the defeatists!

Conscious and Conscience...

Paul Krugman should probably be Secretary of the Treasury. I don't think he'd accept it, or Commerce, or the FED, but he's probably the best example of a Conscious Economist with a Conscience operating in the public view these days. He's not a "maverick," whatever the fuck that is that's worth having. In the west, a Marverick was a steer without a brand. Steers are castrated bulls. Get my point?

Anyway, Krugman is a mainstream economist, in the tradition of Heller, Samuelson and JK Galbraith. He writes well, which is rare for an economist and guy who first got wealthy in the textbook writing scam. However, he has a rare gift for a Nobel Laureate in the dismal psuedo-science of economics. (All Social Science is Psuedo-science, in that the conditions can never be totally replicated and the results always have more than random variation, or else the experiment is probably rigged. However, that's a rant for another place.) He has some humility. Today's column is an exemplar, sort of...It's also an evisceration and a call to arms. He begins with humility...

He begins with a confession, and although he gives some credit, before damning the bastards for being corrupt, stupid, stupidly corrupt or corruptly stupid. I think those are the only available choices. Of course, delusional is another option...he skips that one. Blind and ignorant are also skipped. They are distinct possibilities...

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

He then does a marvelous job summarizing how we got where we are, and belling various cats. He remains somewhat hopeful, although guardedly. The welfare of the Republic and its future now rests on the ConservaDEMS who are perfectly capable of going DIXIECRAT on the mess and refusing to play. Do a Liver-man on the whole deal. (Does Joe Lieberman have a place to sit in the caucus after that display this weekend? Do Connecticut voters have access to the recall? Why is Ben Nelson still a Democrat? Seriously, there could easily be a third party in the Senate. The far right nutcases, the hypocrites, and the Democrats. Lieberman and Nelson and a few other sellout to insurance and banking and financial fat cats would be a great starting place to sell out on the road to a new economic serfdom...if we were to dig up JP Morgan and Jay Gould, we'd be better off than today.) However, Krugman takes off the gloves and lays into the conservatives in their bizzaro world and that alone is worth the price of admission. Which, since it's on the webs, is really just time. A shame, I guess but still...

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Frankly, as a guy who prides himself on having that understanding, it can be damn near fatal. None the less, Krugman nails it, them and us -- we the people elected those idiots -- and leaves the denouement to the imagination. Back to the future...barter. 

Bob and Maureen's Incredible Adventure....and the end of the world slouches closer

Crusader AXE is reaching new heights of wondering what the hell is the matter with the world...for some ungodly reason, I ordered sushi tonight in a little Japanese place 30 miles south of the crossroads of opportunity. I'm not that fond of sushi, but what the hell...anyway, the California roll was tasteless, they had a heated spicy crab role that was ok and then there was what I thought was spicy tuna roll which turned out to be red snapper roll. Ok, I admit it. I dislike sushi. I've been trying to like it for a couple of reasons, but forget it. Sushi sucks. I'm not that fond of fish to begin with, a heritage of meatless Fridays and fast days. But raw fish is tasteless, and wrapping it in eel skin and tossing in a dollop of something doesn't work. It's disappointing. Frankly, I prefer to roll the fresh ginger in the wasabi. That may not have much bulk, and damn little protein, but you know it's there.

However, culinary issues aside, as I was driving into the burg because Mrs. AXE wanted more cat food -- the monsters turned up their noses at the leftovers, showing cats are smarter than people -- and a brownie pan, when the phone went off. (I have a lengthy bitch about the inability of my phone to permanently link with the damn on-board blue tooth, but we'll let that pass.) My buddy the GINORMOUS quality guy wanted to let me know that one of my old team's six month old grand daughter had died in her sleep. My partner knew that would bother me a lot -- the gal had doted on the grand daughter, and when the husband and wife were having strife, actually offered to take the child and raise her; she had moved into the spare bedroom and was working full-time and being a live-in baby sitter. The child was happy, healthy and well loved. I now have someone who used to work for me, and is now in a lot of pain. And me, I'm eating sushi and complaining about it. Somehow, perspective approaches us and then walks away...

Which leads me to the trip that Secretary of Defense Gates just finished up to Iraq and Afghanistan. HuffPO  has a piece on it as well as Dulcinea Dowd's coverage. Gates is really looking like possibly Twitsheet de la Dweeb's sole intelligent move as President. Unfortunately, he and the president he now serves seem to have been dealt a really horrid hand. And, in this game of poker, the option of folding is just not there. Yet, the Iraqis and the Afghanis seem to be making that option more attractive daily. As she puts it, "Puppets just aren’t what they used to be. Or maybe a trillion dollars doesn’t buy the same felicitous level of obsequiousness it once did."

First of all, Karzai undercut Obama's surge than leave strategy with this...Afghanistan is like the Hotel California, boys...you can check out, but never leave. As Dowd explains, "Needling his American sugar daddy, the Afghan peacock observed: “For another 15 to 20 years, Afghanistan will not be able to sustain a force of that nature and capability with its own resources.” Well, the Iraqis at least have oil to fight over. Afghan's have one realistic cash crop -- opium poppies -- and no alternatives. Left to their own devices, they'd have gone back to butt fucking each other, playing a version of rugby on horseback with a dead sheep, and stealing from each other. But, the Russians, the CIA and the Taliban screwed up that paradigm. There is no other -- as the Romans learned with their tame barbarians in the late empire, once they get used to being paid off and defended, they expect it to continue. Ms. Dowd describes it this way..."Gates and his generals in Afghanistan talked a lot last week about “partnering” with and “mentoring” the Afghan Army and police. But given the Flintstones nature of the country, it’s more basic. Americans have to teach the vast majority of Afghan recruits to read and write before they can get to security training. It’s hard to arrest people if you can’t read them their rights and take names..." We need to remember we're talking about central Asia here. Baksheesh is as much a part of the culture as thuggery, buggery and illiteracy. Dowd notes that Gates discovered on this trip that the Afghan army is the low bidder on salaries with the Taliban. Since I suspect that to Omar the tribesman trying to figure out how to feed his family and sheep, the Afghan government and the Taliban don't seem that much different, and in fact, he probably feels more comfortable with the Taliban given their attitude toward women, and praying five times a day, and so on. It's really pretty simple...

Then Mullah Malaki skipped a meeting with Gates. Seems he's having a security crisis. The AXE has noted the various bombings and revenge killings going on in Iraq, and has failed to comment on it because " WHAT THE HELL DID WE EXPECT TO FUCKING HAPPEN?" Dulcinea points out that the Iraqi Prez did agree to a 0730 meeting on Friday, which was spun like a bunch of reused cotton batting used to make your next shirt from India to seem like a victory. Malaki likes to sleep late. Stress. And hookers, I expect.

Mainly hookers.

Now, Dulcinea appears to like Gates, and frankly, so do I. Compared to Rumsfeld, Homey the Clown would be an improvement by several orders of magnitude, but sheeeeeiiiiitttt, this guy knows what he is talking about. Although, anyone who would leave a gig like running Texas A&M to pick up the pieces has the sense of duty and responsibility that I can only admire. I've commented before that I like Obama because he's undoubtedly brilliant and has a sense of irony that he can't help but show. Gates appears to be somewhat similar..."His form of ego is not to show ego. When a much-anticipated trip to see an Army Stryker brigade in Kandahar was canceled because of fog, he dryly told us: “As Clint Eastwood said, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations."  He says that what he thinks he brings to the table is common sense, according to Ms Dowd; he isn't trying to prove anything. More to the point, he says something that strikes me as very true, and thus likely to be ignored: “Anybody who reads history has to approach these things with some humility because you can’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows what the last chapter ever looks like.”

Personally, I think I know how it all ends for us, the Afghans, the Pakistanis and the Iraqis...poorly. The details remain to be fleshed out, and people like Obama and Gates will try to minimize the damage, but ultimately this just sucks. And, as I put the macro into perspective and the micro into perspective, my dislike of sushi is so trivial that for penance I should force myself to eat more of it. But, I won't. My friend's loss will trouble me and I will continue to reflect on just how lousy things are, but I will not do penance for not eating sushi. Again.

By the way, on Saturday Gail Collins addressed the contracting mess, that really irks me. First of all, my work for GINORMOUS was as a member of a well-honed contracting project, and we generally did what the government wanted us to do very well. However, there is a problem with the changing model that probably had something to do with my leaving and undoubtedly will have a lot to do with re-structuring that paradigm. Contractors don't really make sense. She explains why, very graphically indeed.

Do you remember the scandal about the U.S. Embassy guards in Kabul, Afghanistan, who got naked and held wild hazing rituals? ...I am bringing this up because I want to talk about government contracting. When you venture into topics like that, it’s always a good idea to try to begin with an orgy.

She and the Times have uncovered a real boondoggle here that won't get a lot of attention but is very close to reality, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. As clusterfucks go, this one is amazing, and not just the nonsense with the guards. Turns out there were a number of professional soldiers in addition to the clowns who went through the drunken games of ass-licking and body shots...Gurkhas. Well, I got to meet a few Gurkha officers and I'd trust them over any of our home grown mercenaries. However, only the officers generally speak English. The average Nepalese tribesman doesn't learn English unless he gets shipped off to one of the Royal Regiments. So, this allows a small additional income stream for Nepal, but they don't freaking speak English. The Americans appear to be a bunch of incredible rejects. The company has been threatened with the loss of the contract, and a new contract will be bid and let in 2010. June, 2010. The Gurkhas still don't speak English, and there's no reason to assume the guards have gotten any better. They're just quieter...

Ms. Collins sums up the entire "war by private contractor" better than just about anything I've read; the only thing that does it better in my mind is the John Cusack/Maria Tome tour de force called War Inc.  ( I seldom buy movies, and as I get older I have fewer I want to see again. However, that one is well worth it. Grosse Point Blank grown up...and taken to a whole 'nother level.)

When did we decide this was a good plan?...Let’s pretend for a minute that it is not stupendously irresponsible to let private contractors stand in for our military in wildly sensitive and dangerous situations abroad.  Even if it was a terrific idea, we would still have to ask whether huge government agencies, which frequently have a difficult time finding cost-effective ways to order a hammer, know how to purchase services that actually work...These days, there’s virtually nothing the government doesn’t contract out. At the height of the war in Iraq, there were 190,000 contracted personnel taking part in the effort — 23 times the number of allied troops who were lending a hand..."This is the real surge, with a dwindling number of overseers riding herd." There’s no reason to believe the government has the capacity to determine how well all these private contractors are doing their jobs. And it’s doubtful that if the government did know, it could do much about it.

Yeah, the lack of a plan B should really bother people. Oh, the DOD has no plan B. Or if they do, they sure aren't telling the contractors. Which is fine, I guess...maybe they think the contractors will figure it out and do what's necessary to keep their work. However, my experience makes me think probably not. As the poet says, "Some of them were dreamers, and some of them were fools/making plans and talking about the future..." with a heat seeking missile headed up our butts.

I've been trying to not raise my blood pressure, but...

This goddamn woman is going to kill me.

 I kept thinking I should comment on the speech in Oslo, but I couldn't think of much to say.  I pretty much agreed with Obama, who pretty much agreed with everybody except the occasional mad pacifist-philosopher on the just war argument. From Aristotle through Ricoeur, the just war argument gets restated and retitled, but rarely changes -- there is evil and you have the right as a person/group/nation to defend yourself and the responsibility to try and prevent it from eating you and the rest of the world alive. Broughhahahaha about Toby Keith aside, 9/11 provided the justification for Afghanistan and possibly the necessity. Sorry. Bridge in the song sucks, but it was still an honest statement. And, Toby Keith is a moderate Democrat, so go figure.

So since my brothers are finding ways to plug Gary Busey's face onto everything imaginable and the world is turning as per normal, I gotta say, I was doing really well. Staying calm...and then, I read this bit of absolute bullshit and degradation of the sacred by the illiterate/insane/and deranged crone from Minnesota, Michelle "I can see aliens from my house" Bachmann. Tiffany call her home!

Bachmann's argument is fallacious and stupid -- everyone tried in the United States, its territories and possessions including all the ships at sea, military bases, military tribunals and in captivity by a board of court martial in a POW camp is entitled to a fair trial. Including the little green men who obviously have taken over Michelle's mind and body. I mean, Minnesota has excellent public schools. I know she's from Lake Woebegone country, but still they have fantastic schools. She has to have taken civics...I think.

More to the point, Crusader AXE believes in American Exceptionalism. Although Ronald Reagan was a 30 year disaster for this country through his influence on law, thought, foreign policy, his reference to the beacon like a city on a hill from John Winthrop's sermon to the Massachusetts Bay Colony has always struck a note with me. Winthrop more than Ronnie, but then, I was better educated than Ronnie, or for that matter, Michelle Bachmann. Anyway, America is special not because of the water and our superior body fluids, but because of the idea of America. Truth, Justice and the American Way. Bachmann is supposedly a Christian, although we all know that in itself means nothing. But, we have a big statue in New York harbor that celebrates the American idea. The door is open to anyone. Goering got a goddamn fair trial! Jesus...didn't this woman swear to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies domestic and foreign? I did. Anyone who ever served in the military, the Federal Service, and any of a number of state agencies has done the same thing. She was sworn into office in the Capitol.

I know that politicians don't have to know how to read and certainly there is no requirement that they know how to use logic. But, the Amanda Knox trial ought to give Bachmann pause. The gal is guaranteed a lot of time in prison because people don't like America as much in Italy, and all the things that occurred in that trial, from never cautioning the jury, to allowing hearsay, to letting the goddamn jurors give interview during the trial are contradictory to the very concept of a fair trial. Under the Napoleonic code. Where Ms. Knox and her attorneys face the duty of proving the negative...which cannot be proven. Guilty until proven innocent, so that the state and the "homeland" are protected first, and then the Rights of the Individual. The goddamn Napoleonic code is a heritage of tyranny in much of Europe. We are a common law nation, and along with the British Commonwealth, have other expectations.

Then, the fact that she refers to the Bill of Rights as "perks," that only Americans have just makes me cringe. They are rights and responsibilities. As a member of Congress, she has a special responsibility to "preserve, protect and defend" those rights. Instead, she giggles and fingers her erroneous zone lasciviously.

So, this menopausal bimbo who shouldn't be allowed to be on a goddamn zoning panel or school board -- damn, especially a school board --has a bully pulpit and adoring fans. Yet, she is truly ignorant, and truly anti-American. Seriously, I can picture Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Hamilton staring at her, bemused, taking a pinch of snuff and then walking away sadly. Especially if their shades still walk...

At least it doesn't take the skin off your ass...quickly

If you visit American City...How does that lyric go again?

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

So, we're watching our infrastructure crumble around us. In China, you don't drink the tap water unless you have a death wish. Here, we brag about our water and air and wonder why we have to clean things up...and, that e coli might be headed for you, not from Jack in the Box, but the water company. We're not aspiring to China's growth rate; we're aspiring to China's standard of living.

It used to be common to compare states and for local politicians to say, "At least we're not Mississippi." Well, Cletus, Mississippi has a lot more going for it's civic society these days than California. We used to brag about our technology and our infrastructure. Shanghai has a Magleev train. California has a plan that's been scrapped. Ten years or so ago, my boss' husband who was in his 70s came down with a terrible case of e coli...from the local water. It didn't shorten his life appreciably, since he died in his late 80s. But still -- we weren't in Calcutta, damn it, they were in Olympia, Washington. Absurd.

Oh yeah, this is how it goes.

Squaring the ....say, wha?

 
From Frank Rich of the New York Times:

Obama’s speech struck me as the sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign policy America has ever known. But some circles of hell can’t be squared.

Rich goes on to make a number of very good points while mixing an incredible number of metaphors. However, the key point is interesting and perhaps left unsaid. We may not have reached the end of history that the neo-cons babbled about after the wall came down in Berlin, but we have reached a point of the trivialization of history. Between the media wall of white noise and the distance in time, something as awful and as immediate as 9/11 can become trivialized and banal. Rich pointed to the age of the cadets at West Point -- a senior who joined the Corps at 18 was 13-14 in 2001. Horrendous as 9/11 was, it has been overwhelmed. Historical perspective lost; in the oddly distorted flow of the space/time/continuum, it falls into the pit of yesterday. In ten years, asking people to remember 9/11 will be like asking them to remember the Maine, or the Alamo, or Tippicanoe. It's history, not My-story. I'm not proud of that construction, but it has the disadvantage of being true. 

Today, citizens in the developed world have so much stimulation that they become numb. Our brains have not evolved as quickly as our world. A friend of mine in Olympia, Washington, Dr. Sarah Reade, an Internist and one of the brightest people I know described it to me roughly this way a few years ago. In the past, say, 10000 years ago, there was little sensory stimulation except one's immediate surroundings. I recall her saying that, "The most exciting thing that might happen IN A YEAR was seeing a bear. If they survived the encounter, well, that was it as far as stress and fear and endorphins. If they didn't,well, it was irrelevant. Long story short, compare that to a trip on I5 through Seattle during rush hour."

The story of the healer who saw the bear and lived would become part of the tribal memory. As the healer aged, she would be sought for advice on surviving seeing the bear. People would ask what the bear meant...searching for meaning a la Joseph Campbell or The Golden Bough. (Or, for that matter, The Madness of Crowds!) Perhaps over the decades, the healer would become a goddess, or a seer, or a legend. The bear would become a moment of epiphany, a hierophany, a moment of the intersection of the sacred and the profane.

Today, too much. Except for those physically touched by the event, much or most of its power has
been lost. I realized that it was receding quickly in my life later that September, when I opened the drapes to my hotel room high in one of the towers of the GM complex in Detroit, and realized that I was on the 55th floor of what has to be still be a symbol of America. I'd checked my bags in at the curb, shown my ID, gotten on a plane and flew to Detroit from Seattle. It was sort of overwhelming, looking out over the city...

And realizing that the city was dying. It was really obvious over the next few days. Detroit, not 9/11, is what is killing us. So, outside of having to comfort a 20-something  volunteer on 9/11 because her dad had been in a meeting in 1 World Trade Center that morning -- which had been moved to the Marriott, so he survived -- my clearest memory of the time is of the fact that in terms of my life, it became irrelevant watching the lights of Detroit just before dawn, from the 55th floor of a lumbering brontosaurus that hadn't quite realized that at least a couple of its brains had died.

Not a lot to say...

When the spouse came home this evening, she informed me that the Marines were laying off over 350 people at a local logistics center -- 350 "accelerated hires" that they desperately had to hire this past summer. Ouch. Effective date of layoff is...tomorrow. Interesting approach; she coordinates Workers Comp at this place, and I told her expect a lot of people to claim they were hurt today, yesterday and tomorrow. For my friends who are thinking about the WARN notices that should have gone out, I'm not sure they apply to the government. Civil Service HR is weirder than regular HR. So...who knows.

Had to drive out to the installation to pick up drugs -- old soldier drugs, not fun drugs -- and get mail. Post office decided to make the installation post office a one person station at the front. Poor gal was going insane. I get out there about every ten days, and I could see she was being slammed. Hospital was done to one person at the pharmacy, and no supervising pharmacist. Seeing a trend here?

And, although I planned on not watching "the speech" it was the most interesting thing on and I had a headache, so reading wasn't really an option. It was a logical and rational discussion, the sort of logical and rational discussion that should have happened years and years ago. I notice that the upper classmen in the audience, the TAC Officers and NCOs, and folks in civvies were all pretty intently following what he had to say. They got it. The guys with bare blouses or 1 ribbon only, the lower classmen, were the ones who were having trouble staying awake. Frankly, given the West Point regime, most of those kids are either up to their noses in homework at 8PM or asleep. Or, doing push-ups. I was struck by the number of Combat Infantry Badges I saw -- indicated that the wearer had gotten shot at. For real. Probably went to the West Point Prep School after an enlisted tour. In general, good quality.

But, the speech made a lot of sense, starting from the point of view that Afghanistan is critical to our national interests. Is it? Not sure. I do know that the last 8 years haven't been terribly successful. I also know that the cost is beyond reason. Granted, the repayment by BOA of $45 billion in TARP money is nice, but I don't feel a lot better about things based on that.

Well, we'll see. Unfortunately, a modern Army can't ditty mao out of a country overnight. I'd hate to be the last guy to try and get out of Bagram. Or Kabul. Or across the bridge into AZERBAIJAN, if it still exists. I'm just tired of posting gloomy Russian soldier ballads and thinking about Afghanistan. What's happening in Iraq? Same thing that happened in Vietnam in 1973-75. Some other set of assholes are running the place, but it's still run by assholes fighting other assholes about money, power and religion. Afghanistan will ultimately go the same way, I suspect. We'll stabilize it, declare victory, get out relatively unmolested and it'll go to shit in 2014 or so. And so it goes...

Enough? Not enough? Too much? There there be monsters...

The news that the President has decided to prepare a dog's breakfast for Bo out of the lives of American Soldiers and Marines and their families is not surprising. If it turns out to be less than 40K, that will be interesting. The challenges of supply and support in Afghanistan make it difficult where in Iraq it is not so difficult. Not that it's easy in Iraq -- it's just that the challenges are not driven by terrain, altitude and weather on a daily basis. If you have a sandstorm in Iraq, everything stops until the sand stops blowing. It's always very hot. It's always very humid. Our shit works fine there. It's generally flat, although in some places there is terrain that looks a lot of Nevada. Or, Fort Irwin.

Afghanistan is a whole 'nother country, and it's not Texas. The weather varies from hot and dry to wet and rainy to "MOTHERFUCKER, IT"S MOTHERFUCKING COLD, MOTHERFUCKER. The terrain is largely vertical. And the bad guys are a lot more ferocious than the bad guys in Iraq. So, if there are 30 thousand combat and direct support types on the ground, there are going to be a lot of indirect support types keeping them fed, watered, healthy and supplied. The ratio is smaller than it used to be, but it'll probably be 2:3 grunts/supporters.

That said, is this enough to win? Well, somebody needs to define win. Good luck with that...the win was going to be getting bin Laden. It's now morphed into something undefined, perhaps indefinable. And, Mr. Nuanced Civility is going to try to measure up to the MacArthur "the Corps...the Corps...the Corps" tradition. An old friend of mine from Europe had been a cadet at West Point at the time they filmed Gregory Peck doing that speech, and he said that people were in tears and the enthusiasm of the applause and everything associated with it was incredible. Well, this will be a bit more complex...

Now, lest anyone think I'm implying that the cadets at West Point aren't bright, you are obviously not getting it. They're incredibly bright. As a senior NCO, I preferred dealing with West Pointers as opposed to ROTC types most of the time, although the tail end of my career was spent largely with ROTC -educated logisticians.  The are lots of dumbasses in uniform, just as there are in all fields. And, the automatic Republicanism of the corps is not something that can be counted on. I suspect at the moment most soldiers are moderate conservatives and the corps probably mirrors that. Since there are no Republican moderate conservatives, most of them are probably classifying themselves as Independents.

No, if Obama sat down with a bunch of First Class Cadets, seniors as it were, and discussed his vision and plans, they'd get it. They might not agree with it, but they'd get it. In this case, he's going to be addressing the nation, using the Corps as props. I resent using soldiers as props. The nation is fucked up enough that there are 20% of the people who think Sister"Gosh darn it, I'm special, not as special as Trig, but I'm still special enough to be President!" is fit for office. Hell, 15% of the people in the country supposedly approve of Mitch McConnell. Town hall rally types oppose federal health care at the same time as they draw Medicare. There are a fair amount of people in this country who are dumbasses...and, then there are those who are entirely too bright. They'll want more nuance, and more nuance...trigger points and firewalls.

Whether this is enough really depends on the Afghans. Given their track record, the AXE is not sanguine about this policy, or that policy, or any other policy. Define victory -- if it's Jeffersonian democracy and the establishment of a branch campus of Mount Holy Oak in Khandahar, it's not going to happen. If it's a somewhat restrained narco-kleptocracy, well, that's possible. It's also what they had after Russia pulled out before the Taliban took over. What would have been victory was the capture of bin Laden and the boys, although I personally would have preferred they all died. We'll see how this turns out.

So what is victory? What are the Afghans going to do? Obama owes the cadets, who will largely be fighting there, and the rest of us a definition and a reasonable expectation of a thus defined success. I suspect that we're headed for victory lite. That's the best anyone has ever done in that hellhole.

Enthusiasm gap? How'd that work in Berlin in 1928?

The revealed truth appears to be that the Obama administration and the Democrats are doomed, doomed, doomed because a lot of self-identified Democrats aren't going to the polls in 2010 because they lack enthusiasm. I would have thought the futility of the Obama administration and the president's inability to recognize that you can't get people who don't want to reconcile to reconcile or people who want to be disruptive and uncivil to be constructive and civil by listening might have a bit more to do with it.

It is always easier to get people to be against something as opposed to for something...and, Democrats in today's political cess-pool are in fact far less ideologically pure than Republicans. Who appear to have annointed  Sister "Gosh darn it, I'm special! Not Like Trig is Special, but Special!" as a spokesperson.

If there ever was a time to run a "give 'em hell, Harry" style effort, this is the time. However, while his name doesn't come up all that much, Obama is tied to Marshall McLuhan's view of media. Television is a "cool" media; the internet and blogosphere is a hot media. One of the aspects of a cool media is a certain level of dispassion; the blogosphere is nothing if not passionate. In addition, the administration in particular and the congress as well isn't able to respond. I'm not thinking Bush, I'm thinking Weimar...the mainstream politicians and press became irrelevant while the Nazis and the Commies and the various nutcases became the mainstream.

Well, outside of running Springsteen for New Jersey governor, how the hell do the Dems connect? They need to have a bit of party unity, and they need to scapegoat the Republicans where they bastards are vulnerable -- like Maine, for example. Rural health care in Maine is a joke, but Snowe and Collins have blown the chance to make history. Joe Lieberman needs to be invited out of the Democratic caucus, immediately, with Lincoln, Landrau and Nelson to follow. Let them be ideologically pure...somewhere else.

If they Dems pass health care, 2010 will not be a debacle. If they don't, or what ends up passing is a disaster, then a lot of Dems won't show up. In 1934, the Nazis showed up. They were evil, wrong, and totally unconnected to reality. But, damn, they were enthusiasm personified. What I suspect happens in 2010 is that who ever wins, we lose.
Kurt Weil and Berthold Brecht and the new decadence...

Comparisons are odious, but...that's the way we think. Damn humans...

There's a story I read years ago that I can't find, but I remember the punch line really well. Once upon a time there was a kingdom. And, the king got on the bad side of the gods. And the gods fucked him over, along with the entire kingdom and eveyone in it. Plague, pox, pestilence, famine, fire, floods, crop failures, balding sheep, eggless hens, milkless cows and so on. As the scene descended into something y Hieronymus Bosch, the kind turned to his son and said, "Just think of it, my boy. Someday this will all be yours." History does not record what the prince said, but one can only guess...

Few American officials know the Soviets' bitter Afghan predicament better than Mr. Gates. In the 1980s, he was the deputy director of the CIA, overseeing a massive U.S. effort to fund, train and equip the Islamic insurgents, called mujahedeen, who fought the Soviet army to a standstill. Now some of the most prominent of these insurgents, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, are allied against America with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Almost daily their men are killing Western troops, who often operate from former Soviet bases and use Soviet-drawn military maps with faint Cyrillic markings. "It's an eerie sense of deja vu," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar who headed the Obama administration's Afghan policy review in the spring and who in the 1980s worked under Mr. Gates as a CIA officer in the region. "America," he said, "is in the rare position of fighting the same war twice in one generation, from opposite sides. And it's easier to be the insurgents." (AXE emphasis.)

The Wall Street Journal has a real problem with schizophrenia. Particularly under Murdoch, the editorial page is one step from either complete lunacy or the American Spectator. However, the journalism is exceptional. This piece, on how we ended up where we are going to be in Afghanistan, is a marvelous example. We're not the Russians. We're also fucked. I tend to agree with both...however, one point needs to continue to be made...

Mr. Gates's knowledge of how the Soviet occupation and its brutalities inflamed local anger contributed to his initial skepticism about a U.S. surge. "I worry a great deal about the size of the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan," he told a Senate hearing in April. "Soviets were in there with 110,000 troops, didn't care about civilian casualties and couldn't win." Gen. McChrystal, at his meeting with Mr. Gates in Belgium, managed to persuade the defense chief that the U.S., unlike the Soviets, is still welcomed by most Afghans. The general argued that certain tactics such as using Afghan rather than American soldiers for house searches could further blunt perceptions of the U.S. as an occupier and put the momentum in America's favor.( AXE emphasis and snark: Who says generals can't be PR weasels? If that isn't spin...)

 I really fail to get excited about a policy of "well, what the fuck do we do now? Ok, let's try a bit of this and bit of that and hope that they all die from a fucking plague!!" Trust me, if that would work, the Russians would have tried it! And probably wiped out a division of their own Army but hey, omelets and eggs.

Eagle probably tastes like chicken...just like snake, gator and lizard

Ah, Thanksgiving. Gail Collins of the NY Times does a marvelous job skewering some of our traditions as she mocks Courage, the Grand Marshall of The Disneyland Thanksgiving Parade, and ponders the cosmos. Courage is of course, a turkey. Obama seems to be becoming more ironic as the year wears on, commenting at the National Turkey Pardoning that “There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this, where I pardon the turkey and send it to Disneyland." For Dispheet de la Dweeb, this was always the high point of his year.

You know, I wonder if the inspiration for DEVO, and certainly the best example of the justice behind the concept of devolution might not be the turkey. Franklin, who was probably drunk, advocated the American Wild Turkey as the national bird. Collins has some thoughts on it...

The National Turkey Federation named the bird Courage, perhaps in memory of Benjamin Franklin’s contention that the bald eagle was a bird of bad moral character while the turkey was “though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage.” If Franklin’s argument had prevailed and the turkey, rather than the bald eagle, had become the national symbol, would we still be eating them? Would the turkey farmers still be in business?

Now, they are just silly, stupid and held upside down to be de-blooded while Sarah Palin cheers. Oh, the AXE dislikes turkey. At the Catholic West Point, we had turkey a lot. Also, tuna fish. I had more than enough of the stuff. Mrs. AXE one year decided that capon would be a nice compromise. Nope. It was awful in its own way. I do prefer a nice bit of hobbit, with some fava beans and San Pelligrino...