It’s amazing how people who make a living, and an excellent one, doing something complicated and involved can at times seem utterly clueless about it. Take, for instance, several members of the Phoenix Suns at this for them unfortunate stage of their season.

The Suns, you’ll no doubt recall, are the run-and-gun team featuring Steve Nash, the sometimes floppy-haired anti-war Canadian point guard whose sensational passes as he pinballs around the court, plus his deadly three-point aim, have brought him fame, awards, and fans from many nations, but so far no championship. He seems a likable sort, if not particularly deep. The Wikipedia entry on him, for example, records his reluctance to do a lot of endorsements, and his wish to work with socially responsible companies, both quite admirable, as well as his longstanding relationship with Nike.

Last year, the playoff series between Nash’s Suns and their rivals the San Antonio Spurs, who’d already knocked them out of the playoffs twice in prior years, was a knock-down drag-out affair, not settling for mere arguments and posturing, but extending to hard fouls and rule violations resulting in suspensions.

In the end the Suns lost, and one Sun was so begrudging of his opponents’ victory that he’s sometimes satirized by the substition of “whiner” for “mire” at the end of his name. This year the networks seemed to play up that image in the broadcasts I saw, using as his stock photo a shot of him with arms out, palms up, and a look of disbelief on his face. The stock Spurs photos that shared the screen showed players making layups or snatching rebounds.

Despite his lack of the big ego common to basketball players (particularly West Coast point guards, not to mention anyone’s name, or call him by the name of the felony he committed), Nash’s skill as the quarterback of his team is beyond question. Late in last year’s series the Suns lost an extremely closely contested game. At one point late in that game occurred one of the hard fouls the teams exchanged; this one left Nash’s nose bleeding on the sidelines. Until they could staunch the bleeding and get some bandage to cover it, by rule he had to be off the court. During that period the Suns fell apart on offense, exhibiting a tenderfoot’s sense of stability and direction; and by the time Nash returned it was too late. To top it all off, his children’s godfather, Dirk Nowitzki, beat him for the individual trophy.

Nash was instrumental in transforming the Suns into one of the top teams of the Western Conference. He led the Suns to the Western Conference Finals in the 2004–05 season, and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. He was named MVP again in the 2005–06 season, and missed out on a third consecutive MVP title to Nowitzki the next season. Named by ESPN in 2006 as the ninth greatest point guard of all time, Nash has led the league in assists and free throw percentage at various points in his career, although he has occasionally been criticised for his poor defence. He is ranked as one of the top players in league history for three point shooting, free throw shooting, total assists and assists per game.

Nash, who is married, is also heavily involved in charity and humanitarian work. His other interests include soccer and film-making. In 2006, Time magazine named Nash as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. On 28 December 2007 it was announced that Nash will receive Canada’s highest civilian honour, the Order Of Canada.

You can count on Time magazine to keep you informed about what’s really going on.

In the most recent offseason, the Suns were in conflict with four-time All-Star Shawn Marion. Like many offensive-minded players, he considered himself underused, in his case as the third option in the offense after Nash and Stoudamire; thus he expressed, somewhat explicitly, his desire to leave. Rather than lose him for nothing, the Suns decided to seek compensation for Marion by trading him, and a deal was cobbled together with the Miami Heat: Marion and Marcus Banks to Miami in exchange for Shaquille O’Neal. One might think from the respective records — Phoenix tied for fifth in the deep Western Conference at 55-27, Miami trailed the league by five games at 15-67 — that history’s verdict was in favor of Phoenix.

’Tis not so. After last year’s thrilling six-game series, this year the Spurs won four of the first five, and will get a few days to rest before the next round. How, Suns fans are no doubt asking, could this happen — we added the legendary Shaq to our A-list offense, yet we lost faster this year than last? Some of the Suns themselves seem uncertain as to the answers.

“We went up against a team that knows how to win,” Suns coach Mike D’Antoni said. “Every time we needed to close something out — a half or a game — they got the best of us. That’s why they’re the champions.”

A team that knows how to win? The Spurs finished one game ahead of the Suns for the season. But they knock the Suns out of the playoffs once again.

“They beat us with the intangibles,” said [Raja] Bell, who had 14 points. “They beat us with the little things. They beat us with the gamesmanship. They beat us with the attention to detail. The game plan. The commitment to doing all the little things to win games.

“That’s why they’re the champs. That’s why year-in and year-out no matter what people say about them they find a way to be right there in the mix and vie for a championship.”

What kind of training leads to improvement at the intangibles? In fact, how does one even know whether improvement is happening? Other than the the won-lost record, of course.

Here, note the quiet reference to the departure of Marion:

“Every year it seems like we always play the Spurs, and they beat us every single time,” [Amare] Stoudemire said. “As long as I’m here we’re going to break it sooner or later, because I’m tired of losing to these guys. I’m sick and fed up.”

Most telling of all, perhaps, are the words of the team’s leader, Nash.

“I think on paper we have more talent than they do. But I think their experience, their commitment and understanding of what they’re trying to do is greater than ours. Their ability to play together and make small plays on both ends of the floor is unsurpassed.”

Stock statements of self-belief, no doubt. But what I find striking is that other than one instance in the Wikipedia entry, the concept of defense didn’t arise, and the single use by Wikipedia was to note that Nash isn’t considered a good defensive player.

San Antonio, on the other hand, is consistently among the top two or three teams in the league in defense, as measured by statistics such as points allowed per game and opponents’ shooting percentage. They feature Tim Duncan, whose Shaq-supplied nickname is The Big Fundamental, but they also have some great outside shooters, some great lane penetrators, and most of all a team-wide commitment to play the real game: defense.

In basketball defense wins, over the long term, for a good reason. Shooting the ball is very much a touch sort of thing; there are good days, when you can throw up a hook with your off hand confidantly, and bad days, when you miss layups. Defense requires quickness, but it’s mainly effort and knowledge. If you’re willing to work, and you know what to do, you can be part of a team that plays excellent defense. Thus defense will be there when you need it if you’re willing to put in the energy, while your shooting touch can disappear at any moment and be gone for a quarter or so.

Steve Nash, a wonderful point guard on the offensive end, seems to me a more athletic version of his coach, Mike D’Antoni, whose style of play was similar: quick, good hands, excellent passer, good outside shooter (though not as good as Nash), middling defense. And relatively short, which means easy to shoot over.

It seems to me that Phoenix continues to do the same thing, expecting a different result. The idea that a team which is great on offense but so-so on defense might not be able to beat, in fact might be less talented than, a team that’s very good on offense and great on defense is beyond their horizon.

The Phoenixians have more talent because they run faster and jump higher; what else is talent about? Their announced strategy is to shoot the ball within seven seconds of touching it. (Presumably Shaq will take up a location in one half of the court and remain there.)

But there is talent also in the mind of the player who thinks, What is my opponent planning? How can I frustrate those intentions? How can I turn the situation to my advantage? There is talent in the hand that anticipates the shot and deflects the ball to a teammate. Most of all, there is talent in the team that dedicates itself to defending its own goal first and foremost. On a team, the big stars are comfortable with their own numbers for the year dropping, because the only number that really counts is going up: team wins.

The final series I look forward to is the Spurs and the Celtics. But the league will probably rig in the rapist.

Update: It appears that D’Antoni’s version of run and gun in the desert has come to an end. J.A. Adande at ESPN thinks the Suns will now admit the need for defense. I think they’ll find another fast-break coach and look for some players who are a bit faster, or can jump a bit higher.

Daniel Levy continues to strike me as one of the most intelligent and informed commentators on Middle East issues, and a good writer to boot. (And we sure need informed comment on these subjects.) Levy has another fine piece up, this time at TPM, about revelations, or perhaps “revelations”, at Thursday’s Senate and House intelligence committee briefing on the Israeli bomb strike on Syria last September. Of course the briefing was closed, so what we have is from the press conference that followed.

The whole story of the bombing raid has not, I expect, been told. Probably no one knows it. It’s unlikely that anyone in any country has a complete accounting for the actions and inactions of Israel, Syria, and the US, to begin with. It’s unlikely that Israel or the US know precisely what has happening in Syria, or that the Syrians fully understand Israel’s motivations. Certainly each of the three governments includes contending factions, about which more in a moment.

In such situations my instinct is to look to the most reliable sources. Like Seymour Hersh. He’s not right 100% of the time, and his predictions can be pretty pessimistic. But he understands and practices the art of investigative journalism, and as a result generally knows what he’s talking about. My guess is, therefore, that his February report on the raid is currently the best available.

One argument against things being as they seem is that no one’s explained themselves. Why didn’t Syria respond to what under most circumstances would be considered an act of war? Why didn’t it become a UN issue? And why was Israel so circumspect afterward? When it bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, says Hersh, “the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.” Not so this time.

Absent such data, inactions are being analyzed. In addition, pressures continue to be applied from multiple sides, thus causing some doubts about credibility of released information.

Whatever happened in Syria, what happened in Washington on Thursday could have been a propaganda effort. I mean, it’s not inconceivable.

…the evidence and photos, if they are to be taken at face value, were certainly impressive and convincing according to those who attended the briefing. Writing in the Washington Post, Robin Wright did add this note of caution: “The sole photograph shared with reporters depicting Syrian and North Korean officials together did not appear to be the Al Kibar reactor site.”

So how convincing is the evidence, really? Or perhaps more accurately, convincing to whom?

Levy proposes to break this problem into four questions. (One of the oddest features of TPM is the combination of high quality information with an apparent disinterest in typographical niceties such as spelling and punctuation, or in this case consistent capitalization.)

1. What were the Syrians up to and why?
2. Why now, and is it all about Matzah?
3. And If Now, Was It Wise?
4. Israel-Syria: Peace or War

There are those in the US — Levy mentions John Bolton’s Cheshire-cat smile at the press conference that followed the briefing — who would like, and therefore try to instigate, more conflict in the Middle East. Apparently life there has become boring.

Then there are those of us who fear that any more conflict added to an area with an existing surfeit of it would be unwise, and would create a world even less sane and much more dangerous.

In all three countries there are factions in the current governments ferociously opposing each others’ plans. And then there’s Iran, which may in the end be the real point made by those Israeli bombs.

Here in the US, the question is whether to start another war, to be known as Hopefully the Last Gasp of the Neocons. (The title for the sequel is still being debated.) Our government is by no means free of neocon influence. Despite never having been right, they keep insisting that theirs is the only view that makes sense, and they keep making alliances with people who see a profit to be made if they get their wish, a war on Iran.

Oddly enough, this Congressional briefing comes as Israel and Syria are said to be involved in what might turn out to be the forerunner of truly momentous negotiations. Syrian President Assad has reportedly said:

…direct negotiations need a sponsor and, unfortunately, this sponsor can only be the U.S. This is the reality of the situation. But the current administration has no vision and no will to support a peace process… perhaps with a future administration in the U.S., we would be able to speak of direct negotiations.

Why would he be interested in negotiations beginning January 21 of next year? Because Israel’s Ehud Olmert is said to be offering to withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for a peace agreement based on UN resolutions and on international criteria. Levy thinks this is happening right now in part because the Knesset is dispersed for the Passover holiday, so it’s impossible to offer a no-confidence resolution.

As he says,

So here is a delicious and rare moment of Israeli-Syrian agreement: we both want to talk, the nature of the Syria-Israel issue is that we both need US facilitation, the Bush Administration is not interested and so, we will have to wait.

One can only imagine the depth of the chagrin, verging on despair, such negotiations would produce among the neocons, their compatriots in Israel, and the Left Behind crowd. Anything but peace! How can we stop it? How about pretending there’s a nuclear reactor in Syria we have to bomb, at the same time proving that our technology allows us to evade Syrian, and thus Iranian, air defense?

Apparently Olmert was against the release of any new details on the raid. He’s trying not to provoke a possible future negotiating partner. Says Levy:

This is one more demonstration that the neocons who pushed for this have their own agenda — and to the extent to which it dovetails an Israeli agenda — it is the agenda of the opposition on Israel’s far-right and has nothing to do with actual Israeli security interests (or any logical reading of American interests for that matter).

There is still of course the question of why none of this was taken to the IAEA over the past seven months or before.

Perhaps it wasn’t taken to the IAEA because, according to Hersh, their experts already examined the evidence and concluded it was, in Mohammed ElBaradei’s words, “unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.” It didn’t look like one in a lot of ways; for example, the main building was the right size horizontally but not vertically, and expected support and defense facilities were not nearby.

There are, it appears, factions in the US and in Israel, in both cases on the far right wing, that want war, and will try any trick they can think of to get it. But their time is running out; everyone’s aware of them; and I think the Joint Chiefs know the military can’t handle another war.

It continues to impress me how much the Bush administration does to inspire emotions that do Americans proud.

For example, consider the swift and courageous action the Secretary of the Treasury proposes to take in the face of impending national financial doom. Does it extend a friendly help-up to those who encountered an offer they couldn’t refuse and moved into a house they couldn’t afford? No; that would involve us in what the faithful call a moral hazard. You might think that involved things like war profiteering, torture, and high-level corruption, but you’d be wrong.

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.

Or for another example, a Wall Street firm might bet fifteen or twenty times the value of the farm on black, knowing that if it comes up red, sympathetic taxpayers will supply the diff. Hey, no prob, you guys buy the first round next time.

Perhaps the government will decide to regulate the activities of the people who have stolen so much, making sure they can’t repeat their profitable scam?

Bush’s move, while a good start and potentially capable of getting bipartisan support, fits more closely with the pattern he has established since they took over Congress in 2006: a near freeze on new regulations unless and until the legislative or scientific ground gives way beneath him, at which point he launches savvy, preemptive moves to limit the scope of any new regulatory power.

As Everett Dirksen — a man I admire at least for his name, which I share, and his voice, which Stephen Colbert would be sampling if Dirksen were still on the Hill — may or not have said, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

But if this whole thing sinks like a lead balloon, don’t blame the president! He is officially not putting his political capital behind this one.

White House press secretary Dana Perino made that clear yesterday.

Q. “Dana, is the President’s goal to get this passed and in place before he leaves office?”

Perino: “I think we’ll have to see. I think if there is — it’s a big attempt, but this President doesn’t shy away from big challenges — and also, if necessary, actions in order to address problems. And this is something, if you’ve looked at some of the coverage, that Secretary Paulson has been working on this package for about a year.”

By contrast, Bush continues to insist that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is possible before the end of his term. So file the Paulson plan as somewhat less likely to come to fruition than Middle East peace.

That’s comforting. At least we’ve got our best people on it.

Worried about the state of the world economy, the American piece in particular? You might want to skip the Bear Stearns story.

Bear Stearns, recently the fifth largest investment bank in the US and heavily invested in the subprime mortgage market, was badly damaged by the troubles there. So badly that it’s been forced to sell itself for a relative song, and even that in a stock-only transaction.

A collapse of Bear Stearns could have heightened anxiety in world financial markets amid a deepening credit crunch. JPMorgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns represents roughly 1 percent of what the investment bank was worth just 16 days ago.

The deal marked a 93.3 percent discount to Bear Stearns’ market capitalization as of Friday, and roughly a 98.8 percent discount to its book value as of Feb. 29. The company is set to report its first-quarter results after the closing bell on Monday.

Bear Stearns shares closed Friday at $30 a share. At their peak, the shares traded at $159.36.

A 99% loss in two and a half weeks, worth thirty bucks on Friday, sold for two on Sunday — it’s the kind of thing that leads skittish investors to panic. So JPMorganChase stepped in, and the government acted on a weekend, hoping to forestall the event everyone’s worried about.

The Fallon resignation leaves me wondering if we’ve reached a Saturday Night Massacre and a McMaster point simultaneously.

H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty tells us that during Lyndon Johnson’s acceleration of the war in Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were ambivalent about a land war in Asia. To a man they agreed that the American system had to be defended against the godless Commies, but there were questions about what it would take to win in Vietnam, whether it was worth it, whether we had the resources and the resolve, and so on. Not to mention which service should take the lead. Should the Navy shell the enemy from the sea, or the Marines establish beachheads, or the Air Force bomb them into submission, or the Army put boots on the ground to excerise the only real control that matters? Interservice rivaly contributed greatly to their failure to offer better options early on, and more coherent resistance to the poor decisions as the quagmire deepend.

Many members of Johnson’s inner circle, in fact, lacked trust in the military and intelligence communities.

1. CIA recommendations and predictions led to the debacle at the Bay of Pigs.
2. Civilian officials considered much high-level military strategy obsolete in light of atomic weapons.
3. The military and intelligence communities do not seem from the record (imperfectly reliable with respect to covert agencies) to have supported releasing the photos Adlai Stevenson showed the UN to engage the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The themes of Stevenson’s bravura performance were repeated as farce in Colin Powell’s fiasco preceding the US invasion of Iraq.

As a result of their perceived ambivalence about taking over the colonial burdens of the French in Indochina, the Joint Chiefs were consigned to tasks involving only tactical considerations. In the planning stages they were rarely consulted except for political cover or occasional feasibility studies. Input from the military at the strategic level was unwelcome.

The CIA was also feeling ignored. Its frequent reports of difficult social and economic situations in Vietnam, and the political realities that arose from these conditions, were generally edited out of the situation reports to Washington from the US embassy in Saigon. The Agency, of course, was not dependent on State to get its reports back to Langley, so some administration skeptics eventually heard some of the information. But the tide of groupthink was too strong, and the lure of war profits too great, for a few leaners to change the course of the ship of state.

In the end, the CIA director resigned in protest against the LBJ inner circle’s refusal to accept Agency input on the situation in Vietnam; but none of the military brass whose advice and experience was treated with sometimes-polite contempt followed his lead. McMaster’s book is well enough known to prompt the question among intelligent military folks of when it’s time to resign rather than accept a destructive and probably illegal order.

Then there’s the Saturday Night Massacre, involving consecutive firings by the embattled Richard Nixon of two Attorneys General (Eliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus) who refused to rid Nixon of the troublesome Special Proscutor investigating Watergate, who had him dead to rights. Finally the one left standing at main Justice was the ever-helpful Robert Bork, who courageously stanched the flow. Perhaps Michael Mukasey can manage to keep the courts from hauling George W. Bush before the bench for the next ten months or so? My mantra is, There’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.

It appears the struggle to create a war with Iran is in its last throes.

Meanwhile, the uneasy partnership between Karl Rove and Dick Cheney continues. While Rovian operations take out political opponents like Don Siegelman in Alabama and Eliot Spitzer in New York, the Cheneyists struggle against the so-called adult leadership of war criminals like Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, and the increasingly lonely rational Republicans in Congress. Wikipedia reports that

The final report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, issued on August 4, 1993, said that Gates “was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran/contra affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment…”

When such a person is your adult leadership, the outlook is sub-optimal indeed.

And sure enough, the makeshift patriots on the Dark Side have managed to gain one of their objectives: Admiral William “Fox” Fallon is resigning as Commander in Chief of Central Command, which includes Iran and Iraq. (Check out this map; I knew CentCom covered a lot of ground but I didn’t realize it was this much, basically Kenya to Kazakhstan.) Fallon is said to have called General (soon, presumably, Saint) David Petraeus, who reports to him, an ass-kissing little chickenshit. Evidence available to the public since the revelation of this remark suggests the characterization was not entirely without merit; but it was certainly unwelcome in the White House, and even more unwelcome in the Undisclosed Location. No doubt similar reactions followed the reports of Adm. Fallon responding to a question about a US war against Iran with “…not on my watch.’

Apparently Fallon’s approach was insufficiently aggressive.

The Persian Gulf right now is booming economically, and Fallon wants to harness that power to connect the failed states that pockmark the landscape to the outside world. In this choice, he sees no alternative.

“What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They’re like sewers, and they begin to fester. It’s bad for business. And when it’s bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we’re back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you’re moving backward.”

Fallon has no illusion about solving the Middle East or Central Asia during his tenure, but he’s also acutely conscious that with globalization’s rapid advance into these regions he may well be the last Centcom commander of his kind. Already Fallon sees the inevitability and utility of having a Chinese military partnership at Centcom, and he’d like to manage that inevitably from the start rather than have to repair damage down the line.

“I’d like to continue to do things that will be useful to the world and its inhabitants,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of good things, and I’ve seen a lot of stupid things.”

He omitted to specify the deciders in the cases of the stupid things he’d seen, or even which side they were on.

Discussing one of the incidents in which Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats showboated around and taunted American warships in the Strait of Hormuz,

Fallon’s eyes narrow and his voice becomes that whisper: “This is not how a country that wants to be a big boy in the neighborhood behaves. How are we supposed to take these guys seriously as players in the region? You’d like to deal with them as big-league players, but when they do this, it’s very tough.”

As before, there is the text and the subtext. Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.

And time will tell whether being reasonable will cost Admiral William Fallon his command.

Well, it has. I’m not one to glorify any part of military life or militarism, so I don’t mean to put Fox on a pedestal. I agree with Gibbon:

…as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

Nowadays, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out, we’re more likely to vanquish our enemies with lawyers than soldiers. If you’re a threat to win a governorship we want, we’ll find a way to put you in jail on trivial or even trumped-up charges. If you’re a rising star, we’ll investigate your private life, and tell lies about your name, history, family, and religion. If you get elected President on a platform you copied from us, we’ll impeach you for adultery.

And if you try to stop our war machine, we’ll run over you.

This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:

Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.

Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.

The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.

Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.

Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?

Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.

Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."

Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.

Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?

Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?

On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.

It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?

Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.

Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.

Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.

By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.

The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.

On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.

Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.

Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.

Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.

Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.

Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

Imagine this. Democratic candidate John Doe is set to speak at a local campaign rally that his advance men have prepared.

Chosen to warm up the crowd is a well-known local Communist. He comes out and berates the Republican candidate, dissing his race, religion and capitalist beliefs.

It's on film. When Doe finds out about the speech, he apologizes and says it will never happen again.

A local political commentator explains the Communist has a large following and is good at getting out voters. That explains why Doe's staff chose him to deliver his harangue.

Instantly Doe is pilloried by both Republicans and Democrats and is driven into early retirement. Too bad for him he wasn’t a Republican.

Republican neocons and the GOP's mean trash-talkers are tolerated, even revered, by the Republican establishment.

And yet neocons, having captured the executive branch, have caused far more harm to the United States than any domestic Communist ever dreamed of doing. Still, they are tolerated or embraced by a major American party.

The far left of the Democratic party, on the other hand, has been branded as dangerous to the nation. The mainstream Democrats ousted them and would never choose one of them to warm up the crowd at a political rally.

So which party is radical ? Which one harbors anti-Americans in its ranks? Which tolerates members who are a proven threat to the United States ?

We note with pleasure the return of our royal friend and colleague Simbaud to the active throne. He points us to Scott Horton’s post at Harper’s, “Congress Cites Bolten and Miers for Contempt — But Is the Issue Really Impeachment?”. We certainly hope it is.

Horton’s point is that the House vote this week to hold in contempt the contemptible Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten seems gratuitous, in that there’s next to no chance of it being enforced. No Attorney General working for Dick Cheney will ever prosecute Republican lawbreakers, no matter what law they break; and a court case, which the House can mount even if main Justice opposes it, will show no results before the eagerly awaited January 20, 2009.

But past experience indicates that John Conyers does not act gratuitously, and Horton’s sources tell him that the DoJ investigation into the firings of US attorneys like New Mexico’s David Iglesias are likely to conclude that the firings were politically motivated.

Now the Justice Department’s investigation focuses only on Alberto Gonzales, Paul McNulty and a handful of other senior political appointees, almost all of whom have left. It does not have the jurisdiction to address staffers in the White House like Rove, Miers and Bolten, nor indeed, President Bush.

But they are clearly within the jurisdictional remit of the Judiciary Committee. Moreover, if the Justice Department’s report implicates not just Rove, Miers and Bolten, but also Bush in the decision to fire for improper reasons — a conclusion which is now looking extremely likely — then it will be up to Conyers’s committee to press the investigation forward. In so doing, he is entitled to conduct hearings on the footing of impeachment. If he does, the executive privilege objection interposed by the White House and backed in another Constitution-defying opinion of the Attorney General, would not apply.

It’s even possible that the obviousness of White House influence in the firings would overcome the well-known resistance of the Speaker to anything that might hurt the Republican administration. We can hope, at least.

I doubt anyone will be sad to hear that Haji Mohammad Suharto, whose brutal and bloody dictatorship set Indonesia’s development back a generation, whose graft and nepotism turned what could have been a wealthy country into a poor one, is dead.

He ruled Indonesia for thirty-three years, until mass protests drove him to resign in 1998.

Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army’s six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt.

Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces and promoted himself to four-star general.

Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region’s bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.

Over the next year, Suharto eased out of office Indonesia’s first post-independence president, Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The legislature rubber-stamped Suharto’s presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times.

Wikipedia briefly notes the assistance provided by the CIA in naming and locating many of those who were “purged”, but doesn’t spend as much time on the support he received from the US as, say, Chomsky.

But he wasn’t just a murdering bastard, he was also a thieving bastard.

Suharto’s economic policies, based on unsecured borrowing by his cronies, dramatically unraveled shortly before he was toppled in May 1998. Indonesia is still recovering from what economists called the worst economic meltdown anywhere in 50 years.

Still, he claimed the mantle of anti-Communism, so the US loved him. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were pleased to green-light his brutalization of East Timor, where his troops “purged” about a third of the population. Apparently he couldn’t kill enough people to satisfy our bloodlust. Or our fear.

Good riddance.

Let me start by stipulating: I fully understand that snappy titles attract readers to articles. I’ve tried that trick myself on occasion, though without noticeable success. So maybe that’s all Gallup’s doing in today’s article, “An Inexplicable Jump in Americans’ Long-Term Optimism”.

Or maybe it’s more subtle than that. Perhaps the editors at Gallup are sneaking in a Stewart-like funny, describing with a smirk the reality we’re supposed to believe in.

When I was living in Rochester, NY, the local paper once had an article on research about depression, which showed a significant disparity among days of the week and parts of the day. The researchers reported, but claimed to be without an explanation for, the result. The part of the week most highly correlated with depression, it turned out, was Sunday afternoon.

(h/t Froomkin)

I note with sorrow the passing of a permanent legend of the chess world.

Bobby Fischer long ago stopped competing openly, though there were lots of rumors that an anonymous player of tremendous strength was beating GMs on the internet. His last officially sanctioned game was in 1972, when he played Boris Spassky for the world championship. His brilliance and eccentricity are both well chronicled, so I’ll only relate a few of my favorite anecdotes.

Everyone knows he learned to play when he was 6, and dropped out before graduating from high school because he was already a professional chessplayer. In fact he won the US championship, handily, when he was 14. Such talent cannot fail to warp the way a child learns to deal with the world. Much like Mozart or Gauss. And yes, I am comparing Fischer as chessplayer to Mozart as composer and Gauss as mathematician.

But also as weirdo. Unfortunately chess has acquired a nerdy reputation, based largely on the overwhelming percentage of nerds among chessplayers, though those of us in the chess-instruction industry are laboring night and day to change that. And it must be admitted that Fischer is only an extreme manifestation of an intense, inwardly-directed, perfection-seeking personality that one often finds in chessplayers. Fischer famously complained during his match with Spassky about the noise from the cameras that were broadcasting the board position. Even when the cameras were in a separate room shooting through glass.

He blundered badly in the first game of the match, then disputed a ruling so vehemently that he refused to show up for the second game and was forfeited, thus starting the match 0-2. From that point he proceeded to demolish a strong, sharp, and resourceful sitting champion in Spassky, ending the match plus four at 12.5-8.5. Winning by a clear point (draws are worth half a point) is usually considered a strong showing in a tournament; two points is a large lead in a match. To beat the reigning champion by four is historic. Yet Spassky actually gained rating points, because Fischer’s rating was so much higher than the champion’s when the match began.

From an early age Fischer was famous for playing the same openings in all his games — 1. e4, or P-K4 for you old-style readers, as White, specializing in the Ruy Lopez; as Black, Najdorf Sicilian against king-pawn players and King’s Indian, or occasionally Gruenfeld, against queen pawns. He apparently believed that he understood the tree of possible moves and the consequences thereof so clearly that he knew certain paths all the way through the tree. (Try to build a tree of all the possible moves in one of your favorite openings and see how quickly the tree expands.) He also claimed to remember every game he’d ever seen.

In his match with Spassky he opened with the queen pawn for the first time in his career in a serious game. Spassky played his favorite defense. Fischer didn’t just beat it, he refuted it. Next cycle, he went back to the king pawn. I think it was that game, though I haven’t looked it up, that ended with Spassky so impressed that when he resigned he stood and began to applaud along with the audience. This was both a typically classy move by Boris and a smooth psychological ploy. Fischer was so rattled he got up and left the stage immediately.

On his way to beating Spassky, becoming the first and so far only American ever to win an official World Championship of chess, he got a congratulatory call from the President, who happened to be the old cold warrior Richard Nixon, happy for any American citizen beating a Soviet one. Fischer told him what he could do with it. He said he didn’t represent the US or anyone but himself. And that was right.

Bobby Fischer obviously had lots of psychological problems. His 1982 screed I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! convinced many that he’d completely lost it. You can understand how he might have become paranoid; his parents really were watched by Hoover’s FBI. And the Soviets were not above conniving to draw each other, saving all their energy for beating Fischer. He was paranoid, no doubt about it. But they really were after him, too. Poor guy.

At the time of Fischer-Spassky, grandmaster games usually had time controls of forty moves in two and a half hours. If the players hadn’t finished the game as the five-hour mark approached, the game would be adjourned. To equalize the overnight-analysis playing field, the player on the move would write down a move on a piece of paper but not make it on the board or show it to the opponent. The tournament director would seal that move. When the game was resumed, the TD would open the envelope and make the move written down. Then the opponent would be on the move and the game would proceed.

Spassky’s entourage, supplied by the Soviet chess machine, was impressive, with multiple masters and grandmasters, even including a couple of former World Champions, plus physical trainers and at least one psychologist (Fischer was particularly freaked by Krogius). If a game was adjourned, Spassky could analyze for an hour or two, then go to bed. When he got up, the assembled GMs would relate their findings as to the best plan and series of moves to employ upon resumption.

Fischer refused help. His entire support staff in Iceland consisted of William Lombardy, a priest as well as a grandmaster, mainly there to deal with the press. Lombardy later talked about analyzing with Fischer, saying that when they combined adjournment analyses Bobby would be moving the pieces so fast that Lombardy, a GM, could not follow the ideas.

After he won, he hit the big time: he continued his column in Boy’s Life, and was invited on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, proving to be the world’s worst interview. Carson had obviously boned up on the chess lingo and asked good questions, nearly all of which got monosyllabic answers. The only really memorable line to me was when Carson asked what, given Fischer’s intense concentration on the game, he did for fun. Bobby looked at him like he was crazy, and said, “I play chess.”

When he was 13 he played a game still known as the Game of the Century. He was famous for opening preparation; yet author and International Master Jeremy Silman ranks him among the top five endgame players so far (along with Lasker, Rubenstein, Capablanca, and Smyslov). An attacker who paradoxically enjoyed difficult defenses, he excelled at turning a small technical advantage into something tangible and then attackable and finally decisive.

Wikipedia says he did the Fifteen Puzzle in less than 25 seconds multiple times, including once for Johnny Carson. He invented a new kind of chess clock now in very wide circulation. He suggested a new way to play chess, now called FischerChess or Chess960, in which pieces are placed behind the pawns on the first rank randomly, thus requiring players to operate on positional understanding rather than memorized lines.

He held many unpleasant, and some despicable, opinions. I don’t recommend anything about his method of living to my students. Presumably music teachers don’t recommend a Mozartian life to their charges either. But the genius is undeniable in both cases. It’s too bad Fischer’s life was outwardly so unhappy. But I suspect he didn’t really give much of a damn about that. He was the best chessplayer who ever lived, and that’s what he cared about.

Sorry to see Oscar headin’ out. But he left us something to remember him by. I think it was about 200 albums’ worth of something.

My interest in baseball runs neck and neck with my interest in the carbon-based life form said to be growing within the younger sister of Britney Spears.

And the idea that the sport possesses an “honor” which is capable of being “besmirched” seems to me as ludicrous as Bush talking about his love of “freedom” while he maneuvers us toward a permanent military occupation of Iraq.

Still, I found this op-ed in today’s New York Times interesting. As so often in our great national outrages, nobody till now has bothered to ask the underlying question: ”Do performance-enhancing drugs improve performance?” Professors Cole and Stigler have.

Not that I’d been following his career recently, but I do report with sadness the passing of a unique character in the world of music.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a true weirdo, in the best sense of the term. He made waves of all types, from declaring that he was educated “on Sirius”, which would presumably mean he wasn’t human, Sirius being a star rather than a planet, to composing the world’s longest opera.

The logistical demands of the 29-hour long work are staggering. For just one section alone, entitled “Helikopter-Streichquartett” (Helicopter String Quartet), a string quartet hovers in four different helicopters above the concert hall, with audio and video feeds relayed to the audience below.

You can see why you’d need one helicopter for each of the quartet’s members. Can’t you?

I first heard his works in my first year of college. The professor who played them in class also introduced me to John Cage. One of my proudest achievements was building a relationship with that professor that led to one class on the blues and another on early jazz, both huge hits among the student body, mostly for the music but perhaps also for the intoxicants and the social scene. I miss him. Now I can miss Stockhausen along with him.

Steve over at TWN quotes the recently released NIE on Iranian nuclear capabilities, which seems to be exactly what you’d expect: a nuanced attempt to tell the administration something of what it wants to hear without overtly lying or stating confidance where little exists.

E. We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program.

~ Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might — if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.

~ We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons. In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons — and such a decision is inherently reversible.

But how difficult is it really to specify the basis of a combination of carrots and sticks, backed by credible US statements, that would induce whatever entity runs Iran to bargain in good faith? Seems to me that if we told them we wouldn’t attack them unless they attacked us or our allies, and they believed it, everything else could be worked out. The problem is that the current US “strategic posture”, as announced by the Pentagon, is to exert a certain level of control over all the world, allowing no rivals in military power. This requires us to “take out” — a phrase until recently more associated in the US with food than bombs — any potential threat.

How could any conception of a world community, ordered or otherwise, contain the idea of one globally dominant country, claiming the sole right of intervening at any time, place, or hour, without everyone else feeling threatened? This seems to me an instantiation of the abstract object I call the Mythical Knockout Punch. Truman rode this sucker to the everlasting infamy of two needless massacres, thinking the Russians, little men that they were from Harry’s grand viewpoint, would be quaking in their boots with respect for the Americans, proudly standing tall; possibly they would even concede, like the Japanese.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that then as now the biggest problems were with policy rather than procedure, the politicians rather than the military men. Truman was advised not to the drop the bomb by:

Adm. William D. Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff[…;] commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. “Hap” Arnold; Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet; Adm. William F. Halsey Jr., commander of the U.S. Third Fleet; and the famous “hawk” who commanded the 21st Bomber Command, Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall[…;] [Gen.] Dwight D. Eisenhower [commander-in-chief of Allied forces in Europe…]

He paid as little attention to them as our current Big Man did to active Generals like Shinseki and retired ones like Zinni and Clark. And in order to sell the policy of massacre to the American population, earnestly striving to win but equally sincerely tired of war, Truman fixed the facts around the policy (if you don’t believe this I suggest a dose of Gar Alperovitz).

One thing about Roosevelt’s war, though: it wasn’t naked aggression on our part. It may have been, in fact I expect it was, an intentional oversight at Pearl Harbor, in some ways like that of 9/11. Those who believe in war, like those who believe in tax cuts, have the gift of seeing validation in every event. Every set of ideas is self-reinforcing, as the cognitive psychologists demonstrate.

One idea that, to the philosopher’s surprise, continues to motivate despite its opposition to the real world as it’s experienced is that if you hit your opponent hard enough he’ll give up. Civilization is thus represented by one of its least civil activities, boxing.

But it seems a superficial notion at best. For example, in chess tournaments my threat indicator hits red as soon as I start thinking I’m winning. It’s an easy time to trip up and make an oversight, at exactly the moment the opponent is panicking and buckling down with all available energy. It’s extremely rare to find oneself in a situation of such dominance that resistance is truly futile. The resistance may be, as we call it today, asymmetric. But it’s unlikely to resign the game while breath remains.

Truman hit Stalin with everything he had, calling it the greatest thing in history. It did indeed scare the Russians, so much they instituted a crash program and quickly generated their own bomb. Knockout punches only work in boxing and video games, where the opponent’s anger and shame and need for revenge aren’t relevant because time has expired.

As long as we continue to invade countries and take their resources, or claim the right to kidnap who we will off the streets of allies like Britain at the President’s whim, no one would believe any guarantee of security we made. Nor should they. Friends, in short, will be few and hard to come by.

But perhaps George Friedman, who usually seems to me the most right-wing of the Stratfor folks on Middle East topics, is correct to suggest that the NIE might be a signal of US readiness to consider the possibility of thinking about negotiations with Iran. As long as they wouldn’t deny interest in nukes, it was hard for us to negotiate; but if the intelligence community can say that they’re working on nucular power but not nucular weapons, talking might be possible. After all, we allowed Syria to show up at the Annapolis photo ops, where of course there wasn’t any action to exclude them from, thus preserving their diplomatic feelings.

In any case, it’s looking less and less likely that Cheney will be able to add one more war to the trough before he returns to a few years (all spent in this country, of course) of fabulous wealth and privilege in that part of the private sector that benefits most from the destruction.

Bush, Cheney, and those we would call their henchmen if these disastrous decisions and situations were being reported from Haiti, or even Mexico, have committed crimes against humanity and peace, and war crimes to boot. They should be in the dock at The Hague. It’s our job to send them there if we wish to maintain some international credibility as a nation.

Where, oh where, could Howard have learned such a trick? And why didn’t he adopt Karl’s skill in execution?

The election strategy of the Australian prime minister, John Howard, was in turmoil today after members of his Liberal party were caught red-handed in an inept dirty tricks campaign.

Bogus flyers from a fake organisation called the Islamic Australia Federation were distributed through the letterboxes of voters in a marginal seat, claiming the Labor opposition sympathised with Islamic terrorists.

How inept were they? Well, how about rendering Allah Akbar, God is Great, as Ala Akba? Evidently the husbands of a retiring candidate and her replacement did not have a high opinion of the intelligence of their target audience. Obvious authoritarian conservatives, and probably Christianists to boot.

You start thinking that reporting in the mainstream has grown old and lost its teeth, has followed the population and completely abandoned anything hinting at effort or thought, simply regurgitating what its masters feed it.

Then you read some of the questions asked of former Secretaries of State William Cohen and Madeline Albright, co-chairs of the Genocide Prevention Task Force (apparently without irony). To wit:

• How do you reconcile your work in trying to build a moral American consensus against genocide when just very recently each of you signed letters urging America not to recognize the Armenian genocide? [Answer: there are American troops in a position that requires help from Turkey.]
• If we are saying that this isn’t the right time to acknowledge this [Armenian] genocide, does that mean that you are arguing that for political expedience purposes, we are not going to be taking action on nor should we take action on future genocides because of what are perceived to be U.S. interests? [Answer: yes, but we don’t want to say it that way.]
• It sounds as if you are both saying — if our friends do it, it is not genocide… And if our enemies do it, it is genocide. A professor at the University of Haifa, Ilan Pappe, has written recently that he believes there is genocide ongoing in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. But you folks wouldn’t agree with that because Israel is our friend and we couldn’t say that about Israel. Secretary Cohen, you say — we can’t say that about Turkey and the Armenian genocide because our boys and girls are in harm’s way. If you are going to define genocide by who does it, not by what it is, your task force is in trouble. [Answer: we’re looking to the future, not the past. “You can have all kinds of emotional arguments why something is wrong and then you never get it off the ground” — Albright.]

I recommend the article, it’s short and pithy. Where were these reporters when we needed honesty about Iraq? Otherwise assigned, no doubt, for obvious reasons.

My opinion: William Cohen’s not a bad guy for a Republican. But the difference between Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger was only opportunity.

I’m reminded of JFK’s famous mutter as he left a briefing on US plans for nuclear war: “…and we call ourselves the human race.”

In our continuing effort to concentrate all wealth and power in the hands of a few, Congress has allocated $100 million for a vehicle that can be launched with 48 hours notice, travel 9,000 nautical miles from the continental US, deliver 12,000 pounds of “payload”, presumably not food, and return in two hours.

Sound unbelievable? The first generation is scheduled to go into operation at the end of next year.

Hypersonic speed is far greater than the speed of sound. The reusable vehicle being contemplated would “provide the country with significant capability to conduct responsive missions with quick turn-around sortie rates while providing aircraft-like operability and mission-recall capability,” according to DARPA.

The vehicle would be launched into space on a rocket, fly on its own to a target, deliver its payload, and return to Earth. In the short term, a small launch rocket is being developed as part of Falcon. It eventually would be able to boost the hypersonic vehicle into space. But in the interim, it will be used to launch small satellites within 48 hours’ notice at a cost of less than $5 million a shot.

What could possibly be more useful?

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.

Why is it that San Francisco, by any measure among the most progressive constituencies in the country, continues to elect do-nothings like Pelosi, right-wingers like Feinstein, and embarrassments like Lantos?

Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.

The lawmakers said that Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.”

[…]

“You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany,” Lantos said, according to the Dutch lawmakers.

“The comments killed the debate,” said Harry van Bommel, a member of the Socialist Party. “It was insulting and counterproductive.”

Not to mention typical.

Is there any thread that ties these atypical San Franciscans? Anything they can agree on, other than a rejection of San Francisco values?

From the UK we get news of what’s happening in Pennsylvania. I’m getting a little afraid already knowing that the State of Pennsylvania is protecting the right to vote by ensuring that the citizens don’t know where to vote. It’s not Halloween, but are you scared yet? Maybe you should be.

State officials have decided not to publicize their list of polling places in Pennsylvania, citing concerns that terrorists could disrupt elections in the commonwealth.

The Department of State was influenced by the terrorist bombings that struck just days before Spain's national elections in 2004, spokeswoman Leslie Amoros said. Election officials consulted with state police, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and the state Office of Homeland Security.

“The agencies agreed it was appropriate not to release the statewide list to protect the public and the integrity of the voting process,'” Amoros said.

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.

In a recent post, Josh Marshall mentions discussions with his readers about reactions to the President of Iran’s request to visit Ground Zero.

Apparently most readers felt that we shouldn’t allow him the propaganda victory. Josh asks if he’s alone in supporting the idea that we should ignore him, that we’re bigger than that. “Why should we care what he says?” is Josh’s view, and I think there’s a lot to that.

In fact, I’d go beyond that to say that we should escort him there, and give him access to the press. Make sure he gets a good view of our gaping national wound.

If we were strong and proud and sure of ourselves, that’s what we’d do. In fact, we’re a nation scared stiff, not unlike our Congressional representatives, strutting and puffing ourselves up but secretly afraid that we’re about to lose it all. We’ve got an incurious faith-based windshield cowboy at our head, our general’s an ass-kissing little chickenshit, and most of the rest of us watch the soap opera on TV, seemingly unaffected except that our economy is ruined as our liberties disappear and our representatives cower.

Ironically, here’s where the argument against letting Ahmadinejad make a propaganda point holds up best. If we allow him to see our national wound, for which some of us seem to bear him ill will, what’s to keep him from pointing to one of Iran’s most grievous wounds, the destruction of the elected government of Mossadeq and its replacement with the brutal Shah and his secret police? And where did Savak learn its “interrogation” techniques?

A case can be made that the United States has wounded Iran more than Iran has wounded us. And we don’t want to think about that. That’s the propaganda victory that would hurt, because it would break the spell of American exceptionalism, which we’ve tried so hard to re-weave after the revelations of Abu Ghraib.

We used to be brave because we were sure we were good. Lots of times we weren’t, but we were sure we were anyway. Now we know we’re not, and we’re frightened.

Monique Frugier, whose work has appeared on Bad Attitudes previously, sends a video collage of photographs from the march in Washington taken this past Saturday, September 15, 2007. She's gone to the trouble of uploading the video she created with her photographs to YouTube (below). More of Monique’s videos are available here. You won't find this kind of coverage on your television, in your papers, or virtually anywhere else. But you’ll find it here. Thanks Monique!

Everyone will be talking about the Washington Post article whose byline comprises six writers (Peter Baker, Karen DeYoung, Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick, and Robin Wright) and a researcher (Julie Tate).

The story of executive branch discussions provides plenty to chew on, from vicious infighting to blithe disregard for reality to political calculations that involve lives.

Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.

With that level of effort they had a chance to produce a decent policy, had they taken it in mind to do so. But their policy is faith-based. The Decider has decided, and experience tells us what that means:

“The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.”

I expect some people will take issue with this article on the basis that a lot of it is bullshit. My view is that the bullshit parts are probably accurate representations of the administration’s thinking. Whether they’re equally representative of the thinking of the article’s authors is a different question. DeYoung has written some of the best stuff about the political decision-making process on Iraq; Tyson, Warrick, and Baker have done good work as well. Ricks was famously for the war at the beginning but has contributed critical thinking once he realized it would fail, regardless of motive. Robin Wright has been in the moderate-Republican to hawkish-Democrat neighborhood since at least the Iran hostage crisis; a viewpoint far to the right of mine, but I still read her because her sources are good, and I don’t think she lies. I disagree with her bias, but I know what it is and interpret information in that light.

This article is not, in other words, written by Post equivalents of Judy Miller, but by people who can be read in a way that is informative if you read between the lines just a little.

To get access to this level of inside thinking in a famously secretive administration, reporters would essentially be required to agree to present the thinking as given to them, without much commentary. I don’t think these folks have pulled a Broder or a Woodward, I think they’ve agreed to restrictions because knowing how insiders were thinking serves several ends.

The most basic purpose served is that of informing the public about the real goings-on in the republic. In this case, how completely the White House has lost its grip on reality, if more data were needed in that area.

The article also contributes data to the historical record. I have no objection to, in fact I strongly support, adding the self-proclamation to the record. It’s often useful in assessing a situation to know what people were thinking as they made their decisions, particularly when the results were disastrous. Recording those thoughts doesn’t mean we’re granting their sanity or morality. It means that in order to get a realistic Big Picture we need to consider what the various actors were doing, and why.

In fact, as William Faulkner’s novels demonstrate at length, your enemies and opponents, whom you may regard as acting from evil motive, almost never see themselves that way. Sometimes they see you that way. But it’s extremely rare that people actually decide to do what they think is evil. Much more often, they choose what seems best from what they view as a limited set of choices.

Cognitive psychology suggests that we filter the data our senses get from the world because there’s too much of it to process. The shape of the filter is based on our ideas about the world, and that shape determines what we call information as opposed to noise. The logical conclusion is that a belief fundamental enough to affect the filter will tend to be confirmed by sensory data; what doesn’t confirm it will tend to seem irrelevant or anomalous.

If we believe in miracles or alien visitations or demons, we’re more likely to encounter them. If our experience is that difficult problems can be solved by breaking them into smaller pieces, we’ll at least try that before we give up. If we believe that absolute unchanging truth should be the basis of life, we tend to be attracted to authoritative personalities, whom non-believers call authoritarian. If we believe in a Hobbesian world, a sort of modern jungle, we’ll avoid coöperation even when it’s in our interest, just to prove the point. If we believe government is a bad thing, we’ll govern badly. If we believe we’re attractive, we’ll interpret friendliness as a come-on; if not, we won’t recognize overt signals.

It may be an overstatement to say that we create our own reality, but we do create our own list of choices based on our understanding of the situation. At a simple level, generals or chessplayers who invent a strategy that takes the opponent by surprise are celebrated because they realize that received wisdom about the available choices is incomplete; in the popular phrase, they think outside the box. They have a limited set of variables to consider, but the number of combinations, though finite, is really, really huge. In such situations, practice generates intuition. Playing lots of five-minute chess may have bad influences or not, but it certainly provides a breadth of experience that helps one locate areas of comfort and preference, and thus to navigate in that direction. War games serve, or at least should serve, a similar purpose.

But I digress. What I want to say about the Post article is that if you’ve been reading, say, Karen DeYoung’s articles, frequently linked to in the blogosphere, you know she’s been showing a bit more skepticism than we saw from the press corps for the first few years of Bush II. So I look for subtle indications of whether she’s buying the administration line, or just recording it for informational and historical purposes.

Amid the uncertainty, the overriding imperative for Bush these past eight months has been to buy time — time for the surge to work, time for the Iraqis to get their act together, time to produce progress. In Washington’s efforts to come to grips with the war it unleashed, the story of these months is one of trying to control the uncontrollable.

They don’t bring up the deaths likely to occur as Bush buys time, overtly; the subject lurks ominously just out of sight.

They pass up the chance to make fun of Bush’s trip to Camp Cupcake, not mentioning its size, remoteness, or hardening, but consistently attending to the effect of the visit on insider thinking.

The trip energized Bush and his team. Even Gates said he was more optimistic than he has been since taking office. While the secretary had been “cagey” in the past, a senior defense official said, “he’s come to the conclusion that what Petraeus is doing is actually more effective than what he thought.”

But the trip did not end the debate. [Petraeus’s superior, Chief of CENTCOM, Admiral] Fallon has made the case that Petraeus’s recommendations should consider the political reality in Washington and lay out a guide to troop withdrawals, while Petraeus has resisted that, beyond a possible token pullout of a brigade early next year, according to military officials. The Joint Chiefs have been sympathetic to Fallon’s view.

Right now, it looks like the Joint Chiefs are the defenders of sanity (!), or what remains of it. It certainly makes a difference in your calculations when you’re involved in the enterprise for the long term. If like Reagan you expect Armageddon, or like Bush Œdipal Victory, you don’t care what might happen twenty years from now. You got yours. Would we be better off if our so-called leaders didn’t believe in an afterlife, but followed the Romans in thinking that the only thing we leave is our actions and their effects on the community? But that’s a utilitarian analysis, and a believer in absolute truth wouldn’t find it convincing.

Of course I may have it all backwards. The Joint Chiefs have expressed their interest in having some flexibility to deal with problems outside Iraq. Which could mean Iran. But given that Times article, I hold out hope, foolish though it may turn out to be.

It was never easy being a singing senator. Maybe they were jinxed, by jiminy.

Back around the turn of the century, four Republican senators formed a barbershop quartet called the Singing Senators. The singers were bass Trent Lott of Mississippi, baritone John Ashcroft of Missouri, tenor Jim Jeffords of Vermont and lead Larry Craig of Idaho.

The first hint of trouble in the quartet came in 2000 when Senator Ashcroft lost his reelection bid—to a dead man, as I recall. Ashcroft returned to Washington as attorney general, possibly the worst attorney general we ever had until the next one.

Then, in 2001, tenor Jeffords quit the party and the quartet could no longer use its nickname, “the vocal majority”, as Jeffords’ defection cost the Republicans control of the Senate.

But the party came back and the Singing Senators’ bass became Senate majority leader until, in a moment of irrational exuberance at Strom Thurmond’s hundredth birthday party, he allowed the country would have been better off had the arch segregationist Thurmond been elected president in 1948.

And now, the lead singer has fallen. Craig, one of those family values Republicans who has been an outspoken opponent of gays, was arrested in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport after allegedly soliciting an undercover cop in the adjoining stall.

As the senators used to sing,

“There goes Jack, there goes Jim,
Down to lovers’ lane,

Now and then, we meet again,
But they don’t seem the same.”

I think I remember hearing of this case a couple years ago, when the principals were indicted. To the extent I paid attention, I was less surprised that profiteering and bribery were involved in the food-for-oil program the US engineered after the first war against Iraq than I was that someone had actually been caught and indicted. War is good for business, and the US is currently set up to do very little else efficiently and effectively.

Which means Oscar Wyatt is probably in even deeper doo-doo than would be the case had he only bribed Saddam to get oil. He did that, of course, but here’s what looks worse: in his upcoming trial, due to start Sept. 5,

His attorneys are asking a federal judge in New York to prohibit prosecutors from presenting as evidence handwritten notes purportedly made by an Iraqi oil official, which suggest Wyatt conveyed information about when the United States might begin bombing, when ground forces would be sent in and how many soldiers would be deployed.

“Oscar Wyatt never passed secret information on to the Iraqis,” Wyatt attorney Gerald Shargel said in an interview Tuesday.

It’s gotta be a bit disheartening when your lawyer’s first statement is denying treason. But what information did Wyatt actually pass on?

The biggest problem seems to be in the diary of Mubdir Al-Khudhair, a former official with Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization. Therein lies an entry that is dated January 27, 2003. But the notes in question appear to be scribbled on a page dated Tuesday, August 13. No year is given, but August 13 was a Tuesday in 2002. Thus there’s some question about when the conversation covered by the diary entry took place.

That document, mostly in Arabic, recounts a purported communication between Al-Khudhair and one “Oscar Wayatt.”

Dated Jan. 27, 2003, the notes focus on the impending U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

“The current schedule is that the bombing will start on 2/15,” the notes read, according to an English translation provided with the document. “At that time there will be 160-180 thousand American soldiers. The ground attack will start at the beginning of March.”

Of course, as Shagel argues, this information was widely known, though little discussed. The numbers turned out to be pretty far off at first, but more accurate later; the dates turned out to be off by a couple of weeks. I could have produced something that accurate from the Post and the Times, had I wished to pass information to a worthless piece of humanity like Saddam.

It might have been harmless business talk designed to keep the customer in the store. But BayOil, the company Wyatt, David Chalmers, convicted today, and others were involved with, had additional issues with the Feds. And some history, going back to the Iran-Iraq war in which Saddam was our son of a bitch. Seems BayOil helped set up a three-way deal in which Saddam got arms, BayOil got oil, and the arms dealer got cash. What did Saddam’s little heart desire? Cluster bombs.

Apparently oil made Wyatt do it. He’s a fine symbol for an empire about to ride its favorite wealth-concentration engine down the tubes. Chessplayers try to develop a spidey-sense of danger lurking. In this situation, no such sensitivity is required. Many, I daresay most, Americans are interested in environmental quality, even to the point of supporting intelligent taxes for cleanup and enforcement. In San Francisco Priuses are everywhere, as are recycling bins. (In northern California, it’s not our fault that we put on the mileage like there’s no tomorrow: everything’s so far away from everything else. Right?)

Nationwide, we continue to use oil as if it will be here forever. You don’t have to believe that we’ve reached the Hubbert peak to see the slowing rate of new discoveries coinciding with an increase in demand both significant and continuing. As Michael Klare says, tough oil times are ahead. Five years from now, if things go pretty well.

Which Presidential candidate is most likely to act to reduce our dependence on oil? We should be asking them now, when they’re taking questions.

No doubt elated by his recent surge in popularity, the President once again played the little boy caught in malfeasance who knows that what he was caught doing is the least of his transgressions. If that's all he suffers for, he'll do it again. If he gets caught in major misdoings, he'll blame everyone around him.

In a White House news conference before leaving for vacation, Bush also had cautionary words for U.S. allies in the region: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. He said Maliki, who is visiting Tehran, should realize that Iran is playing a “very troubling” role and that he would need to “have a heart to heart” talk with the Iraqi leader if he believed the Iranians were being constructive. Bush said he expects the embattled Musharraf to take “swift action” against Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders if there is “actionable intelligence” on their whereabouts in Pakistan's rugged tribal areas, and he called on the Pakistani general to hold a “free and fair election.”

On U.S. domestic issues, Bush dismissed the idea of raising the federal gasoline tax to generate funds for repairing the nation's bridges in the wake of the collapse last week of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis. Instead, he said Congress should do a better job of setting priorities.

Does anyone know the actual source of the observation that the US is the only society to have gone from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization along the way? Wikiquote says Wilde or Shaw or Clemenceau…

‘All the way through that flight I was on the verge of screaming,’ al-Rawi said. ‘At last we landed, I thought, thank God it’s over. But it wasn’t — it was just a refuelling stop in Cairo. There were hours still to go … My back was so painful, the handcuffs were so tight. All the time they kept me on my back. Once, I managed to wriggle a tiny bit, just shifted my weight to one side. Then I felt someone hit my hand. Even this was forbidden.’

He was thrown into the CIA’s ‘Dark Prison,’ deprived of all light 24 hours a day in temperatures so low that ice formed on his food and water. He was taken to Guantanamo in March 2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement in terrorism by a tribunal.

Turns out he had been a source for MI5, and had freely given information under the strictest assurances of confidance, which were — surprise — violated. Bad move, apparently.

The report confirmed that al-Rawi, 39, was only held after MI5 sent the CIA a telegram, stating he was an ‘Islamic extremist’ who had a timer for an improvised bomb in his luggage. In reality, before al-Rawi left London, police confirmed the device was a battery charger from Argos.

The committee accepted MI5’s claim, given in secret testimony, that it had not wanted the Americans to arrest him, in November 2002, concluding the incident had damaged US-UK relations.

Yeah, that’s how I remember November, 2002. A chill in US-UK relations.

Where’s the outrage? Pointed in the wrong direction, to allow us to acquit ourselves of participatory guilt.

Everywhere you look there’s outrage at the accusations against Michael Vick for running a dog-fighting ring. With good reason; the fighting alone is a disgusting thing, not to mention the gruesome executions. But I don’t really understand why people are surprised, or why it’s such a big deal.

Compared, say, to Chris Benoit’s murder of his wife and child, quite clearly a product of the same chemically-induced rage that Vick and his fellow scumbags sought a release for.

Or to the accusations that Pat Tillman was killed intentionally by comrades, shot three times in the forehead with an M-16 from ten yards away.

Or to the deaths of about a million Iraqis, and the torture of who knows how many others.

In my book, people are more important than dogs. I expect I’ll be accused of speciesism, but there it is. Hell, I may as well go all the way and declare that I believe war is more important than wrestling (especially fake wrestling), and, God help my future book sales, even football.

But it’s easier to direct one’s inner rage against a target like Vick. Especially given the sensitive nature of the steroid issue right now, and the approach by Bondsy Barr to hallows everyone knows he didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve, the official records of which should in my opinion be erased, not asterisked (at least his chemically-induced rage hasn’t killed anyone, as far as I know). Benoit, after all, has the benefit of being dead.

Just as with the war in Vietnam, and for the same reasons, Americans have a lot of inner rage right now. A lot of it comes from inner conflict, very especially among those who found some reason to support the war. It’s not just the right-wing warmongers who feel this; liberal interventionists like George Packer are still struggling to resolve the contradictions in their positions without having to admit they were wrong morally, wrong legally, and wrong realpolitik-wise.

Given all those inner conflicts, plus the constant drumbeat of distraction from the media, it’s not surprising that people look for scapegoats, and focus on things that don’t really matter to the exclusion of things that do.

So it begins.

It’ll be harder to extract our military from Iraq than we’ve admitted to ourselves (and that’s saying something), because with all the mercenaries and their support systems we’ve really got over a quarter-million people on the ground. Of course about a quarter of them are Iraqis, but a lot of those will want to leave.

They’ll have to catch something other than Expat Airlines, though. So will the Indians and Pakistanis who’ve been employed in large numbers by the various contractors, as described for example in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

Pro Group, with offices in Amman and the United Kingdom, is launching Expat Airways in conjunction with the Jordanian Air Force. The Baghdad flights will use Jordan’s Marka Airport.

Ashraf Mraish, managing director for Pro Group, based in Amman, said Jordan’s tight visa restrictions drove the decision to exclude non-Westerners. Refugees have overwhelmed Jordan, which has imposed strict entry requirements for Iraqis.

“It would cost us much more to accommodate non-Westerners,” Mraish said this week. “We hope this flight is a solution to make (contractors’) lives easier.”

You can see why the Jordanian Air Force would consider it a national security issue to get Americans and other Westerners out of Baghdad, can’t you? Well, I can’t. It looks to me like a US operation under Jordanian cover. Probably Blackwater and Halliburton types starting to draw down.

According to the article, US taxpayers are funding payroll for 180,000 contract workers in Iraq. And of course we also have about 150,000 uniformed military folks there. It’s gonna take a while to get that many people out. But with those in the White House seeing clear signs of desertion in Republican ranks, the panic they deny is obviously setting in.

So it looks like they’re starting to decamp. But they don’t want anyone to know that, a perfect symbol of which is that Expat Airlines planes will have no logo.

California has well over 35 million people. And who’s more connected than we are?

I just went to Senator Diane Feinstein’s web site and entered a comment from a constitutent. The site says “The total number of e-mails sent to Senator Feinstein through this web page”, before the one I sent, was 114,864.

Where the hell is everybody? Californians: Senator Feinstein is on the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, currently attempting to extract information from Sara Taylor, Harriet Meirs, and the White House over the US attorney firings. Got anything to say to her?

Here’s what I said.

I believe the Senate should hold Ms. Sara Taylor, Ms. Harriet Meirs, and the President in contempt of Congress absent full testimony in the matter of the firing of the US attorneys.

My understanding is that Ms. Taylor and Ms. Meirs no longer work for the White House, and are therefore not under its direction. If the President is claiming that his executive privilege allows him to prevent former aides from testifying about possible illegal actions, I don’t believe such a claim would hold up even in today’s Supreme Court.

If the Congress does not act to restrain this President, he will cause even more harm to the country.

But the greatest harm, an irreparable one, would occur if the Congress fails to enact legal punishment for this administration’s illegal actions.

This President and, most especially, this Vice President have acted as if they are above the law. Congress must show them that they are not, most vigorously, or future Presidents will be completely unaccountable, and the Republic will fade away, like Rome’s did.

It’s not enough to pass resolutions that call President Bush a bad guy. He’s a war criminal; he should be in the dock in The Hague along with his Vice President. In addition, he’s a domestic criminal: he’s violated our civil rights with abandon, and he’s made us less secure, breaking all kinds of laws in the process, and ignoring many more through signing statements.

There are so many reasons to impeach both the President an