Years ago Esquire had a feature called “Dubious Achievements of 19XX.” It was accompanied by a photo of the disgraced President Nixon, grinning as if he were eating chocolate ice cream or something of similar appearance. The caption was always, “Why Is This Man Smiling?”

Today’s Maureen Dowd column asks the same question. It starts off with:

Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood…

Dowd goes on to catalogue Bush’s string of weird public performances these last few weeks— jigging, dancing, giggling, grinning, joking and singing as the new Rome burns all around him.

And she concludes:

Or perhaps it’s a Freudian trip. Now that he’s mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash-and-burn presidencies.

Her analysis gives me the opportunity to utter once again the sweetest words known to man: I told you so.

Here’s Dubya’s Creepy Death Wish, from September of 2002.

Then in May of 2006: Mission Almost Accomplished.

And last July, an update in The Smirking Chimp called Dragging Daddy Down.

I’m glad to welcome Ms. Dowd aboard, and only wish she had seen through Bush a little sooner — for instance when her public fawning over the adorable drugstore cowboy from Greenwich during the 2000 campaign caused keener judges of manflesh to mutter in disgust, For Christ’s sake, guys, get a room.

Things aren’t as bad as you thought. Once again, they’re worse. This excerpt is from James Fallows’s look back at the Hart-Rudman Commission which, as few now alive remember, predicted in early 2001 that terrorism would be our greatest national security problem.

The commission was wrong, of course. Our greatest national security problem lurked in the West Wing of the White House — and also, it turns out, back in the vice-presidential mansion at Number One Observatory Circle.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China’s back!)

I’m not one who spends a lot of time at the Lyndon Larouche site — they do have their wacky theories — but here’s a selection from an article from one of his sites that I agree with wholeheartedly. Enjoy that tap water while you can. The powers that be are already conditioning us to think of water as something we have to pay for. Look for the price to spike — just like the price of oil has done. The selling off of our infrastructure — and it is we the people who are the real owners of public infrastructure — has begun in earnest. Watch for the sovereign wealth funds — meaning the princes of other nations — to start buying their shares in earnest. We’re being sold down the river and the pace is picking up faster than ever.

There are also many projects underway to create special fee-based lanes (“Lexus lanes”) on public highways under the guise of dealing with congestion, and even discussions of tracking all cars, and charging drivers by the mile driven on all “public” roads. Add to this, the growing number of schemes to privatize water and sewer systems, bridges, tunnels, airports, and other infrastructure projects, turning them into profit centers.

The pressure for governments to agree to such deals is rising, as the effects of the economic collapse are felt. Falling real estate values, for example, are beginning to devastate county tax receipts, and the breakdown of the securities markets is making it increasingly difficult for state and local governments to raise money for infrastructure projects through the sales of bonds. Under such circumstances, the lure of money from private equity funds to buy or lease government assets is increasingly powerful. But governments which accept such bids are basically selling their populations down the river.

The treating of infrastructure as a profit center to be judged in its effectiveness by the amount of revenue it produces, is a sign of a society gone insane. The purpose of infrastructure is to raise the productive power of the people in the area it serves, as a way of making the economy more productive. Selling it off to the highest bidder, who will charge as much as possible to maximize income, is actually counterproductive to economic growth.

Rather than attempt to bail out our banks by shifting their losses to the population, and allow corporatist privatization of what should be free public services, we should return to the policies associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR put those he termed "the economic royalists" in their place, and defended the general welfare of the population, and in doing so, defended the nation. That is a policy which worked, and a policy to which we must return if we are to survive as a nation.

I haven’t bothered to track down this Bush quote on the White House site, but I trust the Doonesbury site, from which it came:

“It’s what I do during my presidency. I go around spreading good will and talking about the importance of spreading freedom and peace.”

If Nixon had said something like this, we could be vaguely comforted by the knowledge that at least he knew what a load of crap he was handing out, and was sniggering in the darkness of his soul at the suckers who were dumb enough to believe it.

But this White House is an irony free zone, and Bush, God help us, is one of those suckers.

Taken at the mass peace demonstration in Washington on March 20, 2003, four days before the idiot attacked Baghdad.

A Sharon friend, who is also a folk singer, recently forwarded me a perfectly astounding quotation from Edward R. Murrow that was broadcast over the BBC in February, 1946, as Murrow left Britain after years of covering World War II from there. Said Murrow: “I believe that I have learned the most important thing that has happened in Britain during the last six years.”

No, Murrow wasn’t speaking of routine courage, or the Blitz, or the Battle of Britain, or El Alamein, or Normandy — important as those facts and events were. He was speaking of the continued British respect for democracy and human rights, in spite of the war. Murrow cited two particular examples, excerpted here:

“Do you remember that while London was being bombed in the daylight the House devoted two days to discussing conditions under which enemy aliens were detained on the Isle of Man? Though Britain fell, there were to be no concentration camps here.”

“Do you remember that two days after Italy declared war an Italian citizen, convicted of murder in the lower courts, appealed successfully to the highest court in the land, and the original verdict was set aside? There was still law in the land, regardless of race, nationality or hatred. Representative government, equality before the law survived.”

Future generations who bother to read the historical record will see that in Britain, during the greatest war of all time, there was no retreat from basic human rights and principles. Isn’t it telling that today our U.S. Supreme Court should have to be even considering whether “detainees” in the so-call “war” on terrorism have the right to fair trial, to habeas corpus, to counsel, or even the right not to be tortured in violation of national and international law?

Surely, this is not our “finest hour.” Compared with our British friends in wartime, how far have we fallen? How far have we yet to fall?

The good news is Gonzales is gone. The bad news is Gonzales is gone. I’m going to miss Alberto. Call me a sentimental old fool, but I had hoped he would hang from Bush’s neck for the next 511 days, putrefying slowly in the nostrils of all mankind.

And in fact there is strong literary precedent for such just such a punishment. Let us turn, then, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Sympathetic pundits cry in chorus:

“God save thee, Court-crowned president!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus! —
Why look’st thou so?” —’With my crossbow
I shot the Albertross…”

Relieved, the pundits opine thusly:

Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.

But the hot and copper sky returns apace, causing the Ship of State to stick, nor breath nor motion, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The pundit chorus turns like so many lapdogs on its now-disgraced emperor, who laments:

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albertross
About my neck was hung.

Anon, remembering the fallen Rumsfeld, Rove and good old Brownie with sorrow, yet relieved that Cheney and so many other brave hearts still survive, the Impostor Prince sings this bittersweet tribute:

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

Until, after an interminable wait made bearable only by Jenna’s story-book wedding to a Karl Rove aide, Inaugural Day at long last dawns. The father of the bride sings:

…And from my neck so free
The Albertross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

I consider this to be the best video I’ve seen on YouTube.

Direct link

On Wednesday the government of Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi fell, following protests in the city of Vicenza against the expansion of an American army base there.

The plan, which Prodi had approved, was to double the size of the base so that the entire 173rd Airborne Brigade could be garrisoned there — 4,500 troopers instead of 2,750.

Two questions:

For what sane (or even faintly plausible) reason do we have any paratroopers in Italy at all?

And secondly, why do we tuck an entire regular army airborne brigade out of harm’s way in northern Italy at the same time we are breaking the back of our reserve forces by deploying and redeploying them to Iraq as occupation troops during a civil war?

For answers — not good or even sane answers but the real ones — turn to this excerpt from Chalmers Johnson’s new book, Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic. He writes in part:

Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 — mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets — almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

And don’t miss the comments following the article from which the paragraph above is taken. They add a whole new dimension of insanity to a global policy that is already batshit crazy.

Eisenhower, of course, predicted all this with great accuracy in the military/industrial complex speech he delivered on leaving office. Also of course, it has to be said that he did little or nothing to solve the problem during the eight years when he could have done more than talk about it.

But when you’re in office, as the bagmen on K Street say, money talks and bullshit walks.

Soldiers. Untold civilians.