Mulligan the Masterpiece, Part II

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them to be like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment....Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their ancestors...Each generation is as independent as the ones preceding, as that was of all which had gone before."

-Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson went on to say that "the Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead." This, on one hand, is a boorish truism, but on the other hand it sheds some much needed light on our tendency to bow to a parchment idol, even after the world in which the parchment was written has long since slipped into the abyss of history.

This is not to say that all attachment to tradition is foolhardy; in fact, it is perhaps the most indispensable ingredient of humanity. Memory and tradition is what makes us super-organic, and ensures that we can spend our lives progressing, rather than learning anew each generation how to dig wells and bind books.

We must take care, however, to incorporate past knowledge and paradigms without enslaving ourselves to them. It is, I believe, impossible to argue that our Constitution today is not an iron cage, chaining us to concessions made to slave holders.

If George Washington were reincarnated today, would we put him in command of American troops in Iraq? Probably not. Not because he was not an accomplished general, but because mounted cavalry are quite vulnerable to IEDs. As the father of our country, who must be understood as one of the greatest men to ever live due to how much power he attained and then divested, said, "I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after us."

One may argue that George 1 was wrong, given the relative intellect of George 43, but despite some well-documented exceptions, he was of course correct. After all, George 43 may be deficient in wisdom, but at least he doesn't own any slaves.

The concessions made to the southern states are now writ large across the nation, with two ultimate manifestations of the tyranny of the minority: the United States Senate and the Electoral College. For Wyoming to have the same power as California in the Senate, despite California's 70:1 population advantage, is as clear a crystallization of tyranny of the minority as one could fathom.

We cannot accept the small states to voluntarily renounce their wildly disproportionate power in the Senate or the election of Presidents. It is often said that power corrupts, but what actually corrupts much more predictably is the prospect of losing power. This is why the Electoral College stands, even after the coup d'etat of 2000, and this is why it will remain until and after a presidential election is inevitably thrown into the House of Representatives, in which each state gets one vote. Such an un-democratic nightmare is only a matter of time.

Interestingly enough, the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that, within individual states, legislatures modeled on the United States Senate were unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional, for example, for every county to have one seat, because since the counties varied wildly in population, this would violate the principle of one man, one vote.

This is an intriguing ruling for many reasons. First of all, one wonders how the Supreme Court could argue that the federal government is allowed to conduct itself in a manner that is deemed unconstitutional if pursued by an individual state. How could the Supreme Court not go to the logical conclusion and declare the United States Senate unconstitutional? Don't hold your breath.

Another flaw with our constitution is the presidential veto. This essentially endows a single man with the sway of a third house of Congress. A single man can disregard the will of representatives of two-thirds of the people. Does that seem democratic? American presidents have vetoed 2,500 bills. Congress has overridden 100 of them. Vetoes are final, and they are tyrannical.

The Supreme Court has declared 160 laws to be unconstitutional in the history of our republic. The president, noted above, has in effect done the same for 2,500 would-be laws. And these are "co-equal branches"? A tyrannical executive, a timid court, and a Senate in which 25% of the senators represent 5% of the population is many things, but democratic is surely not one of them. For the first three-quarters of the Bush 43 presidency, the Republican majority in the Senate, 51% of senators, represented 20% of the American population. Fantastic.

There is an easy way to fix this, to ensure that the federal government does not carry out actions that are objectively opposed by the majority of citizens for whom these actions are nominally executed. Here's what it would take:

"There shall be one house of Congress, a House of Representatives, with each representative representing that same number of citizens. The president shall be elected by a universal ballot in which each vote carries identical weight, regardless of where the vote is cast. The president shall have no power to veto the will of the people as expressed by the Congress."

We know this won't happen, because the fear of losing power is the ultimate corrupter. For the good of our country, however, we need to recognize that these issues are far more important than whether Hillary cried or whether McCain is too creepy-looking to be president. Or maybe Jefferson and Washington gave us to much credit and we'd be better off sticking to what they came up with. It's up to us.

How Hitler Won

There are so many morbidly fascinating things about Adolf Hitler that the ultimate reality of his designs has been overlooked by the West. Specifically, if we assess what Hitler intended to "accomplish", we will realize that, to a considerable extent, he succeeded. What's more, he succeeded only after his own death and only with the help of the Allied powers.

There is a challenge I've always had in studying Hitler, aside from reconciling with the fact that he was real, and that he was popular, and that he presided over, but did not wholly invent, a situation in which the most "civilized" of nations took it upon itself to pry children from their mothers in the middle of the night.

The hardest thing to understand about Hitler, for me, is what he wanted. What Hitler wanted, above all else, was a Europe that conformed to his own vision, obssessive compulsive, entirely amoral, pseudo-scientific, and under girded by a scale of violence that no one had previously imagined as even being imaginable.

We know Hitler hated the Jews, the gays, the gypsies, the communists, the liberals. Hitler hated everybody, including himself, pathetic example of Aryan stock as he was. Hitler was like Mama Cass killing 50 million people for the sake of creating a race of people who look like Gisele Bunchen. No small amount of self-loathing at work there.

What Hitler hated more than anything, however, was ambiguity, cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, and truth for truth's sake. Which explains why he hated the United States. Which explains why he just may be the stupidest person in the history of the Earth, as one would have to be to declare war on the United States.

Most of us, even those of us who are relatively well-informed, either do not know or do not appreciate that the United States, even as Western Europe was overrun and Britain was on its knees, weeks from capitulation, would never have declared war on Nazi Germany. Without America to fight, Hitler would have won. But his hatred of what the United States was in his eyes dictated that he would declare war on it.

These are the questions I return to: how could someone so great (in a way that makes no moral judgement, but simply reflects one's impact on history) could be so incredibly stupid? No leader had been able to conquer all of Europe as had Hitler. And there has never been born a man so stupid as to simultaneously invade Russia and declare war on the United States, as did Hitler.

The biggest nightmare for any would-be European conqueror, especially a German, is a two front war. The most nightmarish manifestation of a two front war would be one involving the literally endless waves of tanks, ships, and guns produced by a sufficiently aroused United States, totally impervious to conventional attack, and the endless waves of bitter cold and bitter humanity that is Russia. Hitler took on both at once when he could have easily co-existed with both, at least for a time.

So what did he want? What he wanted was homogeneity. Hitler looked at waves of humanity in the same detached sense as an obsessive compulsive sort might look at a dirty dish or a dust bunny. They will not sleep while the disorder lingers. Hitler wanted a German Germany, and his obsession ran so deep that it literally meant that not a single human being in the Reich, as populous as America at its height, could be allowed to live there if he or she was insufficiently German.

In other words, he wanted the impossible. But, in 1941, he had already done the impossible, conquering the whole of Europe without stirring to action the giants of East or West. The holocaust was the clearest manifestation of Hitler's design. The fact that it continued apace until laterally the last day of the war speaks all the volume necessary as to its importance to the Nazis.

The Nazis wanted a homogenized and categorized Europe. Subservient Gauls to the west. Germans in the center. Slavs (slaves) in the east. Jews dead. This is a nightmare vision, of course, but we should take pause if we believe that it is a project that we would never support. Because, in the end, we did.

To Hitler, and to many other thinkers who would not agree with Hitler on anything else, the cause of European wars from time immemorial was the mixing of antagonistic populations. Experiments with multi-ethnic empires had led to a cosmopolitan and frontier-less Europe that genuinely disgusted many people, not least of all the Nazis.

What happened after World War II? Did populations return to their pre-war homes so that Europe could start over? No. The killing slowed to a trickle, but the ethnic cleansing actually gathered steam.

Millions of Germans who had lived to the East and South of Germany for centuries were forced from their homes. Knock on the door. Get all your shit and leave. Go to Germany. Lived here 200 years? Own this house? Don't know anyone in Germany? Don't have transportation? Child sick? Tough shit. Leave. That happened millions of times in newly-liberated countries.

Put simply, the way Europe dealt with World War II was to finish Hitler's project for him. The European states in 1950 were more ethnically homogeneous that ever before in history. Hitler was right about one thing; Europeans don't want to live with Europeans. Germans want to live with Germans.

And the Jews? Let's just say that the creation of Israel had less to do with remorse for the crime of the millennium that it had to do with total contempt for the Arabs and the attraction of a way to get rid of the Jews once and for all without having to kill them all.

This is the sad truth about Hitler's aim in World War II and the degree to which people agreed with him, even if they were on his list of undesirables.

A similar dynamic took place after the Gulf War in 1991. There was another bout of ethnic cleansing carried out in Kuwait, with the support of the United States, that we are just as well-practiced at ignoring. After restoring "freedom" to Kuwait or, more accurately, to the venal and medieval al-Sabah family, every Palestinian living in Kuwait was expelled. All of them.

Their crime? Being Palestinian. Yasser Arafat, who represented Palestinians with about the same amount of legitimacy as George W. Bush represents San Francisco, had sided with Saddam Hussein when he annexed Kuwait. So, when the al-Sabahs regained power they ethnically cleansed their country. And we let them.

Such details are far easier to ignore than to acknowledge as parts of the American story. They bear out a simple truth, though. People, more often that not, do not want to live with people who are different from them, even if those difference are wholly imperceptible to outsiders. We should be grateful to live in one of the few countries that, despite all our problems, dares to try to be open to all.

Stars and Bars

Mike Huckabee's recent remarks about the Confederate Flag remind us once again how pathetic our presidential candidates are and, much more importantly, how willing we are to avert our gaze from historical truth in the interest of not "offending" some rather offensive people.

Governor Huckabee told a crowd in South Carolina that, "if someone came to our state and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole." Such a concentrated dosage of historical ignorance, thinly-veiled racism, and embarrassingly petty behavior from a would-be president is somewhat surprising since, as we are constantly reminded on the "news", Mike Huckabee is such a "likable guy". He is, after all, a Christian Leader. And he lost 100 pounds!

Let's parse this line, which admittedly is pretty funny if seen in a vacuum. It starts "if someone came to our state." Now, we all know how much the south loves "states' rights". Specifically, they support the right of their states to commit treason against the nation and crimes of humanity against their own citizens. Also, they support the right to bitch incessantly about people "coming to their states" to exercise such nefarious designs as rural electrification and the guarantee of voting rights.

They resent the northern states even though, while we're not busy sodomizing each other in the back of a Starbucks after we tire of the latest issue of Moral Relativism Monthly, the northern states shift considerable wealth to the southern states.

"If someone came to our state" is meant to evoke the image of the hated Yankee carpetbagger, the self-righteous dilettante who refused to respect the south's right to....to what? To enslave human beings. To deny citizens the vote. To actively support terrorist organizations. To execute imprisoned army officers who dared to command black soldiers.

The amazing thing about the south's devotion to states' rights is that they never applied it to any remotely redeemable principle. Instead "states' rights" meant "the rights of states to deprive their citizens of rights." Nice principle. Is there anything more un-American? But the South didn't want to be American. They wanted to do their own despicable and medieval thing. And they resent losing. And they resent the welfare, though not enough to throw away the checks.

"If someone came to our state and told us what to do with our flag"...After evoking up spectres of northern imperialism, which had the despotic aim of allowing black people to live free and even, God forbid, vote, Huckabee refers to "our flag." He's clearly talking about the Stars and Bars, the flag of the Confederacy, although that flag was never the flag of South Carolina.

But, then again, Huckabee's not from South Carolina, so when he says "our flag", he's speaking of southerners. And he's speaking of the Stars and Bars, as if everyone in the south felt some transcendant attachment to a banner that symbolized, it must be screamed, nothing but treason and slavery. I'd be pissed if I lived in the south and was lumped in with that crowd.

"...we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole." Like I said, I am a connoisseur of low-brow humor, and this is pretty appealing in that sense. In another sense, though, it's rather disturbing. It's an ordained minister, who claims to be a serious contender for the most important job on earth, saying several times during campaign speeches that, if douche bag meddlers from the north ever tried to tell him what to do with his blood-soaked memento of tyranny and treason, he would sodomize them with a large pole. First of all, that's kind of a violent threat. Secondly, sodomy is illegal in South Carolina. Because of states' rights, no less!

This is a very thinly-veiled attack and it is one that merits attention. While the United States desperately needs an election that is not about replaying the Vietnam War again, we also need one that does not replay the Civil War. How clearly can I put it? Fuck the Confederacy. I say the same about the Nazis. I'm sure some of their soldiers were brave, but so what? They were wrong, and they fought for a vision that would have brought hell on earth for millions had it succeeded. Except the Confederates caused more American blood to be spilled than Hitler did.

While I consider myself to be a states' rights man, and I believe that far too much power has been aggregated to the federal government, and that that is the biggest institutional threat to the United States today, I would never dare adopt the insulting ruse that the Confederacy nobly sought to preserve local governance against tyrannical centralized power.

Their definition of states' right, it cannot be repeated enough, comes down to this: states should have the right to commit treason by waging war on the United States. States should have the right to deny people all civil, political, and human rights based upon their race. States should have the right to allow terrorist organizations to ensure that people will not vote, own significant amounts of property, or receive equitable returns from taxes based upon their race. That was what the Confederacy fought for, and that is why I say, "fuck them."

The South still, even after its unspeakable treason, holds wildly disproportionate influence over this country. They still boast a stranglehold over the Senate and the Electoral College. They still suck wealth from the wealthier regions of the country. And yes, they still bitch about Yankee interference.

The South needs to be called out, preferably by ending the fiction that they deserve any sort of concessions in term of representation in Congress. And secondly, they must not be indulged in this narcissistic fantasy that holds that treason can be spun into "a noble sacrifice". Treason, of course, to defend the principle of barbarism. Fuck them.

Part of this reckoning is to understand exactly what Mike Huckabee meant. He knew exactly what he was saying. Ask yourself whether his conduct, where he threatens to violently sodomize any number of people with a symbol of slavery for the sin of rejecting that symbol of slavery, strikes you as Christian behavior. If we adopt the Golden Rule, which we hear Huckabee prattle on about, we would be safe to assume that he secretly wishes to be sodomized by a swastika flag, since I assume he would "come down there and tell me what to do with" said flag if I were to fly one.

The Civil War is over. The south lost. They lost because the wages of sin is death. They betrayed this country and every ideal it stands for. Only don't tell them that. To them, we're the bad guys. People in the south disproportionally supportive of the idea that they have the right to tell people in Baghdad how to run their lives. But the idea that the federal government of the United States has the right to enforce the Voting Rights Act? Now that's tyranny.

Mulligan the Masterpiece

Americans do well to lionize the founding fathers, especially since our contemporary leaders so clearly lack the judgement and intellect of the authors of our republic. But the idolization, the idolatry, of these men, and of their words of wisdom, have led us to a calcified place where we play the 21st century with 18th century rules.

Since we no longer chain ourselves to the founders' scientific theories, technological tools, tolerance for chattel slavery, or preference for attire, why do we exalt their political theories as unalterable except by the blasphemous?


This dynamic is somewhat analogous to a blind belief in the Bible, which was written by men whose views of geography, geology, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, physics, government, law, and economics are absurd caricatures of a thankfully extinct dystopia. Why then do most of us assert that their religious constructs are beyond amendment?


The anti-democratic compromises made with the construction and adoption of the constitution aggregated to the benefit of states with small populations, giving them influence on par with states with far more citizens. One (white) man, one vote would apply within states, but not between them. And therein lies the flaw. It is a flaw that should never have been accepted and which must now be reversed.

It's time to mulligan the masterpiece. It's time for a new constitutional convention.

When one considers the monumental concessions given to smaller states, which were sometimes only "small" because they did not count slaves as full people, it is clear that the founders gave the greatest import to the necessity of the 13 colonies coalescing as one nation, rather than two or three. It was thought, not without reason, that any more than one new nation would result in domestic war or in hopeless disunity in the face of European powers.

It is impossible to argue that, had the United States not formed a single nation in 1787, it would not have been rapidly undermined and dismembered by England or France. It is also impossible to argue, however, that the Civil War of the 1860's was a reasonable price to pay in the interest of ensuring domestic tranquility (for white men) in the 1780's.

Regardless of where one stands on the wisdom of such sacrifices to small states, only the people who live in those states could possibly maintain that such sacrifices are still necessary or fair. It is necessary or fair that Wyoming has as much power in the Senate as California, even though California's senators represent a full seventy times as many Americans as do Wyoming's?

It is necessary or fair, or remotely democratic, that a president could take office after objectively receiving far fewer total votes than his opponent?

The Constitution is amendable, which is commendable,but the amendment process is held victim to the same distortion as the functions of government itself; it is possible for a constitutional amendment to fail even if office holders representing ninety percent of the American people supports it. Because of the small states.

The Constitution is incredibly difficult to amend, and any attempt to amend the undue influence of the small states would automatically fail, due to the very undue influence it aims to quell.

We are so loathe to change the constitution because, when it was written, it was simply the most important political document ever written. Needless to say, it was the best constitution in the world, since it was the only constitution of a technically democratic republic.

We are not the only democracy anymore, however; we are one of scores. And it would be imprudently narcissistic to maintain that no concept has been tested by these scores of democracies over the last two centuries that we might learn something from.

The small state sacrifices were made for five or six slaveholding southern states originally. Now, half of the fifty states in the union enjoy these undemocratic perks. Know what else? After the Civil War, the minimum price the Confederate States should have had to pay for its treason is the indignity of assuming their proper place in our union, with the same amount of per capita influence as those Yankee bums, who insist on burdening their states with free highways and electricity.

Electing better people isn't going to help us. We need to elect a better Constitution.

Benazir and Billary

Amid all the attention paid to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the most important aspect of each has been studiously ignored with such a comprehensive consistency as to belie coincidence. In other words, there is an aspect of each phenomenon that the American media intentionally ignores. That aspect is the profoundly un-democratic nature of what each woman symbolizes.

First, for Benazir. Madame Bhutto, who met an end very few deserve (of which she was decidedly not one), is remembered in the American media as the personification of democracy in Pakistan. Ironically enough, she is less remembered for being the first woman elected to lead a Muslim nation. Unfortunately for the American interpretation, however, Bhutto was far more complex than this candy-coated caricature.

Bhutto's political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), lived up to its name only for those Pakistani People with the last name of Bhutto. Her father founded the party. She assumed his mantle when he was hanged by his own military for corruption and political murder. She was subsequently driven from office, though spared the noose, by her own military for...corruption and political murder (of her own brother, no less). Now the mantle passes to her son, a 19 year old Oxford student, surely the most qualified Pakistani imaginable.

The PPP was dominated jealously by a single family, and though it led to the first elected female head of state in the Muslim world, it was hardly a harbinger of progress. American leftists are fond of pointing out that many countries have elected female heads of state. Many of these are countries from which, to put it politely, we would not expect to encounter vanguards of progressivism.

In most of these countries, specifically Pakistan, India, The Philippines, and Argentina, the women elected to serve just so happened to be the daughters or wives of previous executives. In other words, these phenomena were more reflective of North Korea than North Carolina.

Madame Bhutto, while she led Pakistan, did more than any other Pakistani to facilitate the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. One would be hard pressed to identify a government more abusive towards women this side of the birth of Christ. Yet Bhutto cultivated the Taliban as a strategic asset in Pakistan's unending and narcissistic cold war with India.

So, not only was Benazir Bhutto the product of a profoundly undemocratic scenario, but she actually aided "the terrorists" to an extent that Musharraf never has.

Benazir Bhutto was a great woman. In the final analysis, she was on the right side. She was a patriot, and she was braver than I and most other people are. She did not deserve to die, and the men that killed her were nihilistic midgets who not even the ugliest God would spare. But she was not a democrat.

Now, for Hillary. Hillary, like Benazir, is seen as the embodiment of the ceiling-less promise of democracy. But Clinton, like Bhutto, symbolizes an aristocratic contempt for democracy more than anything else.

The Democratic Party is now dominated by the Clintons in a manner differing in extent but not substance from the Bhuttos' dominance of the PPP. The party now pretends to offer a new horizon in the form of a female executive, but there is nothing revolutionary about this, unless we take revolution in its literal, natural sense in which it means something going round and round endlessly.

Are we willing to openly embrace dynastic aristocratic control of the Democratic Party in the interest of the Pyrrhic victory of "a female president"? Hillary Clinton would be the first female president. But far more importantly, she would be the second Clinton president. And the first Clinton president, still in his prime, would be back in the White House.

One can not deny that an historically significant threshold would be crossed if Hillary Clinton were elected president. Girls and women everywhere would experience jubilee in the biblical sense, and I do not intend to discount that.

But, below that imputation would be this insidious asterik: "if you marry a man who is president and stick by him even when he commits adultery with a woman less than half your age in front of the whole world, you too can be president." We need a female president, but not so bad that the very first boasts many of the specifics that would discredit her successors.

This is not an imputation that Hillary, as a female, needs a man around to really run the country. Hillary Clinton is a brilliant, strong, successful woman. Bill probably needs her more than she needs him. But some things are more important than Hillary Clinton. On the top of that list is a republic that was founded upon the repudiation of power by association.

Apollo

What is the greatest thing America has ever done? America has done many great things, whether “great” means powerful, good, or any derivation or combination of the two. America has many great accomplishments, great failures, great acts of selflessness, and great acts of selfishness. This contradictory tapestry is predicated upon America’s one dominant characteristic: Greatness.

But what is our greatest deed? What is the one thing America has done that will leave a mark more permanent, more universal, than any other? I consider the two greatest men to ever live to be Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler, so it cannot be stressed enough that greatness does not mean goodness. With that in mind, it just so happens that America’s greatest deed was good as well.

Project Apollo. That was America’s greatest iteration, its moment in the sun, which was all the brighter in the atmosphere-less moon. Only America could have the balls and the brains to send men to another world, after publicly predicting that they would before the requisite hardware even existed, and then put its spaceships in museums and switch its focus to the more noble scientific pursuits of Rogaine and Viagra.

What else has America done that is great? A short list would be changing the nature of government, changing the nature of economics, changing the nature of individual identity, changing the nature of warfare, changing the nature of technology, changing the nature of food, and changing the nature of transportation. That was a short list.

But all those things had been done previously. America just did them better, bigger, faster, more productively and, ultimately, more destructively. But, Apollo. That was something without precedence. Beneath the Cold War cock fight was no small amount of romantic humanism; America was the first country that dared to leave Earth, and it was not just due to wealth. It was due to Greatness, and the ridiculously absurd, but ultimately vindicated, idea that there was literally nothing that America couldn’t do.

John Kennedy vowed to land on the moon by the end of the 1960’s. This would be akin to someone vowing to land on Pluto by 2015; the theoretical framework is there, but the physical and logistical manifestation of such a mission simply had not been invented. They existed on chalkboards. They existed on sliderules. They existed in computers with less computing power than my 1994 Toyota Tercel, never mind my $30 cell phone.

There was no wealth to be gained by going to the moon. There were no minerals to mine there, no moon-men to toil in sweatshops. There was nothing but expense and danger. And Greatness.

Part of greatness is the absurdity of it. It is absurd, to put it kindly, that America went to the moon while its cities were burning, its army was being mauled in rice paddies, its leaders were being assassinated, and its youth were flirting heavily with nihilism. But we did it.

And at the end of 1968, the most violent American year since the Civil War, three American squares filmed the earth rising over the horizon of the moon for live television, for all of their jaded and frightened and stoned and bloodied countrymen and worldmen. By going to the moon, they discovered the earth.

I personally doubt that the United States of America will exist in one hundred years. I have no doubt, however, that America is great. Every person that is alive now looks every night upon a moon that we have walked on.

Forget 9/11. Apollo changed everything. America sent men to a place where they saw the earth for what it is: a single organism, a single family, fragile beyond all comprehension, suspended on an invisible string and surrounded by invisible scissors. America showed the world what the world is. And that is Greatness.

The Blueprint

Hold your breath. The last time Al-Qaeda assassinated a Muslim leader anywhere near as pro-American as Thursday’s savage slaughter of Benazir Bhutto was two days before 9/11.

On September 9, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives assassinated Ahmed Shah Masoud, an Afghan veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad and the charismatic and relatively pro-Western leader of the Northern Alliance, the only organized alternative to the Taliban.

In retrospect, it would appear that bin Laden ordered the assassination of Massoud to be carried out right before 9/11 because he realized that the attack would focus American might on Afghanistan, so it was clearly in his interest to eliminate any rivals who would be likely to support an American intervention.

The assassination of Bhutto follows this blueprint seamlessly. If, God forbid, the ensuing pattern mirrors that of the Massoud assassination, a catastrophic attack on America will be carried out in short order by Al-Qaeda, harbored now primarily in western Pakistan rather than Afghanistan.

Bin Laden, fully aware that the American military, in such an event, would focus on Pakistan, would have every motive to eliminate Pakistan’s equivalent of Massoud, the one person who may have worked with the Americans without losing legitimacy in the eyes of her people.

But Bhutto was a much more important person than was Massoud. And Pakistan is a much more dangerous country than is Afghanistan. And, if history repeats itself, the imminent attack will be much worse than 9/11. Hold your breath.