think today that’s the American Dream, unsustainable and in most cases unattainable as it is. So I don’t want to seem ungrateful.

But I’m put in mind of one of my favorites from Bertrand Russell.

[John Locke] makes a great deal of the imperishable character of the precious metals, which, he says, are the source of money and inequality of fortune. He seems, in an abstract and academic way, to regret economic inequality, but he certainly does not think that it would be wise to take such measures as might prevent it. No doubt he was impressed, as all the men of his time were, by the gains to civilization that were due to rich men, chiefly as patrons of art and letters. The same attitude exists in modern America, where science and art are largely dependent upon the benefactions of the very rich. To some extent, civilization is furthered by social injustice. This fact is the basis of what is most respectable in conservatism.

(Russell at 10)

Conservatism is such a poorly defined word. Does it refer to conserving the values and goals of the Declaration and the Constitution? I’m all for that. Those documents include some of the greatest public pronouncements ever made. The obvious fact that the actual US has never for a moment lived up to its own founding ideals doesn’t detract from the beauty or worth of the ideals; it simply emphasizes the imperfections of humanity, a shopworn theme.

But it doesn’t seem to me that most conservatives these days are interested in conserving anything from the Constitution other than their misapprehension of the meaning of the Second Amendment. They’re mainly in favor of vicious behavior toward anyone who refuses to follow the narrow path the “social conservatives” have chosen. Those familiar with the history of the first few centuries of the Roman church will recognize the pattern. And shudder.

Still, one must be grateful for the Gregory Chases of the world, and still more for the Mike Gravels.

McClatchy’s Washington bureau has run the numbers on the compassionate conservative. As you will see by the highlighted text below, those numbers prove, in spades, what the late (and lamented since 2000) Richard Nixon once said: “We are all Keynesians now.” Of course Nixon knew what a Keynesian was.

“[Bush] has presided over massive increases in almost every category … a dramatic change of pace from most previous presidents,” said Slivinski.

The White House counters by noting that Bush took office as the country was heading into a recession, then reeled from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“When democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only in order to gain power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition.”

—Josef Goebbels

The race for the Democratic Presidential nomination is a pretty depressing sight right now. It appears that Senator Clinton has it in the bag; but history cautions against early wagers, even in normal circumstances, which these are not.

I see Rove attacking Clinton on his way out the door, and Bush anointing her the nominee and quietly advising her to leave some wiggle room on Iraq. And I think, they really seem to want to run against Hillary.

Yeah, it’s true that they’re incompetent, ideological, moronic, thieving war criminals. But how’d they get where they are today? I’m neither talking about nor omitting the blatant cheating in the 2000 and 2004 elections. How did they get with Diebold range to begin with? The only great skill the Bush administration exhibited was in politics, in particular the divisive Rovian sort.

Of course Rove was disastrously wrong in his predictions about the 2006 election, but his official position required him to make sunny statements. It’s impossible, for me at least, to tell whether he was really wrong, or just saying what he knew he had to say. I tend to suspect he was wrong, but I don’t think that’s been proven.

At this point in the previous cycle, Rove was attacking Kerry. As Matthew Dowd, a political strategist formerly in the Bush camp, said:

Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds. So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards.

I don’t think Rove was afraid of Edwards because he thought the trial lawyers could beat the insurance companies and oil companies on a level playing field (much less an actual election). I agree with the purists who claim we should support Kucinich because his proposals are the most progressive of the available candidates. I except Gravel here; I’m proud to call him a fellow citizen, and I’m happy he’s at the debates to call bullshit on the spectacle; we need more of that. He reminds us of our civic duties. But Kucinich has clearer and more detailed proposals, and indeed a more detailed understanding, than Gravel. In Rome the proper office for Gravel would have been Censor, a former Consul essentially in emeritus status, still called upon to resolve thorny civic disputes, and beyond veto, or at least some vetos, if I remember correctly.

The problem I have with Kucinich is that I don’t think he can sell the US on his policies in the 2008 election. I love him, I think he did great things as mayor of Cleveland, I re-registered as a Democrat to vote for him in the primaries last time around. I was very disappointed with what seemed to me to be his capitulation to being a nobody at the convention; but in exchange he does seem to have been granted a seat at the table, the ability occasionally to be asked a question in the debates, and to sit beside Al Sharpton as a commentator after the convention. It’s not nothing, and I give him full marks for determination, principle, and ability to accomplish something over the long term when most people would have given up. I would happily vote for him if I didn’t think anyone with a realistic chance was acceptable. Which in most years would be my position, but not this year. (Notice I made it all the way through the paragraph on Kucinich without mentioning his wife.)

So far, Edwards is taking enough of my positions that I can vote for someone who’s got a ghost of a chance of selling the country on progressive ideas. He’s good but not perfect on Iraq. His health care proposal won’t pass as is, but I love the touch of having the insurance companies compete with single payer in the marketplace, and let the most efficient approach win. A lot of people have a visceral distaste for him I only partly understand but encounter often enough to know it’s real. And he’s raised lots of money, but that’s lots less than Hillary and Barack. All of which makes him an outside shot in the race for the nomination. And even that probably depends on making a good showing in Iowa.

But he’s been a driving force in the conversation that takes place at the beginning of the process, which determines in large part what the themes of the full campaign will be. He was, for instance, the first major candidate to come out with a health plan, and to my mind his is still the best; it’s the only truly universal one. In fact most of what I like (that I know of) about the plans of Clinton and Obama seems to have been lifted from Edwards’s. Edwards has said that in the negotiations over how to set up universal health care, the insurance and drug companies should not have a seat at the table. And that statement got lots of media coverage — in some alternate universe where the mega-corporations don’t control our news.

Personally I have two worries about Clinton. First, I don’t really trust her, given her Republican past and the Republican policies of her husband. She’s peeling away a progressive here and there, in a sort of Rovian style, probably folks who have calculated that she’ll win and they may as well get on her good side early. But she’s still a Goldwater Girl at heart.

Second, I think the Democrats can only fail to win the White House if they nominate Clinton. I’m not saying she can’t win, only that she could lose when Edwards or Obama wouldn’t. Rove et.al. seem to be salivating over a campaign against her, so they’ll be well prepared. And my guess is that they wouldn’t have to make as much stuff up as they did against McCain. Take Norman Hsu, for example: not just pushing the envelope of the fund-raising laws, but psychologically unstable. Or Mark Penn, whose firm’s connection to Blackwater the Clinton campaign is busy spinning, but whose union-busting past is unspinnable. The Clinton campaign’s people seem about as likely to deliver to progressives as Bush’s were to evangelicals.

Sure, she kicked ass in her Senate campaign in a relatively wealthy, relatively liberal state, spending something like $35 million against token opposition. Some Democrats apparently complain that some of that money could have been passed to candidates in close races, but there it is. All along her best strategy has been to seem inevitable. Which might be effective in the primary. Come next fall, the Clinton haters are not likely to be intimidated; for one thing, what Altemeyer calls the high RWAs, right-wing authoritarian personalities, are less reality-based, and don’t calculate inevitability the same way as the rest of us. Many of them are quite used to believing three impossible things before breakfast.

Then there’s the polarizing effect of the name Clinton.

If Giuliani convinces Republicans that only he can defeat Clinton, the right wing may overlook his less-than-conservative views on such issues as abortion and gun control, experts say.

“The specter of Hillary Clinton is enough to have Republicans overlook things,” said [Marist College pollster Lee] Miringoff. “That buys him some leeway in their estimates.”

President George W. Bush added fuel to the fire recently when he predicted Clinton would win her party’s presidential nomination but lose the November 2008 election.

“She’s got a national presence, and this is becoming a national primary,” Bush said.

Then there’s the possibility of the Clinton backlash hurting down-ticket Democrats. And the non-trivial possibility that Rove has some valuable oppo on her, or her husband, that will remind people of the sleaze factor the rose-colored glasses of hindsight have endowed us with.

And the fact that if she wins the nomination the Democratic wing of the Democratic party will have lost, or caved, causing some to vote with their feet.

The war machine grinds on. This primary is, so far, an object lesson in how it operates at the mundane level; but we can still change the outcome…

I don’t think Rove is afraid of Edwards because he fears a groundswell of opinion like mine. Not in this universe, at least. I think it’s because he sees Edwards as the potential opponent who’s most capable of selling the progressive policies that Rove’s people fear more than anything, a sort of New New Deal. They failed to keep FDR out, and once he got in he became an American demi-god. Hopefully we’ll never have another one. But the progressive movement has seen peaks and valleys before; it seems to me a good time for a resurgence.

Here, for your holiday reading pleasure, is a particularly vicious and irresponsible specimen of so-called “liberal” snark:

The hard-nosed super executives Bush chose to run this country for us turned on each other like rats in a slum-fire when the first signs of trouble appeared. What we have seen in the past few months is the incredible spectacle of a President of the United States either firing or being hastily abandoned by all of his hired hands and cronies — all the people who put him where he is today, in fact, and now that they’re gone he seems helpless. Some of his closest “friends” and advisers are headed for prison, and his coveted “place in history” is even now being etched out in acid by eager Harvard historians.

A year ago George W. Bush was Zeus himself, calling firebombs and shitrains down on friend and foe alike — the most powerful man in the world, for a while — but all that is gone now and nothing he can do will ever bring a hint of it back … He will go down with Harding and Grant as one of America’s classically rotten presidents …

The slow-rising central horror is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.

Already — with the worst news yet to come — there is an ominous tide of public opinion that says whatever Bush and his small gang of henchmen and hired gunsels might have done, it was probably no worse than what other politicians have been doing all along.

Anybody who really believes this is a fool — but a lot of people seem to, and that evidence is hard to ignore. What almost happened here — and what was only avoided because the men who made Bush president and who were running the country in his name knew in their hearts that they were all mean, hollow little bastards who couldn’t dare turn their backs on each other — was a takeover and total perversion of the American political process by a gang of cold-blooded fixers so incompetent that they couldn’t even pull off a simple burglary … which tends to explain, among other things, why thousands of young Americans died for no reason while Bush and his brain trust were trying to figure out how to admit the whole thing was a mistake from the start.

Now substitute Richard Nixon for George W. Bush throughout and you will have exactly what Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone 34 years ago. The only big thing he got wrong was his last sentence. Bush and his brain trust are too stupid and/or pig-headed even to know they were wrong, let alone admit it. This is why so many pointy-headed liberals of today will say, and mean it, that they are nostalgic for the good old days of Nixon.

Here is historian James Truslow Adams, in a book called Our Business Civilization. It was published just before the 1929 stock market crash which kicked off the Great Depression. And 2007 looks good for being the new 1929.

Again, we are told by leaders of the world of mass-production that thrift is out of date. One of the greatest manufacturers in the country recently wrote that “use” not “saving” should govern our ideas with respect to our national and other resources.

In another remarkable pronouncement, this man, who is an idol of a large part of the people, said that no boy had ever succeeded or would succeed who saved money when he was young.

Another leader writes that “one reason for America’s prosperity and one reason, in my opinion, why that prosperity will continue, is that we have committed ourselves to a standard of living far beyond our wildest pre-war dreams…

”We cannot make good except by producing more wealth, and always a little ahead of us is advertising with its alluring images of still other good things that work will buy. Americans have passed out of the period where they care about petty economies.

”They want convenience. They want action. They want comfort and style. It is impossible to call Americans back to petty thrift, and I personally am glad of it.

”I live now in New York where everybody expects to be overcharged and where nobody counts the dimes, much less the pennies … We have ceased to count our pennies in America, and I certainly hope we never return to the days of the most graceless of all virtues, a niggardly and pennypinching thrift.”

Here’s another glimpse, as if we needed one, into the dank interior of John Bolton. You will remember him as that silver-tongued charmer whom Bush once sent to represent us at the United Nations:

“Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities.”He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the “source of the problem”, Mr Ahmadinejad.

“If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back.”

The fact that intelligence about Iran’s nuclear activity was partial should not be used as an excuse not to act, Mr Bolton insisted …

Mr Bolton told an inquiring delegate that he was not and had never been a neoconservative: “I’m not even a Reagan conservative. I’m a [Barry] Goldwater conservative. They [neocons] have somewhat — I would say excessively — Wilsonian views about the benefits of democracy.”

For the history-challenged, Woodrow Wilson was, like Bush, a warmonger who believed that democracy was so desirable that he should — and could — spread it at gunpoint. Bolton seems to be saying that he himself believes in war simply as a display of national manhood and the hell with all this soft-nosed crap about this soft-nosed crap called democracy. He is thus more of a Kissingerian than a Wilsonian. The difference is of course inconsequential to the victims, who remain dead in either case.

Sy Hersh, the best investigative reporter of our time, takes the macro view:

Spiegel Online: If the Iraq war does end up as a defeat for the US, will it leave as deep a wound as the Vietnam War did?

Hersh: Much worse. Vietnam was a tactical mistake. This is strategic. How do you repair damages with whole cultures? On the home front, though, we'll rationalize it away. Don't worry about that. Again, there's no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We'll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades.

Spiegel Online: Of course, preventing that is partially the job of the media. Have reporters been doing a better job recently than they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?

Hersh: Oh yeah. They've done a better job since. But back then, they blew it. When you have a guy like Bush who's going to move the infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he's going to put everybody in jeopardy and he's secretive and he doesn't tell Congress anything and he's inured to what we write. In such a case, we (journalists) become more important. The First Amendment failed and the American press failed the Constitution. We were jingoistic. And that was a terrible failing. I'm asked the question all the time: What happened to my old paper, the New York Times? And I now say, they stink. They missed it. They missed the biggest story of the time and they're going to have to live with it.

From Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland, quoted in the September National Geographic:

“In ancient Ireland a king’s subjects ritually demonstrated their submission by sucking on the ruler’s nipples.”

Okay, I think I’ve got it. Here’s how we build an American Utopia.

First let’s examine what we’re starting with:

1. Our manufacturing base is pretty much gone. We still make more weapons than everyone else put together, but other than that most of our heavy industry is blowin’ in the wind.
2. Computers are ever more capable of handling routine tasks. We think nothing of machines handling our money; soon they’ll be flipping our burgers, and probably do a better job. They can already land jets better than the pilots.
3. Our economy is thus based today on weapons, finance, and service jobs, including all sorts of retailing, most of it legal.
4. Thus, as the last gasp of the American military empire peaks and then fades over the next few decades, the service and retail sector will take on a much larger share of the burden of supporting us.
5. The problem is that this will happen at the same time that our economy slows as our military expenditures no longer drive our wealth, and as a result, our overseas bills begin to come due. Let’s see, here’s $850 billion for Japan, $800 billion for China… Say, I’m running a bit short, you carrying your wallet?
6. This will lead to a “euphemism”, probably a new one to avoid comparison with depressions and recessions of the past. But lots of jobs will be lost. And there’ll be a flood of sitcoms.

Before the Great Depression, manufacturers actually manufactured goods, which they then distibuted for a price. If a short economic slowdown occurred, the manufacturing plants just slowed down, but kept going for a while. As they became more and more efficient, and the economy slowed, they eventually built up overwhelming inventories and stopped manufacturing altogether and laid off their workers, thus decreasing demand and reinforcing the negative cycle.

Today, goods come from overseas, and we make our livings on computers or with service and retail jobs. Thus, everyone suffers quickly if there’s a serious slowdown, and it’d be far worse if we weren’t spending more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined.

There’s only one solution as far as I can see. The corporations are making record profits, computers are taking over more complex tasks every day, goods come from overseas, and they’re not buying themselves.

The corporations should pay us to shop.

Most of the stuff is pretty crappy anyway, so it’s not like they’d have to pay us much to shop for it; plus, it’ll break or be recalled, and we’ll have to take it back and get another one. I suppose we’d have to submit to a bit of advertising, but collectively we do a pretty good job of that as it is. What’s television for, after all, if not to let us know when we’re doing a good job of shopping and when there’s something we’re not getting?

They wouldn’t even have to give us money, just credit cards. They already control and record most of what we buy, eat, wear, watch, and listen to. This would just make it official: the corporation as doting parent.

Think of the advertising campaigns this would generate. “Don’t worry, Mom, Viacom will take good care of your kids!’ “Hungry? Call ConAgra, she’s in the kitchen!’ “CNN: we’ll let you know if anything happens.’

Don’t know where I’ve been all these years, but I’ve just made the (online) acquaintance of James Carroll, former Catholic priest, novelist, historian, and Boston Globe columnist. My first impression, from an interview on Tom Dispatch, is that he is a national treasure. I’ve just ordered a couple of his books to explore further.

Meanwhile, here’s a sample from one of his columns:

Coming into power as the world’s relationship to military force was being fundamentally altered by such figures as Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, Óscar Arias, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev, Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, John Hume, Corazon Aquino, and Pope John Paul II, Clinton was unable to claim what should have been his natural place among them.

Instead, he squandered a golden opportunity to reshape his nation’s relationship to war and peace, preserving a Cold War military ethos — and budget — and handing it on to George W. Bush, fully intact. Whether or not Clinton was tough enough to take on America’s enemies, he turned out not to be tough enough to take on America’s defenders. The great contest given him by history was with the Pentagon — a contest for which he did not show up…

Nuclear Weapons. Bill Clinton’s most fateful decision was made in 1994, in response to the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review — a call for maintaining the nuclear status quo as a “hedge” against the possibility that Moscow would go fascist. When Cl