What A Tangled War We Wage

I have refrained from writing about the Iraq War for quite some time, primarily because the conflict has taken on the air of a runaway train which most regret letting lose while simultaneously maintaining that an application of the brakes might bring new tragedies in its wake.

This is the paralysis a superpower incurs when it defines both shitting and getting off the pot as unrealistic options in the wake of an ill-advised incursion into an alien land.

Today, as I write, America's sons are dying in the defense of an Iraqi government dominated by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. How can we explain to American mothers why their sons are dying to defend the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, created and funded by Iran? We can't. And that's not because American mothers are stupid.

Since John "So Obviously Qualified That We Shan't Question His Readiness" McCain is still foggy on the difference between Shi'a (Iran) and Sunni (al-Qaeda), how can we expect our leaders to grasp the even-more convoluted morass that exists within the Shi'a community itself?

Here's a brief primer: there are two main Shi'a camps in Iraq. The first is the group led by Muqtada al-Sadr, who represents the impoverished, largely illiterate masses of Shia Iraqis who survived the crucible of Saddam Hussein. Every male elder in Sadr's family, and several females, were tortured and executed by Saddam. But Sadr never fled.

The second camp, which we'll call the exile camp, consists of the highly educated Shi'a ulema, or intelligentsia, who fled to Iran during the 25 year nightmare of Saddam Hussein.

They are more urban, more sophisticated, and in the eyes of Iraqis like Sadr, more suspect, since they claimed refuge in Iran while Saddam was massacring their brothers. An Iran, let us not forget, that was at war with Iraq for nearly the entire 1980's. They returned to their homeland on the heels of the American invasion.

One concept that translates from American ghettos to Iraqi ones is that of street cred. You know, like 50 cent had, and what Hillary Clinton so clearly lusts after, as manifested by her inventing a story about being shot at by snipers.

She merely "misspoke" of course. And when I went to Israel in 2006, I wrestled a would-be suicide bomber to the ground as he tried to enter a nursery school. Oops, I misspoke.

Sadr has street cred because, even during the darkest days of Saddam, he never left. And, just as importantly, he has rejected the legitimacy of the American occupation since day one. In other words, he is an Iraqi nationalist, mistrusting both the Americans and the Iranian-backed Iraqi government.

Since our government harps incessantly about Iran's nefarious designs and their clear hostility to peace and liberty and puppies and ice cream, why are we killing Sadr's Iraqi nationalists, who resent Iran's influence, in the name of an Iraqi government beholden to our mortal enemy?

Good question, no? Why are we killing for Iran?

Why are we not backing Sadr, an Iraqi nationalist who would reject undue Iranian interference? Because he opposes all foreigners, not just Iranians. He doesn't want Iran running his country, and he....gasp....doesn't want American running his country, either. And, since he rejects the manifest goodness of the American military, he must be in league with Beelzebub. Therefore, we will destroy him, even if in doing so we only consolidate the power of our "real enemy", Iran.

There you have it. Americans are killing and dying for Iran's allies, targeting the one Shi'a leader (Sadr) who is uniquely Iraqi and uniquely legitimate among millions of Shi'a.

Tonight some American mother will get that knock on the door, which will echo through her brain until the day she dies. And she will know that her son died to protect Iran.

The most important thing about this recent cycle in Iraq is that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Nothing. It has nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and even less to do with "al-Qaea in Iraq", which has largely been rejected as nihilistic by the more nationalist strains of the Sunni insurgency.

People have been killing and dying in Mesopotamia for 10,000 years. They will continue to do so. And, despite our staggering and narcissistic delusions of self-importance, that killing will be neither our fault nor our responsibility nor our business. Unless, of course, we insist on choosing sides in each and every dispute, even when our direct interest is beyond opaque.

The picture of the child on the top of this post must remind us of this. In Iraq, the innocents pay the price, and though we are irreducibly invested in a narrative in which we are just as innocent as anyone else, we're not.

Because of our bloody blindness, innocents will die today in Iraq under American bombs. My bombs. Your bombs. And for what? Apparently, to make the world safe for Iran. After all, we want Iran to feel good and secure before we start bombing them.

Not only will we bomb them for "interfering in Iraq" with total lack of irony, but we will do so despite the fact that we're both supporting the same side. I'm not given to cliche, but this is the ultimate example of having to laugh so that you don't cry.

An Island of Integrity

After my mea culpa regarding the JFK assassination, I was drawn to reflect on the 5 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, presaging Easter and the 4,000th American military death there.

There were few mea culpas uttered by supporters of the war on these occasions, those hard-edged realists, those visionary romantics, those brass-balled statesmen. Those war criminals.

Asked for a reaction to the fact that two / thirds of the American people consider the war to have been a mistake, Vice-President Cheney reflected, and I quote, "So?" Honestly, you have to respect a guy like that, who does not even bother to insult your intelligence by pretending he gives a shit. It really is rather refreshing.

There was one mea culpa penned for the occasion by Andrew Sullivan, quoted below, which I commend for its probity and its honesty, both of which must have come at no small psychological price. I was right about Iraq; I wish I had been wrong. Sullivan was wrong, and he acknowledges this. We need more people like him. Maybe even in elected office.


"But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions.

When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw.

I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom—the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, it was yet another epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.

I know our enemy is much worse. I have never doubted that. I still have no qualms whatever in waging war to defeat it. But I never believed that America would do what America has done. Never. My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of—a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise—was my worst mistake.

What the war has done to what is left of Iraq—the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed—was bad enough. But what was done to America—and the meaning of America—was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself."

To Die For

Capital Punishment is a remarkably unaddressed subject in American discourse today. There are so many things wrong with this policy that I find myself flustered as to where to start.

First, morally. Why do we allow criminals to defend themselves? Why are they protected from unreasonable search? Why are we not allowed to beat or threaten suspects? Because we hold ourselves (the state) to be better than the criminals.

If we go through the charade of jurisprudence, wherein we claim to treat the defendant with utmost deference, how is it that we can then murder the defendant based on the judgment of a handful of citizens?

This is akin to the torture issue; if you are going to execute or torture people, just dispense with the trappings of disinterested justice and stop insulting our intelligence; any state willing to torture or kill prisoners, foreign or domestic, cannot realistically be expected to safeguard any standard of moral conduct.

Second, legally. What legal power gives the state the authority to kill? The state can only kill in its own name when it is either at war or executing a citizen. When we are at war, we kill foreigners. We are usually not justified in doing so, but the point of fact is that foreigners are not protected by our Constitution, though of course they are protected by a morality and humanism that is alien to our "leaders".

But we are protected by the Constitution. When the American government kills an American citizen in a "judicial" process, there is a Rubicon that we dare not ignore. Is death not "cruel and unusual"? Come to think of it, its the most usual thing in the universe, but it's still cruel. Especially when visited upon a healthy citizen by his own government.

The death penalty is nothing more or less than the state saying it is above the law. If murder is against the law, why do we allow the state to commit it? If no person ever has the right to kill, how is it that a judge does? Is a judge not a person?

Third, ethically. When one supports the death penalty, he is saying this, "anyone who kills an innocent person can be killed by me (as represented by the state)." Okay. If you choose to believe that, that's your right, but it's also your ethical responsibility to draw the inference, which is this: "if you (the state) were to ever execute an innocent person, you should be killed in turn."

Right? And since most of America's executions have been carried out before or without DNA evidence, can anyone rationally argue that no innocent person has ever been executed in this country? No. And, since innocent people must have been executed, does not any supporter of the death penalty deserve to die in turn?

The last argument is libertarian in nature. Let me put it briefly and bluntly: If you ever accept living under a government that reserves the right to kill you, you're fucked.

Mea Culpa

I was wrong. I honestly believed that John Kennedy was murdered in a conspiratorial crossfire involving at least two gunmen and at least a half dozen plausible perpetrators. I did not reach these conclusions without forethought and honest analysis, but I was wrong.

I lost my job last week, so I focused my fancies on what any single, 28-year old, heterosexual male would do with the first week of spring; I read a 1,000 page book. "Reclaiming History", by Vincent Bugliosi, to be precise. He had me at page 500.

For any generic murder victim, the identity of the murderer centers on motive, means, and opportunity. Usually, there are exceedingly few people who would have the motive, means, and opportunity to kill a person. For Kennedy, especially in light of what has been disclosed about his associations and conduct since his assassination, there was no shortage of people and factions who would have motive, means, and opportunity to kill this man.

And that is the ultimate fount of the conspiracy paradigm; since so many people wanted Kennedy dead, doesn't it seem unlikely that a 24-year old loser would kill him with a 12-dollar rifle? And that that same loser would be murdered in police custody with a single revolver shot to the stomach? Of course it does. But that's what happened.

Though there were many people who wanted Kennedy dead, and though the parade route in Dallas was not secured in a remotely competent fashion, and though the limo did not speed away after the first shot, and though the Zapruder film seems to show a shot from the front, and though Oswald did an unrealistically good job of shooting, the fact remains that every last inch and gram of physical evidence points to all of these things being innocent and accurate.

The Kennedy case is a good study in the aberration masquerading as the rule. ALL of the physical evidence in Kennedy's murder points to Lee Harvey Oswald and nobody else. The conspiracy viewpoint relies on taking pieces of that evidence, which ALL points to one man, and arguing that any flaw or inconsistency in that evidence is proof that that man, to whom ALL evidence points, must be entirely innocent. After all, it worked for O.J.; but don't we all really know he did it?

Oswald did some expert shooting, even though the Marines did not label him an expert marksmen. We should say, "Well, Oswald was trained to use high-powered rifles in the Marine Corps." Instead, we say, "Well, Oswald wasn't labeled an expert, so he must be totally innocent." That is not a leap we would make for any other murder victim than John Kennedy.

Lee Harvey Oswald bought the rifle. He worked in the building where the rifle was found. His hand and fingerprints were on the rifle. All three of the bullets retrieved were linked to his gun. He was the only employee of the building to leave after the assassination. He murdered a police officer for no apparent reason 30 minutes later. In any other case....case closed.

The part of the history that most grates on credulity is Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald. This is the Building 7 of the JFK assassination; it is the point at which rational people say, "okay, I was with you up to this point, but give me a fucking break." A building that wasn't hit by a plane collapses into its own footprint? The alleged assassin of the president is murdered on live television in a police station, handcuffed to an armed police officer?

I still reserve my cynicism on Building 7, but Oswald's murder is not analogous. Rather than a proof of conspiracy, it was the blunder that led to the conspiracy industry. His murder does not reflect a ruthlessly efficient conspiratorial apparatus, however; it reflects the utterly predicate pattern of human incompetence and irrationality.

I can comfortably say that I am glad that I was wrong. I'm glad that Kennedy was killed on a fluke and a lark by a man who was only lucky one time in his life. That is far more comforting than the image I have lived with prior to this week. Thank God I was wrong.

Lost in the Shuffle

Here's a piece that was in the draft drawer for a spell, focusing on Madame Clinton's health care proposals. Sometimes we need to burn a village in order to save it. And sometimes, we need to fine the villagers if they don't want to give their money to a private corporation.

http://timerustedcompass.blogspot.com/2008/03/fascunism.html

In Defense of Dick

Richard Nixon never had a chance. He was many things, many of them vulgar precisely because he thought himself incapable of being vulgar. But more than anything else, Nixon was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in the Oval Office during the first moment in history when masses of people openly defied the credibility and authority of the government. It didn't matter who was there. But it was Nixon.

The true import of Nixon's "crimes" was not in their measure, in their audacity, or in their novel nature; indeed, on the scale of post-war presidencies, Nixon's crimes were actually rather mild. The only new thing about Nixon was that he was caught. And when he was caught, he honestly could not fathom how he was being crucified for things that Kennedy and Johnson did most days before shaving. This only re enforced his predisposition to self-pity.

Mustering all the detachment that I can, having not lived through this man's tenure, it is clear to me that Nixon was one of our best presidents, certainly better that his predecessor and successors. Indeed, it was Nixon, of all people, who steered the ship of state during what were by far its darkest days since the Civil War.

It was Nixon who first gave federal endorsement and backing to the environmental movement. It was Nixon who made peace with China, thereby further isolating the Soviet Union and making detente a much more attractive option for the Kremlin. And it was Nixon, albeit too late for many, who ended America's war in Vietnam.

These nods may seem sacrilegious to many, perhaps including my parents, to whom Nixon was just a jowly and considerably less folksy premonition of Bush the Younger. But Nixon, remember, created the EPA, made peace with adversaries armed with WMD of apocalyptic potential, and ended an unwinnable war without causing a right-wing backlash. Can one imagine Bush doing any one of these things? Has he not, in fact, done precisely the opposite?

When Bush confronts a problem, his first instincts are to bomb it, cut it down, or set it on fire. Nixon, it is now clear, was more "liberal" than Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, of course, is usually full of shit, but at Nixon's funeral in 1994, he found room to acknowledge that historians would come to speak respectfully of "the age of Nixon." Perhaps the young president intuitively grasped that any age would seem golden when compared to the then-dawning Age of Clinton.

But Nixon, whom nobody ever liked, and who was elected only due to the murders of the last two politicians that Americans actually did like (mostly because they had no idea what John and Bobby were capable of), was undone by a two-bit burglary, and by an air of entitlement and paranoia that his predecessors had shared but were somehow spared of having to confront.

If John Kennedy had lived, and even if he had avoided disclosure of the minefield he had layed for himself (or laid for himself, if you will), he would not be remembered as fondly as he was due to his martyrdom. Martyrdom does things for men that they could never do for themselves, no matter how good and great they are. Kennedy's martyrdom made us forget everything, including the fact that he stole the election of 1960 from one Richard Nixon.

For all the misery wrought by America's involvement in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson was more directly responsible than any other single person. Yes, his predecessors dithered, keeping South Vietnam half-pregnant for nearly 20 years. And yes, his successor, Nixon, took 5 years to extract American from the war, but it was Lyndon Johnson, and nobody else, who took the plunge.

Kennedy and Johnson spied on their enemies, tapped their phones, read their mail, plotted to kill foreign leaders, and so forth. But only Nixon was caught. This is not to excuse the conduct, of course, just to illustrate the tragic aspect of it that is so Nixonian.

Out of the three men who led the United States during the 1960's, there is only one who was probably too smart to start an American ground war in Vietnam. That one was Richard Nixon. Instead, having been robbed of his place by the golden boy, it fell to Nixon to clean up the mess, although only after the golden boy's heir had been slain as well. Only Nixon was left. And that was why he was hated.

Now More Than Ever

Obama. Now more than ever. After the senator's speech on race in the wake of the controversy caused by his pastor, it is more clear than ever before that, if we do not give this man his due, we will avoid this long-overdue reckoning for another generation.


Obama's not winning because he's black; he's the first man who may win in spite of being black, however, and that is inextricably linked to the kind of black man that he is. Put bluntly, Obama's not angry. If he were, he wouldn't have made it out of Iowa.


But neither is Obama too frightened or canned or calculating to reject the reality and the import of the angry black men that surround him, whom he refuses to denounce or patronize. Obama is dealing with his reverend in a way that says far more about his character than any prior test in this campaign.


He rejects Reverend Wright's comments, but he does not betray the man. He rejects the anger, but he fully embraces his responsibility and his unique ability to speak honestly about the sources of that anger to the country as a whole. He alone can understand this anger, reject this anger, but still speak credibly about the sources of this anger.


Only Obama, whose grandmother would have crossed the street had she seen his father approaching, has the ability to speak to all groups about shared insecurities and common responsibilities.


Only Obama can tell black men that they must be better fathers while simultaneously telling whites that blacks and immigrants are not to blame for their insecurity. As this country slides further into oligarchy, and as the most powerful middle class in history is steadily eroded, these insidious trends will rely increasingly on the poor forming a circular firing squad amongst themselves. Only Obama has the courage to call this what it is.

Because Obama is not a hostage to the ultimately self-defeating worldview of Reverd Wright and his ilk, he is able to forge a way forward that does not center on anger and self-pity. Because Obama knows how much America has changed in the last fifty years, he knows it can continue to do so.

Because Obama is a product of opportunity rather than oppression, he is spared that insidious belief that the United States is an irredeemably racist country. He does not pretend, however, that inequality ended with Brown v. the Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act.

When one quits smoking, their body is not instantly purified of the toxins; that takes years. But the leap has been made, and Obama understands this in a way that his calcified elders are constitutionally incapable of acknowledging.

Even if one does not agree with or relate to Obama's paradigms, and I know many good and honest people who do not, we should all take pause to reflect on the tone of the speech. This was a speech by and for adults. I have never heard a speech by a major American politician so free of platitudes and circular self-delusion. There was no "they hate us for our freedom" drivel to be found here.

Obama spoke to us all without sandbagging any one of us, without trivializing any of our fears or hopes or insecurities or differences or commonalities. At the very least, this man is the best politician in 50 years. I think he's more than the very least.

Due to an utterly unique combination of self-endowment and self-actualization, Obama has managed to thread the needle. I pray that we follow him through the eye.

Treasonable Doubt, Part II (It's Not Every Day You See A Horse With Two Asses)

Eviscerate the Evidence, Murder the Motive

The murder of John Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks are the two most commonly held memories among the 300 million Americans alive today and, indeed, among all human beings, due to the reach of American media.

I have touched on how the American government's versions of these crimes, codified respectively in the Warren Commission Report and the 9/11 Commission Report, rely heavily on the dismissal of hundreds of eyewitnesses, the refutation of common sense, the dismissal of logic, and the suspension of the laws of physics.

Their other ultimate commonality, and the most direct evidence of cover-up, lies in the destroying of evidence and the masking of motive.

JFK Evidence

What was the physical evidence in the murder of John Kennedy? The body of the victim, the car the victim was riding in, and the alleged assassin. All of these things were destroyed within 48 hours of the crime.

John Kennedy's body, in contravention of Texas law, was forcibly removed from the custody of the Dallas coroner. By the time the body reached Bethesda Naval Hospital for the "official" autopsy, the wounds to the president's body did not remotely resemble the wounds he had suffered in Dallas.

The Dallas coroners noted an entry wound in the front of the head and a large exit wound in the rear of the head. In Washington, the government's mulligan found that the president's head had been nearly blown clean off, such a large and violent wound that a shot from the rear became a pseudo-defensible assertion.

John Kennedy's car, which contained blood, bullet holes, and other forensic evidence that could help determine how many shots were fired, where the shots came from, and where they struck the president, was ordered destroyed without being combed for evidence. To spare us the emotional anguish, of course.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed assassin, was the ultimate piece of evidence. He was destroyed as well, earning the distinction of being the first person to be murdered on live television. Not murdered as John Kennedy had been, exposed and helpless, but murdered indoors and surrounded by a phalanx of armed men. And not just any armed men; Texans.

John Kennedy was murdered, and the government did not even pretend to follows the protocol regarding preservation of evidence.

9/11 Evidence

The 9/11 attacks were, among so many other things, a murder. 3,000 people were murdered in one day. Were any rules regulating the investigation of a murder followed after the 9/11 attacks?

What was the physical evidence in the 9/11 attacks? Most of the physical evidence was incinerated. But it was not only incinerated in the fiery chaos of the attacks themselves; it was incinerated by our government afterwards.

The rubble at the World Trade Center site was not treated as evidence; it was treated as rubble. To some degree, this is understandable; to some other degree, this is unforgivable. Here was the way to ascertain how these buildings could have possibly collapsed.

What about the dozens of reports of explosions? What about the eerie likeness of the collapses to planned demolitions? Had al-Qaeda somehow wired the buildings with explosives? Had someone else? Surely we would find out. Surely we would reconstruct evidence, as we had rebuilt TWA flight 800 after it broke into a thousand pieces over the ocean. But, no. The evidence was hauled away. And destroyed.

JFK Motive

John Kennedy was not killed with three shots in four seconds from Lee Harvey Oswald's twelve dollar rifle. What would be the harm in the government's asserting that he was killed by 2 or 3 "lone nuts"?

John Kennedy was so corrupt that everybody had an interest in avoiding the truth, including his own brother, the Attorney General. John Kennedy crossed the mob and the CIA, after having no compunction about engaging both groups in blatantly illegal activities when he so desired.

Who pulled the trigger was irrelevant. The only relevant imperative was that the American people never learn how compromised their entire nation had been under Kennedy's leadership. Kennedy's friends couldn't admit that the president had had it coming. And Kennedy's enemies couldn't admit that they had killed him.

The government could not admit that the president was sharing women with mafioso, contracting mobsters to kill Castro, and beholden to the Mafia for his election in 1960. Nor could the government admit that a certain faction of it had murdered the president. Herein lies the motive of all involved, even those who wept bitterly over the crime, to conceal the actual motive.

9/11 Motive

Even if the physical account of the 9/11 attacks were true, the question of motive would remain. In any common murder, there are relatively few people who were intimate enough with the victim to be willing to kill him or her.

The targets of the Kennedy murder and 9/11 raised a problem; There were a lot of people, far too many people, who wanted John Kennedy dead and who wanted America to bleed. Rather than acknowledge that any rational person could have a legitimate grievance with the symbols of American power, we are presented with the irrational, martyred actors.

Just as Lee Harvey Oswald had a murderous hatred of John Kennedy for no discernible reason, the 19 terrorists of 9/11 hated freedom. The logical inference being that they worshipped slavery.

There was no mention of the American government's sordid dealings with the very factions that were supposedly responsible for the attacks. There was no disclosure of how it was that, on September 12, we had headshots of all 19 terrorists, just 24 hours after they had come all too literally out of the blue.

Why?

Lyndon Johnson did not murder John Kennedy. And George W. Bush did not plan 9/11. So why do they cover up? Well, in their minds, they do it for us. They cover up not their direct guilt, but their prior associations. Associations that the "common man" may frown upon, but were oh-so-necessary at the time, albeit necessary in a way that We The People did not deserve to be apprised of.

The American government, or factions there within, were doing business with some very unsavory characters, to put it diplomatically, before the murder of John Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks. After being struck at its vitals, the government lied out of shame; it could not admit that it used to be friends with the perps.

And here is where we measure ourselves. Do we appreciate a government that sells us lies with the most benevolent intention of sparing us the anguish of the truth? Or do we reject that government for its condescension of the people it is mandated to represent?

The murder of John Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks prove beyond doubt that, when the government picks "our" friends, we pay the price. We pay the price, and then they demand more authority over us, assuring that such authority will help them next time. And as long as we allow this, there will always be a next time.

True Colors

I've repeatedly made the mistake of assuming that my disgust with the Clinton campaign has peaked. I thought it had peaked in South Carolina, where the Senator's husband gave us a nod-wink explanation of why his wife's loss there didn't really matter.

(I have yet to hear anyone explain how you could accept Mr. Clinton's remarks without being drawn to the clear inference, "Black votes don't matter. Unless they're voting for a Clinton.)


I thought it had peaked in Rhode Island, when the Senator in an awkwardly distateful diatribe clearly took great pleasure in mocking Obama's near-universal inspirational qualities as the rantings of a shallow and hollow manipulator.


I thought it had peaked last week, when the Senator informed us that Senator McCain has been tested, that she has been tested, but that Senator Obama simply "gave a speech." In other words, if she can't beat Obama, she recommends John McCain for president.



Obama, having failed to support an illegal war of agression that has morphed into an absurdist abattoir which consumes lives, money, and logic at every-greater rates, was clearly far too naive to be trusted. America's punishment for rejecting Hillary Clinton, then, would be a McCain presidency.



I thought it had peaked earlier this week, when the Senator and her husband offered Obama the vice-presidency. Only people as comprehensively narcissistic, as pathologicaly solipsistic, as the Clintons would tell the man who is winning by every measurable metric that they, in all their benevolence, would be willing to accept his victory as their own.

There is no small amount of an uppity nigger dynamic at work here. I am usually not given to calling people racist, but there is no other adequate explanation for this. "Oh, you've won 30 states! You're beating us! Good for you! Now, why don't you run off and wait your turn. Cool your heels for a few years. There are some great seats in the back of the bus. Let the grown-ups deal with this. Noone your age could handle this job. Unless his name is Bill Clinton."



I though it had peaked two days ago, when the Senator's surrogate, Geraldine Ferraro, told us that Obama was only winning because he is a black man. I now know that my disgust with these people will never bottom out.



Hillary has tried it all. Obama's not a Muslim, "as far as I know." Classy. The three a.m. television ad, subtley reminding us that only Hillary Clinton can save your sweet sleeping children from some unnamed horror. Priceless. Because of all that experience, of course.



Obama's only winning because he's black? Let's take this step by step. If Obama is only winning because he's black, it would be the first time in the history of the United States that someone won something because of his blackness rather than in spite of it. In such an instance, could we at least feel happy for such a person, a person who turned black into gold for the first time in 400 years in this land? Apparently not.



That being said, if Obama is winning because he's black, surely we can measure this. He's winning black votes largely because he's black, of course. Just as Hillary Clinton is winning the votes of professional white women. I also assume she is doing quite well among self-absorbed, vindictive, petty elitists.



Bush won the evangelical vote because he claimed to be one of them. Hillary wins white female votes. Obama wins black votes. Since there are more white women that black people of either gender in this country, Hillary clearly has gained the most from self-identification voters.



Have white men voted for Obama because he's black? Only someone as shameless as a Clinton would say that with a straight face. To say that blackness is a benefit in America, that only white-on-white fights are fair fights, is......well, it's classic Clinton. It betrays a self-pity that literally knows no bounds.



If, at the beginning of a campaign, your last name is Clinton, if you have more money than any prior candidate for president, if you have the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, if you enjoy the rolodex of a globally popular ex-President, and you can't beat a black man whose name rhymes with "Iraq Hussein Osama", then honey, it's not him; it's you.

And what about the converse? What about Hillary Clinton? Is she not winning just because she's a woman? Further, is she not winning just because she's a Clinton? What if Hillary Clinton had the same resume, same personality, but were named Frank Wilson?



Well, Hillary Clinton with a Y chromosome and without the last name is John Kerry. But way less qualified to be president, far less experienced, and without the ability to conceive of things larger than one's self that is so fundamental to capable leadership.



Has every president to date in American history been elected only because they were white men? In part, yes, but we didn't just pick any white man; most of them had other things going for them. Jefferson, for example. Pretty decent writer. In Hillary Clinton's world, however, once that mold is broken, its illegitimate. Unless it's her.



If it's Barack Obama who breaks the white male stranglehold, we just like him because he's black. While previous presidents were more than "just white", and while Hillary is so much more than "just a woman", Barack Obama is "just black", and if he were not black, he would be nothing. He is a token. He is cynically manipulating the largest obstacle to personal achievement in the history of this country. Of course.



What does it say about Hillary Clinton that she is running a blatantly racist campaign? What does it say about her that she openly mocks, ridicules, and insults the man who is beating her? What does it say about her when she makes it very clear that, if she can't win, she would rather destroy Obama and the Democratic Party than see him in the White House?



This is a dangerous person. This is a person unworthy of authority. This is a person so self-centered that she probably takes the weather personally. This is a woman who must be rejected and, if need be, humiliated. Not just because she's white. Not just because she's a woman. Just because she's Hillary Clinton.

Treasonable Doubt

How to articulate that delicate and elusive dance between fact and memory? That relationship is part of what makes us who we are. Students of history especially are attuned to this balance and to how it applies to collective memories and dominant paradigms.


There are things that happen. Then there are things that are remembered. In our most brazen illusions, those two things match up almost seamlessly; In reality, they absolutely never do, and are at many times far more divorced than we might imagine.


How is memory shaped, especially now, when so much "fact" can be preserved via recording of various types? Collective memories, it pains me to say, are by their very definition created by dispensing with "the whole truth" and "nothing but the truth", preserving islands of truth peeking up through the fog.


The collective memories of the assassination of John Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks are the two archetypal collective American memories of the past half century. In studying them, we bear witness to that insidious process of constructing a memory.

The government's versions of these two events both depend on a collective forgetting of what hundreds of people saw, heard, and recorded as the events were actually happening, as the "facts" were actually taking place.

JFK

When John Kennedy was shot, dozens of witnesses had a very similar story to tell. They had either seen a gunman, seen gun smoke, or distinctly heard gunshots from the grassy knoll in front of the president. The local police, intimately familiar with the sounds, sights, and smells of gun fire, raced to the grassy knoll. Many civilians, a good deal of whom were combat veterans, had the same reaction.

These people did not race towards the Texas School Book Depository. That building was not stormed or surrounded; if it had been, Lee Harvey Oswald would not have been able to saunter out the front door several minutes after the shooting.

There was one simple reason for this: the eyewitnesses, including police officers and combat veterans, knew exactly what they had seen and heard and they were not yet privy to the "official story", which hinged on the assumption that every last one of them was simply mistaken.

The doctor who examined the president at Parkland Hospital was likewise not clued into the "official story". This man who, like the local police, had years of experience and no reason to lie, informed the press that the president had several distinct entry wounds in the front of his body, including one in the neck and one in the head.

This was before the "official story" dictated that all the shots had come from behind, from that building that nobody raced to after the shooting. Again, the "facts" hinged on the assumption that this doctor was woefully incompetent.

Apologists for the Warren Commission, purveyors of the "official story", chalk up these discrepancies to "the heat of the moment" or "chaos" or "rumors". But what they really reflect is the brief existence of truth before the insidious onset of memory.

The lie-laden "official story", which could only be foisted on a population desperate to believe it, turned these real-time eyewitnesses to the facts into confused or obstructionist nuisances.

What was castigated later as the frenzied first impressions of the overzealous and the ignorant was actually a fleeting snapshot on what actually happened. The Warren Commission asked us to believe that everyone who had actually witnessed the shooting and seen the president's wounds in Dallas were mistaken. They must have been mistaken, of course, or else their accounts would have jibed with the "official story".

The only other explanation for this discrepancy would be if the "official story" were itself a lie, which would be worse than, well, worse than a president being executed in broad daylight in the streets of an American city.

9/11

The Kennedy assassination was witnessed by several dozens of people, many of whom would have testified that, if there were indeed only one shooter, that shooter was absolutely not in the Texas School Book Depository. Good thing there was no trial.


9/11 was witnessed by tens of thousands of people, and by hundreds of millions of more on live television after the attacks started. There is also an "official story" about 9/11 which is, just like the Warren Commission, deeply vested in rejecting real-time eyewitness accounts in favor of an unlikely narrative of events that only became clear after the fact, and only to people who weren't actually there.


It is amazing to watch television coverage from the day of the attacks and compare the reporters observations, given obviously before they were aware of the government-sanctioned narrative, the 9/11 Commission report, which essentially discounted all real-time witnesses as being discredited by those old bogeymen, "chaos", "rumor", and "the heat of the moment."


There were indeed rumors swirling on 9/11, such as those warning of more hijacked planes than there actually were. Most of the early assertions that were rejected, however, were not rumors; they were interpretations of events being witnessed in real time. These were physical observations made by reporters and witnesses that, only after the emergence of the "official story", were "proven" to have been "mistaken."


The first reporters to reach the Pentagon noted how pristine the lawn was, how localized the damage was, how absolutely minuscule the supposed plane wreckage was, and how few the eyewitness accounts of jumbo jets flying over the nation's capital a couple hundred feet off the ground were.


The first reporters to reach Shanksville, Pennsylvania noted how small the gouge in the earth was, how utterly absent any discernible plane wreckage was, and how peculiar it was that government officials in hazmat suits were scouring the sight, rather than the NTSB men who would normally respond to civilian air crashes.


The first reporters, as well as dozens of eyewitnesses including police officers and firemen, consistently noted multiple explosions inside the World Trade Center towers. Some firemen actually ascended to the fires themselves, the same fires we were later told were so hot that they melted the entire steel core of the building until it collapsed at free-fall speed.


Once the "official story" took hold, however, these observations were all held to have been wrong. The Pentagon could have proven that the initial observations of reporters there were mistaken by releasing video of a jumbo jet flying 450 miles per hour 50 feet of the ground into the side of the building. They have not.


And why haven't they? National security, they say. As if a video that the government insists simply shows what everybody knows already happened could possibly be a threat to anyone. How is evidence of the government's honesty a threat to the country? Forgive me for harboring the sneaking suspicion that a release of that video would render the "official story" a bit quaint.


When the "official story" took hold, we had to forget about the Pentagon video and forget about why we weren't being shown that video; once we could read the official story, that is, we were held to have no reason to actually watch the facts as they unfolded on video. We are to blindly believe that the image would fit the story, that the image would simply prove the government right, that there is a legitimate reason for the government to conceal evidence of its veracity.


We had to forget that no steel building had collapsed due to fire in the history of the world prior to 9/11, when it supposedly happened three times. We had to forget that Building 7 collapsed later that afternoon, at free fall speed, after most conspicuously not being struck by an airplane.


Our forgetting of that fact, perhaps the single yarn that could unravel the whole ball, was facilitated by the fact that Building 7 is not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. It is as if it never existed. If a steel-frame skyscraper like Building 7 had collapsed due to isolated fires on any other day in history, it would have warranted its very own exhaustive investigation.


But since it happened on 9/11, and since its very existence mocked the "official story", it was wished out of existence. It was as if that building had never existed. You know, like the witnesses in Dallas who heard shots from the knoll. They, like Building 7, do not appear in the "official story".


We had to forget that dozens of people reported explosions inside the building before their utterly unexpected collapses. We had to forget that the building hit second was the building that collapsed first, and that both buildings, these thousand-foot pillars of fire-proofed steel, collapsed at free-fall speed, as if nothing were holding them up.


We had to forget these things, and a great many others. Perceptions, images, sounds, mathematic truths, scientific constants, and common sense. All these were layed on the alter, the sacrifice necessary for the Phyrric reward of allowing ourselves to believe that these massacres were carried out by a small and hermetically sealed group of outsiders who got so lucky in their execution that they temporarily suspended the laws of physics. On 9/11, we were torn asunder by 19 swarthy Oswalds.


Remember


When we remember, we must take care to remember what we heard and saw, as opposed to what we remember being told. We must not let common sense and recorded real-time events be discarded in the interest of maintaining a palpably ridiculous revision.


We must not let policemen and veterans and doctors and pathologists in Dallas be ignored for the sake of maintaining the Warren Commission's view of history. We must not let a 50-story building be erased from history for the sake of maintaining the 9/11 Commission's view of history.


Most importantly, we must accept an ugly truth. We must accept that somehow, someway, we are all implicated in these crimes. They were not simply bolts of lightning delivered by young and alien men who did not live to tell their stories. They were, more than anything, failures of America's institutions.


We may or may not have blood on our hands. We will not know that until we know the truth. The only thing we know right now is that we don't know the truth. But we are all culpable. Not because we told the lies ourselves, but because we as a society chose to believe them.

Fascunism

What's worse than both Fascism and Communism? Fascunism, that hideous two-headed offshoot of the most brutal ideologies in recent history. This insidious mix of corporatism and bureaucratic tyranny is the worst of all possible worlds, and if Hillary Clinton gets her way, it will rear it ugly heads via her health care proposal.

When dealing with an issue as emotional as health care (after all, who could disagree with Hillary Clinton when she tells us that we all deserve health insurance?) it is important to make clear distinctions between the means and the ends. While the ends may seem appealing or even necessary, the means that Madame Clinton proposes would be a catastrophe.

If we are going to force citizens to buy health insurance, which is a considerable leap away from liberty that we should soberly acknowledge before undertaking, there are two ways to do so.

The first way, which for the purposes of this discussion we can broadly call "communistic", is to compel citizens to contribute to a general fund, managed by the state, which will provide a service to the nation as a whole. This is how the Pentagon is run, for example. I think there is a very compelling argument that we are long overdue for a similar approach to health care.

When we are compiling a list of justifiable coercions, and it should be a very short list, we must accept the communist approach as the only valid one, since the beneficiary of the coercion, the government, at least theoretically represents the society as a whole.

In other words, if we're going to make sure everyone has health care, it must be administered through taxes paid to the federal government, as that is the only entity in America that represents everyone.

The second approach, the fascist approach, coerces the citizens to contribute not to the "commune", represented by the government, but to private corporations. If everything is privatized, the citizens must do business with said corporations. With fascism, however, at least the citizen can theoretically choose not to buy whatever product or service the corporations are selling.

With the Clinton approach, we have a two headed beast. As with communism, the government assumes the authority to coerce citizens to contribute wealth to the state. Unlike, communism, however, Senator Clinton's approach uses the coercion of the state to benefit not the state itself, the embodiment of the "commune", but private corporations. This is the genesis of the two-headed beast.

The state, in Hillary Clinton's world, should have the authority to force citizens to buy things from private corporations. What happened to liberty? What happened to the common good? Both will be extinguished, with no residual benefit. Except, of course, to the corporations.

What power in the Constitution or anywhere else in the universe would authorize Hillary Clinton to tell me that I have to buy something from a private corporation, and that if I choose not to, the federal government will garnish my wages?

Say I take home 2000 dollars a month. Say after rent, utilities, and food, my discretionary income is 700 dollars per month. Say Hillary Clinton decides that I can "afford" to buy a 200 per month health insurance plan. Say I don't want to. Say I decide that, all due respect to Hillary Clinton, I can NOT afford what she says I can. Well, then, according to her plan, she has the authority to take that money directly from my paychecks.

This is dictatorship. This is slavery. And that is not hyperbole. If any government tells its citizens that they are criminals if they do not buy certain goods or services from private corporations, why bother having a government? Why not just have Wal-Mart run the country? They'd probably do a better job, anyway.

As if the black hole for liberty that this represents were not enough, let's try a simple though exercise: Say Hillary Clinton who, coincidentally I'm sure, has received far more money from HMO's and pharmaceutical companies than any other candidate, achieves her goal, and the coercive power of the federal government is deputized to guarantee that all citizens must buy private insurance, what do you suppose will happen to the price of said insurance?

If the most powerful physical and economic force ever (the American federal government) forces the richest group of people ever (the American people) to buy something, say....eggs, from private companies, what do you suppose would happen to the price of eggs? Think it would go up? If it there was a fine for not buying eggs, if people were forced by the state to buy eggs, think the egg people might bump the price up? Just a bit? Maybe?

This may sound increasingly cranky and old-fashioned, but liberty means something. Any honest supporter of Hillary's health care plan can not also be an ardent defender of liberty. The two are mutually exclusive.

Fascunism will not help sick people. It will create a new sickness all its own. When tyranny comes to the United States, it will come wrapped in the American flag. Popping pills. With a stethescope around its neck.

There Is A Crack In Everything (That's How the Light Gets In)

We all know there are those who are incapable of admitting defeat. There is a thin line between resolve and delusion, but some innate perception in us allows us to identify this invisible marker. For example, George W. Bush is not resolved when it comes to Iraq; he is delusional. This is the most human of attributes, this insistence on hoping against hope, of dreaming against reality. Generals, lovers, and artists know it well; it is an inescapable and often redemptive part of the human condition.

But what about its mirror image? What about those who refuse to accept victory? What about those who are so invested in a narrative of victimization that they are literally incapable of acknowledging that they have slayed their dragons, that they have cowed their conquerors? This tendency is also a part of the human condition, and it is one we can observe in all walks of life. It is currently manifesting itself among the punditocracy of the left in regards to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

First, we have feminists such as Gloria Steinem, who insist that gender is still the "biggest obstacle in our society", and that an inherently misogynistic culture such as ours will never accept a female president. This case would be far easier to make if Hillary Clinton was not winning tens of millions of votes from American men while Steinem was ranting about their misogyny.

Steinem, and others like her, seem invested in looking at the world as it was, not as it is. Because the world as it is is clearly ready for the idea of a woman president. And if Hillary Clinton fails, it will not be because she is a she. It will be because she is unlikeable, amoral, a warmonger, married to a walking blackmail magnet, and ascendant due to marriage more than merit. Those are legitimate reasons to vote against someone.

This is a bit like the false and lazily reflexive proposition that criticizing any action taken by Israel is indicative of anti-Semitism. If I say Israel should not have destroyed an entire country in retaliation for two kidnappings, that does not mean that I hate Jews. It means that I hate seeing countries destroyed.

We don't live in the world Steinem grew up in, and we should not be held hostage by her inability to recognize how much things have changed in exactly the direction she has advocated for so long. Many people of her generation are simply incapable of accepting how much things have changed for the better.

They cling to such house-of-card-canards as "women make 70 cents to the dollar for the same work as men". Really? If that were true, why would ANY unskilled workplace hire ANY man? If this insultingly transparent slander had any truth to it at all, there would be nary a Y chromosome in a single American Wal-Mart, Dunkin' Donuts, or McDonalds. Women make less than men because they disproportionately take lower-paying jobs such as teaching or child care and because they take time out from their careers to raise children.

To Gloria Steinem and others like her, I say "you have advocated for a cause that had great moral force and has achieved great moral ends. You should be commended for your efforts and accomplishments. But to deny that those accomplishments have been made only betrays your alienation from contemporary society."

If the nation was still tethered to stodgy WASPish men, what happened to Joe Biden and Chris Dodd? Sober, white-haired, vastly experienced? They lost. To a woman and a black guy. Wake up, Gloria, you won!

The same dynamic is at play with Obama. We are told over and over again by members of the generation that came of age in the 60's that a black man can not win the presidency. Again, this insistence, this unsettling investment in America's image as a racist nation, betrays a divorce from reality.

The United States, over the last 50 years, has undertaken the most comprehensive moral leap of any society in the history of civilization in such a short period. In less than one lifetime, we have gone from a society where good people genuinely believed that segregation was the natural and just order of things to a society where, if a Senator says "macaca", he is ruined. Finished. Bill Clinton may have gotten away with molesting the help, but what if he had been caught on tape saying "nigger"?

When Barack Obama was born, American policemen were beating and hosing black people for the sin of trying to vote. Then they took off their uniforms, waited for nightfall, and killed a few of those black people for good measure and without consequence. Now Barack Obama, still a young man, is on the cusp of the presidency. It is literally unbelievable. But it happened.

And that is why this election is about the young, with "young" in this instance covering anyone under 40 years of age, say. The tens of millions of Americans who grew up in a time where racism and sexism were seen as vulgarities and injustices, not as the natural order of things, the fodder for jokes at dinner parties.

Part of the refusal of the 60's generation to acknowledge what is happening is the age-old defense mechanism of refusing to believe as a way of avoiding disappointment. In this context, if McCain wins, the wizened old folks will say, "See! We told you so!" But they are wrong not to believe.

We must say to those who do not believe in what they have wrought, "thank you." Thank you for making this a country where a woman or a black man can be president. Thank you. And even if you will not let yourself believe, we do. To see Hillary and Barack today must seem utterly surreal to those, like my father, who, with the very same eyes, saw black men beaten in public like dogs for daring to assert their humanity.

I do not blame this cohort for their cynicism and wariness; Lord knows they have ample justification for such jaded hearts. I am jaded as well, and I have no illusions about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or the ability of either one of them to undo what has been done, which is rather limited. But one of them could win. Because we believe.

Wars Do Not Make One Great

If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee in the general election, he will be subjected to withering broadsides targeting his lack of foreign-policy experience and what is taken to be his naivete about the nature of American power. This weekend's newspapers afforded us a preview of this strategy. The following excerpts show how hollow these attacks really are but, more importantly, they illustrate the amoral and insatiably militaristic depths to which our republic has sunk.

The Iraq War will become a Republican plus. On the one hand, he voted to authorize the invasion. On the other, he consistently disagreed with the administration’s prosecution of the war in general and with the judgment of defense Secretary Rumsfeld in particular. And on the third hand, he advocated for a course of action that was at last implemented in the so-called “surge,” and with some success.

To say that the Iraq War could still become a "Republican plus" is to tread a bit too lightly on the graves of one million human beings as well as to engage is some rather comprehensive self-delusion. Maybe some folks will, for some pedestrian and pedantic "reasons", despise John McCain slightly less than Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz, but this war will not be a "Republican plus" barring the invention of a time machine that will allow us to withdraw from Iraq in May of 2003.

To say that McCain has credibility because he: 1.voted for the war 2.criticized Rumsfeld and 3. "supported the surge" is to miss the point, a point everyone even remotely connected to the establishment, except for Barack Obama, consistently refuses to acknowledge.

That point is 3-fold: 1.the war was illegal and those who authorized it are war criminals 2.criticizing Rumsfeld's strategy in Iraq is like criticizing Saddam's strategy in Kuwait; it is beside the point entirely 3.the surge has "bought" fewer American deaths in the most literal sense, by paying off insurgents to take a breather. So why didn't McCain support just paying Saddam Hussein to not attack us in 2002?

So, at any moment, he would be able to present himself as a strong patriot, and at another moment as a critic of the hard-line hawks, and at still another as a hard-line hawk with more experience and military knowledge than the others.

Here we have that rosiest of herrings, the blithe and supremely casual observation that supporting a war of aggression in contravention of all international and domestic law to be followed by an indefinite military occupation of a hostile population makes one "a strong patriot". Which made Saddam Hussein quite the patriot when he invaded Kuwait, I would imagine. I bet he even had a little Iraqi flag pin on his lapel.

So, while McCain supported the Hitler / Hussein school of international relations, he still qualifies as a critic of "the hard-line hawks", presumably Ghengis Khan and the aliens from Independence Day and and the alien from Alien. The pseudo-dovish McCain, of course, was able to restrain these dogs of war because, after all, he has more "experience and military knowledge than the others".

Ah yes, the experience and military knowledge born of Vietnam, when 500,000 American troops could not pacify a nation of 25 million. This experience and military knowledge led McCain to conclude that America's problem in Iraq was too few troops. In a perfect world, something tells me McCain would have asked for, oh, I don't now....500,000 or so troops to pacify a nation of 25 million.

And he can add, I too had my doubts about the conduct of the war, but now a policy I long advocated has been put in place with good results. Moreover, by saying something like that he would be reminding the electorate that he knows how to think tactically about military strategies, while his opponent’s only experience in combat has been trying to figure out how to beat Alan Keyes in the Illinois senate race, something anyone with the letter D (for Democrat) after his name would have been able to do easily.

So McCain had his doubts about the conduct of the Iraq War, which reflected his doubts about the Vietnam War. The problem wasn't that American soldiers were sent to an impoverished and alien land to spread the gospel with hand grenades, it was that they weren't allowed to stay long enough or kill enough people.

Thankfully, though, a new strategy has brought "good results". Instead of the pornographic violence of 2006, we know have intolerable levels of violence. Nice! And all it took was paying the killers of thousands of American soldiers not to attack us. To say that the surge has brought good results (or "bought" good results, to be far more accurate) is like saying that 9/11 brought good results because the 4th plane missed its target; it indicates a morbidly low standard for "good".

Nonetheless, we are meant to believe that support for the surge indicates that McCain "knows how to think tactically about military strategies". Okay, McCain has the tactical gravitas to support cutting checks to Sunni insurgents. That's super. But Barack Obama had the strategic gravitas to warn against this abattoir in the first place. How about taking someone who gets the strategy right versus someone who, four years in, prescribes a tactical band-aid for the strategic hemorrhage that he helped set in motion?

Despite the unalterable fact that McCain is prescribing futile tactics to rescue a strategic bus-off-a-cliff, Obama would have avoided the catastrophe entirely, rendering McCain's "tactics" irrelevant. But Obama, we are told, is a lightweight, since his only "combat" was beating Alan Keyes, who any Democrat would have dispatched. Interesting. Apparently the author slept through Obama's 28 head-to-head victories over Hillary Clinton, who any other Democrat would have lost to.

The parts of McCain’s story, even with one or two twists and turns, fit nicely into a coherent narrative that brings credit to him in every chapter. I was resolute in the beginning, I demurred for a while but for good reasons, and now I am resolute again, and you can trust me because, in this area especially, I know what I’m doing.

At my age, I'm surprised by less and less, but this is pretty staggering. "I was resolute in the beginning"???? Yes, he was resolutely wrong. Yes, he resolutely made a decision that made him a war criminal. Yes, he resolutely supported a war of aggression. Yes, he resolutely signed on for the most fundamental sin (let us stop calling this a "mistake") in recent American history.

But, we can "trust" John McCain because he "knows what he's doing". Honestly. Does anyone think George Bush "knows what he's doing?" And on Iraq, how have Bush and McCain differed? They have not.

He can rehearse this narrative without apologizing for anything and then turn around to Obama and (borrowing from Clinton’s attacks on him), declare: You, on the other hand, don’t know what you’re doing, as everything you say, not only about the war, but about the conduct of foreign policy, proves.

Without apologizing. What would John McCain have to apologize for? Well, for starters, about a million specific things. But they're all dead. Then again, McCain doesn't speak Arabic, so expecting him to apologize may be a bit much. "He can rehearse this narrative without apologizing."

Yes, he can. And he will. Because American has nothing to apologize for. The million dead? Well, they shouldn't have been there. But we should have, of course. Without apologizing for the incinerated children and the eviscerated women, or being expected to do so by a proto-fascist and supremely sedated and deluded public, McCain will turn to Obama and question his judgement.

As the quote above indicates, Barack Obama "doesn't know what he's doing". Again, is there anyone left who thinks that anyone who supported invading Iraq really "knew what they were doing?"

We also have Obama's assertion that he would strike locations in Pakistan if he found that bin Laden were there, and that he would do so without Pakistani permission if necessary. McCain has said that he would follow bin Laden "to the gates of Hell." Apparently, John McCain will go to Hell, but not to Pakistan, which actually exists. Okay. Just keep in mind, Obama is the one who "doesn't know what he's doing."

Obama’s judgment -- what little we know of it -- lacks a foundation in history and evidences no understanding of how the levers of American power can be pulled to move the world.

Okay. Same thought exercise: does McCain's judgment on Iraq illustrate "an understanding of how the levers of American power can be pulled to move the world"? Well, yes, if he aimed to "move the world" to a place in which America is despised, its military bloodied, its treasuries depleted, and its credibility gone. If that was his intention, he nailed it. If it was not his intention, then it seems that Obama had a pretty sound footing on the levers of American power and when not to use them.

Does he really believe that the war the terrorists and the nations supporting them are waging against America will end with a retreat from Iraq? Or does he understand how our withdrawal from Beirut in 1984 and our retreat from Somalia emboldened our enemies? Has he read any of bin Laden’s or Zawahiri’s screeds bragging of how Islam defeated America in those instances?

Gee, I don't know....did Gerald Ford really believe that world hunger would end with a retreat from Vietnam? No, he didn't. But he withdrew anyway. The rhetoric above is a quite sloppy way of conflating two things that have nothing to do with each other. Has Obama ever said that leaving Iraq will make all terrorists give up? No. Does it then follow that we stay there until the end of time? No. Waiting for an utter lack of risk of negative consequence before taking an action is an ironclad reason to do nothing.

The author points to withdrawal from Beirut and Somalia. Yes, we withdrew. We withdrew because our "interests" there were so indirect and opaque that they simply weren't worth a loss of American life. So Reagan and Clinton, to their credit, withdrew.

Note what the author does: he adopts bin Laden's talking points as his own, blaming those withdrawals for showing American weakness. Interesting that he co opts bin Laden's reasoning there. As for the reasoning that bin Laden cited regarding the American military presence in the broader Middle East.....well, that's different.

When bin Laden says that American militarism in the Middle East causes hatred among Muslims, it is treated as delusional ranting. When he says that the withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia emboldened him, he is treated as a sober and credible statesman. Interesting.

Is there anyone who really believes that al-Qaeda attacked us because we withdrew from Lebanon? That they have not attacked us since we invaded Iraq because they are scared of us? That if we withdrew from Iraq they would stop being scared and renew their assault?

Well, one person believes that. His name is John McCain. Good thing he "knows what he's doing."