Are The House Democrats Already Doomed For 2014?

[Before we get started this evening, let me just mention that the last congressional race of 2012 was a run-off today in Louisiana's 3rd congressional district pitting two conservative Republicans, "Lord" Charles Boustany, the Establishment candidate, and teabagger Jeff Landry. Democrats were allowed to vote but both Republicans were so busy claiming that they were more right-wing than the other one, that I suspect most Democrats were turned off. Turnout was light. A.P. called the race pretty fast for Boustany, who is best known for having once bought a fake British title of nobility for himself in an online scam. With 100% of the precincts counted, Boustany's win was 58,726 (61%) to 37,688 (39%). I wonder if His Lordship gets anointed with Crisco. And will Landry try to challenge Mary Landrieu in the 2014 Senate race?] 

Yesterday Chris Cillizza's column in the Washington Post was titled House Democrats face long odds in 2014 but rather than talking about the anti-heroic stand Obama and the dominant New Dems are taking in the Grand Bargain or about what a unmitigated disaster it was for Nancy Pelosi to appoint clueless loser Steve Israel to head the DCCC again, he happily pukes up another Beltway voodooism-- "the 6 year itch." Remember how Beltway pundits were crowing about how no president can ever be reelected if unemployment is above 8 percent? At least we'll never hear that one again. And that one makes relative sense compared to the 6 year itch.

Where I do agree with Cillizza is that the Democrats are unlikely to win back the House in 2014. But I reckoned that the moment I was told that Pelosi was reappointing Israel-- who still insists the DCCC was victorious last month and that he did exactly as well as Patty Murray did at the DSCC. That alone would disqualify him from consideration if Pelosi was still sentient.

Cillizza points out that Democrats won "slightly" more of the popular vote for Congress than Republicans did. Although the Democratic majority is still growing, the last I looked voters had given Democratic House candidates 59,247,617 votes and Republican House candidates 58,096,033 votes. We don't have to quibble over the meaning of the word "slightly" but 1,151,584 votes is more than that. What happened in past elections-- "the president’s party has rarely gained House seats in a midterm election"-- has a lot less meaning outside of the realm of Beltway conventional wisdom than the real problems the Democrats will face: Israel's willful incompetence and Obama's insistence that he's being forced to sell out to the Republican predators. No House Member who goes along with him will deserve reelection-- which will make the Democratic boycott of the 2010 Great Blue Dog Apocalypse look like the good old days for congressional Democrats.

The silliest part of Cillizza's silly post are his 10 most endangered incumbents list. Raul Ruiz doesn't belong on that list at all. He beat a popular longtime incumbent, Mary Bono Mack, 98,843 (52%) to 91,507 (48%) in a district that is dramatically turning bluer and bluer by the day. Cillizza, of course, goes right for the most hackish possible reason to predict a GOP victory: "in a midterm election... presumably, the district’s sizable Latino population will turn out in smaller numbers." In reality, a Republican should probably never in our lifetimes win in CA-36 again.

Cillizza called it right when he predicted that Republican Rodney Davis will have a hard time being reelected in 2014 but he somehow neglected to mention that the only reason he won last month is because a ConservaDem bit into Democrat David Gill's support, taking 21,319 votes, while Davis' margin of victory was a tiny 1,002. He's also correct in predicting that conservative corporate whores Ron Barber (D-AZ), Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) and Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UR) will all have trouble in 2014. In fact all three won because of Libertarian candidates taking enough votes from their GOP opponents to let them slip into the winner's circle with under 50%.

Patrick Murphy's seat is his to win or lose depending if he reverts to being a Republican and alienates the Democrats who voted for him or if he decides to take a strong stand defending working families. Since he's already joined the New Dems, it's likely that he'll sell out at every opportunity and lose the seat. But when Cillizza mentions one of the reasons Murphy will have a tough time in 2014 is because it was "one of the most expensive and nastiest races of the cycle ." It was but that has no relevance whatsoever, unless Allen West runs again, which is unlikely. First of all, as far as the expensive part, West spent $17,836,728 and Murphy spent $4,312,665. No one will have that much money to spend against Murphy again. And the same goes for outside spending in the district. About $3.5 million went into bolstering Murphy and about $3.3 million went into bolstering West, a wash.

In the case of Dan Benishek, who managed to fend off DCCC pet Blue Dog Gary McDowell again, Cillizza claims the district was evenly split between Obama and McCain. Um... More to the point (much more), Obama beat McCain 49.7-48.4% but Romney beat Obama 53.6-45.3%.

When Cillizza predicts major gloom and doom for Joe Garcia he sites the dubious conventional nonsense about how Garcia only won because David Rivera is a crook and that the district is a Republican district. The district's demographics have changed considerably since the last time Cillizza bothered to check on the numbers there. In 2008, McCain managed to beat Obama 50.0 to 49.6% this time, Obama did significantly better, beating Romney 53.1-46.4%. Only in the world of Beltway pundits doe s that describe "a GOP-leaning district."

Where I have no quibbles with Cillizza are on his 2 most endangered seats. #2 is Blue Dog Mike McIntyre's. He won by 654 votes and next year the Republicans will make him their #1 target and find a solid candidate to beat him. In even worse shape is right-wing fanatic Gary Miller here in California who only won in a quirk of California's idiotic new primary system in which so many Democrats ran that the two top vote getters were Miller and another Republican which meant there was no Democrat in the general election-- and in a pretty safely Democratic district. In 2008 the district went to Obama 56-41% and this year Obama expanded his lead to beat Romney 57.2% to 40.6%. Miller is a corrupt shill for Big Business and he's an unhinged zealot. He'll lose in 2014, as long as the Democrats manage to get a candidate on the ballot this time. Of course, with Steve Israel running the DCCC again...

Last Two Races In For House Seats-- Lord Charles Boustany (LA-R) and Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC) Are Leading

With Allen West's anti-climactic concession yesterday, only two House races remain up in the air. One, in Louisiana's 3rd CD, pits two Republican incumbents against each other, Lord Boustany-- who is heavily favored to win the December 8th runoff-- and teabaggy freshman Jeff Landry. It isn't that Democrats have no interest in a race in which the 2 Republicans are fighting with each other over which one is more conservative. At least one Democrat, Ron Richard, who was the candidate who forced the runoff, seems to care which one wins. He endorsed Boustany, who is also the preferred candidate of the GOP House leadership as well. Landry, on the other hand, has been endorsed by the most extreme right teabaggers in Congress, kooks like Tom Graves, (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Mick Mulvaney (R-SC).

The other race still up in the air also pits two very right-wing candidates against each other, Republican state Senator David Rouzer and 8-term Blue Dog/New Dem Mike McIntyre in North Carolina's recently gerrymandered 7th district, specifically rejiggered by the Republican-controlled legislature (of which Rouzer is a member) to deprive McIntyre of his seat. McIntyre, though, is ahead by 655 votes-- 168,697-168,042. There's a 1% threshold (3,360 in this case) that will trigger a recount if Rouzer asks for one. He did.

Rouzer helped draw the new lines that put McIntyre's Lumberton home outside of the new district, cut out much of Democratic-leaning Robeson County and added Rouzer's own home Johnson County. Seems pretty blatant... sort of the way they do it in Florida, where grubby political hacks in the state legislature like Connie Mack, Mark Foley and Debbie Wasserman Schultz drew themselves districts that fit themselves to a tee. But don't get all welled up over the martyred McIntyre. He's one of the most reactionary Democrats in Congress. McIntyre isn't just a corporate shill opposing the legitimate aspirations of working families, he is also an old time bigoted homophobe and a fanatic anti-Choice zealot. His ProgressivePunch score is one of the worst for any Democrat in Congress, a dismal 32.1% in the current session and he's one of the congressmembers Boehner and Cantor count on to make it possible to call their extremist nonsense "bipartisan." McIntyre is always looking for opportunities to vote with the GOP. Only 10 Democrats have worse voting records and of the 10, 5 were either defeated or are retiring this year. Fellow North Carolinian Walter Jones, a conservative Republican, has voted more frequently with the Democrats on crucial roll calls than McIntyre has. So has Ron Paul.

McIntyre spent $1,831,126 on this race and Rouzer spent $1,152,834. Outside groups spent far more. The NRCC and right-wing SuperPACs threw $4,515,634 in negative ads against McIntyre. The DCCC spent $2,251,996 to bolster McIntyre and their affiliated House Majority PAC threw in another $131,915. Cantor put $1,556,490 in Young Gun cash, out of the $5 million Mafia-connected Sheldon Adelson gave him, into this one race. The recount will take place next week, after Thanksgiving. There is no good outcome.

All four of these conservative candidates oppose a sane national health care policy. But, as this Boustany ad shows, he has a unique approach which is, in the end, pretty sick:

Lord Boustany Faces Off Against A Louisiana Teabagger

In the contest next month for Louisiana's third congressional district, Democrat Ron Richard isn't really a factor. The race pits two Republican incumbents, Jeff Landry, a teabagger who currently represents the old 3rd CD and His Lordship Charles Boustany, currently the representative of the 7th CD (which will cease to exist with this election). Until 2010-- and the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse-- the 3rd was a conservative Democratic bastion in the southernmost part of the state. (In 2008. the GOP didn't even bother to field a candidate against Blue Dog Charlie Melancon but he made a quixotic run for Senate in 2010 and had his head handed to him by sex freak and whoremonger David Vitter.) Landry beat the Democratic aspirant 63.8- 36.2%. The new 3rd moves significantly west into what is now Boustany's fiefdom. The heart of the district used to be Houma and Thibodaux and Morgan City was the western part. Now The district starts at Morgan City-- Houma and Thibodaux are part of the 6th-- and the district goes up to Lafayette and Lake Charles and all the way to the Texas border. It looks a lot more like Lord Boustany country than Landry territory.

Charles William Boustany, Jr., age 56, is a pompous little shit from Lafayette who's been in the House since 2005, when he became the first Republican to ever win the seat. He's best known for spending $18,250 to buy a title of British nobility, which is why everyone calls him Lord Boustany (even though that was a fraud and he never got the $18,250 knighthood) but he's also known as the doctor with the most medical malpractice suits against him in the history of Congress. Boustany is a cloddish laughing stock but his opponent, Landry is no rocket scientist either and he was one of the first idiots to sign up for membership in Michele Bachmann's Tea Party Caucus. He's also a member of Congress' most prominent internal Hate Group, the very extremist Republican Study Committee. Boehner and the rest of the GOP House Establishment would like to see Boustany beat him. Boustany is considered less of an embarrassment. Jim DeMint, of course, is backing Landry and last night I noticed something that gave me some cheer:

There are around 80 members of the Progressive Caucus, most of whom-- though not all (some are leadership shills-- will oppose the Grand Bargain Obama and Boehner are cooking up for the Lame Duck Session. That's certainly not enough to stop it. So people are counting on teabaggers and far right extremists to help derail it. Most likely the real action will be in the Senate. (Imagine Bernie Sanders and DeMint filibustering the monstrosity together!) What DeMint was pointing us to in his Landry tweet was a story in the Times-Picayune about Landry and His Lordship fighting over the Grand Bargain. His Lordship is, of course, for it.

Two Louisiana Republican congressmen fighting each other for re-election disagree on whether Congress should return after the November election to deal with expiring tax breaks, farm aid and looming budget cuts. Rep. Jeff Landry, of New Iberia, said the decisions are too large to make in a rushed, "lame duck" session and should be rolled into the new year when a new Congress takes office. "Why would we want to try to bundle these major policy decisions, that basically we've been having a debate about for decades, into a lame duck session with people that aren't going to be accountable to the people because they won't be returning?" Landry said.

But Rep. Charles Boustany, of Lafayette, said if Congress doesn't address some issues before year's end, the nation's economy could spiral into deep recession, echoing a concern repeated by Republican and Democratic lawmakers across the country.

"To say you can punt this into the next year, when every economist is giving us dire predictions of $400 million in taxes hitting this economy and throwing us into recession, is irresponsible," Boustany said.

The issue served as one flashpoint Tuesday evening at a candidate forum in Crowley, with Boustany and Landry sharply at odds over the congressional session and its implications on the U.S. economy.

Lawmakers are expected to return to Washington on Nov. 13 for a list of items considered must-do by many, including a deal to avert what is called the "fiscal cliff": the combination of expiring George W. Bush-era tax cuts and $110 billion in automatic spending cuts that begin Jan. 2.

...Landry, a freshman lawmaker and tea party favorite, used the disagreement with Boustany to continue framing his opponent as a Washington Republican insider. He described lame duck sessions as "a special interest buffet" that cram too many issues into a handful of bills and then involve scare tactics to get support from members of Congress.

"They force people to compromise their principles," Landry said in an interview Wednesday. "This is the Washington establishment trying to convince the American people that they have to swallow bad medicine."

Boustany, who is seeking a fifth term, used the disagreement to continue framing his opponent as a reckless obstructionist. He said members of Congress are responsible for working on outstanding issues through the end of the year, even if they aren't elected to new terms.

"We have an obligation to serve out that term and to do everything we possibly can for America," Boustany said after Tuesday night's forum. "To do otherwise, I believe is a violation of the oath of office."

Landry dismissed the economic concerns cited by Boustany.

Recall up above how the Times-Picayune writer effortlessly slipped in the phrase "considered must-do by many?" Who, exactly, are the "many" being referred to? Month after month Digby has been exposing the plutocrats behind the conservative consensus that rules the roost Inside the Beltway.

Don't you just love the fact that a 25 million dollar campaign financed by millionaire CEOs is telling average people to go to Townhalls and hold up signs? I guess they just don't have any access to power to make their case...

No, they're brainwashing the citizens, trying to persuade them to sell-out their on interests on behalf of these greedhead plutocrats. But you knew that.

Back in July I started writing about this latest scheme. Before it was called "Fix the Debt" it was called something else: The Moment of Truth Project (and before that something else again.) Bowles and Simpson and their allies have been working this relentlessly

By the way, the teabagger has raised $1,353,691 (as of his last FEC filing, July 28). Lord Boustany was up to $2,838,057 by September 30. Lord has $1,268,158 cash on hand and the teabag-boy has $952,067. Although far right groups like Citizens United are trying to save Landry, Cantor and Boehner have directed corporate PACs to spend big on his Lordship... and they have. Aside from direct contributions (below), FreedomWorks has spent $291,967 bolstering Landry. The American Hospital Association PAC did an independent expenditure for Boustany to the tune of $192,755. They want that Grand Bargain bad.

Scientology-- Joke's-On-You-Cult Or Dangerous Criminal Conspiracy?

Unlike the shady Church of Scientology, Republican Congressman Charles William Boustany, Jr of Lafayette, Louisiana has never been lampooned on South Park. He should be. The right-wing loon and ex-medical doctor drowning in malpractice suits, who was just reelected for the 4th time (running unopposed), once attempted to buy an English title of nobility. He shelled out $18,500 to a couple of hucksters hawking take Lordships to naive and grandiose Americans. Canadian film industry legend Paul Haggis shelled out a lot more to buy the Scientologistic equivalent of a lordship before he woke up and quit the fraudulent-- and very dangerous-- pseudo "church."

A winner of an Emmy (for thirtysomething), a Golden Globe (for Crash) and three Oscars (for Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and Letters From Iwo Jima, Haggis is an A-list screenwriter, director and producer. He was also an active member of the Scientology Cult for 35 years, leaving as an Operating Thetan VII (which costs between $300,000 and half a million dollars in "donations"-- a lot more than Lord Boustany paid for his fake title), because of an argument involving the cult's refusal to take a position against California's homophobic Proposition 8. Tuesday he told the Washington Post in regard to the insidious nature of the cult that "These people have long memories. My bet is that, within two years, you're going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church." And that brings us to the must-read new issue of The New Yorker, which broke the story about the acrimonious parting on the ways between Haggis and the powerful and dangerous cult that dominates Hollywood far more than the Catholic Church dominates the rest of L.A.

In L.A. you could drive around some areas and get the idea the Scientology Cult is as powerful here as Mormons are in Salt Lake City. I mean it. And they have a unique way of penetrating the entertainment business here. They put up open calls for actors to be in ads or films and then they badge them into joining the cult to get ahead in the Biz. But Haggis isn't from L.A. originally but from London, Ontario. He was on his way to a record store one day when a Scientology recruiter accosted him on the street.

“You have a mind,” the man said. “This is the owner’s manual.” The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, “Give me two dollars.” The book was “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,” by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, Dianetics had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million.

Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.”

“Take me there,” Haggis said to Logan.

Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn’t bother him. In fact, he said, “it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don’t understand.” When he arrived at the church’s headquarters, he recalled, “it didn’t look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworth’s.”

At the time, Haggis and Gettas [his girlfriend] were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. “It was pitched to me as applied philosophy,” Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.

The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan—an immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as “the source” of the religion. Hubbard’s writings offer a “technology” of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides “the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality.” A church publication declares, “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.” Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. “As Scientologists in all walks of life will attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities.”

In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an affiliated publication urged Scientologists to cultivate celebrities: “It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it.” At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era, at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and ambitious. The actress Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas in 1970, during her sophomore year, to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for cocaine. “Without Scientology, I would be dead,” she has said.

In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, The Devil’s Rain, in Durango, Mexico, when an actress on the set gave him a copy of Dianetics. “My career immediately took off,” he told a church publication. “Scientology put me into the big time.” The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors “make it in the industry.”

...Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading Dianetics; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. “Most of Hollywood went through that class,” Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions “about life, people, and behavior,” and said that Katselas “said some things in class that were really smart.” Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. “I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, ‘My God, this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve finally found something that works.’ ” She added, “Life didn’t seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”

Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology “recruited a ton of kids out of that school.” Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas’s tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. “You see a lot of people you know from TV,” Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. “When you started off, they weren’t really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse’s levels Scientology became more of a focus,” he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers... Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.

...[A]sked why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged Haggis said, “I identify with the underdog. I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”

...“There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something I’d never experienced—all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join.”

Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some people’s I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212,” he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964.

...[Haggis:] “If they’d sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away.” But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material he’d already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the church’s claims. Haggis admits, “I was looking forward to enhanced abilities.” Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high.

Just like any other two-bit huckerism. Except this one has been spectacularly successful since it was first cooked up in 1952. Although the U.S., where there are around 25,000 believers, buys into it as a tax-exempt "religion," the cult is simply treated as another money-grubbing cult preying on the weak-minded in most of the world, including the U.K., France, Canada, Belgium, Israel, Mexico and Germany. It's pretty perfect for L.A. though, where the weak minded think the world revolves around them because they escaped whatever frozen hellhole they come from to the warm, balmy weather.

IS BUSH ABOUT TO ATTACK IRAN?

Wolf Blinzter just had some clownish Republican congressman (Charles Boustany of Louisiana, a vicious warmonger and total kook) on with Kendrick Meek (D-FL) and the Repug is doing his best-- which isn't encouraging-- to parrot fallacious Republican talking points (i.e.- lies about casualties, deaths, peaceful strolls in Iraqi cities and, most absurd of all, the "unbiased" report coming from his excellency General Davis BetrayUs). You look at these two congressmen and you see an honest, intelligent young man from Florida calling for a bipartisan effort to come up with a way to start cleaning up the mess the Bush Regime has saddled the country with; and then you see this lying sack of Mitt from Louisiana just spinning and spinning so hard that even Blintzer had to point out that the Mitt was flowing out of his ears.

And while all this is going on, London's Times is reporting that Bush and Cheney are preparing their real goal: an attack on Iran.

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told the Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

One Washington source said the “temperature was rising” inside the administration. Bush was “sending a message to a number of audiences,” he said to the Iranians and to members of the United Nations security council who are trying to weaken a tough third resolution on sanctions against Iran for flouting a UN ban on uranium enrichment.

Maccabee over at Kos reports first hand knowledge about the preparations Bush is making for an illegal attack against Iran. Like many of us with friends in the military, Maccabee has a story about marines, soldiers and sailors who are very unhappy with the country's incompetent and venal leadership-- that and up to the minute preparations for a massive attack. Maccabee quoted his military source:

We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens. And whatever the consequences, whatever the consequences, they will have to be lived with. I am sure if my father knew I was telling someone in a news organization that we were about to launch a supposedly secret attack that it would be treason. But something inside me tells me to tell it anyway.

... I have become cynical only recently. I also don’t believe anyone will be able to stop this. Bush has become something of an Emperor. He will give the command, and cruise missiles will fly and aircraft will fly and people will die, and yet few of us here are really able to cobble together a great explanation of why this is a good idea. Of course many of us can give you the 4H Club lecture on democracy in the Mid East. But if you asked any of the flight officers whether they have a clear idea of what the goal of this strike is, your answer would sound like something out of a think tank policy paper. But it’s not like Kosovo or when we relieved the tsunami victims. There everyone could tell you in a sentence what we were here doing.

That’s what’s missing. A real sense of purpose. What’s missing is the answer to what the hell are we doing out here threatening this country with all this power? Last night in the galley, an ensign asked what right do we have to tell a sovereign nation that they can’t build a nuke. I mean the table got EF Hutton quiet. Not so much because the man was asking a question that was off culture. But that he was asking a good question. In fact, the discussion actually followed afterwards topside where someone in our group had to smoke a cigarette. The discussion was intelligent but also in lowered voices. It’s like we aren’t allowed to ask the questions that we always ask before combat. It’s almost as if the average seaman or soldier is doing all the policy work.

If Bush attacks Iran, Nancy Pelosi should be stapped to the first Tomahawk missle for taking impeachment off the table. And all the pathetic pygmies™ should be given their own Tomahawks to ride too. Then who will the Republicans run against Hillary? Well, Bill Maher has the obvious candidate for the Republican Party to run as the next George W. Bush.