Holy smoke, the new Holy Joe wear's women's clothes! (No, not Lindsey G, silly!) Oh wait, it's a woman!

Why, it's a dead ringer for "His Holiness"!

"[Sen. John "Young Johnny McCranky"] McCain called her 'very serious' and 'a very quick study.' He said he has come to believe Ayotte could be a leader in the mold of Margaret Chase Smith, the trailblazing Maine Republican who served four terms in the Senate. 'I see her kind of in that tradition -- working hard and being involved in national security issues,' he said."

-- from "Sen. Ayotte offers GOP an influential new voice,"
by the Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman

by Ken

Oho, so there's a new Holy Joe in town! Or rather in the Village. A replacement stooge for the trio broken up by the way-overdue retirement from the Senate of that master crook and megacorporate stooge Holy Joe "The Jomentum Man" Lieberman. The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman reports ("Sen. Ayotte offers GOP an influential new voice") that the Holy Joe slot in the foreign-policy troglodyte troika has been filled by NH Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

Ayotte's partnership with [AZ Sen. John] McCain and [SC Sen. Lindsey] Graham on Benghazi began shortly after the attack, which is now understood to have been an al-Qaeda effort to kill Americans. Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and three others died in the attack.

Ayotte's role in the trio has been filled in the past by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the former Democrat who is retiring from the Senate in January. The three of them were cheekily dubbed the "three amigos" on the Hill, and over the years, they repeatedly joined together to push for a strong U.S. interventionist role in the world.

"I don't even purport to try to replace him," Ayotte said of Lieberman. But she said she shares with Graham and McCain a view of the U.S. role in the world that makes for a natural partnership. On Thursday, the Senate adopted an amendment sponsored by Ayotte to ban the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States on a bipartisan vote, 54 to 41.

"I believe we should be a leader in standing up for human rights around the world," she said. "I also believe it's important for our military to remain strong and to be the strongest in the world, so that we can remain safe and so that the world can remain a safer place.

"That's my overall view. And I believe that they [Graham and McCain] believe in a strong role for America in the world."

Yessir, what this country needs is more "leaders" like this -- lying thugs and imbeciles preaching hot-botton demagoguery to a public that has trained to think with its fat butt.

As if Kelly Ayotte has any better idea than arch-doodyheads Young Johnny McCranky and "Sweet Lindsey" Graham what would make either America or its role in the world "strong." These are, after all, the people whose idea of "strength" is gorillalike bullying that makes us objects of contempt and hatred everywhere . . . well, everywhere where there are people. All the while throwing billions of dollars down sinkholes like Iraq and Afghanistan with the effect, if not in fact the intention, of making them even more hellish places to live than they were before our pathological mental, physical, and moral weakness led us to try to throw our weight around like the most despised playground bully.

It's hard to know whether the wreckage of the U.S. economy was an intended result or merely a happy byproduct for the pols who give their lives in service to the war-profiteering oligarchy that arranges things so that it always gorges on other people's financial misfortunes. My guess is that some of those stooges are willingly paid-off hired help of the 1% while others are simply too stupid to understand how they're being used. I'm not sure it matters a whole lot which of them are which.

Apparently the GOP has suddenly found itself short of Senate voices that can credibly argue for further ruination of the U.S. economy in favor of adventurism designed to widen and harden animosity to the U.S. around the globe. Is it possible that party "thinkers" realize how ridiculous and hateful its standard spokescreeps have become even to the docile public it has so strenuously miseducated into gibbering idiots?

This week, Ayotte was everywhere expressing concern at the possibility that Rice could be nominated to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. Those concerns were not being taken lightly as Ayotte has emerged as a newly influential voice in a party that does not have many like hers and desperately needs them.

"She has the potential to be an important voice in the Republican Party," said Tom Rath, a top adviser to Mitt Romney who has deep roots in New Hampshire and has known Ayotte her entire professional life.

One sign of Ayotte's new stature is that when the embattled Rice decided to try to mend fences with critical lawmakers, Ayotte was included in the first and most important meeting.

At 44, Ayotte is a fresh face in a party that has lagged behind in advancing women into its most powerful positions and in making a convincing case to many female voters. Ayotte (pronounced AY-aht) infuses new blood into the GOP national security brain trust in the Senate led by Graham and McCain.

Oh, swell! (That's presumably a typo in the last sentence, which surely must have meant to refer to "the GOP national security brainless trust in the Senate led by Graham and McCain.")

What's important, though, apart from making sure the gravy train for our 1% war profiteers, is making sure that any sane foreign-policy initiatives are immediately drowned out by the brainless trust's patented imbecility.

Senator Kelly may in fact be a holier Holy Joe than His Holiness himself. As reporter Helderman notes: "Lieberman has parted ways with his longtime friends on Rice, indicating last week that he does not think the Benghazi incident should disqualify her from serving as secretary of state." But the Right still hasn't come up with any better ideas, it seems, that to obstruct and obfuscate. If the president's "fer it," they're "agin."

His Holiness himself seems impressed, but not unreservedly so.

"If she's going to replace me, they've found somebody obviously more brilliant and more beautiful," Lieberman said. He praised Ayotte and another GOP first-term senator, Florida's Marco Rubio, for sharing his "pro-democracy, pro-freedom, keep America strong in the world" principles.

But he counseled that McCain, Graham and Ayotte will need to pull in a Democrat to join their group if their work is to continue to carry weight in the next Congress.

I don't know. The McCranky-Jomentum-Graham troika did OK without a Democrat. Or maybe our Joe means that they need a pretend Democrat. Well, there's no shortage of those, and I'm confident that McCranky and Lindsey know where to find them. Unless the current GOP thinking following the November elections is that excessive bipartisanship caused those unfortunate results.

Speaking of which, one question for Young Johnny McCranky, referencing the quote at the top of this post, in which he suggests that he sees her as "kind of" in the tradition of onetime Maine Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, "working hard and being involved in national security issues." Young Johnny doesn't really think his party would tolerate Senator Smith today, does he? Look how the party beat down her fellow Mainer retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe, who had about a thousandth of Smith's courage. So far what her putative new Margaret Chase Smith has demonstrated is her willingness, nay eagerness, to pander for the party, the Party of No.

#

Where Would Mitt Romney Be When The Phone Call Comes Into The White House Switchboard At 4AM?

 It's now widely acknowledged that foreign policy is clearly-- dangerously-- Romney's weakest suit. From his bungled and insulting romp through England, Israel and Poland, his attack on America while the consulate in Benghazi was under attack and his grotesque attempt to politicize the death of Ambassador Stevens to his attacks on China trade policies that belie his own bizarre net of investments in Chinese sweat shops, and the substance-free foreign policy speech he made at a military academy, Romney is clearly out of his depth on foreign policy. It's not, after all, like converting "heathen" Christians to Mormonism in France or like finding shady off shore banks to hide cash from the tax collector.

The 2011 return has 267 pages devoted to offshore corporations and partnerships. Reuters' Lynnley Browning reported that $4.5 million of the Romneys' long-term capital gains for 2011 came from foreign assets and $3.5 million from foreign income. The New York Times noted that Romney invested $77,262 in CNOOC Limited, the Chinese state-owned oil company, and in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. He also had large investments in a Swiss bank, a Luxembourg steel company and machinery companies in Denmark and Japan. (These were all sold on Aug. 10, 2011, the day before Romney debated his Republican rivals in Iowa and before he started blasting President Barack Obama for being soft on Chinese trade policies.)

This record shouldn't give anyone the idea that Romney is remotely competent to handle foreign affairs, perhaps the single most important job of an American president. And the foreign policy advisors he's surrounding himself with-- the Bush era catastrophe team which led us into unjustifiable, bankrupting wars and breeches in alliances-- only make matters worse. Perhaps the reason polls of the only state where Romney ever held public office show him barely able to break into the 40 percent approval, though, is an even clearer warning-- Romney was a hands-off, absentee chief executive after he was elected governor of Massachusetts. He spent one day in 4 outside of the state, either vacationing or setting himself up politically for one of his presidential runs. "More than 70 percent of that time was spent on personal or political trips unrelated to his job, a New York Times analysis found."

When the ceiling collapsed in the Big Dig tunnel here, Gov. Mitt Romney was at his vacation home in New Hampshire. When the Bush administration warned that the nation was at high risk of a terror attack in December 2003, he was at his Utah retreat. And for much of the time the legislature was negotiating changes to his landmark health care bill, he was on the road.

...Romney, now the Republican presidential nominee, took lengthy vacations and weekend getaways. But much of his travel was to lay the groundwork for the presidential ambitions he would pursue in the 2008 election, two years after leaving office.

During his last year as governor, he was largely an absentee chief executive. In October 2006, for example, he was out of the state all or part of 25 days. His public schedules said he was spending “personal time in Utah” or “attending political events” in California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. He went to a fund-raiser on Oct. 6 in Georgia for the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, stumped on Oct. 12 for a candidate for governor in Pennsylvania and appeared on Oct. 31 in Idaho on behalf of another candidate. In December, his last month in office, he took a swing through Asia before vacationing in Utah.

No one points to any lapses from his absences. But some former constituents, particularly Democrats, say Mr. Romney’s travels suggest that he was more interested in attaining the governor’s post than in doing the job. They argue that his focus on his political rise limited his achievements, and they point to President Obama’s double-digit lead in polls in Massachusetts as evidence of a bad taste left by Mr. Romney’s single term.

“I thought he gave up on his job,” said Phil Johnston, the chairman of the state Democratic Party while Mr. Romney was in office. “Romney was quite popular at the beginning of his tenure. The relationship between him and the Massachusetts electorate really soured.”

...Much of Mr. Romney’s time on the road when he was governor was spent barnstorming the nation-- traveling to at least 38 states-- as he positioned himself for his first presidential run. He also sought to build up his foreign policy credentials, visiting Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as Greece, the Vatican, China, Japan and South Korea. He attended fund-raisers for local legislators in swing states like Iowa and Michigan and raised money nationwide for his political action committee.

...As his term progressed, the press corps took note of the governor’s travels — and the ill will they generated. The Herald reported that an anonymous group distributed pictures of Mr. Romney on the back of a milk carton, with the caption “Have You Seen Me?” One headline from The Herald was blunt: “Mitt’s Mass Denial.” A Globe analysis of the costs of his travel-- Mr. Romney took no salary and paid for his personal and political trips, but the state paid for his security detail-- found that taxpayers had paid more than $100,000 in the 2006 fiscal year and $63,874 the year before.

Mr. Romney’s frustrations in his home state, where he was often thwarted by an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, became a common theme when he was on the road. He told audiences in Missouri and South Carolina in 2005 that being a Republican in Massachusetts was like being “a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.” He told the Heritage Foundation that he was like a “red speck in a blue state.”

His comments irked some in Massachusetts.

“He would make punch lines making fun of Massachusetts, and that was not widely appreciated,” said Michael J. Widmer, the president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-backed public policy group. “He was traveling so much the last two years, his most active period was really just two years. It’s tough enough for governors to get something done in four years, let alone two.”

Mr. Widmer said that while the administration focused on passing health care legislation in the second half of Mr. Romney’s term, “the rest of his agenda just went by the wayside.”

...[I]t was not uncommon for Mr. Romney to spend a week or more vacationing. During the summer, he frequently spent weekends at his retreat on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, about two hours north of Boston, and in 2005 he stayed for almost all of a two-week stretch... Romney’s visits to New Hampshire became so frequent that the Manchester Union Leader, the state’s largest paper, wrote an editorial complaining about attempts by his security detail to cordon off a section of the lake around his home.

“The Massachusetts State Police have no jurisdiction over Lake Winnipesaukee,” it said, adding that troopers from a neighboring state should not be allowed “to harass and intimidate people who are out to enjoy that section of the lake.”

The paper endorsed Senator John McCain in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries and Newt Gingrich this time around.

It wouldn't be the first time that a newly elected president needed on the job training but Romney's aides say he has no interest or understanding of foreign affairs and, let's face it, this is a hands-off CEO type who will delegate things he doesn't like to people he trusts... like John Bolton.

Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, skewered Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team on Monday, saying their policies make his stomach turn.

   Wilkerson took particular aim at John Bolton, former President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations-- and now an adviser to Romney.

  “The man scares me to death,” Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz. “He would defeat all the enemies in America and the world-- and believe me they’re plentiful—and he’d do it with everyone else’s blood. John is like Dick Cheney, never served a day in his life and wouldn't serve a day in his life … These people make me sick.” 

As Andrew Rosenthal noted in an editorial for the NY Times last week, "It’s rather amazing that Bolton and co are playing such prominent roles in the campaign; their ideas have been discredited and, by right, they should be hiding in undisclosed locations or at least enjoying early retirements as adjunct professors at third-rate universities-- not blathering on television and feeding a possible future president talking points."

Reckless, Amateurish... Romney's Foreign Policy Agenda

Glenn Greewald made a valid point in his presidential debate coverage for The Guardian last week by pointing out that the debates give us an illusion of choice. He's determined to expose the hidden consensus behind all they agree on. "Most of what matters in American political life," he asserts, "is nowhere to be found in its national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point. ...[T]hey have no discernible differences when it comes to any of the underlying policies, including America's relentless fixation on treating drug usage as a criminal, rather than health, problem. The oppressive system that now imprisons 1.8 million Americans, and that will imprison millions more over their lifetime, is therefore completely ignored during the only process when most Americans are politically engaged."

President Obama's dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.

A long list of highly debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department's refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

On still other vital issues, such as America's steadfastly loyal support for Israel and its belligerence towards Iran, the two candidates will do little other than compete over who is most aggressively embracing the same absolutist position. And this is all independent of the fact that even on the issues that are the subject of debate attention, such as healthcare policy and entitlement "reform," all but the most centrist positions are off limits.

That said, this was the top of the front page of Greenwald's daily paper in the U.K. when I woke up Monday morning, just before Romney's foreign policy speech at (ominously) a military academy in Lexington, Virginia. A lot of saber-rattling and nothing much else... it's a war between freedom and tyranny, that type of crap that the GOP base eats up. He's ready to chaaaaaarge right back into the Bush Doctrine. And Obama isn't "free trade" enough for him. He flat out lied that Obama hadn't signed any free trade agreements. I wish he hadn't but he signed three.

Serious Europeans and Brits-- both conservatives and Conservatives-- have written Romney off as a dilettante and feckless rich boy way out of his depth but brimming over with grand presidential ambitions. Foreign leaders all shudder at the thought of this bungling clown winning next month. Yesterday's speech, in which he declared we should arm the Syrian rebels-- whoever they are (something even McCain admits is a horrible idea)-- didn't help make anyone feel less apprehensive. His foreign policy is, basically, "Obama is bad." Romney said it was, for example, a mistake to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. The occupation should have continued. No doubt even Greenwald senses a clear difference between the two parties there. So did Donald Rumsfeld:

And so did former Senator Larry Pressler (R-ND), a Vietnam vet who listened to Romney and immediately endorsed President Obama. "I endorse President Barack Obama for a second term as our Commander-in-Chief," he wrote. "Candidates publicly praise our service members, veterans and their families, but President Obama supports them in word and deed, anywhere and every time... This decision is not easy for any lifelong Republican. In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama, the first time I ever voted for a Democrat, because the Republican Party was drifting toward a dangerous path that put extreme party ideology above national interest. Mitt Romney heads a party remaining on that dangerous path, proving the emptiness of their praise as they abandon our service members, veterans and military families along the way." He said what a lot of mainstream Republicans and independent voters have been thinking as they watch Romney in action.

What really set me off was Romney's reference to 47% of Americans to be written off -- including any veteran collecting disability like myself, as a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) veteran.

Behind closed doors with his donors, Romney made clear he'd write off half of America-- including service members and veterans-- because, as he said "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility for their lives." But there's no greater personal responsibility than to wear your country's uniform and defend the rights we all enjoy as Americans. We don't sow division between "us" versus "them." The Commander-in-Chief sets the bar for all to follow and fight for the entire country. Mitt Romney fails that test. As a veteran I feel written off.

Just as revealing is what Romney actually says publicly. As a former Foreign Service Officer, I find it offensive that Romney, Congressman Paul Ryan and their Republican Party are politicizing the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans who lost their lives in Libya. Being Commander-in-Chief requires a resolve and steadiness that's immune to politics and fear mongering. Mitt Romney fails that test.

And along with high-profile Republican surrogates, Romney and Ryan are pandering to election-year politics rather than focusing on pending cuts to military spending. Strategy should drive our military priorities, not party purity.

...That's the difference in this election. In word and deed anywhere and every time, President Obama never forgets that standing by those who serve is the heart, soul and core value of this country. As a life-long Republican, I stand by him as he stands by all of us, putting national allegiance ahead of party affiliation. I endorse President Obama for reelection in 2012.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright summed up his speech by saying he's a lightweight and his ideas are trivial. "I just find him very shallow in the ideas that he has,” she said. “Shallow. The op-ed that he had in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago? I’m a professor and if one of my students turned it in they’d get a ‘C’ because he gave absolutely no specifics."

Here's a Romney spokesperson on CNN just before Romney made his speech. Soledad O'Brien questioned her about Romney's foreign policy agenda. She completely elucidated what the agenda is: attacking Obama. That's it-- nothing but that-- even if the specifics were 180 degrees away from things he's been saying (privately) to the Republican base.

Romney Will Probably Be Defeated-- But Because Of Himself, Not Jason Clausen, Nor Even His Grotesque Formulations On Foreign Policy, His Weakest Suit

Jason Clausen, the Iowa man in a new Mitt Romney ad, has a long rap sheet featuring a stint in jail for an assault on a peace officer. Like almost all Romney supporters, he's a substance abuser. But that isn't what makes Romney vulnerable to a loss that will rival Barry Goldwater's in it's completeness. Oh, sure, Romney will win most of the Old Confederacy and the Mormon states... but not much else.

I don't spend a lot of time reading the American Conservative and I bet you don't either. But Dan Larison had a column-- really just a paragraph-long column with a delusional Republican hack's quote to make fun of-- yesterday that is worth taking a look at. Larison, unlike many conservatives already understands why Americans have a visceral dislike, if not hatred, for Romney. And it's not because he's a Mormon or because he's a multimillionaire who cheats on his taxes.

Doug Bandow’s article on Romney and foreign policy is another reminder that substance is something that Romney does not have on his side. Fortunately for him, elections aren’t decided by a candidate’s grasp of policy, foreign or domestic. Elections are typically decided by voters’ economic circumstances. This is the main reason that Romney has any chance of winning. He isn’t “well-positioned” at all. Romney is a pro-bailout corporatist with a reputation for phoniness and dishonesty. He embodies everything that people claim not to like about how the country is being governed, and he seems to be out of his depth on issues of national security. He’s a hybrid of the worst traits of Nixon and Dukakis.

As for the Bandow [from Cato] article, in the same right-wing publication, it's just devastating to Romney already, at least for anyone who would like to have him viewed as a serious leader in the foreign policy world. Romney is nothing but a clawing careerist clown-- even to serious-minded Republicans. The only thing that recommends him to conservatives is his red banner. Other than that, they're probably better off with Obama!

In fact, a recent Washington Post-ABC poll found that Americans prefer Barack Obama to Mitt Romney on international issues by 53 percent to 36 percent. Republican apparatchiks Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie nevertheless claim, “the president is strikingly vulnerable in this area,” but so far Romney is convincing only as a blowhard with a know-nothing foreign policy. Noted Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest, the GOP is “returning to a prescription that led to trillion-dollar wars in the Middle East that the public loathes.”

Romney’s overall theme is American exceptionalism and greatness, slogans that win public applause but offer no guidance for a bankrupt superpower that has squandered its international credibility. “This century must be an American century,” Romney proclaimed. “In an American century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.” He has chosen a mix of advisers, including the usual neocons and uber-hawks-- Robert Kagan, Eliot Cohen, Jim Talent, Walid Phares, Kim Holmes, and Daniel Senor, for instance-- that gives little reason for comfort. Their involvement suggests Romney’s general commitment to an imperial foreign policy and force structure.

Romney is no fool, but he has never demonstrated much interest in international affairs. He brings to mind George W. Bush, who appeared to be largely ignorant of the nations he was invading. Romney may be temperamentally less likely to combine recklessness with hubris, but he would have just as strong an incentive to use foreign aggression to win conservative acquiescence to domestic compromise. This tactic worked well for Bush, whose spendthrift policies received surprisingly little criticism on the right from activists busy defending his war-happy foreign policy.


...If Mitt Romney really believes that the world today is so much more dangerous than during the Cold War, he should spell out the threat. He calls Islamic fundamentalism, the Arab Spring, the impact of failed states, the anti-American regimes of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, rising China, and resurgent Russia “powerful forces.”  It’s actually a pitiful list-- Islamic terrorists have been weakened and don’t pose an existential threat, the Arab Spring threatens instability with little impact on America, it is easier to strike terrorists in failed states than in nominal allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, one nuclear-armed submarine could vaporize all four hostile states, and Russia’s modest “resurgence” may threaten Georgia but not Europe or America. Only China deserves to be called “powerful,” but it remains a developing country surrounded by potential enemies with a military far behind that of the U.S.

In fact, the greatest danger to America is the blowback that results from promiscuous intervention in conflicts not our own. Romney imagines a massive bootstrap operation: he wants a big military to engage in social engineering abroad which would require an even larger military to handle the violence and chaos that would result from his failed attempts at social engineering. Better not to start this vicious cycle.

America faces international challenges but nevertheless enjoys unparalleled dominance. U.S. power is buttressed by the fact that Washington is allied with every industrialized nation except China and Russia. America shares significant interests with India, the second major emerging power; is seen as a counterweight by a gaggle of Asian states worried about Chinese expansion; remains the dominant player in Latin America; and is closely linked to most of the Middle East’s most important countries, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. If Mitt Romney really believes that America is at greater risk today than during the Cold War, he is not qualified to be president.

In this world the U.S. need not confront every threat, subsidize every ally, rebuild every failed state, and resolve every problem. Being a superpower means having many interests but few vital ones warranting war. Being a bankrupt superpower means exhibiting judgment and exercising discretion.

President Barack Obama has been a disappointment, amounting in foreign policy to George W. Bush-lite. But Mitt Romney sounds even worse. His rhetoric suggests a return to the worst of the Bush administration. The 2012 election likely will be decided on economics, but foreign policy will prove to be equally important in the long-term. America can ill afford another know-nothing president.

So THAT'S why we're in Afghanistan! It's "military Keynesianism"

"This is what the American dream has come to? Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom. And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it." (Ian Welsh, today -- see below)

"Obama has to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. The economy is in bad shape, and it needs that stimulus. Since he can’t get a new large stimulus through Congress that means he MUST keep the Afghan war going if he doesn’t want an economic disaster, which would then lead to an electoral disaster."

-- Ian Welsh, in a recent blogpost,

"Actually, Afghanistan is a war of choice"

by Ken

If I told you that you could get the wisdom of one of the smartest people I know of, right in your e-mailbox, at absolutely no cost to you, I bet you would say "Surely you jest" or perhaps "You're drunk." But no I don't and no I'm not. Just go to the Ian Welsh website and click the link to subscribe, by either RSS feed or e-mail.

Yesterday Ian was writing about RNC Chair Michael Steele's surprisingly unstupid comments about the president and Afghanistan, which reminded him of "my favorite definition of a gaffe: 'saying the truth in the worst way possible.'"

After making the point that, much as Chairman Michael said, our involvement in Afghanistan is "a war of choice for Obama," even if it had first been a war of George W. Bush's choosing, and noting that "being the RNC chairman, Steele isn’t allowed to say things that make sense and contradict Republican warmongering," Ian proceeds to "a truth that Steele didn't tell."

Obama has to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. The economy is in bad shape, and it needs that stimulus. Since he can’t get a new large stimulus through Congress that means he MUST keep the Afghan war going if he doesn’t want an economic disaster, which would then lead to an electoral disaster.

This is the sad truth of America: the only acceptable form of Keynesian spending is military Keynesianism. Instead of hiring tens of thousands of teachers, building a high speed rail network across the country, refitting every building to be energy efficient and doing a massive solar and wind build-out to reduce dependence on oil, well, the US would rather turn Afghans and Pakistanis into a fine red mist.

That fine red mist is what’s keeping the American economy from going under entirely. And so, even if it’s the wrong thing to do, even if it’s the graveyard of America’s Empire, the war will continue.

I should note once again that I'm one of the few people I know who doesn't claim to have implacably opposed the idea of an invasion of Iraq, and who similarly isn't reflexively opposed to the idea of military intervention in Afghanistan. In both cases, though, I do require a believable understanding of purpose: what we hope to accomplish and, at least roughly, how we expect to accomplish it.

The Bush regime tried several substantially different explanations for why we had to invade Iraq, but all of them were so far from credible that it seemed clear the regimistas didn't believe any of them either. (Even with the shoddy job most of the Infotainment News media were doing "reporting" the issues, it was hard not to see that even if you tried to take any of the regime justifications for war seriously, the "evidence" presented was dubious, to put it mildly.) What was clear was that, for reasons we were free to speculate about, the various subspecies of the Far Right that made up the regime were of one mind that an invasion was a splendid idea, and all that remained to determine was how to sell it to, or slip it past, a somewhat cranky American public. It's well to remember that, until the actual invasion, the most persistent objections to the idea came not from the Left but from the Right.

(It surely didn't help that Chimpy the Presidential Candidate had sought so often to score cheap political points by denouncing soft-headed Democrats' inclination to "nation-building." Perhaps in retrospect some of the regime strategists may have appreciated that the essentially isolationist rhetoric of the campaign may not have been the ideal way to prepared the country for a foreign policy that was going to feature unilateral American intervention anywhere and everywhere in the world that the regime felt like.)

In the case of Afghanistan, I believe that the original American intervention made sense and produced some real accomplishments, starting with the removal from power of the Taliban. That those accomplishments were shallower and less durable than they may have appeared at the time is undeniable. Could they have been built on, if the Bush regime had chosen to stay the course in Afghanistan rather than instigate a war in Iraq? I guess we'll never know.

At the same time, that doesn't mean that the case for military involvement now is in any way established. It has seemed increasingly clear that if the Obama administration actually has a defined plan of action for Afghanistan, it is afraid or simply unwilling to share it with the American people. And given the cost to the country in so many ways, if we don't have a reason for being there, we shouldn't be there.

Except that perhaps we can't afford to leave, because our own queasy economic disequilibrium depends on the money the war is pumping into it. As Ian puts it in an addendum to the above post he offered today ("American War Economics 101"):

I recently wrote that Obama has chosen to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has. I am baffled by many of the responses to that article. What do readers think would happen to the US economy if all that spending stopped and wasn’t replaced by anything?

POSTSCRIPT: FOURTH OF JULY THOUGHTS FROM IAN --
"WHAT WE SEE TODAY IS THE AMERICAN DREAM DYING"

Today Ian has some thoughts -- "American cannot be America at perpetual war" -- as a Canadian on Fourth of July:

I don’t primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

I sometimes think that many of us who aren’t Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do. We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion. We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.

He recognizes that we haven't been terribly assiduous about living up to those lofty ideals, but argues that "both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards."

America’s ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope. If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.

But what we see today is the American Dream dying. Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that’s dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.

Then he invokes Thomas Jefferson's "prescient" warning "that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."

I’m not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.

The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you’ve got one, politicians are always tempted to use it. When it’s a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases. When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.

War by necessity concentrates power in the executive, Ian cautions, which leads to the multitude of basic rights tramplings we've talked about so much here.

This is America?

This is what the American dream has come to?

Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.

And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.

Are Americans who don’t believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?

That is my question to you on July 4th.

Happy Independence Day.

#

Reason no. 1827 why it's a bad idea to go to war behind leaders whose first interest is compensating for their tiny penises

Iraqi interpreter Ali Kanaan suffered hearing loss and burns to more than a third of this body as a result of a 2006 bombing while he was working as an interpreter for the U.S. military. He says he was pressured into taking an insurance settlement he did not think was adequate. [L.A. Times caption]

by Ken

It's hard to believe that stupidity and deceit practiced at this level don't rise to the level of a crime.

I know we've said it, and said it, and said it. But we are paying a horrendous price for pretending that it's okay to allow the crimes and malfeasances of the Bush regime go unaccounted for. President Obama's nice-sounding rhetoric about wanting "to look ahead" is, I"m sorry to have to say, nonsense. Allowing past blunders to go unexamined -- and, yes, unpunished where that applies -- all but guarantees that those same blunders will be repeated, and compounded.

The indications are that not only are we going to continue paying, but the price is going to continue going up. I think most Americans still have little idea the extent to which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were planned by ideologically blinded dimwits, liars, and wholly unaccountable thugs.

I think people have some idea that there were some crossed wires in the planning for the Iraq war. If you read the first couple of Bob Woodward "privileged insider" in (a politer way of saying designated propagandist for) the Bush regime, you can see then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld terrorizing his nonpolitical subordinates in the Pentagon (the political people, of course, understood that they were involved in planning a political, not a military, undertaking) to produce a war plan that matched what Chimpy the Prez and especially "Big Dick" Cheney were insisting on: something lean and quick involving a bare minimum of troops -- especially relative to what seasoned military commanders thought necessary.

Of course their "war on the cheap" came close to bankrupting us, or maybe did bankrupt us, because nobody involved in the process of planning the invasion seems to have felt responsible for figuring out how to pay for it. Possibly they believed some of the rhetoric we heard about Iraqi oil revenues paying for the whole fine adventure. Ha ha! Or maybe they just understood all they had to do was keep the expense out of the regular budget, and Congress could be counted on to keep passing "supplemental" appropriations, and never mind how those would be paid for.

This was all quite monstrous, but the real monstrosity was the failure to think through the real-world contingencies, starting with the question that you or I would probably have thought the second most basic, right have the question of how we would manage the invasion: What do we do afterward? The degree to which the Rumsfeld brain trust was unprepared in every way for every single thing that happened is staggering.

I'll assume that DWT are familiar with the basic outlines of that catastrophic failure, and are aware that in fact in the State Department they actualy were trying to plan for what would happen after the invasion. And we're also aware of just how far Cheney and Rumsfeld to keep the State Department entirely out of the planning and execution, sneering at those sissies' pussyfooting and thumb-sucking. The great innovation of fighting a war with mercenaries called "contractors" was all DoD, and all the ways in which that was completely out of control, literally so in the matter of policing the behavior of the contract employees -- that's all the handiwork of Rumsfled's geniuses' innovation of fighting a "secret" war. . And of course it kept costing us extra billions of dollars we didn't have.

What's new, at least to me, is the continuing unveiling of yet more ways in which the Cheney-Rumsfeld war plan ignored considerations you would have thought basic. My attention was directed to the third part of series by a team of Los Angeles Times reporters ("Injured war zone contractors fight to get care" -- following "Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting" and "Foreign workes for U.S. are casualties twice over") and the story is in almost equal measures shocking and nauseating.

It concerns the contractors, but not the glamorous ones like the Blackwell and KBR ones, and this last installment concerns interpreters in particular. Maybe it's not all that surprising that Rumsfeld's Robots never stopped to think that our forces in Iraq would need to be able to communicate with the locals, especially once the adventure switched from invasion to occupation. Americans generally have a habit of forgetting that not everybody in the world speaks American, and for some reason our defense establishment seems especially resistant to this fact of life, as witness the glee with which it has expunged most of our linguistically qualified military personnel under DADT. "It's only them gays that speak furrin languages," I can hear the generals saying.

Eventually, of course, something had to be done, and the Pentagon went the contractor route. But the contractors who are the subject of the LAT reports weren't the regime-favored soldiers of fortune who were paid enormous salaries and benefits and excused from what appears to be any kind of oversight. No, these people, and the interpreters in particular, were not well paid, were treated even worse, lied to repeatedly while they were being killed an maimed in our service, and then left pretty much to fend for themselves. We have simply walked away from our obligation to those people.

The detail is horrifying and stomach-turning, so I'll refer you to the Times for that. But for the overall picture, here's just the start of T. Christian's Miller's Part 3.

FORGOTTEN WARRIORS

Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting

For Iraqis and Afghans killed or injured while working for the U.S. military, benefits have often fallen far short of what was promised to them and their families.

By T. Christian Miller
December 18, 2009

After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military discovered that rebuilding the country and confronting an insurgency required a weapon not in its arsenal: thousands of interpreters.



To fill the gap, the Pentagon turned to Titan Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, which eventually hired more than 8,000 interpreters, most of them Iraqis.



For $12,000 a year, these civilians served as the voice of America's military, braving sniper fire and roadside bombs. Insurgents targeted them for torture and assassination. Many received military honors for their heroism.



At least 360 interpreters employed by Titan or its successor company were killed between March 2003 and March 2008, and more than 1,200 were injured. The death toll was far greater than that suffered by the armed forces of any country in the American-led coalition other than the United States. Scores of interpreters assisting U.S. forces in Afghanistan also have been killed or wounded.



An insurance program funded by American taxpayers was supposed to provide a safety net for interpreters and their families in the event of injury or death. Yet for many, the benefits have fallen painfully short of what was promised, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found.



Interviews, corporate documents and data on insurance claims show that:



* Insurers have delayed or denied claims for disability payments and death benefits, citing a lack of police reports or other documentary evidence that interpreters' injuries or deaths were related to their work for the military. Critics, including some U.S. Army officers, say it is absurd to expect Iraqis and Afghans to be able to document the cause of injuries suffered in a war zone.



* Iraqi interpreters taken to neighboring Jordan for medical treatment say they were pressured to accept lump-sum settlements from insurers, rather than a stream of lifetime benefits potentially worth more, and were told that if they didn't sign, they would be sent back home -- a potential death sentence for Iraqis associated with the American war effort.



* Interpreters who have immigrated to the United States as refugees have ended up penniless, on food stamps or in menial jobs because their benefits under the U.S. insurance program are based on wages and living costs in their home countries. Payments intended to provide a decent standard of living in Iraq or Afghanistan leave the recipients below the poverty level in this country.

Now Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are apparently all off the hook. It's not their problem. Somehow, even though it wouldn't directly help the victims, these disclosures would feel more palatable if Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and a bunch of their co-conspirators were languishing in dungeons. It would at least be a statement of acceptance of moral responsibility, a necessary prelude to accepting legal responsibility.

You feel bad for President Obama, with all the problems he has inherited from the Bush regimistas. But it's truly his problem now., and by now he's lost the window of opportunity for blaming it all on the Bushfolk.

#

Aid Strategy For Afghanistan Has Been As Unsatisfactory As Military Strategy

I rarely do a post about Cuba without consulting international troublespot writer Reese Erlich, whose book Dateline Havana is one of the best and most readable looks into U.S.-Cuba relations. Last June Reese was in Iran and gave DWT an inside look at the Iranian elections. His book, The Iran Agenda, is another must-read. So it didn't surprise me in the slightest when I got my first-ever e-mail from Kabul a few weeks ago... from Reese.

Yesterday he sent me my second. Many people eager to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan are talking about sending more foreign aid. Having spent a good deal of time there in the late '60s-early '70s I didn't feel that was necessarily a good use for taxpayer dollars. And Reese confirmed my trepidation's by mentioning that "the same folks who brought us the $700 toilet seat are now in charge of US aid to Afghanistan. Some military and civilian contractors have now become adept at ripping off foreign aid money before it ever reaches the intended recipients." That's news that well-meaning progressives in Congress need to hear. And Reese's article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. Aid Often Misses Targets In Afghanistan is something that needs to be distributed on Capitol Hill. It won't be.

As much as 80-90% of the aid money spent in Afghanistan goes everywhere except into the approved projects-- and even the approved projects wind up as useless junk doing nothing for U.S. policy goals and nothing for the long-suffering Afghan people. It started under the incompetent and venal Bush Regime... but apparently Hope and Change hasn't come to Afghanistan yet.

In 2003, the U.S. government believed local farmers could safely store and transport their crops and earn more money by exporting to neighboring countries. Building 145 market centers would also help swing Afghan public support behind the U.S. war effort, Bush administration officials argued at the time.

A Washington, D.C., company, Chemonics International, won the bid for the $145 million program-- known as Rebuilding Agricultural Markets Program, or RAMP-- that ran from 2003 to 2006.

Chemonics then subcontracted the training and construction work to other Americans, who in turn subcontracted to numerous Afghan companies who did the work. At each level, the subcontractors deducted costs for salaries, office expenses and security, according to Afzal Rashid, a former senior adviser for the ministry of finance who now lives in Sacramento.

Only a small percentage of the original RAMP contract money actually reached farmers and other intended recipients, Rashid and other critics say. The exact percentage may never be known because neither Chemonics nor the U.S. government tracks such figures. Moreover, opponents note, many constructed market centers have deteriorated or are not being used for their original purpose.

In an exclusive interview with the Chronicle, Afghanistan's foreign minister, Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, sharply criticized how U.S. aid is spent in his country. He estimates that only "$10 or $20" of every $100 reaches its intended recipients.

The United States Agency for International Development, the agency responsible for most nonmilitary foreign aid, once employed tens of thousands of technical experts and contractors to staff aid programs around the globe. After the Vietnam War, however, the U.S. government deemed private enterprise more efficient at international assistance. Today, USAID has been reduced to being a contracting organization with just 2,200 employees, and only five engineers, according to recent news reports.

The inter-national aid agency Oxfam says USAID awards more than half of its Afghan aid to just five U.S. private con-tractors with close political ties in Washington: KBR, the Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, DynCorp International and Chemonics International. USAID allows contractors to budget $500,000 annual salaries and benefits for high-ranking employees, and $200,000 for lower-ranking administrators, according to Rashid. All expatriate employees receive a bonus of up to 70 percent for hazard and hardship pay. The average Afghan civil servant, however, receives less than $1,000 a month.

Rashid and other critics say waste is built into the system. Expatriate employees bank most of their salary because companies pay for employee travel and living expenses.

"In a lot of cases the money goes from one bank account in the U.S. to another account in the U.S.," and never helps the economy of Afghanistan, said Rashid... Afghan officials and aid workers say smaller nongovernmental organizations that emphasize people-to-people aid have helped Afghan society and have kept overhead costs low. Former Finance Ministry adviser Rashid said Washington should rely more on such groups and Afghans themselves to administer future programs.

But Rashid concedes that direct funding of the Afghan government and contractors could also lead to increased corruption, a problem that has gained significant ground since the Taliban regime fell. But he says a multilayer system with improved oversight could diminish fraud.

Waste and corruption in Afghanistan are "tremendous problems," conceded Foreign Minister Spanta. But, he noted, since the United States delivers only 10 percent to 20 percent of its aid money to targeted Afghan recipients, "Afghanistan officials are not more wasteful or corrupt than that."

The U.S. has no business in Afghanistan and isn't capable of making a positive contribution there. There is only one solution: redeployment out... immediately. Earlier I mentioned Barbara Lee's bill, HR 3699, which would prohibit funding for escalation. It's a perfect first step. I also mentioned that we have a contest going on today for anyone who donates to No Means No.

What? The adventure in Iraq (you remember Iraq?) led by our heroic & steadfast War & Peace President hasn't been an unbroken triumph?

Didn't he tell us he didn't believe in nation-building?
Well, he sure proved it!

"Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

"The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

"By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.

"The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort."

-- from "Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders"
by James Glanz and T. Christian Miller, in yesterday's NYT

by Ken

We should probably take note of this draft history of the U.S. attempt to rebuild Iraq currently circulating in Baghdad on Washington, reported on in yesterday's NYT by "James Glanz report[ing] from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit investigative Web site ProPublica, report[ing] from Washington."

One reason I'm curious is that, at least until our one-and-only president was dragged back onto the job by the impending collapse of the U.S. auto industry, all of his energies (such as they are) seemed to have been diverted to the herculean task of burnishing his "legacy" -- or, to put it less politely, inventing a fictional legacy to replace the all-too-apparent real one.

Most notably, in the burnished history of the Bush regime, that adventure in Iraq, led by our steadfast War & Peace President, has been a triumph! We set out to bring democracy to the Middle East, and by gosh, we succeeded beyond expectation! Hooray!

Apparently the still-unpublished new official history paints a different picture, and even names names. The NYT account, datelined Baghdad, begins:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag -- particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army -- the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

That the Pentagon simply made up numbers to soften the political blow -- in such matters as the readiness of Iraqi security to take over policing and fighting -- is vouchsafed by no less than former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Iraq ground-troop commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and even the viceregal Blob of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, the man who more or less ran Iraq until the Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

"Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," as the report is titled, "was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here." It is "based on approximately 500 new interviews, as well as more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which Mr. Bowen's office has reported over the years."

The report makes clear that the roots of the bungling run deep, starting with the total failure of the Defense Dept. (which of course totally freezed out the State Dept., which was planning for a post-invasion Iraq) to plan in any meaningful way for any kind of rebuilding effort:

On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

"What do you think that'll cost?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

"I think it's going to cost billions of dollars," Mr. Garner said.

"My friend," Mr. Rumsfeld replied, "if you think we're going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken."

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

Mr. Garner, of course, was summarily replaced by the abovementioned viceregal clown Paul Bremer. Apparently, along with failing to consider every other aspect of the aftermath of the invasion, Secretary Rumsfeldand his DoD geniuses never took into account the devastation produced by the invasion and its aftermath.

Tables in the history show that measures of things like the national production of electricity and oil, public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service and the presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted by at least 70 percent, and in some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion.

Subsequent tables in the history give a fast-forward view of what happened as the avalanche of money tumbled into Iraq over the next five years.

By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June 2004, none of those services -- with a single exception, mobile phones -- had returned to prewar levels.

Glanz and Miller end their account by looking at the way Stuart Bowen ends his:

At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from "Great Expectations" by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: "We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us."

#

Is John McCain Ready To Lead? Clearly Not-- Let's Look At Georgia

"I had just returned from Gori, which was still under the shadow of Russian occupation," wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Melik Kaylan dramatically this morning. Gori, Stalin's birthplace, has no Russian troops or checkpoints during the daytime. But there is the great big monstrous looming shadow of a voracious bear and if you hang around into the wee hours of the night... "if you stayed overnight after observers left, as I did with various locals, you could hear and glimpse the tanks in the dark growling back into town and roaming around. A serious curfew kicked in at sundown, and the streets turned instantly lethal, not least because the tanks allowed in marauding irregulars-- Cossacks, South Ossetians, Chechens and the like-- to do the looting in a town that the Russians had effectively emptied. Now that the Russians have made a big show of moving out in force-- but only to a point some miles to the other side of Gori toward South Ossetia-- they've left behind a resonating threat in the population's memory, a feeling they could return at any moment."

Yes, Cossacks! They chased my grandfather into a forest when he was a teenager and he hid in a tree before emigrating to America. Yesterday I introduced you to Svetlana, not Stalin's daughter, another Svetlana, a nurse who works for my doctor. She was trembling with outrage about the distortions in the America media about the conflict in the Caucasus. Svetlana places the blame for the flareup squarely on the shoulders of political hack and cynical opportunist John McCain (and well-paid Georgia lobbyist/McCain foreign policy czar and notorious Neocon Randy Scheunemann). When she referred to the deceitful and clueless American media, the Wall Street Journal is more in the deceitful camp than the clueless. They're on a mission: elect McCain.

The trope they're pushing: Saakashvili attacked first because he knew "the Russians had been planning an invasion of his country for weeks-- even months-- ahead of time" and because NATO didn't admit the little Neocon bastion. Oh... and how could a far right mouthpiece like the Journal not mention victory in Iraq? Scheunermann's paymaster-- and McCain's ally-- Saakashvili says "the invasion had to be done before the situation in Iraq got any better and freed up U.S. forces to act elsewhere-- a matter not simply of U.S. weakness but of increasing U.S. strength. 'If America thinks it is too weak to do anything about Georgia,' said Mr. Saakashvili, 'you should understand how the Russians see it, how much Moscow respects a strong United States-- or at least a U.S. that believes in its own strength.'" He must have forgotten to add: "Vote for John McCain."

Europeans are getting a less biased perspective on what's been going on with the nasty little war McCain incised so he would have something to talk about without mentioning that Obama is black. A couple of weeks ago we looked at a column in Britain's Guardian by Seamus Milne. Milne's column today, Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world, is more disturbing-- and something American voters should focus in-- more than just Karl Rove's machinations in getting Willard named to the Republican ticket tomorrow... or whenever.

Milne writes about what McCain's self-serving Neocon publicity stunt has wrought:

If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable-- and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it.

...America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states," are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance.

Is John McCain ready to lead? Clearly, not-- not any more than George Bush was-- or will ever be. They walked hand-in-hand into the greatest foreign policy disaster of our time and McCain has learned... absolutely nothing. He is a captive or the worst elements of the Neocon forces that need to be excised from American politics as soon as possible.


UPDATE: CNN INTERVIEW PUTIN

The Moscow Times presaged what Putin told CNN about American neocons encouraging Georgia to attack South Ossetia and destabilize the Caucasus. Putin "accused the United States of orchestrating the military conflict in Georgia in order to boost the chances of a U.S. presidential candidate." You wonder which one? Hint: follow the money.

Tomorrow's NY Times also reported that Putin claimed the Republicans-- though not by name-- "needed a small victorious war." He's groping in the darkness; McCain doesn't care if it's a victory or not. He just wants trouble so he can try making the case that he's an old warrior who can protect us.

Sure, the McCranky "campaign" continues to sink to unimaginable depths, and House Dems shook an angry fist at Karl Rove, but what is there to say?

"I think this is the car crash between the McCain of 2000 and the McCain of 2008."

-- Rachel Maddow, talking to Keith Olbermann about the apparent free fall of the McCranky presidential "campaign" on tonight's Countdown

"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!"

-- the shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs, alone in his workroom in the wee hours of the morning, in Act III of Wagner's Mastersingers of Nuremberg

by Ken

Talk about a crazy day! It's not that there's been no news, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to write about any of it.

Of course there's the presidential contest, but what is there to say about that? The McCranky "campaign" (I really see no alternative to using quotation marks around "campaign") now has no real issues, and so is reduced tp mindless invective and wholesale lying.

And yet 40-some percent of the electorate is thinking seriously about voting for the worthless shell of a human being that is Young Johnny McCranky.

Oh, you think he has issues? Like oil drilling. Are you a total moron? Do you really not know that there is not the slightest possibility on this earth that the oil companies will ever under any circumstances do anything to increase supply in order to lower prices. Their only interest in offshore drilling is as a hedge for the future, to maintain a supply of the stuff that they can continue to sell at ever-mounting prices, to feed their ever-mounting, unimagined-in-human-history corporate profits. Any Republican who has the chutzpah to say anything else is either lying his/her putrid guts out or is too stupid to know better -- or both.

Oh, and national security? We need Young Johnny to "win" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the War on Terror?

It's sad to think that there are Americans who have been ruthlessly hornswoggled into believing any of this rot, by people whose ignorance of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror is total. The warmongers are treating those poor folks like fecal matter, patsies for their ceaseless lies and stupidifications. The Britney Spears TV commercial??? America, they're telling you you're dumber than shit.

Now even the phony-baloney War on Terror is kaput. Today the Rand Corporation, an extremely conservative think tank, reported what has been obvious to most everyone who has had any awareness of the real reality of international events since 9/11: that the law-enforcement approach to fighting terrorism -- reflexively derided by lying or cretinous demagogues who think the American people are as stupid and dishonest as they are -- has been genuinely productive and is the obvious and only way to go. Military solutions, says the Rand report, are total bullshit. (Okay, they may not use the actual word bullshit, settling for the Rand-speak equivalent.)

Reference to "the law-enforcement approach" is used as an automatic sneer-slash-laugh line by the likes of Rudy "I'm Too Smart for My Brain" Giuliani and "The World's Tiniest George" Bush. There is irony here. Not with regard to Tiny George, of course -- it's hard to imagine much of anything even potentially ironic about his useless carcass. But Rudy built his whole career on hi record in law enforcement.

Of course that always depended on ignoring the staggering rate of reversal his prosecutorial convictions as U.S. attorney suffered on appeal, and ignoring the fundamentally pogrom-like culture of violence he bred in the New York Police Department during his time as mayor of New York. Now he's made it clear how little he understands and respects real law enforcement.

Meanwhile, as talk arises of Barack Obama's "presumptuousness" in behaving more like a president on his trip to the Middle East and Europe, the only commentators who remember that in the early stages of the senator's trip, commentators generally assumed it was just a matter of time before he committed a campaign-ending gaffe are commentators who now ridicule that kind of talk as overblown. I can't help thinking that closer examination would reveal that it's the very same commentators who (a) were lying in wait for the sure-to-happen gaffe and (b) later turned to deriding the gaffe watch.

In the interim, of course, an awful lot of people, Americans and otherwise, noticed that Senator Obama really did behave presidentially, if by "behaving presidentially" we understand behavior that doesn't leave us cringing every time he opens his mouth, or indeed moves a muscle. After all, by that modest definition, it's been almost eight years since we had a president capable of behaving presidentially.

Okay, so you see why I'm stumped for anything to write about the presidential campaign. So how about the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives displaying historic courage in voting to cite Karl Rove for contempt of Congress?

Oh yeah, great. I'll bet our Karl is shivering in his shoes.

Meanwhile the scandals pile up. And I don't mean charges or accusations. I mean the steadily growing pile of Inspector General reports, like the one from the Bush regime's notoriously gutless Justice Department IG, which nevertheless rips the Bush DoJ to shreds, making clear -- and adding some pungent detail to -- what most of us knew for years now: that the Bush DoJ was fundamentally a criminal enterprise, a betrayal of historic proportions of the department's basic criminal-justice function. Every second of every day of the Bush regime, its Justice Department (and the people who illegally and unethically manipulated it from the White House for partisan enforcement) was first and foremost devoted to transforming the U.S. into a dictatorship of the Far Right.

And Karl Rove was at the center of that wildly illegal as well as unethical and unprincipled deformation. As he was in transforming to primarily political function every agency of the federal government he could get his slimy mitts on. Worse still, if it's possible to imagine anything worse, we have substantial indications -- still awaiting proper investigation for actual evidence -- that our Karl engineered the overthrow of the legitimate government of the state of Alabama and successfully railroaded its governor into a prison sentence.

So the Dems on House Judiciary screwed up their courage and rose in righteous wrath, declaring, "Bad Karl!" Let's say the House goes ahead and actually votes for their contempt citation. Woo! Just ask Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers how scary that is.

The whole fucking Bush Justice Department should be under indictment, not to mention Rove and the whole of "Big Dick" Cheney's senior staff. Not to mention several hundred senior stooges who have infested the executive branch in this regime. Now it's more or less official: We can't lay a glove on any of youse bums.

So you see what I mean? It wasn't exactly a no-news day. But what is there to say about it all?

#

Not that we Americans care what other people think, or that we necessarily trust the Washington Post to tell us, but this is interesting, isn't it?

WaPo caption: British papers heralded Obama's victory in the
Democratic race. Reaction was not enthusiastic everywhere;
Israel and China have policy concerns.

"For much of the world, Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries was a moment to admire the United States at a time when the nation's image abroad has been seriously damaged."
--lead paragraph of Kevin Sullivan's report, "Overseas, Excitement Over Obama," in today's Washington Post

The report continues:

From hundreds of supporters crowded around televisions in rural Kenya, Obama's ancestral homeland, to jubilant Britons writing "WE DID IT!" on the Brits for Barack discussion board on Facebook, people celebrated what they called an important racial and generational milestone for the United States.

"This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime," said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. "A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different."

The primary race generated unprecedented interest outside the United States, much of it a reflection of a desire for change from the policies of President Bush, who surveys show is deeply unpopular around the globe. At the same time, many people abroad seemed impressed -- sometimes even shocked -- by the wide-open nature of U.S. democracy, and the history-making race between a woman and a black man.

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

While Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has admirers, especially from her days as first lady, interviews on four continents suggested that Obama is the candidate who has most captured the world's imagination.

"Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a British foreign policy institute. "We have immensely enjoyed the ride and can't wait for the next phase."

The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, who has extensive overseas experience, is known and respected in much of the world. Interviews suggested that McCain is more popular than Obama in countries such as Israel, where McCain is particularly admired for his hard line against Iran.

"Although no one will admit it, Israeli leaders are worried about Obama," said Eytan Gilboa, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. "The feeling is that this is the time to be tough in foreign policy toward the Middle East, and he's going to be soft."

In China, leaders are widely believed to be wary that a Democratic administration might put up barriers to Chinese exports to the United States.

But elsewhere, people were praising Obama, 46, whose emphasis on using the Internet helped make him better known in more nations than perhaps any U.S. primary candidate in history.

There are indeed lots of opinions from lots of places. For example:

Obama also has strong support in Europe, the heartland of anti-Bush sentiment. "Germany is Obama country," said Karsten Voight, the German government's coordinator for German-North American cooperation. "He seems to strike a chord with average Germans," who see him as a transformational figure like John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr.

His father's journey to America as an immigrant resonates with many foreigners who hope to make the same trip. Many people interviewed said that although the candidate's living in Indonesia for several years as a child doesn't qualify as foreign policy credentials, it may give him a more instinctive feel for the plight of the developing world.

"He's African, he's an immigrant family; he has a different style. It's just the way he looks -- he seems kind," said Nagy Kayed, 30, a student at the American University in Cairo.

For many, Obama's skin color is deeply symbolic. As the son of an African and a white woman from Kansas, Obama has the brownish "everyman" skin color shared by hundreds of millions of people. "He looks like Egyptians. You can walk in the streets and find people who really look like him," said Manar el-Shorbagi, a specialist in U.S. political affairs at the Cairo university.

In many nations, Obama's youth and color also represent a welcome generational and stylistic change for America. "It could help to reduce anti-U.S. sentiment and even turn it around," said Kim Sung-ho, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul.

In terms of foreign policy, Obama's stated willingness to meet and talk with the leaders of Iran, Syria and other nations largely shunned by Bush has been praised and criticized overseas.

And if Israelis fear that Obama's Middle East policies may be "too soft,"

Obama's candidacy has generated suspicion among Palestinians as well. Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University, said that even if Obama appears to be evenhanded in his approach to the Middle East, he would never take on the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. "The minute that Obama takes office, if he takes office, all his aides in the White House will start working on his reelection," Jarbawi said. "Do you think Obama would risk his reelection because of us?"

In Iraq, views on Obama's victory were mixed. Salah al-Obaidi, chief spokesman for Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite Muslim cleric who opposes the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, said the Sadr movement favors having a Democrat in the White House on grounds that McCain would largely continue Bush's policies.

But in Samarra, a Sunni stronghold north of Baghdad, Omar Shakir, 58, a political analyst, said he hoped McCain would win the election and combat the influence of Shiite-dominated Iran.

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