P.M. Carpenter

Back home. Anything new?

We have returned, after enjoying, while visiting my immediate family in the Missouri Ozarks, a three-day news blackout. I have yet to update myself on current events, although I'm assuming nothing has changed, since virtually nothing changed for nearly four years before I so briefly retired to the bosom of Ozarkian ignorance. It has its merits. If McConnell, Boehner & Friends are going to stifle every program of Obamian invention, one might as well suffer them in peace, while watching the deer roam and a mother raccoon play.

Has the conscientious electorate ever felt so helpless?

At any rate, for the day's remainder I must shake the profound blackness that comes after every visit back home. I miss my family. I miss them terribly--my mother, my two brothers. Also, before our daughter came my wife--a native Illinoisan--and I lived in the Ozarks, surrounded by my family. We loved our life there. Now she's gone, and my visits back home--peppered by so many places we frequented together--only propel the emotional aches to the surface. I want things as they were; so many of us do. But it cannot be. 

How to shake the blackness? Submerge the aches in work and the political distractions of nothingness (or is it the nothingness of distractions?), to which I'll return tomorrow. See you then. I promise not to be so gloomy.

 

A look back: The Iraq war, Part IV

The last in a series of 2003 columns on the Iraq war, this one from September: "The U.S. Must Leave Iraq Now."

I'll be back tomorrow. See you in the morning.

***

With hat in hand, the Bush administration now wants -- or, rather, needs -- a United Nations peacekeeping force in Iraq. As all the world knows by now, only a wretched combination of lies and gross miscalculations put beleaguered American troops there to begin with, and of course that folly was compounded by the administration's postwar insistence on exclusive occupational rights. To the Bushies, Iraq was a sandbox in more than one sense, and it was all theirs to control -- at least, that is, till everything under the blistering Iraqi sun started unraveling.

Virtually all major editorial pages have applauded the administration's new-found spirit of global cooperation and recognition of reality. The ruling neocons finally get it, say these observers. The United States cannot go it alone, and, however belated, their appeal for international teamwork is the right step in a much better direction.

Hogwash.

The famously corrupt rationalizations for military intervention made a productive U.S. presence in postwar Iraq not just untenable, but impossible. And that, precisely, is what the United Nations Security Council should tell the hapless Bushies as they commence begging. For everyone's security -- and that includes ours -- U.S. troops should be sent packing, replaced by a true coalition of peacekeeping forces. Each added day of American occupation assures only snowballing violence and perpetual disruption.

George W. Bush and his principal handlers have reveled in needless hardball tactics since day one, thumbing their go-it-alone noses at every difference of sensible world opinion. Their Ramboism has brought even greater turmoil to the Middle East; heightened Islamic hatred and distrust of the United States; turned a non-terrorist state into a leading manufacturer of terrorism; and converted an economically abysmal nation into an absolute basket case.

With or without U.N. assistance there is no way the United States can now turn things around for the better. Our presence is beyond redemption. Continuing it at any force level will just make things worse. The U.S. must go.

Naturally, the Security Council won't reciprocate the administration's maximum hardball tactics. It won't say what needs to be said and it won't unveil the obvious. It won't, in short, tell the now-supplicant Rambos to stuff it -- for their own good, if nothing else -- and let adults take over. Instead, the Security Council will tinker with and bicker over the administration's submitted resolution, assume as fact a continuing presence of American troops, and thereby prolong the misery.

Yet, just as naturally, the Rambos wouldn't listen anyway. After all, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, his boss's radical reversal of postwar philosophy isn't even a mild departure from what previously stood. How does one get through to distorted, deceptive minds like that?

The consequences of this self-imposed mess are staggering. The worst, of course, is that of lost lives. As hard-liners in their comfortable domestic settings persist in a doomed policy abroad, America's youth will continue dying daily -- and in vain. There is no greater cost, no greater waste.

And the financial fallout? It plunges off the radioactive scale. Forty-five billion dollars for the official war and a projected $300 billion for a 5-year occupation. A few billion for immediate humanitarian aid, a few billion more for Iraqi salaries, $3 billion for refugee resettlement and about $7 billion to restore the public utilities we blew up -- all of which is peanuts compared to a lowballed 10-year miscellaneous tab of another $200 billion (roads, communications, hospitals and so on). Keep in mind that Treasury doesn't have any of this money, so it will borrow and dun us for the interest as well.

To editorially applaud the Bush administration for reaching out to others at last is as wrong-headed as the war was itself. Such approbation only encourages more of the same: the drip-drip torture of an ill-fated occupation. The U.S. must go. That's the message.

 

A look back: The Iraq war, Part III

Another of my columns from the original horror, this one from March 2003: "What Would We Do Without Albania?"

***

The Bush administration's pathology of deception continues unabated. Its most recent outbreak of conning the already conned public is the claim that the United States' illegal, virtually unilateral and unprovoked military aggression against Iraq is but a partial expression of widespread international accord. France, singularly, is made out to be the global bad guy and martial party pooper; not the world's majority voice of opposition to America's depraved conduct abroad.

Why shoot, says the administration, we've got allies up to our eyeballs. The count has, at times, been a bit fuzzy -- how odd for this customarily precise White House when it comes to mathematics, especially on fiscal policy -- with diverse officials spouting diverse numbers. Aside from today's principal party line of 45 allies (which really means 30, because one-third, in a display of true solidarity with the U.S., prefer to pretend they've never heard of us), we have also been treated to allied counts of 35 and 40. In any case, all the estimates are within a comfortable 33-percent margin of error, a considerable improvement over the administration's budget forecasts.

Whatever the actual count, which includes the conveniently anonymously committed, 30 nations have been so bold as to raise their hands and be named. And a few of them have gone even farther. As we all know, allied Britain has promised the greatest number of troops -- ultimately 45,000 -- coming in at 12.9 percent of total "coalition" forces expected in Iraq. That's the good news. The bad news -- as some naysaying leftists such as columnists Robert Novak and Paul Craig Roberts might characterize it -- is that after Britain's contribution, 302,548 troops are still needed.

But not to worry. The leftover manpower burden doesn't all rest on the United States' shoulders. Indeed, because Dick, Donnie and Colin have taken the good time and trouble to amass the redoubtable "Coalition of the Willing," allies other than Britain are committing 0.00842 percent of the necessary troop balance, leaving the United States to compensate for only 99.991 percent of the shortfall. Perhaps these black-and-white statistics from the U.S. State Department will silence, once and for all, those whiners critical of the war as mostly an American ballgame.

For instance our traditional ally, Albania, is sending a contingency of 70 troops. Poland is anteing 200 troops and Romania, not to be outdone by a bunch of Poles, is raising the 200 by 78 more. That's the kind of good-natured competition and can-do spirit that will see us through these troubled times.

Australia promises 2,000 troops. And that rounds out the Willing Coalition list; members willing enough, that is, to commit ground forces. Other much-touted coalition brothers include Spain, where a resounding 14 percent of the population has a favorable image of the U.S. and whose leadership has offered 0 troops. Turkey, 0; Italy, 0; Denmark, 0; and powerhouse Bulgaria, 0. Hitler's foreign policy had better luck attracting allies.

A few other less-touted coalition members are downright comical in description and symbolic of just how desperate the Bush administration has been to inflate its allied support.

Eritrea, for example, is one of the gang of 30. Its Gross Domestic Product is 0.00031 percent of the United States', and its per capita GDP -- you really have to work to accomplish something like this -- is less than Afghanistan's. Though zero Eritreans will be marching off to the Iraqi War, the little nation devotes a whopping 19.8 percent of its miniscule GDP to military expenditures (ours is 3.2). Such a shocking waste of resources is, however, easily explained. Eritrea is experiencing a frightful territorial dispute with another Willing Coalition member, Ethiopia, which, hard as it is to imagine, actually ranks less than Eritrea in per capita GDP. The only reason both nations bothered to enlist as absentee warriors against Iraq is that both are currying favor with the U.S. as leverage in a land-conflict resolution.

For mostly obvious reasons the coalition list excludes America's closest Middle East ally, Israel; which, by the way, between 1967 and 2000 stood in violation of twice the number of U.N. Security Council resolutions than Iraq earned for itself in the same period. But again, not to worry, because George Jr. has a "road map" to a comprehensive Mideast peace. The first step is a U.S. invasion of a Muslim country. That should help grease the skids.

Last week, in a cable-network news interview, a retired U.S. general said yeah, sure, we call the assault on Iraq a coalition product, but let's face it, this is America's fight. Just once -- just to break the monotony of deception, if nothing else -- it would be nice to hear the administration be as honest. Just once.

***

Be back Tuesday.

 

A look back: The Iraq war, Part II

From my columnist days, one from May 2003: "The Biggest Foreign Policy Whopper Ever"

***

As I sit to reflect on the greatest scam in American foreign affairs history, in the background one of conservatism's more accomplished scammers is yapping away on MSNBC -- and as a host, no less. For several days now and in so many words, bit by agonizing bit the Bush administration has been forced to concede that the Iraq war, as a WMD threat-stopper, was a hoax. Thousand of lost lives and unaffordable billions later, Bush II's deceit is exposed -- drip, drip, drip. To describe the administration's latest betrayal of public trust as outrageous is choice understatement; nevertheless, what has kept MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, for want of a better word, outraged for the past week? Not the Iraq scam, but ...

Danny Glover. Yes, that Danny Glover, the actor. I kid you not.

Listening to Scarborough -- a proto-fascistic former U.S. representative turned network media whore -- is a lesson plan in Goebbels-ese. As his beloved president's sordid rock of deceit is overturned, the less-than honorable gentleman from the great state of Florida diverts public notice by waging a cruel, word-twisting campaign against the harmless Glover, who Scarborough says blames only America as the proximate cause of 9/11. Glover does no such thing as MSNBC's barking dog contorts it, yet lawyer Joe Scarborough attacks with the zeal of a drunken Joe McCarthy. He demands that MCI, the long-distance company, fire Glover as its spokesman; he's anti-American (meaning anti-Bush) and should be banished. Scarborough plasters MCI's phone number on the screen and urges viewers to likewise demand Glover's head. The host later declares the virtuous campaign a success: because of his relentless pressure, says Joe, MCI canned Glover. For the moment we are safe in our beds.

As a display of propagandistic art, Scarborough's political depravity is good theatre. His attempts at intellectual somberness are amusing and downright laughable are his right-wing self-parodies in scapegoating sinister liberals, liberalism, the liberal elite and -- what else -- the liberal media. Turns out we who lean leftward are responsible for Stalin's poor character, the 1933 Reichstag fire and New Coke. For a disappearing band of decency-in-government holdouts, we're surprisingly powerful. Just ask Joe McCar ... uh, Joe Scarborough.

But of course there's a much larger point here than the one on Joe's head. His grossly dishonest agenda is all-too emblematic of Bush II's Dorian Gray politics; or as Shakespeare poetically phrased it, its lack of inner music. Neither hysterical or hyperbolic, I think, is the proposition that the administration's habitual use of Big Lies threatens, with finality, America's already ailing democracy.

To date, the Biggest Lie perpetrated was that of a direct, impending foreign menace to our national security. For two reasons this particular Lie outdid all others in the annals of questionable American interventionism. First, in past instances of dubious belligerency -- say, the Mexican War, Spanish-American War and Vietnam conflict -- the commander in chief proffered at least some plausible justification for military action. Hyped, distorted and blown out of proportion for sure, yet there was a conceivable, debate-worthy particle of truth in each, however slim.

Second -- and compared to today, this was a real novelty -- in each instance the United States engaged the actual perceived threat. When we saw Mexico as trouble we took on Mexico, not Bolivia. When we identified Spain and North Vietnam as trouble we took on Spain and North Vietnam, not Portugal and Burma.

But now comes the Bush administration setting a bold new interventionist course. No plausible justification existed for military action against Iraq; the military and economic basket case of a nation was contained, at peace and under international scrutiny. Yet, as is true for a dog's favorite pastime, merely because it could did the administration punish an impotent and innocent sovereign state for the sins of an ambiguous but demonstrably powerful confederation.

In short, within a few months a reckless band of thuggish ideologues violated America's conscience and two centuries of relative international integrity. Rubber-stamped and peddled by a feeble chief executive, only a cocktail mixture of inventive untruths permitted an ethically bankrupt inner circle to dishonor America and swindle its citizens. The damage done to honest democracy is incalculable.

What's more, on another domestic front an equal disgrace played itself out. Beginning around mid-May several prominent news organizations exposed the subsequent reality of Bush II's warmongering dissemblance. Already our most experienced WMD detection team had been ordered home -- empty handed and feeling betrayed. Task Force 75's collective experts went to Iraq expecting to uncover what their government had sworn to without equivocation: the presence of chemical and biological agents by the tons, the technical means of delivering those agents and a robust nuclear armament program.

To ramrod an illegal war, the president had said "we know" of Saddam's illegal goods. The vice president said Iraq both has "reconstituted nuclear weapons" and in time would acquire "nuclear weapons." (Try sorting that one out.) The secretary of state said he "knew" the Iraqi tyrant possessed warheads full of biological agents. And when asked by Congress if Saddam kept weapons of destruction, the Defense Policy Board's chairman said "sure he does."

But it was all a fraud -- "facts" cooked up by a hastily created office of Pentagon yes-men to trumpet what the C.I.A. and Defense Intelligence Agency had found impossible to confirm. Like the American public, Task Force 75 had trusted it leaders. Both got knifed.

So what, as mentioned, was the equal disgrace? The Fourth Estate dropped the story. Editors determined it was an uncomfortable, perhaps even unpatriotic, reality to unload on a sensitive public.

From start to finish the Iraq affair was a professionally huckstered shell game. By and large the public bought into it because the American political tradition -- also by and large, I stress -- has been one of openness, reasonable top-down honesty and mutual respect for a revolutionary social contract. George W. Bush, his furtive handlers and a complicit press have chucked that tradition with breathtaking ease.

One can only hope that we live in a doomed Zeitgeist. At America's helm is a junta of clamoring Joe Scarboroughs for whom smoke, mirrors, deceit and distraction are indispensable staples of political survival. We'll know that God next blesses America when He puts this bug in the electorate's ear: "Cast the treacherous bums out."

***

I'll post another Iraq piece tomorrow. And again, I'll be back Tuesday. See you then.

 

A look back: The Iraq war, Part I

My daughter and I are on the road today, headed to Missouri to visit family. So I'm posting (from the days when I wrote columns instead of blog blurbs) an April 2003 piece on the Iraq war: "Yesterday's Emergency Has Been Cancelled Due to Political Inconvenience." I thought you might enjoy the, ahem, nostalgia.

***

There are some things any hardcore political junkie is compelled to admire about this administration. For instance when it comes to propaganda, the Bushies outdo with ease the wiliest of opposing spin rascals, and that includes the wiliest of them all -- Iraq's information ministry, which defiantly declared the absence of U.S. forces near Baghdad even as the 7th Cavalry was pummeling the city's elite guard. The Iraqi leadership's brand of earnest fiction requires a certain P.R. panache rarely seen, yet Bush II has managed to top it.

Remember when the White House thundered about unavoidable war because Saddam Hussein's secreted weapons of mass destruction posed an intolerable threat to our national security? Remember its verbal pounding on that point? Remember its incessant claims of knowing the whereabouts and wherefores of Iraq's seemingly vast WMD, evidence of which the administration could not then responsibly disclose? Remember its repeated avowals that Iraq would not hesitate to use these weapons against us, even during a faux peace? Remember all that?

Well, forget it.

Since Saddam chose not to unleash so much as a can of pepper spray against invading American forces, invading British forces, the hated Kurds or hated Shi'ites during the onset of hostilities, the White House has leapt to an altogether different dish of propaganda. Sure, Centcom issues occasional warnings about possible chemical attacks just to keep the inspirational Old Testament alive. And such an attack may yet come. If so, the White House will leap back to its original fundamentalism. But by and large, that once-imposing danger is no longer mentioned by the White House. It simply melted away, quite literally without a word, when the chemical nasties and biological bugs failed to arrive as advertised.

Ain't that the damnedest thing?

To fill the nagging void, George W. Bush now speechifies that his chief objective all along has been to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam's long reign of terror. This -- not the protection of national security in the face of clear and present danger -- is why war could not wait, why the United Nations could not stall us any longer, why $75 billion in requested funding was purportedly incalculable a month ago, and why untold young American lives must be put at risk -- now, and not a minute later. This political sleight of hand has been far trickier than Dick and slicker than Willie, and the "in-bedded" media report nary a word.

No one disputes that the sadistic reptile Saddam Hussein has administered said reign of terror. No one, assuredly, will miss His Bloated Pomposity when he's blown to pieces and dispatched to wherever dead dictators go. And naturally anyone possessing the slightest compassion is heartened by the prospect of truly liberating an oppressed people. Excepting the Saddams of this world, we all desire freedom and a democratic voice. Yet those are givens, thus hardly the point.

The point, rather, is that Bush's initial casus belli has been replaced without comment by what the White House propaganda machine, in these ever-changing opportunistic times, now considers the more easily salable: the Iraqi regime's brutality. The administration expected (correctly so far) that by applying proper diversionary tactics the public would simply forget what the selfsame administration emphasized only weeks ago; that is, America's desperate security straights. With characteristic nonchalance, George has opted to erase history. As brazen propagandistic ploys go, this one has been a beaut; one made especially comely by a televised-tragedies-distracted, hypomaniacally patriotic American public buying the president's political gamesmanship in wholesale quantities.

And gamesmanship it is, for if oppressed peoples' liberation was indeed the administration's principal -- and principled -- objective at any cost, then we'd be lobbing cruise missiles and deploying khakied teenagers around the world this very day. There is no shortage of oppression to be relieved, and some of the oppressors possess infinitely more destructive weapons of mass destruction than Saddam Hussein has ever socked away or was too stupid to R&D effectively.

The barely submerged truth, of course, is that neither biochemical bugbears or humanitarian outrage led the administration to drag us all to the brink of global bedlam. It dwells instead in the realm of relentless ideology. Those resolute folks laying siege to the weak and easily impressionable presidential mind have yearned for this war since 41 wimped out, be it to redraw geopolitical maps or assert intimidating military muscle at will. The titular strongman might wish to permanently erase recent history, but reality is stubbornly, inherently indelible. In fact, the above-referenced resolute folks have made little to no effort to conceal their underlying motivations. The public record alone is littered with the frank and open bellicosity long advocated by the Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds of official Washington and assorted right-wing think tanks.

Another truth is that by any conscientiously observed rules of rhetorical engagement, the unsure among us should not take the antiwar commentariat's word for these things any more than they should accept the administration's word without question. They instead should turn off the propagandistic tube and indulge in some honest cramming. Alternatively, they can just stay tuned for tomorrow's new-and-improved emergency message, which could very well be the real thing.

***

I'll post another contemporaneous Iraq war column tomorrow, and will be back "live" on Tuesday.

 

What in hell does it take to "fire up" the left?

Appearing on "Hardball," the Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky just said the oddest thing. The left, he said, isn't "fired up" over the midterms, but should House Republicans move toward impeachment--their lawsuit being maybe but a preliminary diversion--then watch out. The left would become motivated.

For starters, allow me to confess that I'm unsure who "the left" is these days. The term once meant something--unionists, university students, the intelligentsia, civil righters, the working class with a measurably raised social consciousness--but what it means today, I can't say. The Internet is partly responsible for my mystification; what in too many instances calls itself the voice of the left is largely a fringe, as loud and unpleasant and ideologically saturated as the right. Perhaps that's a generalization with little merit. But so is "the left."

At any rate, it's not "fired up" says Tomasky. And the sad part is, he's not wrong. Since we have no better definition, let's assume the left is that majority or at least plurality of Americans who agree with, say, increasing the minimum wage, and that same-sex marriage is the business of same-sex partners and not Ralph Reed, and that clean air and drinkable water are rather worth regulating, and that maybe the loyal opposition to President Obama should be loyal to its country and thus try to come to some compromise on what the majority of Americans aspire to.

Isn't that enough to be "fired up" about? More than enough? Are we as an electorate so jaded, so whipped, so resigned to the monotony and mediocrities of partisan warfare that only insane impeachment attempts can fire us up? Has it come to that? 

If so, we're in bigger trouble than whatever Republicans can land us in.

 

Thomas Ricks on Iraq

New Republic's Isaac Chotiner interviews Thomas Ricks, and it's an interview well worth reading in full. I disagree with Ricks' rebuke of Biden's foresighted (I believe) partition plan--a rebuke whose reasoning Ricks fails to spell out--but in general the former military correspondent assesses the Iraq mess with almost incontrovertible clarity. A key passage worth quoting at some length:

In many ways, the Obama people are handling a situation they didn’t create. A lot of this is all fruit of the poisoned tree. Maliki is the result of a botched political process that began under Bremer. We went in and said, "we’re going to hold national American-style elections, one man, one vote." And the country had three profoundly different groups who are at each other’s throats. It was insane. At that point, when we wanted one man, one vote, we turned control of that country over to Iran and that’s why it appalls me when you see Cheney and Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams saying the Obama administration blew it. No, the Obama administration was trying to clean up the mess these guys made.

I suspect foreign-policy historians will barely footnote them--the Cheneys, the Wolfowitzes, the Abramses--with respect to the Obama administration's Iraq involvement, or rather disengagement (I hope). They're seemingly everywhere now because lazy network bookers and their whorish, ratings-obsessed executive superiors find comfort in names the television audience will recognize. But in the long run they're just that: history--barely footnotable history.

 

When even Luis Gutierrez says it's dead, it's deader than Sonny Corleone

This is ... news?

The two-year attempt to push immigration reform through Congress is effectively dead and unlikely to be revived until after President Obama leaves office, numerous lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the issue said this week....

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said ... "My point of view is, this is over.... Every day, [Republicans] become not recalcitrant, but even more energetically opposed to working with us. How many times does someone have to say no until you understand they mean no?"

I've been asking myself that very question about Democrats since January 2013. It became almost instantly obvious after the presidential election that Republicans would not change their ways; instead, they would double down on attacks, obstructionism, base-pleasing investigations and ruthless partisanship.

They possessed no policy programs of their own. No healthcare-reform alternatives, no immigration- or tax-reform plans, no ideas. "Reform conservatives" were, and are, terrified of their own party, lest they be defrocked Frum- or Sullivan-style. Republican pols would simply retire to carpet-chewing and ride to base-fevered victory in the subsequent midterms on malice alone. That was the plan. And so far, it has worked brilliantly well.

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats have looked like chumps. "How many times does someone have to say no until you understand they mean no?" The answer: Not nearly this many. Let's hope the history of 2013 and 2014 will be a guide for future obstruction victims, since common sense and gapingly conspicuous realism haven't had much effect.

 

Impeachment Lite

The House Republican leadership lacks the guts but has too many smarts to pursue impeachment, so it settles on the hypocrisy of a lawsuit charging that "On matters ranging from health care and energy to foreign policy and education, President Obama has repeatedly run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators, straining the boundaries of the solemn oath he took on Inauguration Day."

I don't follow sports, for which I compensate by ogling with awe the rah, rah, sis-boom-bah of cheap partisanship and hardcore base arousal. Bless the GOP, it positively surfeits the mind, as well as the imagination.

The president, moans Mr. Boehner, is defying the people and their elected representatives on all manner of pressing issues, which is offensive to his "solemn oath" of office. This was undoubtedly composed with great jocularity by the leadership's staff. The last time the Republican House roused itself from overpaid slumber was to shut down the government for utterly unintelligible reasons. Since then, on matters ranging from health care to education, it can't be bothered. It has money to raise, reelections to win and a base to spoon-feed--with a shovel--no-standing lawsuits. Benghazi wasn't enough.

It is, however, the president who's straining the solemnity of his office.

World Cup games. Who needs them? One can always look to Republicans for all of one's entertainment needs.

 

The many Catch-22s of drones

In a rather unsurprising report on the effectiveness of drone strikes, written by "several former senior intelligence and military officials" and released today by the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, the conclusion is this:

There is no indication that a U.S. strategy to destroy Al Qaeda has curbed the rise of Sunni Islamic extremism, deterred the establishment of Shia Islamic extremist groups or advanced long-term U.S. security interests.

It's the old whack-a-mole conundrum inside an exponential paradox--we kill one terrorist and thereby create 10 others; we kill those 10 and create another 100, and so on. Killing terrorists propagates terrorists, yet neglecting them exposes us to death. We can on occasion apprehend them rather than kill them, but then what? Gitmo? Which creates more terrorists? Criminal trials? Which ratchets up politically motivated Republican hysteria and fear-mongering?

Then there's the other, even larger political problem for the Obama administration. If it were to curb or delete its drone-strike program and a terrorist attack on domestic soil ensued, then that would be, as they say, all she wrote. The final two years of this administration's staggering to the finish line would be lethally crippled.

And its successor, the Clinton administration? It would triple down on drones--with convenient, inner-neocon verve--to avert the above, politically dangerous prospect. We'd be slaughtering terrorists by the dozens--and creating hundreds and thousands more.

And then there's this:

The report raised warnings that other countries might adopt the same rationale as the United States has for carrying out lethal strikes outside of declared war zones... Russia could use armed drones in Ukraine under the justification that it was killing anti-Russian terrorists.... "In such circumstances," the report asked, "how could the United States credibly condemn Russian targeted killings?"

Finally, an easy question to answer. It couldn't.

 

Iraq: a foregone conflation

From three separate stories in all the news that's fit to print, let's bookend Iraq's clusterfuck with our helpless diplo-speak and pitiable pleas.

Sect. of State John Kerry said yesterday he was gratified that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had "called on all Iraqis to put aside their differences to unite in their efforts against terrorism." He said this after Maliki refused to form a more inclusive, caretaking government and "blamed other political groups for not cooperating with him."

Meanwhile ...

More than "1,000 American private security guards" are headed to Iraq to guard our 300 military advisers, although the private security force could soon grow to 1,700. The U.S. has upped its surveillance flights--many of them manned--to more than 30 daily.

From a former American airbase in Baghdad, Iran is also conducting (drone) surveillance flights. It has 10 divisions amassed on the Iraqi border, is shuttling across it about 140 tons of military materiel every day, and is also supplying advisers.

Syria's Bashar al-Assad, our mortal enemy, is now bombing ISIS, our mortal enemy, in western Iraq. 

Sect. Kerry added that "one of the reasons why" a fresh, more inclusive Iraqi government "is so urgent [is] so that the leaders of Iraq can begin to make decisions necessary to protect Iraq without outside forces moving to fill a vacuum."

 

A Hannity-Palin colloquium

Do you have 5 minutes and 39 seconds to spare?--to squander, that is, and never get back?

Then here's a video of Sean Hannity interviewing Sarah Palin last night, in which the latter opines that it's "rare" for Republican politicians who "bring home the bacon" to win primaries (she was "thinking" of Thad Cochran); in which she wonders how "crossover" Dems in Mississippi's primary will "impact" the general election--say what?; in which, after frenetically collecting her absent thoughts, she intones that Eric Cantor's primary loss "speaks for itself"--then prattles something about the Constitution and "kind of that principle of following the Constitution"; in which she endorses--finally--a third-party movement; in which she says it was Obama who launched the "war on women" way back in '08 by "depressing" women (I believe she meant oppressing); and in which the former, Mr. Hannity himself, says the answer to pretty much everything is "energy" and a "consensus plan on Obamacare," whatever the fuck that means.

Watch it. You'll thank yourself as you're screaming with laughter, although soon you'll only be 5 minutes older and down a few IQ points.

 

What were they thinking?

FiveThirtyEight on whether Dems made the difference for Thad:

It’s still too early--after the vote and in the morning--to definitively answer this question. We’ll need to look at the profiles of the individual voters, post-election surveys and precinct-level data. Until then, we have county-level results to go on, and that data suggests that traditionally Democratic voters provided Cochran with his margin of victory.

While acknowledging that Cochran's overture was desperately brilliant, the logic of Democrats' reciprocation escapes me. The Mississippi senator has been voting against the interests of working-class Mississippians for 36 years (more than 40, counting his House stint), so Democrats return him to the Senate to vote against their interests a bit more?

If there were some non-extinct species of liberal Republicanism, I'd understand. But Thad Cochran? Virtually all of this morning's coverage of last night's primary race has noted, here and there, that the ideological separation between Cochran and McDaniel is in reality tissue thin; their contest was mostly a battle between the loud and the quiet forces of modern conservatism, whose larger taxonomical genus lies in the family and kingdom of ... madness.

Better, far better, for Democrats to have helped send a shrill, Palin- and quiz-show-host-backed GOP lunatic rather than recycled sludge to Washington, just to expedite the party's demise. That I would have understood. What Mississippi's Dems did? I don't get it.

 

A spellbinding moment with Dick Cheney

I had just eaten an early lunch, so scanning the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's interview with Dick Cheney was the most I could bear without a bucket and mop. This passage, however, somehow caught my eye in full:

[W]hat Barack Obama has been standing up doing, saying, is we’re getting out of the Middle East. We’ve gone to zero now in Iraq. He announced just a couple of weeks ago that he’s going to go to zero in Afghanistan in 2016. That makes absolutely no sense at all. In fact, you’re almost implementing Osama bin Laden’s desires. That’s why he attacked us on 9/11. He said it was because he wanted to drive us out of the region. Obama is in fact taking us in that direction.

Let me see if I understand this as Dick Cheney understands it. Our decades-long meddling in the Middle East--not a hatred of our "freedom"--was the prime motive for bin Laden's attack on 9/11. Presumably such attacks--and certainly attempts at such attacks--will never cease as long as we meddle, especially militarily, in the Middle East. President Obama is thus working to extricate us from said meddling, which to a great extent would obliterate the sort of Middle East hostility that brought us 9/11.

And this, Dick Cheney opposes.

Do I have that right?

 

The measure of a mindset

There are so many things to admire about the tea party: its fashion-setting Georgian attire, its eccentric musket-toting and hobgoblin poster artistry, its violently uncharitable Christianity, its fundamental tenet that relentless malice is a good and decent way of life. But the thing I admire most is its graciousness in losing.

McDaniel didn't concede Tuesday night and ... indicated he would challenge the results over Democrats voting in the Republican primary.

Pouting bullies to the end.