Is Bush’s Stem Cell Policy Vindicated?

Recently, scientists discovered a method of coaxing ordinary skin cells into becoming stem cells, thus avoiding the ethical quandary of having to harvest stem cells from embryos. Conservative commentators have seized on the apparent breakthrough to argue Bush’s stem cell policy – which denied federal funding for stem cell research derived from human embryos – has been vindicated. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer hyperventilates that "the embryonic stem cell debate is over. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president -- so vilified for a moral stance -- been so thoroughly vindicated."

Not so fast. Conservative pundits have been taking a licking on issues like global warming, Iraq, and Bush’s counter terrorism strategy so it’s little wonder that they’d like to turn the tables for once and insist the "debate is over." A closer look at the issue, however, reveals that Bush’s stem cell stance yielded few, if any, genuine moral benefits. Indeed, the supposed "moral clarity" Bush exercised in delineating the bright red line around "human embryos" had far more to do with abortion politics than any ethically or scientifically defensible principle. To put it simply, Bush’s policy did not save lives or uphold the sanctity of life. But curtailing federal funding for stem cell lines created from human embryos will have an ongoing pernicious effect in so far as federal dollars and ethical oversight go hand in hand. Let me explain.

At the crux of the matter is the question: is a human embryo a person? The term "human embryo" is at least somewhat loaded in so far as it implies that an embryo meets the criteria to count as an individual. It does not, for this reason: as late as two weeks after conception a single embryo can spontaneously split in two and begin developing as twins. Simply put, individuality, personhood, and the soul are not concepts that can be appropriately applied at an embryo’s earliest stages. This point is reinforced by the fact that as many as 75% of fertilized embryos spontaneously abort before implanting. Nature is simply wasteful and indifferent in the extreme.

Right-to-life advocates, however, are wedded to the doctrine that life begins at conception. This view is often attended by wooly metaphysical dogma about the infusion of soul and body taking place at conception. This view, of course, is difficult to square with the facts cited above (the vast majority of embryos spontaneously abort and a single embryo can spontaneously become twins two weeks after conception).

It doesn’t follow from this, however, that the moral value of an embryo is nil. Given the right circumstances an embryo has the potential to become a human being. Thus, when we speak of a "human embryo" we should remember that we are using that designation primarily to refer to the genetic material as being distinct from that of other species, but we are not referring to a distinct individual that has the moral status of a human person. If we were, then it would be wrong to create surplus embryos to help infertile couples have children. But even most on the religious right aren’t too keen on creating a fuss over surplus embryos created as a byproduct of helping infertile couples have children.

Nevertheless, conservative pundits use the term "human embryo" as a rhetorical sleight of hand, subtly implying each and every embryo is a unique human being. But deep down, most serious people don’t believe this because, or there would be calls to ban in vitro fertilization and outlaw privately funded embryonic stem cell research. As it stands, Bush’s policy does not prohibit embryonic stem cell research that is privately funded. Since federal funding invariably entails greater ethical oversight, however, Bush’s policy actually creates the worst of all possible worlds; less dollars where they are needed and less oversight where it is needed.

The discovery that scientists can coax ordinary skin cells into becoming stem cells is a remarkable breakthrough. The ability to bypass even a perceived ethical quandary is welcome, but it would be mistaken and way premature to insist that this new procedure vindicates Bush’s decision, it does not. Bush’s decision, and the reasoning behind it, deserve respect as a serious effort to grapple with profound and difficult questions. The approach of countries like Great Britain, however, has been even more high-minded and serious because the debate there has not been distorted by abortion politics. Those crowing about Bush stem cell policy being vindicated should be a little way of declaring "mission accomplished."

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Bush Authorizes Secret Program to Torture Language

President Bush has signed a super-secret executive order that authorizes him, in his role as commander-in-chief, to torture the any member of the Axis-of-Information (language, reason, or truth) without court approval. Previously, according to long-standing American tradition, any president who wanted to stretch language to the breaking point, douse the truth, or shock reason had to go before a special magistrate in order obtain a writ of verbias corpus.

Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that beneath the White House bunker is a secret chamber where men in black hoods use sharp instruments to chop words, dissect logic, and mince meaning. As one former linguistic inquisitor put it: “We have the tools to make language talk. We may have to get a little rough, but we’ll get those damn words to open up. When we’re through with them, they’ll tell us everything we want to hear.”

The Department of Informational Conformity and Kompliance (DICK), which was set up during the last days of the Nixon Administration by a zealous up-and-comer, remains one of the most secretive and sensitive institutions in the bowels of the government. Most officials refuse to confirm or deny its existence, but lawyers for Abdul Hominem, a French national of Arab descent, who was recently held incommunicado in DICK’s chambers for two years, and released only after successfully complying with the Bush Administration’s “Don’t talk, don’t torture*” program, has come forward to expose horrific examples linguistic abuse.

“They’re bending logic like a pretzel, meaning has been turned inside out, and they’ve had common sense tied up without a let up for more than six years. They picked me [A. Hominem] up around election time and flailed me until I was of no use to them anymore. I was putty in their hands. But you should have seen what they did with a couple of guys nicknamed Bait & Switch. They roughed them up so bad they switched sides and are now working for the administration. Talk about flip-floppers. One thing I know for sure, they [the administration] are not interested in the truth.”

President Bush has pointedly maintained that the United States adheres strictly to the Semantics Convention. But after signing Merriam-Webster, legislation that specifically bans tortured syntax, the president issued a signing statement, then winked, and said, “A word means just what the commander-in-chief says it means. Nothing more. Nothing less.” The so-called Humpty Dumpty clause, as critics are calling it, would allow Bush to continue mangling the English language with impunity. As noted linguist and language rights activist Nim Chimpsky puts it, “the Bush Administration War on Language metaphor has led to us an axis-of-clichés – tautologies, non-sequitars, and fallacies – whereby language itself is used to strangle thought.”

President Bush, however, steadfastly insists that he will leave “no slogan behind” on the battlefield of ideas. “Some say the War on Words is just a metaphor. They believe that if we cut and run the axis-of-evil – the grammarians, copy-editors, and smart-alecky satirists -- would leave us plain-speaking, hackneyed, cliché loving Americas alone. They would not; they would follow us home, both literally and figuratively. Which is why I made the decision to fight language abroad, in the realm of thought, rather than here at home, the land of truisms and platitudes. We shall fight to the last cliché.”

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Bush vs. Scott McClellan

It is one of life’s ironies that the so-called “value voters” – the evangelicals and Christian conservatives from the religious right -- were instrumental in installing a president (George W. Bush) who tortures the truth at every opportunity. That Bush is a prevaricator par excellence is not even disputable. His misrule has been predicated on lies, spin, and the subversion of the reality-based community. For instance, the Bush administration spun fabricated evidence to sell the Iraq War, while whitewashing scientific evidence that contradicted their stance on global warming. The end result is an ideological bubble that has burst in the public’s face. One victim of Bush’s mendacity is poor little Scott McClellan, the president’s hapless former press secretary who was asked to disseminate falsehoods on his boss’s behalf. As McClellan explains:

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

McClellan, of course, is referring to his role in vouching for the veracity of Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, effectively telling the public – falsely – that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with leaking the name of Valerie Plame Wilson after her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times debunking a central argument in the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq – namely that Saddam was allegedly trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

The ferociousness of the administration’s counterattack is startling even by the standards of Bush/Cheney. But there were good reason why the vice-president’s office, in particular, was so intent on attacking Wilson in a way that would send a message to other potential critics and whistleblowers. As Crain Unger reports in his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to suggest that some key neoconservative figures may have been involved in a 1999 burglary at the Nigerian embassy in Italy.

The break-in, as it happens, was the source of the forged documents that Bush later cited in his infamous State of the Union Address (the sixteen words about Saddam allegedly trying to acquire uranium from Africa). However, by the time of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, the intelligence community (and much of the administration) recognized that the documents in question were dubious, yet the words were actually re-inserted in the president’s speech!

Was Bush in the dark while Cheney pulled the strings? Did the neoconservatives in the VP’s office fear Congressional, media, or public scrutiny might reveal that key neocon figures might be connected to the forged documents. It is clear that Libby’s lies regarding the Plame leak were not just much ado about nothing; they were a smokescreen intended to protect higher ups and perhaps a conspiracy that brought the country to war by deliberately providing Congress and the American people with false intelligence. Instead of getting to the bottom of the leak, as Bush promised, he had his press secretary lie to the American people and then he commuted the sentence of a convicted perjurer. Well, I guess the Libby case proves that telling the truth isn’t always necessary to set you free.

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Is Bush's Surge Vindicated?

Recently, Bush’s supporters have been chirping that the president’s troop surge into Baghdad has been vindicated because violence in Iraq is in a downward trend. The prospect of a full-scale civil war seems to have abated, and there are encouraging signs that al-Qaeda in Iraq is in retreat. These are welcome tactical developments, but using words like “success” or “victory” would be wholly inappropriate in the context of a war that has otherwise been a strategic and moral calamity for the United States.

For the religious right, however, the campaign in Iraq is not just the central front in the war on terror, but also the central front in a cultural and political crusade to wrest control of the national narrative from the secular left. In other words, the religious right desperately wants to claim some sort of victory in Iraq so that they can declare that God and the tide of history are on their side. When things looked hopeless in Iraq the right insisted that it would be some decades before Bush is vindicated. But when a few encouraging developments materialize the right immediately claims vindication and insists that opponents of the war are in denial.

In reality, the war in Iraq has greatly complicated and compounded the challenges the United States faces. Future historians are more likely to say the Iraq War was “Mission impossible” than they are to say the mission was accomplished, but there are too many variables to know how Iraq will manage to turn out in the end. It is quite possible -- indeed I think it is likely -- that Iraq will be quite better off some decades from now than it would have been under Saddam’s Baath Party rule. However, the benefits of Iraq turning out all right may prove more negligible and irrelevant to America’s interests than the architects of the war ever imagined.

The Iraq War must be understood in a context that includes: the rise of China and India, the twilight of the hydrocarbon era, the challenge of militant Islam, and global warming. The invasion of Iraq has done little to alleviate these challenges; indeed, the botched occupation has drained America’s resources away from these and other pressing issues. It is impossible to tie a single hurricane, wildfire, or similar ecological catastrophe to climate change. But if the United States continues to suffer record economic and environmental devastation predicted by scientific authorities, then even a successful outcome in Iraq will look like an imprudent use of American resources.

The strategic rationale for invading Iraq included the idea of exerting hegemony over the region’s petroleum resources in order that the United States would benefit from China’s voracious appetite for oil. To put it bluntly, the Bush administration wanted to insure that: U.S. and British oil firms benefited from China’s phenomenal economic growth and that oil purchases would be denominated in dollars (which confers enormous benefits to U.S. financial firms). To date, however, the price of oil has risen to $100 a barrel (a five-fold increase since the Bush administration took office) while the dollar is sinking to new lows. In short, invading Iraq has precipitated the exact opposite of the Bush administration’s strategic aims, not just on the economic and energy fronts, but also in so far as it has boosted the jihadist cause worldwide.

The Bush administration is going to have to expend a lot of energy just to undo the damage its ill-considered and ill-executed invasion has wrought. To this end, Condoleezza Rice has organized a Middle Eastern Peace conference to try and contain Iran and ameliorate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An administration that at one time believed to road to peace in the Middle East went through Baghdad, Tehran, and Syria (i.e., regime change) has now flip-flopped in so far as it is embracing diplomacy in a last ditch effort to salvage Bush’s legacy.

The prospects for a positive outcome in Iraq have increased marginally in recent months, but they are still dim. Simply put, the Bush administration’s legacy is at the mercy of external events and the next administration. Unless some cataclysmic event dramatically changes public opinion, neither the next administration nor the American people are likely to be inclined to sustain Bush’s nation building efforts in Iraq. All the parties jockeying for power in Iraq recognize this and they are laying low. As one observer put it, the current lull in violence we are seeing now will be revealed as a great deception.

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Top Ten Policy Achievements of the Bush Administration

10). A lower dollars makes it more likely a foreign buyer can purchase my house before the bank forecloses.

9). Higher prices at the pump means we can afford to spend less on foreign aid that helps oil-producing third world countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

8). Global warming has really increased the potency of my medical marijuana crop.

7). Getting Muslims to fight each other over there in Iraq so they wouldn’t fight us over here is an idea that should have earned the axis-of-clichés, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the Noble Peace Prize.

6). No Money Down, No Interest. No Payments till January, 2009 sure was an affordable way to buy into a war.

5). Hey, who would have thought that George W. Bush could have done so much to rehabilitate the reputations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

4). “Spending the government surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy helped insure we didn’t waste the money on deficit reduction, saving Social Security, or providing health insurance for needy brats. Bah Humbug.” -- Ebenezer Scrooge

3). George Bush has done for politics in America what Vince McMahon did for professional wrestling. Ok, neither is really edifying, but they sure are entertaining.

2). Dirt bike trails used by Bush and his Secret Service entourage are sure to be designated national landmarks by Bush’s successor.

1). Bush’s bridge to nowhere is leading back to anther Clinton White House.

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Bush, God, and the Collapse of the Religious Right

Herman Melville once wrote that a sharing a bed with a sober cannibal was preferable to bedding down with a drunken Christian. After seven years of the Bush administration, the intoxication Evangelicals felt at having one of their own in the White House is giving way to a pretty nasty hangover. To put it mildly, there aren’t many on the religious right anymore who think George W. Bush has been the answer to their prayers.

How could the Bush administration – now recognized by most thinking persons as one of the worst ever – go so wrong when Bush and his followers so earnestly prayed to God for guidance? To paraphrase Nikos Kazantzakis, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man; one shouldn’t expect to get an answer.

The notion of a personal creator God, one that answers prayers and intervenes in history, is not an idea that attracts serious attention among the scientific and philosophically literate. Indeed, many leading thinkers privately believe that religious belief may be a form of mental illness. Certainly, watching the Bush administration self-destruct at it succumbed to its delusions it is pretty hard not to conclude that rationality and religion are incompatible.

Many of the people who helped put Bush into power truly are loony; they believe in preposterous things like the speaking in tongues, Biblical inerrancy, the Rapture, and Armageddon. They also believed that electing a Godly man such as Bush would mean having God’s instrument in the Oval Office. Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib and a thousand other failures of leadership have sorely tested that conviction.

There is nothing more painful than false belief, which is why so many evangelicals are in a state of disillusionment regarding their ill-fated fusion of politics and faith. Surely, the irony is so glaring even fundamentalists can see it: the morally suspect William Jefferson Clinton (the anti-Christ to some on the religious right) is widely regarded as both a successful and popular leader, while George W. Bush is widely recognized and reviled as a disaster.

One of the most salient examples of religious zealotry and foolishness going hand in hand can be seen in the case of Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State who flagrantly used the powers of her office to delay and impede an impartial recount during the disputed 2000 election, effectively undermining the will of the electorate, both in the crucial state of Florida and the United States as a whole.

The flakey Harris, who went on to an undistinguished career in Congress (to put it charitably,) later articulated her belief that America’s leaders needed to be Christians in order to take the government back from the secularists. “If you’re not electing Christians,” she maintained, “then in essence you are going to legislate sin.”

It’s hard to square Harris’ sentiment with water boarding, the sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib, and countless other acts of corruption and lawlessness perpetrated by the Bush administration. But Melville would recognize the perils associated with self-righteous certainty and religious zealotry. After all, his monomaniacal Captain Ahab was convinced he was acting as “Fate’s Lieutenant” as he pursued the incarnation of evil, Moby Dick, “round perdition’s fires.”

Ironically, however, Ahab merely became an agent of the malicious evil he sought to extinguish in his quest to vanquish the great white whale. Tragically, of course, Ahab succeeded only in creating more orphans. There’s a lesson in there for George Bush and his crew; lash out at bogeymen and all too often you come to embody the characteristics you fear and loath.

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Top Ten Reasons to Vote for Dennis Kucinich for President

10) Congressman Kucinich is the only presidential candidate with a comprehensive plan to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq in less than two weeks by using a secret fleet of UFOs based at Roswell.

9) Kucinich’s plan to use his friend Shirley MacLaine to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects telepathically is sure to result in better intelligence than the Bush administration ever got.

8) With the pint-sized Kucinich, we’ll finally have a politician who sides with the little guy.

7) Kucinich’s pledge to name Mr. Spock as his running mate is just what our solar system needs after having Darth Vader reining as VP for eight years.

6) Kucinich’s comprehensive immigration plan will allow extra-terrestrials to apply for a driver’s license, even if they only live on our planet part time.

5) After eight years of Bush as a wartime president it’s about time we had a space cadet as commander-in-chief.

4) Kucinich’s proposal to rename the Defense Department the Peace Department is an idea that’s light years ahead of its time. And so is his idea to rename Air Force One the Starship Enterprise.

3) Kucinich’s plan to reorganize the U.S. Military into a new Starfleet Academy is sure to boost enlistment.

2) It’s about time we had a president who’ll think more about colonizing outer space than the Middle East.

1) Kucinich really is the candidate with the best ideas and values to be president (Unfortunately, the joke here is on Americans who’ll probably end up voting for a candidate as synthetic and artificial as a loaf of Wonder Bread – i.e., Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton – rather than an authentic human being).

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The State of Emergency in Pakistan

“The world is safer without Saddam Hussein” is one of those statements that sounds meaningful, but is actually vacuous nonsense. Is it safer for most Iraqis? Is the threat of global warming accelerating? Are Islamic radicals closer to getting their hands on WMD, perhaps by overturning Pakistan’s shaky government? There are hundreds of question like these one can ask, but most of the answers are unknowable. There are too many “known unknowns,” as the snow flakey former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say.

One thing we do know, however, is that Pakistan -- a pillar of the Bush administration counterterrorism strategy – is crumbling. The recent assassination attempt against Benazir Bhutto, and a state of emergency called by President Musharaff, are indicative of the kind of chaos the country is in. The administration may claim Iraq is making progress, and that this will be a huge setback for the terrorists. But while Iraq has garnered the headlines, Pakistan has arguably become the true front on the war on terror (and to say that we’ve been losing ground in Pakistan would be an understatement).

In a nutshell, the problem with the Bush administration’s approach to Pakistan is that they’ve put all their eggs in Musharaff’s basket. This follows from Bush’s “great man” theory of leadership, the notion that a single individual can turn the tide of history. No doubt, Bush sees himself as a decisive actor, the kind of leader who through force of character and willpower shapes the world’s destiny for the better. It remains to be seen, of course, what verdict History will render regarding Bush: deluded fool or visionary statesman?

It is becoming clear however, that Bush’s destiny increasingly depends on Musharaff’s. The Pakistani general has declared martial law, he is moving to silence journalists and opposition leaders, and he has quarantined the country’s Supreme Court until they ratify his power grab. Whether this will help stabilize or further radicalize Pakistan remains to be seen. It is a test of Bush’s theory of leadership: namely, that great statesmen are a law unto themselves. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal hangs in the balance. Are you feeling safer?

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Bush vs. God

It increasingly looks like evangelicals won’t have a prayer in the 2008 presidential election. The so-called values voters are in a state of disillusionment with George W. Bush, who seems to have fractured nearly everything he’s touched (most notably Iraq, the Republican Party, and the long-hoped for Conservative realignment). Indeed, George Bush’s Road to Nowhere appears to be leading back to the candidate many on the religious-right view as the anti-Christ: namely Hillary Clinton. How could it all go so wrong for the Right?

When you mix religion with politics you get the worst of both worlds. Politics is about compromise, half-measures, give and take, meeting halfway, and cutting practical deals in order to achieve outcomes most of us can accept as we try to make our way in an imperfect world. Religion is about bedrock principles, eternal truths, God’s commandments, and ordering our human affairs to accord with Natural Law. The politician thinks in terms of provisional and incremental progress, while the religious leader frequently surveys the social world and sees social and moral decline.

Abortion, evolution, and secularization are bogeymen as far as leaders on the religious right are concerned. Many of them earnestly believe God will punish the United States if it does not reverse its evil ways, which include a decadent culture, a depraved indifference to fetal life, and an indifference to God in the public arena. I happen to believe that the notion of God punishing the U.S. because Roe vs. Wade is the law of the land is irrational, but that in no way dismisses their legitimate concerns that a widespread and cavalier attitude towards abortion is injurious to the social fabric.

Ironically, many countries that have permissive abortions laws have far lower rates of abortions than countries with Draconian bans on the procedure. The perfect, it seems, is the enemy of the good (a cliché that could well summarize the Bush administration’s tragic errors when it comes to its efforts to export democracy to Iraq).

Evangelicals and the so-called values voters are undergoing a period of heartfelt reflection and reappraisal regarding the infusion of religion and politics. How could a president they prayed so fervently for end up leading America into an abyss of abuse and torture characterized by Abu Ghraib, water boarding, and extraordinary renditions? How could a man of faith, like Bush, make so many fundamental misjudgments? Wasn’t God guiding him?

There’s an Oriental saying that the gods only laugh at those who pray for money. But perhaps prayers directed at political ends elicit heavenly chuckles too. Certainly Bush’s reign has been as much farce as tragedy. Evangelical leaders, incidentally, are distancing themselves from the failures of the Bush administration, a move that more or less excuses the fact that they supported Bush in droves. It seems an agnostic liberal like me – I’ve been sounding the warning bell against Bush ever since the political gods overturned the will of the American people with their indefensible and constitutionally dubious decision in Bush vs. Gore – recognized just how pernicious G.W.B would be for America’s values long before the righteous right did. Now isn’t that a Divine irony? For more on the subject check out this article in The New York Times Magazine.

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Bush vs. Global Warming

Mother Nature is one tough bitch, according to the eminent scientist James Lovelock (originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis). It would be hard to argue with Lovelock after witnessing half-a-million Californians fleeing their homes after yet another season of record wildfires out West. The South East, too, is experiencing dramatically irregular weather patterns, with a record drought depleting Georgia’s water supply so much that residents reportedly have about 90 days worth of water left.

Weather wise, things are starting to get biblical, but according to Lovelock’s the worst is yet to come. Six billion people, Lovelock suggests, may end up victims of global warming. Interested readers can evaluate his dire predictions for themselves at: Rolling Stone. Lovelock, incidentally, doesn't think there's much we can do to stop the worst effects of global warming from materializing because we've already passed the tipping point. Don't the 24% of Americans that still support Bush -- and who once that global warming was a giant hoax perpetrated by the Left -- realize that God would not want a incompetent like Bush to president, unless he wanted to destroy the United States.

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Bush's Balloon

Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq, a record number of Americans (one million) are facing foreclosure, and oil is skirting $90 a barrel. With the housing market hitting the skids, gasoline prices accelerating to $4 a gallon, don’t be surprised if the United States hits a recession by this time next year. All I know is that the administration that botched Katrina, screwed up Iraq, has mismanaged America’s financial situation even more. You can’t cut taxes, flush money down the toilet in Iraq, and expand the size of the government by record levels without some sort of reckoning. The air has been leaking out of Bush’s hot-air balloon for some time, but there may be no soft landing for the rest of the country.

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Bush Wins Nobel Prize for War

George W. Bush is the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for War. The announcement made by the great-great-great grandson of the Prussian military strategist Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz, was greeted by jubilation in the White House Bunker. Previous recipients have included Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Benedict Arnold, General George Armstrong Custer, Napoleon, Mussolini, and the character known as Dr. Strangelove.

The prize, including 250,000 rounds of ammo, will be jointly shared by Bush and the private mercenary firm of Blackwater USA. In announcing their decision the Nobel War Prize committee cited the contribution Bush and Blackwater have made to “capitalize on the fog of war to defeat domestic enemies as a prelude to total war.”

Bush, who has not worn military garb since appearing in his specially-tailored Commander-in-Chief flight four years ago, was on hand to receive the award wearing a black ninja suit and wrap around sunglasses. In accepting the honor Bush quoted his favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, saying: “Throw your soldiers into positions where there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight, if they face the death there is nothing they cannot achieve.” The president then winked and added, “All war is deception.”

In winning the prize, Bush once again stole the limelight from former Vice-President Al Gore who earlier won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in educating the public about global warming. Bush was disdainful of his rival, quoting Orwell’s axiom, “War is Peace,” to buttress his conviction that that the decisions he has made as president – to ignore global warming, scrap the Geneva Conventions, to take the week off during Katrina, and spend billions rebuilding Iraq rather than waste the money at home on pork barrel projects – have been the right ones for the country.

Speaking before audience of foreign policy experts, including Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michele Malkin, Vice-president Dick Cheney argued that his boss’s award vindicated the administration’s war mongering philosophy. Quoting Machiavelli the VP said, “War can only be postponed to the advantage of others.” “We must strike while the iron is hot,” he continued. “Today we are liberating Iraq, tomorrow the world.”

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George Bush and Torture

George Bush’s declamation that the U.S. doesn’t torture is about as convincing as Richard Nixon’s pathetic claim that he wasn’t a crook. The sad truth is that the Bush administration continues to abuse prisoners, the law, and the trust of the American people. Put simply, the coercive interrogation techniques and the culture of lawlessness the Bush administration has fostered are corroding the soul of the United States. Indeed, the Bush administration has managed to virtually destroy America’s good name, a feat no terrorist group could ever hope to accomplish on its own.

After 9/11 the Bush administration made a conscious decision that the gloves were coming off. Ambassador J. Cofer Black, a CIA veteran, who would later go into business with the private security firm Blackwater, promised Bush shortly after 9/11 that he’d have Osama bin Laden’s head on pike for the president. This promise set the tone; the legal niceties against assassination and torture would be suspended. The United States, which ever since its inception had taken a strong stand against torture, would reverse course.

In the aftermath of 9/11 even liberal commentators, most notably Alan Dershowitz, endorsed what is known as the “ticking time bomb” theory, the notion that it is morally acceptable to torture a terrorist if the information we can get from him will help us find and defuse a nuclear device scheduled to blow up a major city. Abstract thought experiments have their utility, no doubt, but reality rarely presents such neat and simple moral dilemmas. Indeed, the ticking time bomb scenario, though improbable in real-life, lends itself to the kind of melodramatic fantasy that passes for entertainment on TV, where good guys can do terrible things (break the law, torture others, etc) and still remain virtuous.

In TV land, torture never dehumanizes the torturer. Likewise, the rouge cop who breaks the law in order to bring the bad guys to justice is vindicated by the time the final credits run. The moral lessons from the typical formulaic TV plot, however, are about as deep as those found in comic books.

The reality, most counterterrorism experts agree, is that individuals being tortured will tell their torturers anything they think they want to hear, thus making it virtually impossible to disentangle solid information from bad. There is evidence that the invasion of Iraq was predicated on false confessions obtained by torture that linked al-Qaeda to Saddam.

The ticking tomb bomb theory is jury rigged in favor of a pro-active course of action. On one side of the scale is enemy combatant whose depravity and guilt are not in doubt, on the other side rests a major metropolitan city with millions of innocent people. But let’s make the scenario more realistic: imagine ten terror suspects, out of which only one holds the crucial information, with the rest of the bunch including at least one completely innocent individual? Would it still be morally acceptable to torture all ten suspects even if we only had 10% percent chance of getting our hands on the right info in time to avert a mushroom cloud?

I assume most of us would find it acceptable to allow a single innocent individual to suffer unjustified torture if in the process we somehow managed to ensure a 10% percent chance of saving millions of people versus a 0% chance if no torture took place. However, modifying the ticking time bomb experiment in this way shows how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope when it comes to torture.

Is it acceptable, for instance, to sacrifice 1,500 Iraqis a month if we stand a fifty-fifty chance of building a better Middle East within the next twenty years, thus reducing the chances of another 9/11? The question seems positively perverse the more you think about it. But the Bush administration has more or less taken a hypothetical query like that and made it official policy. According to the administration’s moral calculus 600,000 dead and 4 million displaced Iraqis are counterbalanced by a hypothetical future where America will be safer because we defused a powder keg in the Middle East. This is a rather messy version of the ticking time bomb experiment. And the line between those we’ve tortured and those we’ve saved is even more convoluted.

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Onward Christian Soldiers

Apologists for the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq have long claimed that the invasion was a way of “draining the swamp,” so to speak, in the Middle East. The “swamp” metaphor, of course, is a close cousin to their “flypaper” theory, which holds that hordes of terrorists will be drawn to Iraq by America’s presence where they can be exterminated en masse. Ironically, Iraq has become a magnet for another specimen associated with swamplands – Blackwater USA, the mercenary outfit whose headquarters is situated along what is known as the Great Dismal Swamp in the foothills of North Carolina.

Blackwater, which has garnered headlines recently for allegedly massacring unarmed Iraqi civilians in a series of unprovoked attacks, exists at the intersection of a number of troubling trends: the privatization of warfare, the incestuous connection between Republican political donors and public officials, and the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by right-wing Christian extremists. No firm exemplifies this axis-of-ills more than Blackwater.

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by Erik Prince, a reclusive former Navy Seal. The hyper-wealthy Prince is a devout Christian with ties to many right-wing organizations dedicated to promoting a libertarian and socially conservative agenda. Such groups militantly oppose abortion, homosexual marriage, and secular character of American society. They believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that America’s law and culture must reflect our Biblical heritage. Citizens like Prince have funneled vast sums to conservative Republican candidates in the hopes of bringing about a cultural revolution in the United States.

Blackwater amounts to a private army, which includes 20,000 elite troops, twenty aircraft, and a state of the art military base. And the war on terror has literally been a godsend for the company. For instance, by some estimates Blackwater has received close to $1 billion dollars in government contracts, making it essentially “the fifth branch of the U.S military.” Business for Blackwater certainly picked up after 9/11, but the invasion of Iraq was a mother lode for the company. As the Times of London noted, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security.” And as the security situation in Iraq worsened, Blackwater’s profit potential exploded.

The invasion of Iraq provided enormous profit opportunities for firms like Blackwater, but many right-wing groups saw the idea of spreading democracy in Iraq as an opportunity to promote Christian teachings and values in the Muslim world, which they believed would be an antidote Islamic extremism. Christianity and capitalism could cure the ills of the Middle East.
Blackwater embodies the idea that one can serve God and mammon. A deeper problem, however, is that democracy and private mercenary armies are incompatible. Put simply, the expansion of for-profit armies erodes democracy (in so far as private interest and the public good are severed). For instance, when the profit incentive for going to war is great, then democratic checks and balances become a nuisance that the military-industrial-security-disaster complex will seek to circumvent and dismantle.

The run up to the war in Iraq is a case in point. That is, if a real democratic debate had taken place regarding the threat posed by Saddam, with the facts, evidence, and arguments weighed and deliberately and honestly, then the United States probably never would have invaded Iraq. But with billions of dollars at stake, then war profiteers had an enormous incentive to manipulate the political process to achieve the outcome they desired. When you add ideological fervor to the profit motive, then making a killing in Iraq can even seem morally justified.

Firms like Blackwater represent and ominous development for self-government and the separation of church and state. The existence of private armies controlled by a single individual (or loyal to a religious ideology) is a throwback to the feudal era. Despite Blackwater’s perfect record of safeguarding every American diplomat it has contracted to protect, the firm has greatly compounded America’s efforts in Iraq with its heavy-handed and that have alienated ordinary Iraqis. “Ye shall know them by their fruits” is a tenet that the Christian soldiers at Blackwater have failed to live up

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Bush's Strategic Stupidity

George Bush’s tenure is turning out to be a tragedy for the United States. Most Americans, by now, are at least dimly aware that Bush is leading the country in the wrong direction, but only as small percentage recognizes how this accidental president has tipped the United States towards a precipitous and probably irreversible decline. Put simply, through a mix of arrogance and obtuseness, Bush has managed to enmesh the United States in a series of vicious cycles that are steadily eroding America’s vitality. If the present tends continue, historians will almost certainly correlate Bush’s ascension to the White House with America’s 21st century decline.

A vicious cycle is a self-defeating pattern where bad habits lead to deleterious outcomes, which tend to reinforce bad habits that lead to even worse outcomes. For instance, imagine a drunk who drinks because he is poor; the more he drinks the poorer he gets, which leads him to drink even more, which only worsens his condition. The United States, courtesy George W. Bush, is enacting similar self-defeating behaviors on a number of fronts.

America’s energy habits are at the heart of several interrelated vicious cycles: 1) global warming, 2) terrorism, and 3) Iraq. For example, America’s voracious appetite for fossil fuels is spewing carbon into the atmosphere, which causes the planet to heat up, which is increasing the potential for ecological catastrophes, which will ultimately threaten the prosperity, stability, and future of civilization itself.

The high demand for fossil fuels has another consequence: high oil prices mean more money for jihadists and anti-American forces. Indeed, as Thomas Friedman notes in what he calls the First Law of Petro-politics: the higher the price of oil, the slower the pace of reform in the Middle East. This is because mullahs, clerics, and dictators flush with petro-dollars can afford to forgo economic development and thwart political and cultural reforms.

The West’s need for cheap oil, of course, is a large reason for America’s presence in Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was supposed to break the back of OPEC, thus driving down the price of oil to the $15-$20 region, which would have rescued America’s ailing automakers (which can’t sell as many gas guzzlers when oil is expensive). Instead, the botched occupation in Iraq has helped drive oil prices to new highs (and high oil prices benefit American adversaries like Iran).
So, the Bush administration overacted to a threat that didn’t exist (Saddam’s alleged WMD) and failed to act to a real and growing threat (global warming). And the steps it has taken have only compounded the challenges America faces. Most ironically, however, the United States is mortgaging its future by borrowing money from China so that we can continue to buy oil from the Middle East, which only increases the blowback we’ll face from terrorism and global warming. In other words, we are burdening future generations with debt that pays for the foolish and selfish choices the Bush administration is making today.

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Target Iran?

According to an investigative report by Seymour Hersh, “Shifting Targets, published in the New Yorker, the Bush administration is preparing surgical military operations against Iran. As Hersh sees it, Bush/Cheney (rather than admit their own ineptness) have decided to blame Iran for the lack of progress in Iraq. And they are determined to hit Iran hard in order to dissuade Iran from seeking to extend its influence in Iraq.

Hersh makes it clear that the U.S. is already a proxy war against Iran in Iraq. Further, Bush & Cheney believe that a combination of air power and Special Forces ground operations could decapitate and discredit the most radical elements in the Republican Guard. Unfortunately, the same wishful-thinking (and the failure to imagine the worst-case scenarios) that characterized the fiasco in Iraq are being repeated in the run up to a confrontation with Iran. The Bush administration never talks about the lessons of Iraq, which is why they seem destined to repeat their errors on an even grander scale.

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Blackwater Blues

Machiavelli disdained mercenaries, which should tell you something. And so did America’s Founding Fathers. But for a variety of political and economic reasons the Bush administration has increasingly come to rely on a privatized form of warfare. The war in Iraq has been profitable for many American companies, most notably the North Carolina based firm of Blackwater USA . But in more ways than not these firms have undermined America’s efforts in Iraq. Indeed, private security firms like Blackwater have been implicated in numerous incidents – the torture and abuse of prisoners, unprovoked shootings, and even the sale of weaponry to insurgents – that have greatly complicated America’s situation in Iraq.

The recent shootout out involving Blackwater security personnel is a case in point. Eleven Iraqi civilians were killed, including a mother and her infant daughter, after Blackwater employees opened fire on an Iraqi vehicle that failed to stop when ordered. The incident grew so heated that U.S. troops founded themselves in the middle of an armed standoff between Blackwater and the Iraqi Army while one Blackwater employee threatened to shoot another. In short, Blackwater had somehow managed to tick off every faction imaginable, except their stockholders.

Blackwater is proving to be divisive in many other ways; Blackwater personnel tend to make ten times what ordinary grunts make, engendering tremendous resentment among U.S. troops. Further, firms like Blackwater operate largely outside Iraqi and U.S. law, which means that they are almost entirely unaccountable (hence they are deeply resented by the Iraqi government).
The United States has 160,000 private contactors in Iraq, and 50,000 fit in the category of being mercenaries. Perversely, it is in their financial interests that Iraq remains the kind of place where their services are needed. Firms like Blackwater will continue to make a killing so long as the carnage continues.

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Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Folly: Bush vs. Gore Revisited

Officials and government insiders are ditching the Bush administration faster than the corporate sponsors that dumped Michael Vick, the disgraced quarterback recently indicted for dogfighting. Put simply, being associated with the administration of George W. Bush is becoming a badge of dishonor. For instance, Alan Greenspan, Paul O’Neill, Matthew Dowd, Colin Powell, and a host of others are stepping forward to preemptively disassociate themselves from the disasters Bush has wrought. The latest is former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who now describes Bush – the candidate she voted for twice in the 2000 election! -- as “arrogant, lawless, incompetent, and extreme.”

O’Connor’s mea culpa is on target, if a bit late. But her broadside against Bush could very well describe the majority’s dubious legal rationale in the infamous Bush vs. Gore decision, where she was the decisive vote that installed the very man she now derides. Talk about flip-floppers.

The vast majority of Constitutional scholars have long recognized that the Court’s decision in that case was right out of Alice in Wonderland – “Sentence first, verdict later.” Put simply, the majority disgraced itself when it abrogated its responsibility to be an impartial umpire and instead allowed itself to become an instrument for pursuing and exploiting partisan advantage.

Justice O’Connor (if putting those two words together don't amount to an oxymoron) put her ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party before her loyalty to the country and the cause of justice and equality before the law. In her most important decision she revealed herself to be nothing more than a political hack. Her legal reasoning, always shallow at best, was especially thin in the case of Bush vs. Gore. Interestingly, in overturning the will of the electorate – the majority of whom had voted for Gore – the fastidious O’Connor went on the blame Florida’s voters for being sloppy and stupid with their ballots. The verdict of history, however, is in the process of reversing O’Connor’s decision. It isn’t stupid and sloppy voters in Florida -- who had to contend with illegal purges, confusing ballot designs, systematic irregularities, inferior punch card voting machines, and the like -- who got it wrong, it is O’Connor who screwed up. And she botched it with a decision filled with stupid, sloppy, and disingenuous reasoning. At least O’Connor can see how wrong she was. Now that’s what I call poetic justice.

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The New Axis of Evil: Bush, Britney, and O.J.

Here’s a story you won’t hear from the mainstream media: following current events too closely may do grave injury to your mental health. O.J. is on the loose, kind of, out on bail on kidnapping charges, which will probably only increase the value his autographed memorabilia is fetching.

The Clintons are once again enveloped in a scandal involving an Asian con artist. It’s seem the Clinton’s political and financial fortunes are about as Kosher as the Pork Chop Suey you might buy from a street vendor in Chinatown. And just as you wouldn’t eat at a Chinese restaurant if you saw them preparing the food, so you wouldn’t vote for the Clintons is you saw where they got their money.

Meanwhile, Britney Spears is still getting behind the wheel, George Bush still has 16th months to go as the leader of the free world, and Dick Cheney wants to nuke Iran. And do you know the worst part of all this? The Mullahs in Tehran want the United States to attack their country to generate an anti-American backlash! Here is a message for the clerics in Iran: If you want to engender an anti-American backlash in among your people, then just invite O.J. and Brittany over for a visit. It will save the Bush administration a lot of cruise missiles and I’m sure Britney would look good in a veil.

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Bush vs. O.J Simpson

O.J is back in jail, a Clinton political donor is in the slammer, and a president named George Bush has U.S. troops camping out in the Persian Gulf. It seems like the 1990’s. Or as Yogi Berra would say, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Actually, it would be pretty nice to travel back in time to a period when the White House scandals mostly involved sex. Bush has his Democratic Peace Theory – spreading democracy will lessen the chances for war. But I have what I’m calling the Lusty Peace Theory – spreading sexy young interns throughout the White House will lessen the chances of war. Of course, my theory may not hold up if America elects Hillary.

Too bad I don't have a theory about how to keep O.J. out of trouble, except to lock the guy up and throw away the key this time. After all, the argument his lawyers made at his previous trial -- If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit -- was even less persuasive than the legal rationale that decided Bush vs. Gore. And now look at the trouble we're in.

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Greenspan Bashes Bush

George W. Bush is about as popular these days as French philosopher hanging out at a NASCAR barbecue. The deservedly unpopular president lost another aficionado when former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan blasted Bush this weekend for his fiscally ruinous economic policies. Yes, the economy is supposed to be one of the administration’s bright spots in a record marred by Iraq, Katrina, and Constitutional misrule, but if Greenspan is correct the bottom could soon drop out as the country faces an axis-of-ills: recession, inflation, and a monster deficit.

According to Greenspan, who at onetime gave the green light to Bush’s 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut, in future years the Fed Reserve will be forced to raise interest rates to double digit amounts in order to counteract inflation. Raising rates to fight inflation could not come at a worse time because the United States is already facing a credit crunch and an economic slowdown associated with the housing bubble. Many believe that as foreclosures rise, cash-strapped consumers, unable to use the equity in their homes as an ATM machines, will cut back spending, leading to a recession. Put simply, the average American are as maxed from the mall out as American forces are from Iraq.

This brings us to the Middle East. The Bush administration, in its bottomless wisdom, pushed ahead with its 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut at one of the least propitious moments possible; soon after discovering that the projected surpluses from the Clinton years were not going to materialize after all, and just before launching its disastrous venture in Iraq, which by some estimates could cost $2 trillion or more.

If you want unvarnished economic advice from a trusted authority figure, then perhaps you’ll find Dick Cheney’s assertion, that “deficit’s don’t matter,” reassuring. However, if you want my advice you’d be wise to spend your tax cut now before the sinking dollar depreciates even further.

Greenspan also offered his view on Iraq, confessing that "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Spoken like an honest libertarian (though many less candid libertarians (Cheney, for instance) seem not the least bit apologetic or embarrassed about privatizing warfare).

The Bush administration’s fiscal policies will eventually prove as rash and imprudent as its decision to invade and occupy Iraq. Just as Iraq is a vicious cycle (the invasion has had the effect of driving up the price of oil, which fuels Iran anti-Western forces like Iran and al-Qaeda), so the Bush deficit will push up interest rates, which will hamper economic growth growing forward. Eventually these two vicious cycles will reinforce each other as higher oil prices, higher interest rates, a bigger deficit, and declining dollar lead to slowing economic growth, which will make most Americans poorer and less secure. Well, As Bush once said of his tax cuts, “It’s your money, you paid for it.” At least that sounds more honest than Bush’s latest slogan “return on success.”

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Bush's Simulated Version of Reality

As the governor of Texas, George W. Bush visited a juvenile prison in order to reinforce his image as tough but compassionate conservative dedicated to reforming the juvenile justice system. After Bush’s photo-op tour, a young African-American inmate, a petty thief named Johnny Demon Baulkmon, asked the governor a simple but affecting question: What do you think of us now? Bush seized the moment to demonstrate his tough-love brand of conservatism. He grew misty eyed as he explained to the young man, “The state of Texas loves you all. We haven’t given up on you. But we love you enough to punish you when you break the law.”

The governor’s aides and supporters high-fived one another following the encounter; indeed, Bush frequently recounted the incident to friends and made it the centerpiece of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2000. Bush would run as a different kind of Republican, a compassionate conservative and a reformer with results.

Things would not turn out so well for Johnny Demon Baulkmon, however. He was raped by another juvenile shortly thereafter. And in 2006, Baulkmon, now serving time in an adult prison for petty theft, would say of Bush, “He doesn’t care about anything but himself. He’s complete trash, a horrible evil person.” A harsh verdict, perhaps, but the full story does not reflect well on Bush’s claim to be a reformer with results (or the effectiveness of his Responsibility Era reforms).

One cannot blame Bush personally, of course for all that has gone wrong on Johnny Baulkom’s life. But the incident seems symptomatic of Bush’s penchant for staging phony photo-ops – think “Mission Accomplished” – that allow him to project a grandiose and overly idealized image, but one that is completely divorced from reality. Bush is hardly the only politician to try and make superficial incidents appear substantive. But with Bush, the Baulkmon encounter seems the norm rather than the exception. No doubt, Bush’s aides and supporters were high-fiving themselves after his “Mission Accomplished” speech, but it wasn’t long thereafter when the evidence of sodomy and torture abuses at Abu Ghraib began to surface.

The Bush administration is attempting to present modest tactical successes associated with the surge as a significant strategic advance. However, much of the so-called progress the administration cites is either misleading or likely to be ephemeral. For instance, sectarian violence may have declined, but much of this is accounted for by the fact that four million Iraqis are now in exile, and most neighborhoods have already been ethnically cleansed. Further, the much ballyhooed American alliance with Sunni insurgents against al-Qaeda is a largely tactical alliance of convenience by the Sunnis aimed at offsetting Shiite military superiority. We are very likely arming and empowering warlords and militias preparing for civil war.

The situation in Iraq is grim and it is likely to remain so when Bush leaves office in about fifteen months. The prospect of national reconciliation in Iraq is much lower than the prospect of a larger civil war. Nevertheless, the Bush administration will continue to sell its version of simulated reality. Bush has used Iraq as political prop, but it hasn’t fared much better than Johnny Demon Baulkman.

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Is The Surge Working?: Biden vs. Graham.

A Lebanese historian once cautioned that “great powers should never get caught up in the politics of local tribes.” That’s a pretty accurate assessment, unfortunately, of why America’s intervention in Iraq has gone so wrong. The United States is spending $10 billion dollars a month in Iraq and it is now losing an average of sixty soldiers a month. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham believes this sacrifice is worth it because he foresees the prospect of a political reconciliation within the next couple of months. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, on the other hand, argues that America will be forced to evacuate Baghdad with the next couple of years, and that our departure will resemble the fall of Saigon unless we dramatically alter our approach in Iraq. Given that the bitter Sunni-Shia schism that has existed for centuries and the fact that implanting democracy takes generations, it seems Pollyannaish in the extreme to expect that Iraq’s factions will reach any kind of political settlement in the foreseeable future.

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Bush's Dead Certainty

Bush contends that history cannot judge his presidency until long after he’s dead. Historians are still debating about George Washington, Bush contends, so how can they presume to render a verdict without the vantage point of time. Bush is not entirely wrong here, but he is betraying a glaring contradiction: how can he be dead certain that he will be vindicated by history when his perspective is inevitably subject to the same limitations he is imposing on his critics? How can he be sure that the chaos in Iraq will inevitably organize itself in the direction he envisions?

Bush is relatively young (60) as far as presidents go. He has good genes and appears to be in robust health. It is not unreasonable to expect that he will be alive for decades to come. Most Americans recognized the Carter administration was a failure immediately after it ended, and that verdict has not changed in the intervening decades. Similarly, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, is, and always will be a catastrophic blunder. The passage of time will not appreciably change these instant verdicts.

Bush’s assertion that history cannot hold him account until he is history doesn’t hold up. This assertion is on par with Bush’s numerous feeble and discredited prognostications. One thing is certain, however, a lot of America troops and Iraqis are going to going to give their lives because Bush is determined to proof himself right. The only other certainty I can think of is that Bush will never admit he’s wrong, no matter what the facts are. But hey, America’s worst president to date, Andrew Johnson, believed to his dying day that he’d be vindicated too.

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Bush and the Art of War

Every time the Bush administration has dug itself a hole it’s asked for a bigger shovel to dig itself out. This thought is worth bearing in mind as talk of a U.S. airstrike against Iran heats up. No doubt, there are hard-line elements in Iran bent on disrupting America’s efforts in Iraq. There aim is multi-fold: 1) Keep America bleeding in Iraq so that it is less capable of responding to Iran’s nuclear program. 2) Force the United States into a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq, which would then leave Iran as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. 3) Goad the Bush Administration into launching preemptive strikes against Iran, which would rally a pro-American Iranian public around the fundamentalist regime.

The discerning reader will notice there is more than a kernel of contradiction between these three goals. But these incongruities do not work to America’s benefit: The United States can lose by staying in Iraq, by quitting Iraq, or by attacking Iran. For the Bush administration, which has inadvertently furthered Iran’s interests by thoroughly botching the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the prospect of a game changing strike against Iran may seem like a gamble worth taking. Put simply, George Bush and Dick Cheney do not want to go down in as the architects of the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. Accordingly, in their view the best way to get Iraq’s recalcitrant militias into line would be to decapitate their sponsors in Iran.

There is also the related problem of Iran’s nuclear program, which if successful would: a) instantly transform Iran into the dominant power in the Gulf, b) provoke a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, c) destabilize the entire region, d) leave the West over a barrel (of oil). In a nutshell, the United States cannot disengage from the Middle East without suffering catastrophic economic and geopolitical consequences. Nor can it easily continue to sustain the Bush administration’s present course, which has decimated America’s image abroad, divided the country at home, and stretched America’s military to the breaking point.

Attacking Iran can be understood as escaping forward, which is military jargon for launching a frontal assault when faced with an increasingly untenable position. As a military gambit, escaping forward is often the soundest choice one can make when facing dire straights. However, most military experts believe that it would be sheer lunacy for the Bush administration to launch a preemptive attack against Iran. After all, Iran could probably close the Straits of Hormuz, the transit way for more than 30% percent of the world’s oil. And U.S. troops in Iraq would be highly vulnerable to retaliation from groups controlled by Tehran. Indeed, a direct assault on Iran could unleash a wave of terror attacks across the globe launched by Iranian controlled sleeper networks.

So, what’s a superpower to do? The Iranian regime’s greatest vulnerability is the price of oil. In fact, if the price of oil were to drop precipitously the mullahs in Iran would likely lose their grip on power fairly quickly. It is axiomatic, for instance, that the ruling elites in petro states are corrupt and cannot sustain their rule without subsidizing inefficient state industries, supporting the security apparatuses, and buying off the political opposition. Significantly decrease the amount of petro profits flowing into the clerics’ coffers and the Iranian regime will collapse of its own accord, just as the Soviet Union did when oil prices hit bottom in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War the successful commander is the one who can defeat his enemy before the first battle even begins. Many military experts consider Sun Tzu’s meditations on warfare the most important observations ever made on the topic. But for Sun Tzu, the ideal commander-in-chief is not characterized primarily by his (or her) military skill or his genius for combat, but rather for his (or her) ability to achieve greater social harmony. The war in Iraq, or a war against Iran, is unlikely to engender a more harmonious and balanced world. However, recognizing the ecological dimension behind the conflicts America faces gives us the opportunity to adapt our energy habits so they no longer feed the forces that threaten us. Before striking Iran it is worth pondering a question that the Bush administration failed to ask before attack Iraq: what would Sun Tzu do?

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Is George W. Bush Driving you Crazy? Take This Multiple Choice Test to Find Out

It is my deeply held conviction that the world is crazier than I am. Of course, I’m close to certifiable myself, so this must mean the rest of the world is off its rocker. For those of you who are completely sane, you have my deepest sympathy. After all, trying to maintain one’s sanity in an insane world is sure to drive you crazy, eventually. If you don’t believe the world is just plain irrational just consider trying to pass this Psychological Inventory prepared by the APA meant to test your mental stability:

1) You are in a lavatory stall when a conservative Republican Congressman peeks his head beneath the divider. Do you?

a) Give him a campaign contribution and run like hell.
b) Ask him if he thinks Bush’s surge is working.
c) Thank him for championing legislation that upholds the sanctity of marriage.
d) Ask him if he liked Will Ferrell wearing leotards in the movie Blades of Glory.
e) Wear pampers like astronaut Lisa Nowak and avoid public restrooms altogether.

The correct answer, of course, is none of the above. You should probably spray the congressman with mace and move your family to Canada. But because this is a multiple choice test devised by the mental health professionals any answer that you give can be interpreted as a sign that you are truly disturbed. For instance:

2) Imagine you are the president of the United States of America. You’ve just ordered the invasion of country X, but you have inadvertently started a civil war. Your generals tell you that cutting and running will spark a regional conflagration and staying the course will destroy America’s military. Do you?

a) See if the job you really wanted -- baseball commissioner – is still available.
b) Do what you always do when you screw up; ask mom and dad for help.
c) Take troops from country X and invade country Y.
d) Blame the politicians in Washington.

Once again, the correct answer is none of the above. The world was a mess before you took office and it will be a mess after you leave. If the next guy/gal wants your job so bad, then let them figure out what to do.

The next question he designed to test if you have a conflict between the delusions of grandeur we all harbor and a natural resentment of authority figures.

3) President Bush reminds me of which fictional superhero?

a) Inspector Clouseau
b) Mr. Bean
c) The Wizard of Oz
d) Captain Kirk
e) The Lone Ranger

This one had me stumped, I admit, till I realized it was all of the above. Now, here’s a question designed to test your moral reasoning:

4) You are pulling in $6 billion a year salary as the manager of an exclusive hedge fund, but hordes of deadbeat sub-prime borrowers can’t keep up with the double-digit spike in their adjustable rate mortgages. If they default, then the value of the assets in your portfolio will be worthless. The best course of action is to:

a) Call the Fed Chairman collect and ask him to print more money so that someone -- anyone – will have enough money to buy the junk bonds you need to sell pronto.
b) Call the President collect and ask him to read, Socialism for the Rich: Why Deficits Don’t Matter, by economist Ken Lay. Then read him the riot act and tell him he needs to cut taxes right away on capital gains, inheritances, and financial windfalls.
c) Buy every Lotto and Powerball ticket in the country.
d) Ebenezer Scrooge was right; foreclosing on deadbeats is the only way to engender fiscal responsibility.

The correct answer, of course, is none of the above. The savvy hedge fund manager should immediately recognize that his best bet is to liquefy his position by selling his worthless stock and bond certificates on EBay, before some other hedge fund manager gets wise and has the same idea.

Congratulations! You’ve just complete the APA’s Psychological Inventory designed to measure your degree of personal psychosis. By now you are probably wondering how you fared? Just count up the number of belly laughs, chuckles, and snickers you experienced in taking this test. If you:

1) Laughed five or more times – You are psychologically well adjusted and are probably qualified to serve as Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
2) Chuckled twice and snickered once – Go back and take this test again and see if you can’t do better next time.
3) You didn’t laugh once – You are definitely a Republican and you probably think Barack Hussein Obama is the leader of the terrorist organization that attacked America.

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Mr. Bush and Mr. Bean

George Bush is to statecraft what Mr. Bean is to vacations; both threaten disaster at every turn. Actually, when it comes to rebuilding New Orleans and Iraq, America would probably be a lot better of if we had Mr. Bean at the helm instead of Mr. Bush. This week marks the second anniversary of Bush’s mishandling of the Katrina disaster. However, Bush is still desperately seeking to salvage his legacy not by rebuilding New Orleans, but by trying to reconstruct Iraq after America’s invasion turned the country into a failed state. Press reports indicate the Bush administration may ask Congress and the taxpayers for an additional $ 50 billion this September, roughly four-fifths of the cost of what is needed to repair America’s ailing bridges and highways.

When the final tab comes due, Iraq is almost certain to be Bush’s $2 trillion Bridge to Nowhere (which will provide a new twist on the slogan Bush once used to describe his economic philosophy: “It’s your money, you paid for it”). The Bush administration claims, of course, that although it may have made a few teensy weensy mistakes in the past, this time they have Iraq moving in the right direction. Indeed, one conservative interest group is spending $15 million to run an ad campaign in decisive Congressional districts in hopes staving of a Republican defection from the president’s Iraq policy come September.

A newly leaked summary of a report prepared by the General Accounting Office presents a grim assessment of the “progress” being made in Iraq. In short, the report indicates that the Iraqi government has made little or no progress towards meeting 15 out of the 18 benchmarks that have been set by Congress and the president.

More ominous, by far, is the fact that Iraq’s much maligned prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has been hinting that he may have to find new friends (Iran or Russia) to replace the United States as a stabilizing force in the country. Is this the thanks we get for ensuring the free and fair elections that helped place al-Maliki in power? Actually, as David Ignatius reports in the Washington Post, the Iranians funneled so much money to Shiite religious candidates favorable to Iran, that they essentially bought the outcome they wanted. Indeed, 5,000 Iranians a week slipped into Iraq with counterfeit credentials that the results in Baghdad were even more suspect than the results in Palm Beach, Florida during the 2000 election.

In sum, the triumph of “free elections” hailed by the Bush administration as a milestone in Middle Eastern politics appear to have paved the way for Iran’s dominance of Iraq, and the Persian Gulf. Mr. Bush, like Mr. Bean, is largely oblivious to all this. There is one difference between Mr. Bush and Mr. Bean: Mr. Bean makes me laugh, but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when watching Mr. Bush.

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Bush vs. History and the Future of Iraq

During the final year of WWI the Germans won a series of tactical victories before losing the war. A befuddled public was fed the right-wing myth that defeatists in the high command had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, essentially stabbing the Fatherland in the back. This falsehood would find favor with a certain bohemian corporal, one Adolf Hitler, who would launch a second world war to avenge Germany’s humiliation in the first. Needless to say, Germany’s decision to refight a war it had lost ended up creating an even greater catastrophe.

Fast forward 60 years, and George W. Bush is invoking America’s humiliation in Vietnam as a rationalization for staying the course in Iraq. Bush represents a fringe in American politics that believes America could have, should have, and would have prevailed in Vietnam, if only America’s leaders had had the will to win. This reactionary element has never seen America’s involvement in Vietnam as a strategic blunder, the product of defective assumptions and pathological misjudgments, but rather as a test of American character that the nation failed. In their view, spineless liberals lost Vietnam. Ipso facto, weak-willed leftists will be responsible for our failure in Iraq (notwithstanding conservative incompetence in waging the campaign in Iraq).

Over the next several months, the Bush administration will be trying to use whatever tactical benefits the so-called surge is producing to cover for the fact that America’s strategic position in Iraq is unraveling. Put simply, despite modestly encouraging developments associated with the surge – Sunni insurgents training their sights on al-Qaeda in Iraq, for instance -- the overall situation in Iraq is a worsening disaster for America’s interests. The longer the Bush administration remains in denial, the worse the denouement in Iraq is likely to be.

Bismarck once famously remarked that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” If this is true, then in follows that so long as the United States is fighting in Iraq it is because the political process, diplomatic efforts, and reconciliation are failing. The question, of course, is can the United States military turn the situation in Iraq around?

A game changing moment is always possible, but the centrifugal forces in Iraq appear to be tipping in the direction of greater chaos. The Maliki government in Iraq appears to have no interest in pursuing political reconciliation. Indeed, the Shiite dominated government gives every indication of stalling for time, essentially waiting the Bush administration out, so that it can proceed apace with its campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Sunnis.

The Bush administration, eager to find some glimmer of hope in the disaster it has wrought, points to the recent Sunni-American alliance against al-Qaeda in Iraq, as proof of progress. This short-term success, however, may actually undermine Iraq’s long-term prospects (in so far as American efforts to arm Sunni militia are an unwelcome development as far as the Shiite dominated central government is concerned). Further, we should be under no illusions that the Sunni insurgents have suddenly become pro-American; they just hate al-Qaeda more than they hate us at the moment. In other words, once they finish fighting al-Qaeda, or Shiites, they might very well turn the guns we’ve given them back on us.

There’s another complication on the horizon for America’s efforts in Iraq; sometime in December, Iraq’s prime minister will have to request that the United Nations renew its Security Council Resolution that provides the legal basis for the U.S. occupation. It is possible that Maliki will no longer be in office at that point, but the Iraqi parliament has already passed a bill requiring the prime minister to consult the legislature on the matter of renewing the Security Council Resolution. They have also passed a non-binding resolution calling for a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal. The upshot, in other words, is that come December the U.S. could very easily be voted out of Iraq, while an American adversary (Iran or Russia) is invited in to fill the vacuum.

The Bush administration, of course, would likely ignore anything from the U.N. Security Council, but it may be tempted to launch a preemptive attack against Iran to change the equation ahead of time. One thing is for sure, the Bush administration is not about to let Iraq’s parliament decide the fate of Iraq.

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Bush's and Absolute Power

Absolute power doesn’t corrupt, as Lord Acton once supposed, but it does reveal character. In the case of George W. Bush, his stint as commander-in-chief has exposed the fact that the 53,000,000 Americans voted for a man who suffers from a glaring lack of substance.

Bush, when you get down to it, is a rather pedestrian character, but his privileged background has imbued him with delusions of grandeur. He does not appear to have learned from his failures, in part because he has never had to face the consequences of failing. Whether it was his alcoholism, his multiple failures in the oil business, or the fact that his father’s friends on the Supreme Court had to bail him out before anyone examined the ballots too closely, Bush is the kind of guy who always got promoted despite his performance, not because of it.

Lincoln suffered from depression, F.D.R. from polio, but George Bush is just plain insufferable. There’s no better example of Bush’s unbearable obliviousness than when interviewers ask him to discuss the topic of asking Americans to sacrifice on behalf of the nation during a time of war. Apparently, as Bush sees it, Americans are sacrificing too much already just by spending a few extra minutes going through airport security. Perish the thought that Americans might be asked to forgo their tax cuts or face a military draft.

One problem with Bush is that he cannot match means with ends. No doubt, this has something to do with the fact that Bush has always achieved his ends without having to bother with the means. For instance, Bush’s oil ventures kept drilling dry holes, but wealthy investors bought him out to curry favor with his highly placed father. Bush’s stock went up, even as his business ventures went bust. No wonder, then, that Bush has a sense that no matter how much he screws up a deus ex machina will intervene at the last possible moment to make everything right.

Bush’s shallowness is apparent in ad hoc style of his arguments. For example, at one time Bush vigorously rejected any comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, but lately Bush has been drawing analogies between Vietnam and Iraq to argue America cannot leave Iraq without creating a humanitarian disaster. Implicit in Bush’s argument, of course, is the notion that America should have remained in Vietnam longer, as if prolonging that mistake could have prevented disaster.

But Bush was against nation building before he was for it, so it is best not to scrutinize his arguments too carefully. Bush has always been a flip-flopper, but he gets away with it because he has no shame in accusing his opponents of engaging in the very tactics he employs. Bush, when you get down to it, will spout whatever slogan or line of argument he thinks will let him get his way. His Vietnam analogy is tailor made to try and pin the blame for losing Iraq on the Democrats. Bush was given virtually absolute power, but the only accomplishment Bush has demonstrated is his ability to skirt responsibility.

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Alberto Gonzales Resigns

Most Americans would sooner trust Michael Vick to walk their dogs than trust Alberto Gonzales with the law. Gonzales has been both Bush's loyal lap dog and the president's pit bull when it came to shredding the Constitution. His tenure will be remembered for his dubious rationalizations for scrapping the Geneva Conventions, his efforts to turn the Justice Department into the political arm of the Republican Party, and his shameless effort to hoodwink a desperately ill John Ashcroft into signing off on unconstitutional procedures associated with the administration's illegal wiretapping program. No wonder Gonzales suffered from amnesia every time he was called to account for his activities.

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George Bush vs. Vietnam

The ordinary person learns from experience. The wise person learns from the experience of others. But the fool never learns. I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which group George W. Bush belongs to. It is clear, however, that Bush exhibits about as much sagacity in military matters as Inspector Clouseau demonstrates in law enforcement. The draft-dodging Bush, never served in Vietnam, but he has no compunction about Swift Boating veterans like John Kerry and Max Cleland, casting them as weak-willed surrender monkeys.

John Kerry, of course, served and was wounded in a war he opposed. George Bush, on the other hand, was gung-ho about a war he took pains to avoid serving in. Which contradiction is more ironic? Kerry’s experience taught him that America’s involvement in Vietnam was misguided from the start, which led him to pose the following question intended to end the war:” How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” It is a tragedy of historic proportions that Bush, the man who failed to serve in Vietnam, and has thus failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, has gone on creates an even more tragic blunder in Iraq.

There are many eerie parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was as phony as Saddam’s phantom WMD, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was as flaky as Donald Rumsfeld. In both cases, it seems, the “reason” we kept fighting was to avoid defeat. America’s leaders during the Vietnam era acknowledged this privately, but Johnson’s determination not to be the first president to lose a war meant that tens of thousands of U.S. troops would die for a cause that was unwinnable.

Bush believes America lost Vietnam because our leaders lost their nerve, not because the war was strategically misguided and misconceived. By failing to understand the lessons of Vietnam – that America’s involvement was predicated on false premises (like the Domino Theory: if Vietnam fell all of South East Asia would become Communist) – Bush has “succeeded” in creating a quagmire potentially even more insidious as Vietnam.

The invasion of Iraq was predicated on similar false premises, most notably the Reverse Domino Theory: once we establish democracy in Iraq it will sprout up all across the Arab world, thus reducing the impetus for terrorism. But so far the invasion has had just the opposite effect; it has discredited democracy and fed the forces that spawn terrorism. Put simply, democracy does not thrive without certain cultural habits, institutions, and a vibrant middle class, none of which exist in Iraq. At best, implanting democracy takes a generation or more, but our botched occupation has set that dim prospect back considerably.

Bush is going to get Swift Boated by History. His “mission accomplished” antics, his intemperate rhetoric (“bring it on”), and his feeble historical revisionism will catch up with him. Bush was AWOL during Vietnam. And Bush will be doing his best evade responsibility for the consequences of Iraq too.

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George and Jesus

Is George W. Bush proof that we live in a universe devoid of intelligent design? Bush, of course, is famous for asserting that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. He has also claimed that God wanted him to be president. Perhaps the Almighty has a sense of humor, because it looks increasingly certain the George W. Bush will go down in history as presiding over the most incompetent, corrupt, and disastrous administrations in U.S. history.

We now know that the Bush administration’s missionary zeal to spread democracy across the Arab world, beginning in Iraq, was just part of a larger effort to export its libertarian ideology and Christian values into the heart of the Middle East. God knows, the Saddamists and Islamicists could do with a little more capitalism, but more religion?

Seriously, though, the fact that the Bush administration used a litmus test to select the diplomats and officials that would oversee our nation building crusade in Iraq proved to be a fatal mistake. Put simply, the administration vetted State Department officials and other relevant personnel according to the following criteria: are you pro-life? That is, those espousing a pro-life philosophy would be sent to rebuild Iraq while those possessing expertise in Middle Eastern and Arab affairs (but not hewing to the president’s pro-life agenda) were relieved.

It’s a little ironic that so many in the pro-life movement were so gung ho about an invasion that failed to meet the standards established by Christian philosophers for a “just war.” For instance, according just war theory the use of force must meet four criteria: 1) it can only be waged by a legitimate authority, 2) it must be in self-defense only, 3) it must be a last resort, and 4) it must be proportional (the good achieved must outweigh the injuries inflicted).

Leaving aside the question of Bush’s legitimacy, momentarily, it is abundantly clear that Bush’s invasion of Iraq failed to meet three out of four criteria the just war theory requires. For instance, it is evident that Iraq posed no serious, direct, or imminent threat to the United States. Second, Bush unilaterally withdrew the U.N. weapons inspectors just weeks before they were due to complete their mission, thus precluding the possibility of a peaceful outcome. Further, the invasion has “succeeded” in spawning a civil war in Iraq, which means Iraqis are far worse off now than they were under Saddam.

Questions regarding Bush’s legitimacy are worth raising. Bush asked for and got a blank check from Congress authorizing the war, but the wording of the resolution called on the president to exhaust all means short of war first. Bush failed to do this, just as he failed to get a second U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing the invasion. Put simply, Bush used the vaguely worded U.N. resolution he obtained earlier as a blank check, though most international law experts believe Bush acted illegally. It is also worth noting that Bush’s path to the White House was extremely dubious. His ascension to the Oval Office owed more to legal sophistry and a partisan Supreme Court, which essentially nullified the will of the American people (as expressed by the majority of Americans who voted for Al Gore and the majority of Floridians who cast their ballots for Gore as well).

Bush is a throwback to leaders who operate according to the discredited theory from the Dark Ages known as “the divine right of kings.” According to this deeply irrational idea the monarch is acting as God’s representative on earth and his decisions are divinely guided. Bush’s disastrous reign is a reductio ad absurdum argument against this theory. However, Bush has brought great credit to the sole political teaching of his favorite political philosopher, Jesus: Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. In other words, George has proven that Jesus was right about keeping religion out of politics.

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Why Bush’s Military Surge is Fizzling

General Petraeus and the men under his command are being asked to do the impossible; buy time for a political reconciliation among Iraq’s warring factions. Most observers agree that General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency techniques have improved the security situation for many Iraqis, but only at the cost of increasing the number of U.S. casualties. Virtually no one believes, however, that the Iraqi government is moving in the right direction when it comes to settling sectarian differences. Because the surge cannot be sustained indefinitely, however, any military progress that is not accompanied by diplomatic progress will be in vain.

General Petraeus, as the cliché goes, wrote the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. According to his estimation, successful counterinsurgency efforts generally take at least eight to ten years. This means that pacifying the insurgency, which is a virtual prerequisite for a political settlement, could happen around 2015 at the earliest. And this assumes that Bush’s successor – not to mention the American public – will continue to back the current strategy, an untenable proposition.

In democratic countries different factions agree to settle their differences peacefully through power sharing arrangements and compromise. In the Middle East, however, power and politics are a zero-sum game. Put simply, in the Arab world power only changes hands through violence. The Bush administration claims the invasion of Iraq was intended to establish a new precedent for the Arab world, where leaders come to power through the ballot box rather than through bullets. But the invasion that violently overthrew Saddam Hussein contradicted the lesson the Bush administration insisted it was trying to teach. Actions, no doubt, still speak louder than words.

Historians will tell you that democracy is a generational enterprise. That is, it takes decades before a given people can absorb and exhibit the state of mind, habits, and cultural practices associated with self-government. Absent the requisite educational levels, institutions, and cultural factors (free markets, separation of church and state, and a vibrant middle class) self-government usually breeds mob rule and tyranny. To put it bluntly, Iraq was probably one of the least promising places on the planet to try and plant democracy.

It is not surprising, then, that the Shiites and the Sunnis each seem determined to settle their political differences through force. To complicate matters, the U.S. has been arming Sunni forces (which previously had been shooting at U.S. troops) as a counterweight to al-Qaeda in Iraq, but also to counterbalance the Iranian friendly Shia dominated government we helped install! Arming Sunnis forces, needless to say, makes tactical sense (in so far as they want to kill al-Qaeda), but it may also backfire strategically because it undermines the Shia led government we are counting on. As military historian Andrew Bacevich puts it, the Bush administration’s strategy amounts to arming one gang to check another. This is unlikely do anything for law and order. Sooner or later, Bacevich argues, whomever we’ve armed may turn their weapons back in the cops (which would be us).

Imposing democracy on Iraq is proving about as feasible as a shotgun marriage. Just as an obligatory ceremony, some official looking documents, and the unavoidable vows about working together won’t keep a warring couple from killing each other after the “honeymoon” is over, so the façade of elections and a Constitution are not going to forestall Iraq’s warring factions from slaughtering each other, if that’s what they are determined to do.
Bush’s surge strategy is almost entirely predicated on the Maliki government reaching a political accommodation that will satisfy Iraq’s rival factions. However, the man Bush has tapped, as the “right guy” for Iraq, is either unwilling or unable to reach beyond the sectarian divisions and forge a genuinely inclusive government. As Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi observes: “It is past time for change at the top of the Iraqi government. Without that, no American Military strategy or orderly withdrawal will succeed, and Iraq and the region will be left in chaos.”Every astute observer, Democrat or Republican, expresses exasperation over the lack of a diplomatic surge to accompany the military surge. Why isn’t George Bush sending one or more of America’s best negotiators – James Baker, George Mitchell, or Dennis Ross (to name a few) – to try and hammer out a political settlement or broker a backroom deal with the parties? It is very likely that Iraq is one mess that even a consummate political fixer like James Baker can’t clean up. But if the man they call the “velvet hammer” could pull it off, then it would certainly make up for his role in securing Bush’s “election.”

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Bush's Catch-22

George W. Bush has always been something of a contradiction. In 2000 he lost the popular vote but “won” the election in the Electoral College. His campaign argued that the most accurate recount procedures violated the equal protection clause, which the Supreme Court accepted as a valid reason for terminating a manual recount. However, Bush’s “victory” in the depended on the fact that votes are weighed unevenly in the Electoral College. To heap insult upon injury, the “states’ rights” candidate effectively got the strict constructionist majority on the Supreme Court to behave as activist judges by intervening in the internal procedures of a sovereign state. It is now abundantly clear that George Bush twisted the law like a pretzel to override the will of the voters. George Bush’s “win,” needless to say, has been America’s loss.

Following Bush’s election America finds itself a universe where Alice in Wonderland logic applies. Only on the wrong end of the rabbit hole could the following things occur:

The draft-dodging duo of Bush/Cheney painting war hero John Kerry as a wimp.
Massive Bush tax cuts in a time of war are followed by the biggest increase in Federal spending in American history (if you don’t think there will be a reckoning for Bush’s financial follies I have a couple of bridges I’d like to sell you).
Bush claims, “the U.S. does not torture. Period. End of discussion.” At the same time, Cheney extols the virtues of water boarding on Rush Limbaugh’s show.
The Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, commits perjury in his Congressional testimony and his so unconvincing that even Republicans and officials at the Justice Department believe he’s incompetent. But the president still believes he’s doing a heck of a job.
Bush would decry nation building as a candidate but then attempt nation building in Iraq (all the while managing to paint political opponents who opposed his nation building exercise in Iraq as flip-floppers and historical revisionists).
Bush declares the end of all major combat operations before Iraq explodes into a cauldron of violence and U.S. casualties soar.
The invasion of Iraq was supposed to defend against a threat that never exist (Saddam’s non-existent WMD and alleged but discredited ties to al-Qaeda) while creating the kind of failed state and terror haven the Bush administration said the invasion was meant to meant to forestall. Meanwhile, the U.S. invasion, which was supposed to engender a wave of democracy that would sweep through the Middle East has in fact discredited democracy, spawned and radicalized a new generation of terrorists, and enhanced to fortunes of our chief adversary in the region, Iran.

America’s predicament in Iraq, of course, represents the ultimate Catch-22. We have inadvertently helped install a Shiite dominated government, friendly to Iran, that is trying to squash Sunni insurgents (who were once our adversaries but are now our allies against al-Qaeda). The Shia government, needless to say, is wary about our arming their Sunni adversaries. And the Sunnis, no doubt, are worried that will sell them out to their Shia adversaries. Meanwhile, the Saudis are arming the Sunnis and the Iranians are arming the Shia. And just in case this wasn’t complicated enough, the Shia are fighting among themselves.
All this means we have to stay put in Iraq, or things will get worse. But we can’t stay put without breaking our military. That’s some catch, that catch-22.

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