Dick Cheney reprising the role of Guy Pearce

So where are you?  You’re in some motel room underground bunker. You just – you just wake up and you’re in – in a motel room bunker. There’s the key. It feels like maybe it’s just the first time you’ve been there, but perhaps you’ve been there for a week, three months. It’s – it’s kind of hard to say. I don’t – I don’t know. It’s just an anonymous room bunker. —The Cheney Memento.

Inside Hollyweird reports that director Christopher Nolan has signed former vice-president Dick Cheney to star in a remake of his cult hit, Memento. Asked what inspired the project, the director of the last two Batman blockbusters replied:

Listening to Cheney’s response to President Obama’s national security speech. Cheney kept returning to the trauma of 9/11, mentioning it some 27 times.  It’s obviously come to define his world.  Yet he mentioned Iraq, the signature post-9/11 issue of his administration, only twice,  Afghanistan three times, and Pakistan and Usama bin Laden not at all.  The inability to remember events after a physical or emotional trauma is a classic symptom of anterograde amnesia, the condition which “Leonard,” the protagonist in the original Memento, suffered from.

Memento was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay and hailed by mental health professionals as an accurate portrayal of a rare psychological order.
Nolan continued.

As you’ll recall, Leonard believes he’s witnessed the brutal murder of his wife during a home invasion. He sets off to find the killer but is handicapped by his lack of short term memory. He compensates by writing notes to himself, taking photos, and tattooing information on his body— everything from vital clues, to which motel he’s staying at.

Eventually, we realize that he is actually the one who killed his wife, giving her an accidental overdose of insulin. Overwhelmed by guilt, he invents a false narrative of what happened.  He turns his anger outwards, seeking revenge against the imagined killer, murdering and beating up people along the way.  But because the story unfolds from his point of view, he becomes the classic unreliable narrator,  forcing the audience to sort fact from fiction.

And how does Leonard’s condition mirror Cheney’s?

In the remake, I envision Cheney suffering from an overwhelming sense of guilt due to the trauma of 9/11. You’ll recall that he was given the anti-terrorism portfolio a few months after W. took office. During that time,  anti-terrorism czar and Clinton holdover Richard Clarke was running around the White house with his hair on fire, warning about al-Qaeda intent to attack the homeland, including flying airplanes into buildings. But Cheney was too busy planning other things, like taking over Saddam’s oil fields, I guess.

Anyway, with Flight 93 heading straight for D.C., a terrified Dick was dragged out of his office by amped-up Secret Service agents and thrown into the White House basement for his own safety. Because the president was flying around the country fearing he might be the next target, Cheney was given command responsibilities, including things like ordering civilian airliners shot out of the sky. In this conceptualization, it was all too much for him. He snapped.

How does Cheney’s difficulty remembering his post-9/11 actions explain his non-stop media torture rationalization tour?

Well, he was running the entire US national security apparatus during the Bush presidency.  He had a prodigious staff that provided him with constant updates of what was happening in real time.  Now that he’s out of power, those resources aren’t available and he compensates by constantly returning to the trauma of 9/11, just as Leonard constantly returns to the death of his wife to maintain a sense of continuity, of meaning. And because they are both in denial about their culpability in the original events, they create false narratives to rationalize their subsequent behaviors.

Leonard kidnaps an innocent man, Dodd, and renditions him to a motel closet and beats him to within an inch of his life. Cheney has innocent men kidnapped, renditioned and beaten and tortured. Both are responsible for the murder of innocent individuals. Both place their trust in people they consider friends but who turn on them– in Leonard’s case, Natalie and Teddy; in Cheney’s, George Bush who refuses to pardon Cheney’s right hand man, Scooter Libby.

Asked whether he envisioned this as a political thriller, Nolan replied:

Only in context.  I’m more interested in the dark side of human psychology, how trauma skews the human brain’s perception of reality.

Like young Bruce Wayne’s guilt over the murder of his father and his subsequent need for revenge?

Right. Recall what Cheney said shortly after 9/11– that we would have to work in the shadows, on the dark side. Well, he worked the dark side alright and the rest, as they say, is history. We see the same psychological distortions in people who engage in torture. While they don’t have the physical scars of their victims, they do share their psychological scars, and it changes their behavior accordingly.

Asked about whether he was concerned about Cheney’s lack of film acting experience, Nolan replied:

Not at all— the man’s a natural.  Anyone who can lie as convincingly he can, for instance when he claimed that there was “no doubt” that Saddam was busy making nukes; that Saddam had helped al-Qaeda  bring down the World Trade Towers; that the US was safer for having invaded Iraq—  all that makes him a born method actor.  Hell, he even made his friend apologize after he shot him in the face!  Now that’s an actor who can sell it.

Filming is expected to start next spring.

Demonstrating an “enhanced interrogation technique”

In 1999, Bush’s family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, reports that W. told him he was intent on invading Iraq, saying that his status as a war time president would give him enough political capital to push through his conservative domestic agenda.

(That would include the privatization of social security whose blood rich corpse would be served up to his Wall Street vampire buddies to feast upon. Not to mention the Oedipal angle of wanting to do his daddy one better by “finishing” the job of deposing Saddam Hussein.)

Fast forward to 9/11/01. The dust of the collapsed Trade Towers hadn’t even settled when W. ordered his terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to find a link to Saddam in the attacks. Clarke was dubious, but ordered a review anyway, producing a dry hole (something which Bush the failed oil tycoon was all too familiar with).

Meanwhile, US troops were sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. SECDEF Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets left to bomb there and rapidly warmed to the idea of invading Iraq.  Special ops troops that were originally set to finish off Al Qaeda in Tora Bora were instead reassigned to prepare for Iraq, allowing them to escape and regroup in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (where they have grown even stronger and now threaten to bring down the nuclear armed government of Pakistan).

Despite efforts to provoke Saddam into providing an overt rationale for an invasion, he lay low, forcing the Bushies to explore other means around which a rationale for war could be devised— fixing the facts around the policy, as the Downing Street Memo so artfully put it.

Discussions were had with the Brits to paint a UN logo on a drone and send it flying lazily over Iraq air space where it could be shot down. Ahmed Chalabi was paid $300,000 a month to produce ex-pat informants like “Curveball” to ‘prove’ that Saddam was actively engaged in producing WMD.  Ex-military “consultants” (with monetary ties to defense contractors ready to make a killing supplying product and services to the war effort) flooded the network and cable news shows warning of dire consequences if we didn’t depose Saddam.

Neocons like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, administration officials like Condi Rice and Darth Cheney, egged on by war mongering talking heads too numerous to mention, took to the airways wielding images of mushroom clouds and cartoons of mobile bio-weapons labs to create an aura of dread in the American people.  Homeland Security helped keep fear alive with their color coded threat charts, displayed so helpfully on the evening news.  Cable news networks ratings soared as they created “war rooms” tricked out with state of the art graphics and martial theme music, eagerly awaiting the latest nosecone videos of missiles slamming into buildings in an orchestrated spectacle of “shock and awe.”

Which brings us to the latest dot in the narrative, the so-called “torture memos.”  The lead story in today’s NY Times reveals that the methods, further detailed in a now declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY used what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were originally developed by the ChiComs and North Koreans in the 1950s, and used as a training regime called SERE (Search, Evade, Rescue, Escape) by our own military to help captured troops resist interrogation.

Apparently, some genius in the Bush Administration figured that adopting those same techniques for offensive purposes would mitigate objections that they constituted torture. “Hey, we use them on our own guys, and they don’t suffer any long term effects.” Three major problems with that theory: [Read more →]

You can live with each other, you just can’t be married.

“And who knows which is which, and who is who”
—Pink Floyd

The long evolutionary heritage of religion has always been inextricably linked with the forms and functions of the evolution of government.  Long ago, the early tribal shamans were the go-to guys for all the practices of evolutionary religion, and in many groups they outranked the war chiefs;  and it was this dynamic that marked the beginning of the church domination of the state.

The early priesthoods were usually allied with the military power of the tribe, so no surprise that all primitive religions sanctioned war.  And the tribe made war at the bidding of their gods—  their chiefs or shamans.

We’re looking at the uniquely American roots of our “Judeo-Christian” heritage and how they’ve managed to grow into our government. A few people were writing stuff down way back when, and their scribbles can instruct us even today.  The early Hebrews of Palestine believed in a “God of battles.” The story of their raid on the Midianites (See Numbers 31 in your favorite interpretation of the scripture) is a typical example of the horrible cruelty of all ancient tribal wars, with the slaughter of all the males, male children, and all women who weren’t virgins;  all executed in the “name of the Lord God of Israel.”

Violence is the law of nature, and war is the natural heritage of evolving humanity.  Peace, then, should serve as the social yardstick measuring the advancement of civilization.  And one of the great peace moves of the ages has been the ongoing attempt to separate church and state.

The first strange wedding and bedding in our survey of church and state is that of the Hebrews under Roman suzerainty. For several generations, a small and decidedly unpowerful group of Jews was able maintain a considerable degree of self-government and relative independence from Syria to the north and Egypt to the south, all the while under Roman rule.

[Read more →]

Bush bids farewell

White House Employee Trampled To Death As Bush Aides Flee

Jan. 19, 2009

WASHINGTON D.C. [C.U.News] —  Long time White House doorman, Oscar Willit, who served four different presidents, died in a stampede today as aides to President Bush and Vice President Cheney fled the building in advance of the incoming Obama Administration.

“It was surreal”, said Rob Cook, a White House porter and longtime friend of Willit’s. “Worse than a Black Friday sale at Wal Mart.”

Rumor has it that incoming Attorney General, Eric Holder, is bringing with him a short list of administration officials facing potential indictments. According to one D.C. bailiff, grand jury rooms have been booked well into 2010.

When asked why the last minute panic, an anonymous Bush official replied:

“We were led to believe that the president would be issuing a blanket pardon for all his staffers. But it seems that with the collapse of the economy, his failure to secure a long term US military presence in Iraq, the worsening situation in Afghanistan, Laura Bush’s impending tell-all book, he’s reverting to type. Remember this is the guy who as a kid blew up frogs with firecrackers, branded pledges at Yale with hot wire coat hangers, and ordered the torture of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.”

Looking around nervously, he added “We should have seen it coming. Bush has been off the wagon since Katrina, at least. Everybody’s on edge around here, even Barney. That incident of him biting that reporter? Major clue. Bush is going down and he seems intent on taking as many of us with him as possible. Recall that Pharaoh had his eunuchs entombed with him for his journey into the afterlife.”

When asked for the White House reaction to Willit’s death and reports of Bush’s deteriorating mental state, Press Secretary Dana Perino replied: “Sorry. I’ve got a plane to catch.” Asked where she was going, she crinkled her cute little nose and said: “Anywhere but here.”

Phonetically corrected transcript:

The question from Couric was, “Why is it much more challenging there; can you explain that?”

“The logistics that we’re already suggesting here, not having eenough troops in the area right now,”  um, The…  Things like the terrain even, in Afghanistan and that border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where, you know, we believe that, um, the Bin Laden is is [sic]  hidin’ out right now and… and is still such a leader of this terrorist movement. Ah, There there er many more challenges there.

So, again, I believe that eh a surge in Afghanistan also will lead us to victory there, as it has proven, to have done in Eye-raq  en. . . as I say, Katie, that we kinnot afford to retreat, to withdraw in Eye-raq, that’s not gonna git us any better off in Afghanistan either. And as our leaders are telling us, in our military, we do need to, ramp it up in Afghanistan, counting on our friends and allies to assist with us there, becuzz these terrists— who hate Amirrica, they hate what we stand for, with the… the freedoms, the democracy, the the women’s rights, the tolerince, they hate what it is that we represent, and, our allies, too, and our friends, what they represent. If we were… were to allow a stronghold to be captured, by these terrorists, then, the world is in even greater peril than it is tehday. We kinnot afford to lose in Afghanistan.”

Sigh.

Of course. Bush on cocaine. Eye-Rack.
Becuzz these terrists hate whut we stand for; the freedoms; the democricy; the women’s rights (except for wage equality and control of your own body); the tolerince.

Does this woman even sound like a leader?  Is this the kind of “leadership” we need?

•

Leadership is vital to progress. Wisdom, insight, and foresight are indispensable to the endurance of nations. Civilization is never really jeopardized until able leadership begins to vanish. And the quantity of such wise leadership  has never exceeded one per cent of the population.
—The URANTIA Book

UPDATE: More with Couric; Palin explains foreign policy experience thanks to proximity of Russia to Alaska.

Oh. My. Gawd.

•

A number of significant economic statistics were announced yesterday: inflation hit a 71/2 year high; consumer earning power declined 3 1/2% from last year; and home foreclosures rose 55%.

Fueling these economic fires has been the soaring cost of the Iraq war and occupation.

Using credit cards, American taxpayers bought huge amounts of stock in Corporate America’s colonization of Iraq. After 5/12 years, the stock has depreciated dramatically, the cards’ principal, interest, and penalties have been reset to infinity, and margin calls are expected shortly.

Analysts following the company say the stock’s collapse is due to a number of factors: deterioration of good will in the American brand; soaring energy and consumer prices; the devaluation of the American dollar and the attendant difficulties of securing future financing; and, looming down the road, the forced sell-off of private and national American assets.

It’s like watching an economic train wreck in slow motion. But there is a silver lining. Given the huge toll that Iraq and Afghanistan has had on the Pentagon’s military readiness and the attendant deterioration of the American dollar, there’s simply insufficient political, military or financial or resources available to support the necons’ future imperial expansion plans. (Said with fingers crossed.)

The karma principle of causality continuity is…very close to the truth of the repercussional synthesis of all time-space actions in the Deity presence of the Supreme. -The Urantia Book

At a press conference today meant to display John McSame’s superior foreign policy credentials, the Rethuglicans‘ reality challenged presidential candidate either had a senior moment, or he believes that the corporatist media is so in the tank for him that he is free to utter even the most egregious hypocritical pronouncements and escape scrutiny.

Case in point: the roiling Russia-Georgia war. Scolds the morally correct McSame:

“[I]n the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

Excuse me? Has our corporatist media sainted war hero forgotten Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of both he so throatily encouraged?

Consider also his previous pronouncement on Georgia that an editor from Wikipedia pointed out contains copious amounts of plagiarized material from the Wiki site.

Guess we know now how McSame would answer that iconic 3:00 AM phone call— frantically try to get online to access Wikipedia.

McSame improvises as an EMF burst fries D.C.’s com circuits

The response from the Obama campaign is obvious— adopt the Rovian tactic of attacking an opponent’ perceived strength. The operative word here is, of course, perceived. As this and other numerous McSame foreign policy gaffes proves, McSame’s alleged expertise is a fiction to begin with.

Should be an Obama PR slam dunk.

                 Urban renewal project in beautiful downtown Baghdad

Chris Matthews‘ substitute host, McCain enthusiast Mike Barnicle, reacted incredulously Wednesday to a comment by Iraq war vet Jon Soltz, co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, that the so-called “surge” has not been a success. Pressed by Barnicle, who refelcts the corporatist media’s official narrative of the surge, Soltz made a number of arguments:

America is less secure as a result of our invasion of Iraq, the surge being just the latest chapter in a failed war and occupation.

Al Qaeda, identified by many including the Obama campaign as America’s top national security threat, is more powerful than any time since 9/11, having reconstituted itself in the Afghan-Pakistan hinterlands. (Lest we forget, AQ didn’t even exist in Iraq before the invasion.)

The US military, tied up on two war fronts, is overstretched and at the breaking point.

The ostensible goal of the surge, Iraqi political reconciliation, is nowhere near a reality, especially in the Kurdish regions.

An overall oil law and revenue sharing law still hasn’t been passed, highlighted by the intensifying ethnic fighting over oil-rich Kirkuk.

Soltz concludes that the problem isn’t overall troop levels but “regional strategic diplomacy”, one of those nuanced Obama concepts that escapes our corporatist media’s obsession with dumbed down narratives for the infantilized American voter. (For which we can thank an educational system that substitutes  dubious testing paradigms for critical thinking skills.)

Additionally, there are a number of other arguments that Soltz didn’t (presumably have time to) make.

Iran has been dramatically strengthened rather than weakened as the region’s presumptive hegemon.

The Turkish military has intensified its incursions into Iraqi sovereign territory.

Regional elections have once again been delayed.

A national oil law has not been signed.

There’s the huge problem of what to do about the 4 million Iraqis that have been forced from their homes, including the vast majority of the educated classes vital to rebuilding the country.

The decision by the political and military wings of Baghdad’s Shia (Mahdi) militias to lay low. Surprising what a couple of hundred high explosive missiles and bombs can accomplish when targeted at your military and civilian base.

The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, courtesy of US financed death squads, for which former Iraq Ambassador John Negroponte of El Salvadoran death squads fame probably deserves some credit. That and the installation of 12 ‘ concrete blast walls has turned the city into a fortified warren of sectarian enclaves.

The decision by the Sunnis, made many months before the surge was even announced, to vanquish foreign fighters from their midst, the so-called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Comes a time when the “enemies of my enemies” strategy becomes more a liability than an asset. Especially when our mutual enemy offers to put you on the dole of the American taxpayer, a perverse permutation of what we call in my neck of the woods– protection money.

Analogy wise, I live in Los Angeles where we have as many heavily armed gang members as the US has troops in Iraq. [Read more →]

Impact of two terms of Bush’s management of the US Economy

The Bush Administration today issued a mind boggling record deficit projection of $482 billion for 2009. And that’s not even counting the off-budget estimated $80 billion being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the cost of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and homeowner bailout bill.

That’s a yearly deficit of over one-half trillion dollars, most of it borrowed from strategic competitors like China and Kuwait.

Skyrocketing energy costs are only beginning to ripple through the economy, showing up as higher prices in everything from food to tires to pharmaceuticals.

Home foreclosures are up a staggering 250% (in LA), unemployment is rising rapidly, and even successful businesses with great credit history can’t get a loan.

The entire financial system, ranging from Wall Street, investment houses, to regional banks is in a deep freeze driven by the fact that no one knows what anyone’s paper assets are worth. The economy is so bad that Bush has been forced to betray his conservative base by doing an about-face (legacy pun intended) on the aforementioned bailout. Ayn Rand must be rolling over in her capitalist grave.

Obviously, this is bad news for all Republicans running for office this year. Despite the tragedy of Iraq and the increasing threat of a reconstituted Al Qaeda and resurgent Taliban in Afganistan and Pakistan, we’re back to “It’s the economy, stupid” as the overriding political issue of the 2008 election. And it’s hitting the McSame Campaign like a Democratic mule kick to the gut.

McSame has admitted that the economy is not his strong suit, and that he’s trying to make up it for it by reading the book by the man who did as much as anyone to create the current crisis, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Kinda like asking a surgeon with a history of amputating the wrong limbs to take a little off the top.

McSame’s answer to the ruinous cost of energy— his flip-flop on off-shore drilling, is a classic case of bad timing, considering that oil billionaire (and Swift Boat funder) T-Boone Pickens is currently spending $58 million on an advertising campaign that states that we can’t drill our way out of the crisis.

Oh well, McSame can still run as Commander-in-Chief of the “surge.”

As for his snuggling buddy, George Junior, the latter can sleep easy knowing that once again he has bested his father, the previous deficit champ. By racking up the three largest deficits in US history, W. wins the gold, silver and bronze medals. Now it’s on to the Beijing Olympics, where he has volunteered to judge the synchronized waterboarding competition.

UPDATES

July 29 (Bloomberg) Merrill Lynch, the third-biggest U.S. securities firm, will sell $8.5 billion of stock and liquidate $30.6 billion of bonds at a fifth of their face value to shore up credit ratings imperiled by mortgage losses.

July 29 (Reuters ) Home Prices Fall in May, Erasing Four Years of Gains. ...S&P said the composite index of 10 metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in May, for a 16.9 percent year-over-year drop. Regions that saw some of the largest gains during the housing boom, such as Miami and Las Vegas, were the worst performing markets in May. Miami home prices fell 3.6 percent in May from April for a 28.3 percent annual drop. In Las Vegas, prices in May slumped 2.9 percent, for a 28.4 percent decline from a year earlier.

Photo of McSame’s Botched Nip/Tuck & Hormone Treatment Said to Resemble Trash Media’s Bat Boy

ABOARD THE DOUBLE TALK EXPRESS  (C.U. News) — In an effort to close the perceived and actual age gap between himself and his much younger rival for the presidency, presumptive Republican candidate John McSame has apparently taken the advice of his surgically and chemically-enhanced wife to do some enhancement of his own appearance.

But in this photo, allegedly leaked by a horrified member of McCain’s inner circle and sold at a handsome profit to Weakly Whurled NEWS, the operation and hormone treatments have gone terribly wrong. Luckily for his campaign, a full head and face mold was taken before the alterations, and a latex mask fabricated that preserved his prior appearance.

“It’s a temporary fix,” explained a campaign aide, who insisted on anonymity. “We’re worried that as the heat of summer increases, the mask will start to sag and deteriorate. We’re also worried about how it will hold up indoors under the klieg lights during the debates.”

McSame, who’s on record saying that he’s a twentieth century kind of guy, is wrestling with whether to ascribe his 64+ changes in position to shameless pandering, poor flip flopping impulse control, the after effects of five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam— anything but symptoms of advancing senility.

“If we can just push John Sidney over the finish line in November, we’ll be in the clear. After that, we’ll have all the power of the White House at our disposal. Look how well Reagan’s people disguised his Alzheimer’s during his second term,” said the aide hopefully.

Asked whether voters deserved to know the truth about McSame’s current condition, he replied:

“Look, the American people have experienced enough traumas during eight years of the Dick-Bush Administration. Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, the tanking economy, the extreme weather effects of global warming— they can only take so much.

“There’s just some change not worth believing in.”

Findings of the US Climate Change Science Program

While the vast amount of media coverage of Obama’s speech on national security today will focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, I would note what Obama himself says is the greatest single security threat to the US (and the world):

This immediate danger is eclipsed only by the long-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next fifty years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the last fifty: Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Most disastrously, that could mean destructive storms on our shores, and the disappearance of our coastline.

This is not just an economic issue or an environmental concern – this is a national security crisis. For the sake of our security – and for every American family that is paying the price at the pump – we must end this dependence on foreign oil. And as President, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Small steps and political gimmickry just won’t do. I’ll invest $150 billion over the next ten years to put America on the path to true energy security. This fund will fast track investments in a new green energy business sector that will end our addiction to oil and create up to 5 million jobs over the next two decades, and help secure the future of our country and our planet. We’ll invest in research and development of every form of alternative energy – solar, wind, and biofuels, as well as technologies that can make coal clean and nuclear power safe. And from the moment I take office, I will let it be known that the United States of America is ready to lead again.

Never again will we sit on the sidelines, or stand in the way of global action to tackle this global challenge.

Over four years ago, the Guardian leaked an internal report, ordered by THE senior Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall, aka “Yoda,” that made this very point. Money quote:

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

Better late than never, I suppose….

Last week in a speech before Israel’s parliament, The Knesset, George W. Bush implied that Barack Obama was a terraist appeaser for his willingness to talk to evil doers like Iran and Syria. His foreign policy clones, John McSame and his Svengali adviser, Joe LIEberman immediately piled on, citing Barack’s inexperience and naiveté.

One has to wonder how they feel now that its been revealed that Israel is actively pursuing a peace agreement with Syria. And with Hamas, via the government of Egypt.

Or that Qatar has negotiated a deal between the government of Lebanon and the terraist Hizbollah to end its takeover of Beirut, on terms quite favorable to Hizbollah.

How about the vital role the government of Iran had in brokering a cease fire with the Shi’ites in the two month old explosion of violence in Basra and Sadr City in Iraq?  Not to mention its previous help in dislodging the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Then there’s the fact that the Bush Administration has negotiated an end to the nuclear weapons programs in of Libya and that charter member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea. And continues negotiations with Iran to reduce the overall level of violence in Iraq. Can you spell hypocrisy?

What are the war mongers to do, now? Well, they can always attack Iran before the election, capitalizing on the historical reluctance of the American people to change war horses in mid stream. Seemed to work in the 2004 elections.

I mean, wouldn’t you want an PTSD crazed experienced war hero like McSame, who did his level best to bomb the Vietnamese into the Stone Age, in the role of Commander in Chief? As opposed to, say, a wimp like Obama who thinks the willingness to talk is a sign of strength and not weakness?

To accept the Obama approach to foreign policy is to reject the neocons‘ glorious vision of the New American Century. How can the USA realize her manifest destiny to dominate the world (and its diminishing natural resources) during this unique unipolar moment in history if we allow other countries to play anything more than a supporting role in remaking that world in our own triumphant image?

To accept an Obama presidency would be a rejection of Biblical prophecy, at very best a delay in the apocalypse and the rapture! Wasn’t the US founded in part to destroy Islam, as John McCain’s (now rejected) “spiritual guide” Rod Parsley maintains ?

I’ll leave it the 20th century bard, Bob Dylan, to describe the moral and diplomatic bankruptcy of the last 7 1/2 years of the McSame approach to international diplomacy:

There’s no success like failure
and. . . failure is no success at all.