Quote of the day: How many banana peels does it take to conduct foreign policy in the Age of Bush? (Answer: It seems like there are never enough)

I suppose you've heard by now that the Republicans plan to use the Supreme Court's rejection of the Bush cabal's totalitarian military tribunals as a political weapon against its enemies. Yes, Democrats who try to capitalize on this political windfall will find themselves once again accused of supporting terrorism.

Here's yet another case where we pay the price for all those mush-mouthed, believe-in-nothing nonentities who master strategists like Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel think are the salvation of the Democratic Party. Because if ever there was a time when we needed Democrats to throw off their veil of timidity and silence and go on the attack, this is it.

What we need now are men and women of conviction and passion, to respond to the slurs and lies the Republicans will be slinging even more furiously than usual with a no-punches-pulled, nonstop barrage of plain, unvarnished truth. They need to launch a bombardment of truth so massive as to force the lazy, don't-give-a-fuck, corporatist media to carry the message to the people, in sound-bite terms they can understand, that the Bush administration has an unbroken record of promoting anti-U.S. terror and undermining American values, that they are liars and frauds whose only demonstrated competence in foreign policy is at enriching their war-profiteering cronies—and hoodwinking patriotic Americans.

Although the Bush administration has more foreign-policy debacles to its credit than you'd think could be crammed into such a short time, I have a special fondness for the fiasco in Somalia. I mean, we woke up one morning to discover that we'd lost Somalia (again) without any of us even knowing it was in play.

And it turns out—according to a reconstruction of events in the Washington Post, conveniently dumped into this Fourth of July news black hole—that it all began with a misunderstanding so silly that it would pass for comical if the consequences weren't so unfunny.

It seems that "a small team of U.S. intelligence officials" (talk about an oxymoron—"U.S. intelligence" officials indeed!) who happened to be at an airstrip outside Mogadishu, fantasizing happily about terrorists, heard some gunfire that was actually a turf battle between battling clan factions and assumed it was an attack on them by the dread International Terrorist Conspiracy. They and their superiors decided that we had to respond forcefully—you know, show our manhood. And so we started pumping cash into the hands of the most hated warlords in the devastated country, making ourselves enemies of most everyone struggling to pull Somalia out of its chaos and economic ruin. And that's how we set the stage for our total humiliation.

Which brings us to today's quote, reported by the Post's Craig Timberg:

"'U.S. support for the warlords hit Mogadishu like a stick in the hornet's nest,' said John Prendergast, an Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group, a research organization, speaking recently from Chad, where he was traveling. 'It was totally the law of unintended consequences in the extreme.'"

Ah, the law of unintended consequences. It may be the only law that's still operative among the emasculated thugs trying so desperately to prove their dubious manhood as they "mastermind" American foreign policy.