December Infamy

December has given us more than one "day which will live in infamy."

Here's a random sampling:  After three years of unconstitutional incarceration, Japanese-American citizens are finally released from detention camps (1944); United States and Russia conduct nuclear test explosions on the same day (1970) spewing particles of radiation contaminants over three quarters of the earth; Rosa Parks arrested in Alabama for refusing to move to the back of the bus (1955); Jerry Lee Lewis marries his 13-year-old cousin while still married to Jane Mitcham (1957).

And in 1981, on Dec. 12, President Ronnie Reagan authorized the CIA to begin spying on Americans -- the start of the United States government assault on the Bill of Rights that reached its apex when Bush II buffaloed a compliant Congress into passing what's come to be known as the Patriot Act. (The name is an acronym, probably created by Mrs. Malaprop.)

Now add to the days of infamy Dec. 16, 2009.  With only 34 nays, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $636 billion defense spending bill -- (that's not the bad part) -- into which was tucked (here's the infamy):

 * Extension of the Patriot act.

*  1,080 so-called earmarks totaling $2.7 billion, most of it for companies or lobby groups that had contributed substantially to the campaigns of the representatives who inserted the earmarks into the bill.  Jim Moran (D-Va.) put in 45 earmarks to firms, mainly in the defense industry, in his home district that gave him a total of $201,000 in campaign contributions.  Jack Murtha (D-PA) put in earmarks to reward firms that gave him $199,050.  The earmark infamy was bipartisan.  C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida (R) took in $122,000 from beneficiaries of his earmarks.

The pork is business as usual in Washington   Ho-hum.  It's only taxpayer money.  We can't afford to pay for health care for every American.  But we can earmark billions  for graft.

And we continue to live under the thick black cloud of legislation that savages the Bill of Rights.  The Patriot Act -- its entire title is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001" -- literally repealed great sections of the Bill of Rights without bothering to follow the constitutional process for repeal.

In a fell swoop, Congress:

 * Decimated the First Amendment with unconstitutional restrictions on free speech and the right to peaceably assemble.

*  Virtually repealed the Fourth Amendment requirements of probable cause and prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure.

* Canceled the Sixth Amendment's right to prompt and public trial.

* Wiped out the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

With a ho and a hum and a dum dum dum, these abominations against our citizenship have just been extended, rather than being permitted to expire en bloc, as they would and should have at the end of  December.

In the intensely emotional aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the legislation was handed to Congress late at night -- 402 pages of language cleverly designed to mask the real effect of the bill and play rather upon the emotions of the Congress for immediate passage.  It is probable that whoever came up with the acronymable title spent more time creating it than our legislators spent actually studying the text of the legislation.

It contains nearly 30 amendments to the United States Code or to legislation previously passed by the Congress following study and debate.  Each of these changes in our laws is constructed in language comparable to the following actual excerpt from the act:

Chapter 10 of title 18, United States Code, is amended—

(1) in section 175—

(A) in subsection (b)—

(i) by striking ‘‘does not include’’ and inserting

‘‘includes’’;

(ii) by inserting ‘‘other than’’ after ‘‘system for’’;

and

(iii) by inserting ‘‘bona fide research’’ after ‘‘protective’’;

(B) by redesignating subsection (b) as subsection (c);

(2) in subparagraph (E), by striking the period at the

end and inserting ‘‘; and’’; and

(3) by adding at the end the following:

‘‘(F) does not discriminate against victims because they

disagree with the way the State is prosecuting the criminal

case.’

In their emotional state so soon after the towers fell, most of those who voted for the act probably had to read no further than this paragraph on the very first page: "To deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes."

The devil indeed was in the details, in those "other purposes." And so we torture or hand over our prisoners to nefarious regimes to do the torturing for us; every American citizen lives under the specter of his government's probing into his most personal records and acts, and possibly suffering dire consequences for innocent transactions; for every one of us there is the awful possibility of being incarcerated without bail, without charge, without trial simply for being politically active.

Ho, hum and a dum dum dum.  Merry Christmas.

*#!$@**&%!!#

F**k the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom today: So it isn't perfect.  But the Senate health care bill would prevent insurance companies from refusing coverage to people who are already sick.  It will, um. . . .it will extend coverage to 30 million people who aren't covered now.  Tell them we won't pass the bill because it isn't perfect.

F**k the conventional wisdom.

C'mon, the conventional wisdom says, be practical.  With the little compromises we've made, we can get the backing we need to pass a bill.  Think of it!  A health care law, after all these years of contention.  An actual bill we can get to the President's desk to be signed into law.

F**k the conventional wisdom.  Why?

1. The bill won't really cover 30 million more Americans.  It simply mandates that every single American buy health insurance or break the law and face penalties and fines. So, rather than "covering" 30 million more Americans, the bill makes them criminals if they don't buy insurance from the same companies that corrupted our health care system in the first place.

2. A real public option -- which in itself is a compromise from true reform, which would have given us a single-payer system --  is a tool that would drive down costs and improve coverage by offering an affordable alternative to private insurance. Your gutless, spineless Democratic "leadership" in the Senate has bargained that away to get "a bill that can pass."




3. It is loaded with little sops to "key" senators to buy their votes.  Sops that sock the rest of us, like the stealth cap on coverage for long-term illnesses, or this little gem: $50 million for abstinence-only sex education.  That's not education; that's not health care; that's religion. "Congress shall pass no law. . ."

F**k the conventional wisdom.

"Honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill," former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told Vermont Public Radio. "The Senate has somehow managed to turn the House's silk purse into a sow's ear," said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus. "Without a public option and no hope of expanding Medicare coverage, this bill is not worth supporting," said Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "Without a public option, this bill is almost a trillion dollar taxpayer giveaway to insurance companies," said Jim Dean, a spokesman for a liberal Democratic action group.

The Senate bill is a tribute to the corruption of Joe Lieberman, the man without a soul, who is owned, lock, stock, barrel and bullshit, by the insurance industry and the Israeli hawk lobby.

"I feel so strongly about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement," Soulless Joe said recently."The government going into the health insurance business - I think it's such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote."

F**k Joe Lieberman.

A Camel in the Room?

If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what is a health care plan designed by the 111th Congress?

Nothing you'd want to ride into the mid-term elections. Committee mark-ups dictated by health industry lobbyists, secret deals whose makers regularly renege, sell-outs, cop-outs and downright sleaze have turned the idea of reform into something possibly worse than the godawful mess we have now.

We can't be certain until we know specifically what little surprises have been, and continue to be, slipped into the bill,  like the stealthy cap on insurance payments for the seriously ill. (See previous post, "How Things Work.")  But when the likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are calling the shots, you can bet the farm on two general points: (1) It'll be bad for sick people and (2) it'll fatten the coffers of insurance companies and their top executives.

For example, the insurance company surrogates have already twisted the bill to virtually assure that, absent a public option to compete with the private insurers, your health care premiums will increase by an average of $1,000 a year.  There's nothing to prevent providers from continuing to raise their fees; not one word.  Medicare won't be allowed to use its economy of scale to bargain down your drug prices.  Since insurance companies will continue to be exempt from anti-trust laws, they won't even have to compete with one another.  New biologic drugs will be protected forever from competition from generics.  All of this has been done more or less out in the open.

Now consider that the first draft of a House effort at health care reform ran to 1,000 pages, much of it written in legispeak gobbledygook that militated against genuine reform.  The last unverified report I saw speculated that the thing kicking around the Senate was up to 2,000 pages and growing.  Can you imagine the number of Catches 22 the lobbyists, lawyers and legislators can cram into 2,000-plus pages behind closed doors?

When something finally reaches the floor, how many Senators will actually have read and understood every word of this document by the time they cast their votes?  Will they finally be so weary of the whole torturesome business, so eager to send something, anything, to the President, so desperate to crow about "making history," that they'll rush this worse-than-a-camel to passage unread, the way they did the horrible USA Patriot Act?

And after that comes the process of reconciliation in conference, where the same health industry puppets who created the messes will attempt to merge the House and Senate versions of health care "reform" into a final bill.  The conferees will, of course, continue to be guided by their muses, the lobbyists, even as they prattle, outside the chamber doors where the TV cameras lurk, about public options and public debts and Joe Lieberman's wife, a former insurance industry shill who now -- Say it ain't so, Joe! -- actually gets money for  promoting donations to a breast cancer charity.

Try to sell this plot as a comedy for the Broadway stage and they wouldn't even let you in the side door at Sardi's.

But there it is, our government in action, our leaders doing their duty to the people who elected them.

May the Angels of Mercy save us!  The health care bill sure as hell won't.

The Nobel Speech

Your Pianist hit a sour note, which he realized only after reading Andrew Sullivan's excellent piece (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/the-tragedy-of-hope.html) about President Obama's Nobel acceptance speech.

That's why I deleted my blog, "Audacity sans Hope."  In it I wrote that the speech "did not lend itself to quick, facile analysis," whereupon my own attempt at analysis proved my point.

I have not reversed my opinion of the speech as oratory: it is a sublime example of the oratorical powers of our most eloquent President since Lincoln.  It was, as Sullivan wrote,  "written and spoken in such a way to reach anyone of any faith or none. . . . It was an expression of tragic hope."

I have reversed my opinion that his defense of war while accepting a prize for peace was an act of monumental hypocrisy.  Rereading the speech, for perhaps the fifth time, I have come to see it as an act of absolute candor, an honest acknowledgment of his own "difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."

The key to understanding the speech is to understand this paragraph:

"We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.  There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified... For make no mistake:  Evil does exist in the world.  A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies.  Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.  To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

Even as an apostle of hope, in his pre-campaign writings, Mr. Obama was ever the pragmatist.  Sometimes progressives such as your Pianist found themselves so uplifted by his rhetoric of hope -- especially  during the last abysmal days of Bush -- that they did not hear his simultaneous warning about what's possible.

Sullivan writes, "Hope is not optimism. We have little reason for optimism given the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hope is a choice. As much a choice as faith and love."

Mr. Obama did not start these wars.  "Our actions matter," he said in Oslo, "and can bend history."  The wars launched by another President have bent the history with which he must deal, a history that hands him a terrible paradox.  On the one hand, no nation can be truly safe as long as there exist those who not only hate it with a suicidal passion, but also possess the wealth and the means to do it the kind of harm that the United States suffered on Sept. 11, 2001.  And so he must pursue Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and to do so he must also fight the Taliban.  In the context of the history he inherited, he can do no other.  Yet the very process of pursuing those goals, of eliminating those threats, builds new animosity toward America in the muslim world, gives birth to new terrorists and terrorist sympathizers, complicates his already labyrinthine task, and can make his acceptance of a peace prize while justifying war seem like hypocrisy.

It is not, for, as Sullivan wrote:  "(Obama) sees that the profound flaws in human nature affect 'us' as well as 'them'; that we "face the world as it is," not as we would like it to be; that the decision to go to war is a moral and a pragmatic one; that ends have to be balanced by a shrewd and sometimes cold-eyed assessment of means."

Obama's cold-eyed assessment of means has led to policies, or the continuation of old policies, that I still find abhorrent.  "All nations," he said in Oslo, "must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." There is call in his own use of force for not just assessment, but reform, to meet those governing standards.

Yet, all things considered, as an editorialist in Canada observed, the Nobel acceptance was "the right speech at the right time."

How Things Work

Ah, Democracy!

Why was Joe Lieberman, Aetna's $3-million man, the only Senator smiling as they emerged from the closed-door meeting that "compromised" the health care public option for the third or fourth time?  Could it have anything to do with the fact that Hartford, which calls itself "the insurance capital of the world," has almost as many insurance company headquarters as Florida has oranges?  Nah, that's cynical.

Left on the cutting room floor after that meeting were the last shreds of "reform" in the Senate version of health care reform legislation.

Among them is one that particularly infuriates me because I am a cancer survivor.  Its loss represents literally a death blow to fellow survivors who, unlike me, require costly, long-term treatment.  A case in point is my friend Garry, one of the most courageous people I know, an athlete who, in the Lance Armstrong mold, continues to push himself to the limit even as medicine and chemistry keep him alive.

He'd have had to start paying all of his treatment costs if the new Senate health care "reform" bill had been in effect.  It would have wiped him out, leaving him a pauper. (A dead pauper, most likely.) That's because the bill would place dollar limits on insurance coverage for costly illnesses like Garry's.

The Associated Press reports today: The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.

The AP quotes an American Cancer Society official as saying, "We don't know who put it in, or why it was put in."

But we can guess, can't we?  As investigative reporters used to be told, back when journalism was practiced and there were investigative reporters, "Follow the money."

What began as a noble ideal called health care reform has died aborning.

The best kind of reform, a government single payer plan, was taken off the table before the drafting of the first proposed legislation had even begun.

Follow the money.

When the first weakened draft of health care reform became public, a vast and highly successful campaign of lies and misinformation ("death panels," "forced enrollment in a government plan," etc.) turned the public against it.

Follow the money.

When Max Baucus (an insurance company million-dollar man) and his finance committee went behind closed doors to craft a Senate version of the bill, the media assured us that "the public option is dead."

Follow the money.

Senators Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Rolland Burris, and Sherrod Brown revived the public option. The $80 million insurance industry puppets Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu took Joe Lieberman's Sword of Hartford and carved out another "compromise."

Ah, Democracy! Follow the money.

The Climate Memos

A very bright fellow who worked for me at one of my newspapering stops eventually left The Business to become an information officer for the Argonne national research laboratory in Chicago.

After a few months on the job he e-mailed me that he was "learning" scientists' humor, which, he assured me, was unlike any other.  He sent me a few samples.  That was 15 years ago and I still don't get the jokes.

Lately, in an effort to make chicken salad out of something less palatable, I have been slogging through the entire text of the purloined e-mails of the climate scientists during a sedentary period inflicted upon me by spinal problems.  I do not recommend this for pleasure-seekers -- neither the spinal problems nor the e-mail reading.

I still don't get most of the jokes, but it's obvious to me that the climate change deniers, ever vigilant for easy-on, easy-off propagandizing, don't "get" any of it.  Like Bushites plucking squibs of intelligence and spinning them into causes for war, the climate deniers have picked out a dozen or so of the memos and made them sound like a vast left wing conspiracy. Much has been made, for example, about one memo in which a climate scientist acknowledges having used a "trick."

Having lived a good deal of my life with a chemist father whose hobbies included astronomy and archeology, and an older brother with a doctorate in chemical engineering whose hobbies ranged from biology to zoology, I became well acquainted with scientists' fondness for the word "trick."

It can mean a shortcut past an otherwise complicated process; a promising new theory; a happenstance; or a scientific joke that involves false clues that aren't revealed until you confess bafflement and the joker explains the correct result. 

In the total context, the "trick" in the purloined memos is simply a shortcut.

Other "suspect" e-mails read very much like the Argonne jokes.  Since the climate deniers don't understand basic science, it's little wonder they cannot "get" the esoteric chit-chat of scientists at work.

The Obfuspeakers

In the mid-80s, several of our favorite Blue Ridge mountain hiking trails were cluttered with obstructions: diseased trees had fallen across them and Reaganomics left the public lands agencies lacking funds to clear them away.

Forestry experts said the villain was acid rain; it was literally decimating the forests under their care.  Drawing on a 1960s paper by a University of Wisconsin graduate student, federal lawmakers came up with a plan to curb the SO2 emissions that were killing the trees and wrote it into Title  IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act.  By 2007 acid rain levels had dropped nearly 70% and the forests were healthier.

The allowance market method that won this critical environmental battle came to be called "cap and trade."

Today, thanks to the Republicans' mastery of the art of obfuspeak, cap and trade has been transmogrified into something nasty, like "liberal" and "welfare."  In the op-ed columns of the Wall Street Urinal and most of the right-wing corporate media outlets that pose as "mainstream," the term has mobilized wild-eyed opposition to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2007.

Ignoring the two-thirds of the proposed legislation that would create jobs by promoting renewable sources of energy and create  more efficient  energy across all sectors of the economy, the obfuspeakers have made "cap and trade" a bogey man symbol for the entire bill. 

Title III of the bill addresses global warming and proposes an allowance market system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Most proponents of government action to curb global warming favor a straight-out "carbon tax" on bad emissions. But in yet another of the concessions to bipartisanship that have come to exemplify the Dr. Kidglove approach to everything, the bill's authors accepted the recommendations of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of electric utilities, oil companies, chemical companies, automobile manufacturers and other foxes who like to "guard" our henhouses.  These concessions to Republican big business interests are the Title III "cap and trade" provisions that Republicans now revile.

Go figure.

Even Thomas Crocker, the graduate student whose paper gave us the allowance market method, has been widely quoted as saying that cap-and-trade is not the best way to cope with today's global warming emissions.

Cap and trade, he said, is better suited to dealing with discrete, regional problems like acid rain. "It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally," Mr. Crocker, now 73, said recently. "There are no institutions right now that have that power."  He favors persuading nations to impose straight-out  taxes on their own carbon polluting industries.

If Republicans really cared about solutions, rather than obstructionism, they would join a bipartisan effort to replace Title III of the new Clean Energy Act with a carefully crafted carbon tax provision. 

But they don't really want that, nor do their big buck campaign contributors in the energy and extraction industries.

They'd rather continue their witless sloganeering against the bogeyman of cap and trade.

FOOTNOTE


"Obfuspeak" is a neologism manufactured from "obfuscate" and "speak" to denote the manner in which Republicans have changed the meanings of words to dominate the vocabulary of political debate in the United States.

It's Broke; Fix It

The two-party system simply does not work any more.

A far, far right-wing tweeter on Twitter texted, during Obama's war speech, "This could just as well be Bush speaking. . . ."

Democrats were complicit in all the terrible policies of the Bush administration.   There is in fact very little difference between the two major parties and the people they elect to office. 

It is time for truly progressive Americans, regardless of their voter registration affiliation, to lead a movement toward a multi-party democracy by forming a new party for those of us who believe:

Peace is better  than war.  For years, a bill sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D. -OH) to establish a cabinet Department of Peace has languished somewhere in the vast bowels of congressional inaction.  Kucinich should be  among the leaders of the new party, whose platform would incliude a pledge to reverse the United States policy of waging endless war.

Americans -- all of them -- are entitled to affordable health care.  The despicable farce that was represented as debate over "reforming" our health care system achieved nothing other than to expose the shameless hypocrisy of our national leadership and our congress.  The new party would promise a single-payer, government-managed system that would provide, in effect, Medicare for everyone.

Massive reforms are essential in how we elect public officials.  We need public funding of campaigns. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests contributed more than $470 million to presidential and congressional candidates last election.  Tax 'em 70% of that for a public campaign fund and they'd save money.  You'd have $330 million in the campaign fund pool.  Put a $3 voter participation surcharge on every individual tax return and you'd have another $300 million.   Divvy the $630 million among all the candidates for congressional seats and the presidency and that's it.  Big Oil couldn't buy candidates; nor could Big Banking, Big Defense Manufacturing, Big Anything.

The two worst laws enacted in half a century must be rescinded.  The War Powers Act of 1973, in which Congress gave away its Constitutional war-making powers to the chief executive, particularly in Sections 4 (b), 4 (c) and 5 (b), gave us Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan.  It must be repealed.  The so-called USA Patriot Act -- rushed through a brain-numbed Congress, most of whom hadn't even read it -- was the first and foremost of Bush-era actions to deprive U.S. citizens of the protection of the Bill of Rights.  These rights must be restored by repealing the act and replacing it with legislation that at once protects  our national security and our individual liberties.

Separation of Church and State. We are not a "Christian nation."  Nor are we a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation or an atheist nation.  We are a free people with freedom of and from religion. It is imperative that our national leaders recognize and respect this condition, which the founding fathers gave us after intense thought, debate and with prophetic foresight.

Government regulation of business is mandatory.  Not just  because  25 years of deregulation have left  the economy in  a mess, but also because the Constitution mandates it (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).

Government has a social obligation, a mandated role in our lives.  It's right there in the very preamble of the Constitution: "promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty."  The new progressive party must give us candidates who can outshout and outthink the fools who shout "Socialism" every time government proposes to right social wrongs, improve our system of justice for all and help the downtrodden among us to lead better lives.

Absolute Equality for Women.  This includes their absolute right to make their own private reproductive health decisions. 

There's more, but these beliefs are the framework for a new, viable and vital force in American politics.  We need to form a new party around them because the existing parties have long since abandoned them. There is a perfectly good, perfectly respectable, perfectly honorable term for such an ethic.  It is "liberal."

We must retake that honorable word and restore its original meaning, even as we lead the way to restore the original meanings of the  founding fathers.

At this stage of our national existence, the alternative -- a continuing rightward slide into a domestic police state and a world policy of perpetual war against . . . .something -- is unthinkable.

Follow Up

Today's news about Max Baucus's bedroom gymnastics and their connection to his Senatorial duties regarding U.S. Attorney nominations reaffirms the bipartisanship of the corruption ethic in today's Washington.

Baucus, Israeli Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- two Democrats and a former Democrat turned Independent -- are important obstructions to passage of the sad carcass of  health care reform being debated in the Senate.

Each of them has received well over $500,000 in campaign contributions between 2005 and 2009 from the health insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industries.

What "days are over?"

Something is rotten in a statement by President Obama in his war speech at West Point.

"In the past," he said, "we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over.  Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear."

Uh-oh!

None of the 30,000 new troops he has committed to the war in Afghanistan can legally be deployed to Pakistan.  U.S. operations there are strictly CIA.

The same CIA that was in charge of our operations in Vietnam before we decided to start sending "military advisers" there.  The same CIA that in February of 1963 told President Kennedy: 

We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. . . . Improvements which have occurred during the past year now indicate that the Viet Cong can be contained militarily and that further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside.

More than 58,000 combat deaths later, we finally pulled out of Vietnam.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Mr. Obama told us, asserting that we have a coalition of allies supporting the Afghanistan effort whereas we acted unilaterally in Vietnam. In support of Mr. Obama's surge, NATO nations have offered 5,000 more troops, mainly in small increments from small nations like Albania.  OK, that's multilateral in the strictest sense of the word, but not  exactly a ringing endorsement of the "new" strategy, which sounds a lot like the old one. Neither France nor Germany, for example, promised any fresh troops.

What's new in Obama's strategy is the ominous little paragraph about Pakistan.

How, pray, shall we build this "partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust?"

By expanding the CIA's secret program of attack drones raining terror on Pakistani civilians? Our government proclaims that these robot attacks have killed nine of the top 20 al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan.  It does not tell us that in the same time, 687 Pakistani civilians have been killed by the drones, a roughly 50-to-1 ratio of innocents killed to bad guys killed.  One suspects that this sort of thing fosters neither mutual interests, mutual respect nor mutual trust.

The hard fact is that Pakistan does not trust the United States and nothing in the new Afghan policies seems designed to change that fact.

Exactly what "days are over" then?

"We cannot tolerate  a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear."  Is that a thinly-veiled threat to a nuclear-armed nation whose people are already suspicious of anything American?

"Further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside," the CIA said 46 years ago about Vietnam.

"America is providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development," President Obama said Tuesday.

"Invest in companies that make prosthetics," a friend advised me after listening to Mr. Obama's war speech.  "Our military will be needing a lot of them."

Shall I invest in casket-makers, as well? 

Something is rotten.

President Irrelevant

"Expect it pains you," a dear friend wrote after President Obama's war speech at West Point.  She sent me a charming little dog story -- knowing these always warm my crotchety old heart -- to salve my pain.

Another longtime friend posted: "As a one-time Obama supporter, it has been difficult not to notice that we, virtually all us old Obama supporters, have been rooked, or not to notice how consistently and persistently we have been rooked. No more love in exchange for getting rooked, Mr. Obama. No deal. For the first and only time, I watched about half of your campaign's life story replayed on HBO's documentary last night. And as I watched, I kept wondering what you were thinking while you fooled us over and over again. Never again, sir. Never again."

We knew it was coming (see my earlier post on Obama's Sinai).  But seeing the scalpel coming doesn't ease the pain of an unanesthetized incision.

Lies, deceit, flippant disregard for basic human decency -- we expected these from his predecessor, an empty-headed buffoon whose only qualification for any office was a rich and well-connected family.

But this man was intelligent, articulate, seeming to ooze human compassion from every pore.  Yet as we watched his actions, even in the honeymoon interim between election triumph and the harsh realities of the Oval Office, we quickly realized that the new President was not the person we thought we were voting for.

Well, some tell us now, you simply deceived yourselves. You invented a Knight in Shining armor, named him Sir Barack, and voted for him.  Quite a bit of truth to this,  Mea culpa.

Well, some tell us, it's simply brilliant strategy.  He will compromise with the opposition on everything and when the resulting policies clearly fail, Shazam!, Dr. Kidglove will become Captain Marvelous and fix everything. Now that's self-delusion!

In fact, Mr. Obama is what he is: a gifted orator, mundane politician and largely powerless chief executive.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writes:

"In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups. Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a 'terrorist event.'

"Essentially, Obama is irrelevant."

How sad.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.