Netroots Blowback

As I predicted a year ago, a wounded but victorious Joe Lieberman would be one nasty son of a bitch to deal with in the Senate.

This is what "Nedrenaline" got us. This is what the criminal waste of money, time and energy won for the Democrats. This is what a few self-aggrandizing blogwhores did to an election year when we needed Democratic unity, not scorched-earth purge-the-party tactics.

Joe Lieberman is a shit-head. Period. He is also a senior senator in a safe seat enjoying majority support in his state. Unless there was a candidate to blow this backstabbing fucker out of the water, it was not a race to enter.

We could really use Harold Ford in the Senate right now, a solid party-line voter who would neutralize Lieberman. Come to think about it, we could have used more Democrats in both houses, and not watched a few people lose by razor thin margins, people often bashed savagely by the netroots left for not sucking up sufficiently to the most vicious, bullying, arbitrary and hate-spewing elements on the left.

But, no, the illiberal left had to go beat up a Southern black man as a tool of the vast underground DLC conspiracy and go promote some white-as-Wonderbread suburban guy with nothing but a fat wallet to recommend him as a viable competitor to Liberman. Like the right-wing Xtians you claim to revile, you would prefer to watch the hope perish than have to interact with people whose views are not quite to your taste.

And now you have Holy Joe bearing down on all your precious anti-war dreams with all guns blazing. Nice going, guys.

Anglachel

What Wes Clark Can Do

One of the reasons that Wes Clark is an appealing candidate to me is because of his unique position as a top military man who is unafraid to call the Republicans on their anti-military actions.

Everyone and the kitchen sink knows that the Republicans are already trying to blame the Democrats for "losing" Bush's Iraq War. They are going to do their damnedest to portray a necessary and thankless job - getting our troops out of Cheney's quagmire with the least amount of death and distruction - into some kind of cowardly retreat or betrayal of the "sacrifices" the military has made.

Wes Clark has consistently opposed the operation since before it was launched as harmful in and of itself to the nation, to military readiness, and to the individual men and women who serve. He can speak authoritatively on the fact that the "loss" was inherent in the operation itself. Unlike Colin Powell, he wasn't afraid to stand up and say so from the very start. Also, unlike people like Edwards, he based his opposition on clear principles and demonstrable facts, and cannot be accused of taking a purely political or expedient stance. Would that more politicians had listened to him at the time.

On the clean-up side of the operation, it is clear that he has both the security of the nation and the long-term viability of the military as primary objectives. He speaks of concrete conditions that must be met in order to withdraw. He is deeply concerned with preserving American power and authority, and that means moral and diplomatic capabilities. A sudden abandonment, while emotionally appealing, is an almost certain way to hamstring US ability to act in the region. I'm not an isolationist or someone who thinks that my nation is inherently corrupt (please, the human stink is the same everywhere) , and I support leaders who think and act for the strategic advantage of the nation.

The Democrats are going to have to act aggressively to change the terms of the debate. The various exposes of the criminal neglect of the military is one of the ways we can use to demonstrate the lie of Republican dedication to security and military strength, but it is going to take people who can speak with authority on this matter. Wes Clark is one of the best positioned Democrats to do so. He knows what he is talking about and his service cannot be impugned. (Though we know the Swiftboaters will try)

He is already out in front on the saber rattling over Iran, and for the same reasons as his oppostion to Bush's Iraq debacle - it is bad for long-term US security, it is destructive of stabilizing initiatives in the region, and it is an inappropriate use of military power when diplomacy and sanctions have not even been tried.

It is time to stop treating the people of the middle east as pawns in our sick national kabuki dance between the fascistic right and the anti-liberal left, neither of whom appear to accept that we must remain engaged and responsible actors on the world stage. Wes Clark is a candidate uniquely positioned to address exactly this issue with consistency and common sense.

Anglachel

HotK - Ch. 57: Confessions

Happy Valentines Day!

For the fanfiction readers, I have just posted a new chapter for Hands of the King, Ch. 57 - Confessions Click on the story title to go to the overview, click on the chapter name to go to the chapter.

Single Finduilas POV chapter. Mild warnings for sadness and minor conflict. A few erotic scenes (what else did you expect for V Day?), so may not be totally work safe.

Finduilas continues to struggle with motherhood. Love is on everyone's mind, though few are content. She listens to the private thoughts of others and reveals her own - not always to good effect. In the end, her patience pays off, though not in ways she really likes. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

Significant scenes with Ecthelion, Denethor, Aiavale, Beregar and Thorongil.

Please be sure to read the Author Note published as the last chapter of the story.

Anglachel

Strategy vs. Pandering

So Edwards hires Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, the right wing kicks into smear mode, and now there's a dither as to whether these two will be fired or kept on and the netroots has its collective panties in a bunch huffily denouncing Edwards for not standing up to the right. They caterwaul over the double standard of the rightwing adoring its psychopaths while the left is ashamed of its own, and how they will support Edwards if he keeps the bloggers and will hate him forever and vote against him if he does not.

Like, duh, what did anyone with two brain cells to rub together think was going to happen?

The point here is that you hire for strategic reasons. Neither of these women had anything of substance to offer a presidential campaign. Sorry, they just don't. Fun to read for a well turned snark, but neither is a terrribly original or compelling thinker, neither has worked enough in the web industry to have picked up technical or marketing strategy chops, and both of them come with the usual exploitable baggage that anyone with a Blogger account and a smart mouth can claim. Their standing in the blogosphere garners Edwards little extra support, drives away people who think, and makes him a hostage to the most irrational, petulant and vindictive part of the netroots.

This is superficial pandering based on a myopic view of the netroots. I wonder if Edwards understands that large numbers of political junkies like me think people like Marcotte are dumb shits, endlessly recycling their stale opinions to the Greek chorus in their comments section? McEwan has absolutely zero presence in my blog awareness. I've read the blog, but couldn't tell you a single post of hers that stood out. Hiring two dull and tedious bloggers says to me you don't respect your readers and are just trying to toss a bone to the worst elements of the netroots left.

Compare this fiasco to Sen. Clinton's hire of Peter Daou. The only news was all the flak Daou took for signing on with someone so (irrationally) hated by the netroots. Of course he was brought on for his connections to the blogosphere, but I dare say this is someone who can advise and not just advertise. I'd be curious to know if he played a part in her decision to announce her candidacy via her website.

What Edwards did with his choice of these two was cement my opinion that he is not a candidate to be taken seriously. It doesn't matter to me what choice Edwards makes. His first mistake was in hiring either of these second tier scolds in the first place.

Anglachel

Happy and Relieved

Just noting that a dear, dear friend got very good news, and I am doing a dance of joy.

Anglachel

The Illiberal Core of the Clean Hands Left

I have been thinking a great deal recently about the part of the American political left that advocates abandoning the South. The basic argument goes - the South is a hopeless morass of retrograde customs, laws, religion and attitudes, forever cemented to the legacy of racism and slavery. We can't change it and only hurt ourselves trying to win over those states because it makes us compromise on our fundamental liberal values. The Democratic party specifically and the progressive left generally needs to "write-off" the South and let it belong to the bigots and the religious fundamentalists. The recent mid-term electoral successes should prove that we can control the nation without having to deal with the South.

I wrote a post not long after the mid-terms, End of the Party of Lincoln, where I tried to distinguish between the South as a geographical location and the Southern Stain, which is a mind-set of a large minority of Americans, rooted in the legacy of slavery and race thinking from the original slave-holding states. What the left fights - what it always fights - is the anti-democratic impulse that can be found in any society, the dedication to tribalism and fundamentalism in preference to modernity. This may have a geographical stronghold in the US, but it is not a geographical problem. The senate race in Virginia, with a California boy ("Macaca" Allen) proudly defending the forces of anti-modernism, should put a firm and final end to that line of thought.

But there is something not entirely "clean" about the arguments of the Clean Hands Left. Ed Kilgore of New Donkey has been getting at it in oblique ways with a number of his recent posts (Hard Boys, Ford and the DLC, and The Netroots and Clintonism to name a few) where he points out the myths and blind spots of a certain portion of the progressive left. I was bothered by it again today in a comment thread on Carpetbagger Report where a commenter quite blithely said that the North should have let the South go rather than wage a civil war to keep them in the union, with the implicit argument that "we" would have been better off not having this retrograde bunch of states messing up our more perfect union. This is the ultimate bedrock of the "Abandon the South" argument.

Does that mean that it would have been preferable to leave several million people in chattel slavery rather than enforce the liberal tenant that all humans are equal beings, endowed with the same intrinsic rights? Evidently so. The arguments about how the civil war wasn't really about slavery, but about Northern economic dominance, begs the question of the foundations of the southern economic system, which was premised upon the illiberal assertion that slavery is an acceptable social and political practice, without which you cannot have the economic system. It also ignores the fact that the South was prepared to wage war to preserve the ability to expand a slave-based economy to the rest of the continent, as well as to require the North to treat US citizens by two sets of laws - freedom for northern state denizens, slavery for southern states. The "Abandon the South" argument sidesteps the core question that Lincoln answered decisively "Yes" - shall the rights of liberal society be extended to and enforced for all citizens, regardless of the retrograde interests of local and regional elites?

Abandon the South arguments also sidestep the role of violence and institutionalized bigotry in preventing liberal practices from taking root. Have the advocates of this stance really forgotten the structural mechanisms (KKK terrorism, Jim Crow laws, voter intimidation, deliberate disenfranchisement) used to prevent change from occurring? You would think that no one lives in the Bible Belt except white racist religious fundamentalists from the way they argue. Their implicit argument is that people who aren't like that should either leave the region, or somehow vote out the local power elites. If they don't, they have no one but themselves to blame.

This is profoundly disrespectful to those trying to bring about change in the traditional American stronghold of illiberal society, and it is strangely anti-political, as it presumes that there is no point in compromise, no advantage to long-term strategy, and no difference between Trent Lott and Mary Landrieu - they are both from the South and neither are progressive, so to hell with 'em both. Any Southerner who will not be more Northeast-Liberal-than-thou is simply a stealth Republican and must be "exposed" for the frauds that they are.

The way in which this perspective is far closer to the ideology of George Bush than to my own liberalism is found in its callous instrumentality. It is focused upon the needs and desires of a small, ideologically consistent group of "progressive" pundits, and simply cannot acknowledge that to "Abandon the South" in real, human terms means to abandon large swaths of the southern state populations to the reign of fascists and fundamentalists. We already know what this looks like. It is de facto apartheid, rigged legal systems and domestic terrorism.

It is treating the South as Bush is treating New Orleans - no advantage to me there, time to move on. It makes individuals who lack access to power responsible for removing the local and regional power elites, and says they deserve their miserable lives if they aren't "smart" enough to know to vote Democrat. It is the attitude that if you don't support the ideologically pure left, you are indistinguishable from Strom Thurmond.

This is in and of itself a profound abandonment of liberalism.

Anglachel

Hillary's In

I'm happy.

I want some combination of the following four on the Democratic ticket:

1. Al Gore
2. Wes Clark
3. Hillary Clinton
4. Barack Obama

That's my order of preference, too. I can vote with enthusiasm and a clear conscience for all of these people.

Now, whiners of the Neo-Naderite left, try not to fuck up our candidate's chances again, OK?

Anglachel

HotK - Ch. 56: Patrimony

For the fanfiction readers, I have just posted a new chapter for Hands of the King, Ch. 56 - Patrimony Click on the story title to go to the overview, click on the chapter name to go to the chapter.

Single Denethor POV chapter. Warnings for threats and acts of violence and some "Eeew" factor moments.

Denethor must confront what he did to Finduilas, and it is not pretty. The world is changing around him in ways both marvelous and unsettling, and he becomes acquainted with his son. Umbar looms on the horizon. Denethor and Thorongil's alliance becomes more complex as they confront the rock-meets-hard-place nature of taking battle to the Corsairs. Denethor does something that sets in motion a cycle of revenge he will regret. Or not.

Significant scenes with Finduilas, Beregar, Thorongil, Aiavale, Brandir and others.

Anglachel

Zbigniew Brzezinski - Five Flaws in the President's Plan

His editorial from the Friday Washington Post. There really isn't much else to say:

The president's speech gives rise to five broad observations:

1. It provided a more realistic analysis of the situation in Iraq than any previous presidential statement. It acknowledged failure, though it dodged accountability for that failure by the standard device of assuming personal responsibility. Its language was less Islamophobic than has been customary with President Bush's rhetoric since Sept. 11, though the president still could not resist the temptation to engage in a demagogic oversimplification of the challenge the United States faces in Iraq, calling it a struggle to safeguard "a young democracy" against extremists and an effort to protect American society from terrorists. Both propositions are more than dubious.
2. The commitment of 21,500 more troops is a political gimmick of limited tactical significance and of no strategic benefit. It is insufficient to win the war militarily. It will engage U.S. forces in bloody street fighting that will not resolve with finality the ongoing turmoil and the sectarian and ethnic strife, not to mention the anti-American insurgency.
3. The decision to escalate the level of the U.S. military involvement while imposing "benchmarks" on the "sovereign" Iraqi regime, and to emphasize the external threat posed by Syria and Iran, leaves the administration with two options once it becomes clear -- as it almost certainly will -- that the benchmarks are not being met. One option is to adopt the policy of "blame and run": i.e., to withdraw because the Iraqi government failed to deliver. That would not provide a remedy for the dubious "falling dominoes" scenario, which the president so often has outlined as the inevitable, horrific consequence of U.S. withdrawal. The other alternative, perhaps already lurking in the back of Bush's mind, is to widen the conflict by taking military action against Syria or Iran. It is a safe bet that some of the neocons around the president and outside the White House will be pushing for that. Others, such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, may also favor it.
4. The speech did not explore even the possibility of developing a framework for an eventual political solution. The search for a political solution would require a serious dialogue about a joint American-Iraqi decision regarding the eventual date of a U.S. withdrawal with all genuine Iraqi political leaders who command respect and wield physical power. The majority of the Iraqi people, opinion polls show, favor such a withdrawal within a relatively short period. A jointly set date would facilitate an effort to engage all of Iraq's neighbors in a serious discussion about regional security and stability. The U.S. refusal to explore the possibility of talks with Iran and Syria is a policy of self-ostracism that fits well into the administration's diplomatic style of relying on sloganeering as a substitute for strategizing.
5. The speech reflects a profound misunderstanding of our era. America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating. That is the fatal flaw of Bush's policy.

What is wrong with this country?

We're having extremely cold temperatures here in San Diego by local standards. Night time temperatures are below freezing and look to stay that way well into the coming week. I realize to people in North Dakota, this may not sound like any big whoop, but the change in the weather is very disconcerting when you're expecting a balmy Mediterranean climate.

As a result, even though the City Council declared that it would not open any shelters for homeless people, the National Guard is providing shelter. Here's the part that got me from this morning's Union-Tribune:

Although the City Council voted against having a shelter, one opened up anyway Friday night at the National Guard armory at 304 E. Park Ave., after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency.

About 35 people spent Friday night in the 50-bed shelter, and by 7 p.m. yesterday, many of those had returned and some new people had come in, said Mel Takahara of the Salvation Army.

One of those people was a man who had just been discharged from heart surgery and was transported to the shelter by hospital workers.

“They made sure they found a safe place for him,” Takahara said. “It's bitter cold, and it would be life-threatening to a healthy individual, let alone a person in frail health.”

What? Someone just recovered from heart surgery has been taken to a homeless shelter and dumped there? WTF? I've had major chest cavity surgery (a chunk of lung removed) so I know that recovery from that kind of invasive event takes months. If the Gropenator had not declared a state of emergency, would this guy have simply been turned out on the street with his healing chest incision and a bag of meds? And what hospital dumped this guy?

What the hell is wrong with this country that it is OK to toss indigent medical patients onto the street in the middle of inclement weather? Would it be because the guy doesn't have insurance? Has profit margin really overcome the Hippocratic Oath? Oh, duh, of course it has. Never mind.

Anglachel

iAmUnimpressed

I think I am the only person in the universe immune to Apple hype. I see pictures of a huckster selling yet another pointless gadget that does nothing new, but is packaged in a pretty shell.

Apple produces status objects. Were it not for DOS and IBM-clones, there would not be anything like the tech industry, the internet, or the inflated housing market in Califonia. Apple, like George Bush, needs to have an evil boogey monster out there against which to compare itself. Think about it - every Apple ad campaign is, at base, We're not Microsoft. The great irony of the "1984" ad campaign is that Apple is the most rigid, regimented, Big Brotherish of all the major OS producers. Control at all costs. Sell your product by inciting insecurity and status envy in the user. Structure your products to obsolete themselves on a regualr timetable by deliberately preventing backwards compatibility.

iPods are MP3 players with pretty cases. iMacs are underpowered computers with limited and over-priced software. iPhones are just another beeping monster to carry around in your pocket and annoy me with at the movies. If you buy the hype, you demonstrate your frantic desire to appear cool, not that you are cool.

Anglachel

The Forever War

Back in September, I said that the Bush neocon thugocracy operates on the principle of End Times - impose your will and destroy what you can, because the Apocalypse will wipe out everyone anyhow.

You also have the case that these guys simply don't care if there is a future for anyone. "We'll all be dead," is the Chimperor's mantra, said with that smirk of his. These are people whose bad drug trips don't end because they don't need drugs to go on them anymore.

I had said that they had two agendas between now and when it came time to throw their sorry asses out of the White House - destroying Social Security and attacking Iran. The midterm elections have put the kibosh on the domestic agenda item, which has only intensified their lust for the latter objective.

The first round of reactions to the Preznit's sad-sack speech on Wednesday was ho-hum, nothing new. More careful analysis, particularly in light of the raid on the Iranian consulate in northern Iraq, is arriving at the conclusion that the "surge" has little or nothing to do with Iraq, and is the cover for an unauthorized assault on both Iran and Syria.

This is consistent with the neocon philosophy of Forever War, turning the nation into an attack machine that rolls over other nations for no reason save to do so, mobilizing paranoia and machismo among the populace to provide enough support to justify their continual condition of war. In this world view, "terrorism" is a *good* thing, as it keeps people in a heightened state of fear. They have no interest in actually being rid of bin Laden, indeed no interest in actually winning any contest because both of those acts would bring the reason for Forever War to an end.

Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and administration senior official who should know the thought processes of the goons occupying the White House, has this to say on TPM Cafe:

According to the President, the Iranians are providing "material support” to attacks on U.S. forces. That is a casus belli. It fits in with the administration’s escalating campaign -- encompassing rhetoric and detentions of Iranian officials in Iraq -- to blame Iran for a strategically significant part of the ongoing instability and violence in Iraq.

Note from Flynt Leverett

Click the link and read the whole thing. They are looking for a reason to engage Iran in war. In Condi Rice's appearance before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she dismissed diplomacy as an option with Syria or Iran. This from our nation's top diplomat. The goal is to get into warfare, not prevent it.

They have only two years to make their war in the Middle East irrevocable, and they are determined to do it. The situation is only made worse by the fact that it is being done as much to attack Bush's critics in America as to advance the more general Apocalyptic desires of the neocon crowd. As I said in September:

It also infuriates the Chimp that people are already saying what an utter loser and fuck-up he is, and that he is held in contempt. Worst. President. Ever. He knows, down in that drug-damaged lump of cells that used to be a brain, that people are waiting for the day he is gone so that they can return to normalcy and try to undo the horrific damage he and his enablers have inflicted on the world.

And he's not going to let that happen. He will do everything in his power to commit the nation to an act of such irrevocable barbarity that his successors cannot even begin to restore the republic.

That is why, though the Chimperor is forging ahead with sending more American soldiers into the meat grinder, he is not really looking for a land war with Iran and Syria. Nope. Those soldiers are there to be targets for some kind of atrocity (and that will probably be ginned up, too) which will justify unleashing nuclear missiles on Iran.

Anglachel

Crimes, Death and the News

I found an interesting juxaposition on the home pages of the major dailies this evening.

• Washington Post leads with a huge headline and feature on Pres. Ford as the national period of mourning begins. They have eight links to stories and images abotu Hussein, all below the fold.
  
• LA Times leads with a small photo of Ford's casket lying in state next to an article about mixed reactions in Iraq to Hussein's execution.
• New York Times has nothing about Ford, 11 links into stories about Hussein, and a single link to a story about Betty Ford, below the fold.

Two very different deaths. Three very different treatments. One great, unspoken thread of continuity.

Ford became president because of the persistence of the news media in uncovering a story about corruption and criminality in the White House. Without the work of Woodward and Bernstein, without publication of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon would probably have ridden out his second term.

Hussein became the scapegoat of a corrupt and criminal White House, a far more filthy operation than Nixon's, with the full collusion and support of the same media outlets that brought down Nixon.

Bringing Nixon's criminal operation to an abrupt halt was one of the great moments of our nation, an example of our democracy working in the right way to make the law of the land, not the whim of a dictator, the final arbiter of our fate. Allowing the Bush crime family to bully their way into the White House and then crudely exploit the murder of thousands upon our soil, a murder committed on their watch and enabled by their negligence, to prosecute a wholly unjust war against another sovereign nation has gutted whatever claim American media could once have made to being an organ of democracy.

Ford's death and Hussein's are bookends to the greatest political story of my generation - how a free and open press willingly castrated itself and made itself into the eager whore of the biggest bully in town.

Your true and absolutely representative agent is Jeff Gannon, the male prostitute turned "reporter" who sat with you in the White House press corps.

Anglachel

It's Not Even Past

To quote William Faulkner - The past is not dead. It is not even past.

Bush has killed Saddam Hussein. It was pointless, pitiful and petty. Had they done this two years ago, perhaps it would have meant something. Now, it is just a mark of shame on our country and another splash of fuel on the fire of the Iraqi civil war. Riverbend cuts to the chase:

...This last year especially has been a turning point. Nearly every Iraqi has lost so much. So much. There's no way to describe the loss we've experienced with this war and occupation. There are no words to relay the feelings that come with the knowledge that daily almost 40 corpses are found in different states of decay and mutilation. There is no compensation for the dense, black cloud of fear that hangs over the head of every Iraqi. Fear of things so out of ones hands, it borders on the ridiculous- like whether your name is 'too Sunni' or 'too Shia'. Fear of the larger things- like the Americans in the tank, the police patrolling your area in black bandanas and green banners, and the Iraqi soldiers wearing black masks at the checkpoint.

Again, I can't help but ask myself why this was all done? What was the point of breaking Iraq so that it was beyond repair? Iran seems to be the only gainer. Their presence in Iraq is so well-established, publicly criticizing a cleric or ayatollah verges on suicide. Has the situation gone so beyond America that it is now irretrievable? Or was this a part of the plan all along? My head aches just posing the questions...

Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.

Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.

Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.

End of Another Year...

Saddam Hussein may be a corpse, but he is most certainly not dead. The same collection of neocons, led by Cheny and Rumsfeld, who built him up to begin with have continued to harvest the foul fruit of their brutal crop. The dictatorship they cultivated as an opposition to the ayatollahs who overthrew their dear buddy, the Shah, became their nemesis. They protected Saddam, thinking to have their own Middle East Pinochet to call upon. Then, he disappointed them, having learned their lessons and believing utterly in their creed of take, take, take. He invaded Kuwait. Ah, lemons meet lemonade as we squelched his imperialist ambitions.

Then Bush the Lesser, C+ Augustus, decided that he needed to use the neocon sandbox again, this time to show he was a bigger, tougher man than his Daddy. He was the perfect avatar of the neocon lust to annihilate, and he set out to kill Saddam. But a funny thing happened. The dictator would not die. He metastasized into Iraq as such.

Iraq is now what Bush claimed Saddam to be, and so does the dictator have his final revenge on his old friends who betrayed him. Iraq, the mess we have created there and the even greater crises to follow, will reach out and harm America as Saddam himself could never do. In the desire to kill the dictator, Bush has guaranteed the butcher will live on long after Bush himself has left office in disgrace.

Anglachel

Nadir

It appears that Saddam Hussein will be executed in the next few days. Josh Marshal has it spot on when he says

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Read the entire post here.

This execution marks the nadir of American foreign policy. It is George W. Bush exacting personal revenge on someone who dissed his family. It is a mob hit, no more, no less.

Hussein dangling on the end of a rope, like a puppet or marionette. A toy to be yanked and jerked about as C+ Augustus demands, a macabre and revolting stand in for the way Bush and his criminal enablers have treated the entire world for the last six years.

It is almost impossible to articulate the horrific damage these people have inflicted on the rest of humanity. I think Americans in general are finally cluing in to the fact that this nation has suffered a massive, possibly mortal, wound from the Chimperor's Excellent Adenture.

Wealth redistribution upwards. Massive debt, public and private. Loss of access to Middle-east oil. Loss of international standing. Destruction of the armed forces. Undermining rule of law to enable torture, spying and police state activities. Nuclear proliferation.

This is the nation under the Bush administration - weakend, reviled, and insecure. The damage done is so widespread and deep, there is serious question as to whether the Republic can survive it. Oh, the US isn't going away. It will simply shrink in relation to the rising power of China.

So read about the "execution" (gangland slaying) of Hussein and understand that it demonstrates nothing save that the United States has lost everything that once made it a leader and exemplar among nations.

It is a pitiful, impotent, petulant beast. Just like its current president.

Anglachel