In case you missed it, at the sister site, Just Above Sunset Photography, guest shots from the south of France –

Art Deco South (the former Belvédère du Rayon Vert hotel in Cerbère, France)

And Hollywood this week –

November Skies (very surreal)

Old Dogs (yep, another movie premiere)

Married guys know it not just a tired but always useful set-up and running joke in television sitcoms – you don’t forget the anniversary. It’s a big deal. There’s hell to pay if you forget that, and even if you remember, you’d better make a big deal of it and plan something damned special, and if not all that special, something at least lavishly expensive and obviously far beyond your means, and a total surprise if you can manage it. Otherwise, it’s obvious you don’t care. Bitter tears will follow, and you’ll be required to hang your head and, of course, then you’ll really pay. If you live out here in Hollywood sooner or later your circle of friends will include someone who writes for a network sitcom, part of the team, the team all hyped on expensive coffee concoctions and stale sugary pastry that sits in an overly air-conditioned conference room and tosses ideas and quips around hoping to come up with another episode. And when that’s just not working someone will say, quietly, “He forgot their anniversary.” That’s followed by groans all around, and then by hammering out the rough script. Yeah, it’s stale and stupid, from the days of I Love Lucy, but it’s universal. It’ll do.

Of course sly young men turn it around the other way – they make up arbitrary anniversaries to get points, and more than points. I brought you these flowers because it was three weeks ago to the day that we first met. It works every time, unless you’ve hooked up with a wry cynic who laughs at you. But we do like to mark off sections of time. Something big happened, and it’s good to remember what did, and you might want remember it, to savor it, exactly one year later, or ten, or twenty. Three weeks is pushing it, however.

And that brings us to Monday, November 9, 2009 – an historic day. On that day in 1953, Cambodia became independent from France. Not your thing? On that day in 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone Magazine was published. No? On that day in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Communist-controlled East Germany opened checkpoints in the wall, allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany, and people start demolishing the thing. That was a big deal. It was the end of the Cold War, or close enough, and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which followed rather rapidly. And that’ll do. This was indeed a big deal.

And this year marked twenty years since the wall was torn down by a slap-happy crowd who loved every moment of the disassembly – happy folks with sledge hammers laughing and the rock ‘n’ roll blaring and a fine time. And the media was filled with retrospectives and analyses and human interest stories and first-hand accounts of being there, as was appropriate. No one forgets this anniversary.

CNN ran a comprehensive story with a cool, full-color slide show:

Thousands of people joined world leaders in the German capital Monday to remember the night 20 years ago when a euphoric wave of people power swept away the Berlin Wall and consigned the Cold War to history.

In scenes calmly mirroring the events of November 9, 1989, crowds thronged through the center of the once-divided city, joining German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a symbolic re-enactment of the first crossing of the breached Wall.

“It was worth fighting for,” Merkel said, after crossing the Bösebrücker bridge on Bornholmer Strasse, the checkpoint where people first poured across the frontier.

The Associated Press went the other way with Thousands Cheer Twenty Years since Fall of Berlin Wall – all human interest stories and first-hand accounts, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s a matter of personal taste, of course.

But the conservative right wanted to turn this into a second rate episode of I Love Lucy. “He forgot the anniversary.” Yes, President Obama did not fly to Berlin. He was a no-show. You can spin a serviceable comic hapless-husband plot out of that – conflict, then crises, then denouement. In the end the guy is just a doofus, maybe a loveable doofus, but a doofus nonetheless. Or he could be a dangerous, insensitive and arrogant bastard. You can play it either way.

The New York Post – since 1993 owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (he’d owned it previously, from 1976 to 1988, but had been forced to sell it because of government restrictions on media monopolies) – went with the dangerous, insensitive and arrogant bastard angle, with this editorial:

World leaders past and present will be in Berlin today for the 20th anniversary of the fall of communist repression’s most visible symbol: the 112-mile concrete wall that split the city for more than a quarter-century.

Conspicuously absent: the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Obama’s folks say he’s too busy to accept German President Angela Merkel’s invitation to attend today’s festivities.

It’s pathetic that Obama won’t be there – and telling, as well.

Obama just isn’t JFK, and he’s certainly not the best president ever, Reagan:

After all, it was one of his own supposed heroes, President John F. Kennedy, who famously flew to Berlin in 1963 and denounced the wall as “an affront to history” when he memorably proclaimed to all the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

And it was another predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who even more famously stood before the heinous barrier and declared: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Less than two years later, the wall had tumbled.

The idea here is that Kennedy said the right things, but Reagan said the magic words, and the wall simply fell. Those precise words did the trick. It was “the triumph of American exceptionalism, leadership and strength.” You demand, because you’re special, better than the riff-raff in all the other countries in the world, and you scare the crap out of people, and they comply. It’s as simple as that.

And of course Obama just doesn’t understand how to deal with adversaries:

For Obama, America is but one nation among many, no different – or more exceptional – than any other. Its record is one that, increasingly, he has felt compelled not to extol but to apologize for.

And, for this president, ideologies bent on America’s destruction must be met not with resistance but with rhetoric, outreach and “understanding.”

So, no matter what he says, the Cold War, in this view, must seem to him “an irrelevant historical relic – an example of American paranoia and fear-mongering prolonging a conflict that could have been resolved with warm-and-fuzzy speechmaking and the soft-pedaling of political differences.” That’s not what he says exactly, but that’s what he means, and that is “not only shameful – but dangerous.”

Well, the Post is a classic tabloid, and railing against outreach and understanding is what they do – bad guys should get hammered and real men are the one who hammer them, as niceties, and trying to figure out what other people think and working with that, is sissy stuff.

In late 2007, however, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the Wall Street Journal, and that’s never been a tabloid. There the opinion piece comes from Anthony R. Dolan, and he was chief speechwriter at the Reagan White House for eight years, and served in the second Bush administration as special adviser in the offices of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. He’s not crude and rude, and he tells the tale of how no one at State or Defense wanted Reagan to include the magic words, “Tear down this wall.”

Yes, those words were too provocative and dangerous. It could mean war. But Dolan say Reagan insisted on saying them, as he was a rue genius who knew better than all the wise men in the world. And course, Dolan, in Four Little Words, comes down just where the Post came down:

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran’s rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan’s. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration’s systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what “good vs. evil” rhetoric can do.

Yep, that worked so well for the younger Bush, didn’t it? Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation seems to have decided to use the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to argue that sure, the younger Bush made a mess of things, but once, long ago, that sort of “good vs. evil” rhetoric changed the world, so Bush’s heart was in the right place – there are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys win and the bad guys lose. It’s as simple as that. Everything else is dangerous nonsense – unless the whole Soviet system was going to collapse upon itself anyway, as they had botched their economies for decades, and the economies of their satellite states, and that wall was coming down no matter who said what, where, and when. Maybe all we had to do is wait and watch. It was certain to happen, really. But that’s best left to historians and economists. They are not Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

And the whole sitcom plot is muddled by this – Obama’s Surprise Video Address to Berlin on Anniversary of Fall of Berlin Wall – which is pretty basic. Cool. Good thing. Glad it happened. Everyone is glad it happened.

But all this needs perspective, which the former neocon Michael Lind provides in Three Anniversaries – there was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there was 9/11, and there was the collapse of Lehman Brothers, He argues that each of them ushered in a new American era, so we should think about all three.

The first:

Ever since its construction began in 1961, the wall had symbolized the division not only of Germany but of Europe as a whole between the dreary, tyrannical Soviet bloc and the imperfectly democratic and vibrant West. Over the decades several hundred East Germans had been slaughtered by their own government as they tried to escape to freedom in the West. Now, on the night of Nov. 9, jubilant crowds streamed through the wall, and East Germans and West Germans collaborated to begin to tear the monstrous edifice down. The liberation of Eastern Europe from the Red Army and the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the final collapse of belief in the secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, even in nominally communist countries like China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, quickly followed.

The second:

To the horror of a world watching on television, two jets crashed into the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center, capsizing them and killing around 3,000 victims. Another jet crashed into the Pentagon, while a fourth, headed for Washington, plunged to destruction in a field in Pennsylvania, after passengers overpowered the terrorists. The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime had hosted al-Qaida, and Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks on the U.S., quickly followed.

The third:

On Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. As news spread of the collapse of America’s fifth-largest investment bank, credit markets froze and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 500 points. In the next few weeks, the stock market quickly erased a decade’s worth of gains. Waves of bank failures and business failures and mass unemployment, from North America to Europe to Asia, marked the greatest global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

He says it’s simple – these three events divide three eras in recent history “the Age of Euphoria, the Age of Paranoia, and the Age of Disillusionment.”

The Age of Euphoria, in his formulation, lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11:

In Washington, the fall of the Soviet Union was misinterpreted as the rise of the United States. The Gulf War of 1991 seemed to ratify American hubris. Using advanced technology designed to defeat the Soviet Union, the U.S. military quickly demolished the armed forces of Saddam Hussein’s feeble regime. It was said that the world had gone from being bipolar to unipolar, that no force since Rome had been as powerful as America and its legions.

This was absurd hyperbole, of course. It was true that the U.S. was the only great power with power projection capabilities that permitted it to defeat weak states on the Eurasian periphery like Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan. But America’s unmatched abilities in the new colonial warfare hardly gave it hegemony over Europe or Asia. The U.S. military budget was strained nearly to bankruptcy merely by the cost of fighting low-level wars against primitive opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some solitary superpower.

And Lind point out that no one chose to compete with the “New Rome” – they “they had better things to do with their wealth.”

The Europeans slashed their military spending after the Cold War to pay for welfare and amenities for their people. The Chinese, having discarded communism in practice, threw their energies into building up a world-class industrial base. If Americans insisted on sacrificing American blood and American treasure to protect oil destined mostly for Europe and East Asia rather than the U.S., well, the Europeans and East Asians were not going to object.

Of course after 9/11, euphoria gave way to paranoia, and perhaps the less said about that the better – it was the panic and overreaction the bad guys sought. We gave them what they wanted, and our government told us to be afraid, very afraid, which of course became unsustainable:

…despite the best efforts of conservative politicians and ideologues to frighten the American people, it has proved to be impossible to sustain a high level of public anxiety for a prolonged period. The public mood changed in a national burst of laughter in February 2003, when Department of Homeland Security director Tom Ridge urged citizens to amass duct tape in order to seal their windows as a precaution against anthrax or gas attacks. The spell was broken. America relaxed. George W. Bush was narrowly reelected as a wartime president in 2004, but by 2006 the electorate no longer saw the connection between the costly war in Iraq and their own security and threw the Republican Party out of both houses of Congress.

And the rest is history, or was until September 15, 2008:

The subject changed from the threat of terrorists with atomic bombs to the threat of bankers with financial bombs, in the form of unexploded “toxic assets” with strange names like credit default swaps and over-the-counter derivatives. There was a brief upsurge in optimism, when a young, vigorous, mixed-race senator named Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. With Democrats in control of the White House as well as Congress, many assumed that an era of sweeping change was about to begin.

But Obama soon proved to be a cautious incrementalist, not a bold reformer. He froze out innovative thinkers and assembled an economic team dominated by center-right Democrats, including some like Larry Summers who had helped to make the crisis possible by supporting the deregulation of American and global finance in the 1990s. Obama’s Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, said no to all proposals for serious restructuring of the financial industry that might upset investment banks and hedge funds. Every major idea for financial reform – from forcing investment banks into insolvency and nationalizing them temporarily to restoring the Glass-Steagall separation of retail banking from casino finance and cracking down on offshore tax havens to imposing a “Tobin tax” on financial transactions – was rejected as too radical by the best friends in the White House that Wall Street has ever had. By the fall of 2009, according to press reports Paul Volcker was considered too radical to be taken seriously by the Obama administration. Paul Volcker.

Lind goes on with other details of how “Obama was just as timid and deferential toward the organized business lobbies who had helped cause the problems he claimed to be trying to solve.” But you get the idea – we’ve become used to disillusionment. Lind says it now feels like the Hoover years rather than the years just after Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration. We all shrug now. Things are a mess now. That’s just how it is.

All Lind can add to cheer us up is this:

But the present Age of Disillusionment that has followed the fall of Lehman Brothers may yet prove to be as much an overreaction to dramatic events as were the Age of Euphoria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Age of Paranoia that followed the fall of the twin towers. The U.S. was never as strong as it seemed after 11/9; it was never as weak as it seemed after 9/11; and it is not as bankrupt as it has seemed after 9/15. Let us hope that we can work our way out of the present Age of Disillusionment, without the need for a new catastrophe to mark this epoch’s conclusion.

The man has no respect for anniversaries. His wife must despise him, or at least find him frustratingly analytical and cold. But he may be onto something. Sometimes what you’re celebrating just isn’t what you thought it was.

In general, big news shouldn’t break on Saturday night. It’s not fair. Weekends are for kicking back, not serious stuff. But late on Saturday night, November 7, the House passed its version of healthcare reform legislation, its quite progressive bill – something no one has been able to do since Harry Truman started trying in the late forties in any form, and certainly what the Clinton administration once botched, big time. It was historic.

But then again, it may be futile – an historical curiosity. The legislation must go to the Senate, where they will have to pass their own version of the House bill, which may not be recognizable after they’re through with it, if they pass anything at all – and their not passing anything at all is a real possibility. And then, hypothetically, the two House and Senate bills would have to be reconciled in joint committee, and then the reconciled final version approved by both houses, and then sent to the president to sign into law. So while the vote was historic, this is the halfway point in a voyage that may or may not reach any particular destination. All the crowing about what an achievement this was for Obama and the Democrats is kind of like the crew cheering Columbus somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, halfway to the New World. Making it halfway there is cool, but it is only making it halfway there. Or there’s another metaphor. It seems odd to be celebrating your unexpected lead at halftime. The game’s not over. And some teams you face always seem to be able to pull off that come-from-behind win in the finals seconds of play – you know, the good teams.

It’s just a structural thing, as Matthew Yglesias explains:

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that in a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world. Now that’s not the world we live in. Instead we live in a world where neither of those things has passed and where their prospects aren’t clear. But think back on this point the next time you hear someone say Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not centrist enough, or else that Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not left-wing enough.

The reality is that he’s struggling with his agenda because of the way our political institutions are structured.

But this was a bit of a win, or a big deal in the history of such efforts, and the best compact account of what happened my actually be from Sioux Falls, South Dakota:

The President called it “historic”, Republicans called it “unconstitutional.” Saturday night the Democratic-controlled House passed a far-reaching health care reform bill. Now the issue goes on to the Senate.

President Obama hailed the passage of the bill and praised those who supported it: “Given the heated and often misleading rhetoric surrounding this legislation, I know that this was a courageous vote for many members of Congress.”

The measure passed the house late Saturday by a narrow margin. Only one Republican voted for the measure – Joseph Cao, from an overwhelmingly Democratic district in New Orleans.

And the basics:

The House bill requires everyone to have health insurance. Individuals will be required to buy it, employers will be required to provide it or pay a penalty. The bill offers tax credits to allow low and middle income people to afford insurance and the plan will be paid for in two ways. First, with a surtax on people making more than 500-thousand dollars, and families making more than a million dollars. Second, with about 400 billion dollars in Medicare cuts.

In addition, the bill says that a person can’t lose their insurance if they lose their job, and that someone can’t be denied health insurance for a pre-existing condition. But to get all that, Democratic leaders had to yield to conservatives from both parties and accept an amendment that imposes tough new restrictions on abortion coverage in insurance policies.

And of course it contains the dreaded public option – if no for-profit insurance company wants to cover you for some reason, or you can prove you can’t find anyone to cover you at any price, and if your employer just won’t cover you at all in those circumstances, there’d be a Medicare-like thing you could buy into – a government plan that would act just like an insurance company, collecting premiums and paying providers, except it wouldn’t be run for profit, just set up to cover the few million who got left out.

That was the killer of course, or what will kill the bill in the Senate. How can the insurance cartel compete with that? And what does it mean to America that anyone would think that providing healthcare isn’t where corporations should be thinking about making big bucks? It’s the desire to make scads of money that that made America great, and gave us everything from Pet Rocks to Guitar Hero to Viagra. And what if people liked it too much and everyone wanted in? People would think that organizations that weren’t set up to make enormous profits growing exponentially year-after-year were just fine. Then where would we be? Innovation would stop.

That’s why Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, says the House bill is “dead on arrival” in the Senate.

But none of it was pretty, as the opening of this editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle explains:

The U.S. House of Representatives overcame a disinformation campaign that clouded the health care reform debate in the summer, and a Republican roadblock that forced Democrats to scrap for every last vote, to pass legislation of vital importance to individuals and the economy.

Passage of the most significant expansion of health care coverage since Medicare was established in 1964 was an enormous first-year milestone for President Obama and a tribute to the blend of persuasion and steel in the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat who had to bring along a legion of balking moderates to secure the votes needed for passage.

One of the regrettable concessions required to win over moderates was an amendment that further tightened restrictions on federal funding for abortions. Federal law already prohibits direct government funding of abortions. The amendment added to the health care reform bill would prohibit abortion coverage on any insurance plan that is purchased with government subsidies.

The anti-abortion language put a new twist in the health care debate, threatening to drive a wedge into a fragile coalition in support of a 2,000-page bill that attempted to balance the concerns of myriad interests. The National Organization for Women signaled Sunday that it could not support legislation that dealt the “worst blow to women’s fundamental right in order to buy a few votes for reform of the profit-driven health insurance industry.”

But it’s in there – if you buy any insurance from any carrier, and you accept one dime of any government subsidy to do so, know that all carriers nationwide will have removed abortion coverage from all their plans, in order to get you onboard as a paying customer. That would be the law. Find a coat hanger or a back-alley doctor who takes cash.

But that was what had to be in there to get this passed. It’s back to the days before Roe v Wade – and getting there without all that pesky Supreme Court nonsense. There’s the law that makes some things legal. Fine – but there’s also the regulated marketplace, where what is allowed to be sold can restricted to those who have the extensive means to exercise their legal rights, and to no one else. This is no small matter, but it had to be done.

As for other reactions, the top three New York Times on the matter were typical. Obama Presses Senate to Act Quickly on Its Health Bill – good luck with that. News Analysis: The Medical Industry Grumbles, but It Stands to Gain – yeah, they bitched, but even with a public option for the dogs they didn’t want to insure anyway, they get tens of millions of new customers paying them whatever they choose to charge with money provided by the government. And this – If Anything, the Senate’s Task is Trickier. It’s always trickier in the second half of the game.

But it’s the first half of the game that was fascinating, as the Thursday before the vote there was this – Tea-baggers descend on Congress today to ’scare’ them out of passing health care reform. Yes, Minnesota Republican House member Michele Bachmann called on the tea-bagging protesters to descend on the Capitol building t to “scare” Members of Congress into not passing health care reform. Bachmann said that Democrats got “scared” by the August tea-bagging protests and that all the protesters needed do is “scare” the Democrats again. She told them to bring video cameras – the Democrats would cave, just like they did in August.

But it seems they brought more than video cameras:

The angry folks at the protest – which attracted several thousand conservatives – held up signs with messages of hate: “Get the Red Out of the White House,” “Waterboard Congress,” “Ken-ya Trust Obama?” One called the president a “Traitor to the U.S. Constitution.” Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” – a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

Some of this was a bit much for Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel – it was the sign showing dead bodies from the Dachau concentration camp stacked in a pile, and compared that to the Democrats’ health care reform plan, prompting this statement from the Elie Wiesel Foundation – “This kind of political hatred is indecent and disgusting.”

He really shouldn’t have said that, considering the responses to Wiesel posted on Politico (unedited):

Rothschilds nothing! Everyone knows that Obama is George Soros sock puppet. Wasn’t Soros Jewish once upon a time? May the Schwartz be with you!

The jews need to clam up and accept the fact that they are in a Chritian country.

This hollowcost thing is totally overblown by the jewish.

Eli Wiesel should just go back to Indonesia. I don’t see him condemnig the terrorist shooter at Fort Hood.

Elie is a whiner. She should stop her whining. You didn’t not complane when the libs were calling Bush Hitler.

You know what? The fact is that at a time in history, The Rosthchild family controlled practically everything. This is a fact. Not anti semitic. I resent the Jewish outrage at everything. I am a tea partier. obama is a Marxist and takes his orders from George Soros… it is similar and these people need to get a life., Why any Jew would support the Obama administation is a mystery anyway. He is a Muslim sympathizer and the greatest threat to Israel ever to sit in the White House. Wake up Jewish community. Take off the blinders.

There are more of those but these stand out:

Elie Wiesel: Newest, most current tool of the sick, perverted, racist, anti-semetic Democrap party. Have you no shame Democraps?

Elie Weisel is disgusting PR-seeking profiteering demagogue who has made a fortune off playing on the world’s guilt trips about the what happened to the Jews during WW2. Most objective WW2 researchers agree now that the beastial Nazi’’s, who happened to be anti-capitalist Socialists, killed even more Slavs and Gypsies in their concentration camps than Jews, but you don’t see the Slavs and Gypsies trying to profit off the “Holocaust” like some of the shameless powerful Jews in the media.

I sometimes wonder what has happened to the Jewish people?. The Bible says that they are GODs’ people and Israel is their home land. I see so many Jews seem to have abandoned their faith and I think this has to sadden our Father in Heaven. I see many Jews that are homosexual-actively promoting it as a “normal” lifestyle. I see many Jews involved in the ACLU – which I call the “Anti Christian Liberal Union”, this bothers me as how can one be against their Father and Son in Heaven who are for Life??. I see many Jews in Hollywood making filthy, sinful movies – what happened to the good, Family movies??. I see many Jews full of Greed in Hollywood, Wall Street,etc. I see many Jews involved in abortion groups- how can one support the killing of human fetuses??, especially people who have suffered through the Holocaust??. I am not anti-semitic, I know many will come on here and attack me. I am simply stating what I see and I believe our Father in Heaven is wondering what is happening to his “chosen” people?. He sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins and I think He is wondering the direction our Country is taking??. I am praying for our Country and all the Jews in our Country and pray that our Father will forgive us all for our sins. I hope I have stated what GOD would have wanted me to say?. GOD Bless and Pray for our Country.

Maybe this was never about healthcare reform, as one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers says this:

I don’t know why the bone deep and deliberate ignorance of some people still shocks me, but it does.

I’ve been to Dachau. I have walked through the gates with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” and looked at the showers and the cramped bunks and the ovens. I have seen the dusty yard where prisoners mustered every morning. I now know that a place can retain horror and despair in its soil. You can feel the evil in the air even fifty years later. I have no idea how anyone survived with their sanity.

There are things for which there are no comparison, things like the Holocaust, rape, the death of one’s child, and yet they are used with frightening regularity. ‘This is like the holocaust’. ‘He is like a Nazi’. ‘This is akin to rape’. No. No. And no. There is no like or akin to these things and using them as political hyperbole shows a breathtaking lack of humanity. Not to mention an inability or disinclination to formulate a reasonable argument.

So the Dems’ health insurance reform plan is equivalent to the poor, tortured souls who lost their lives in Dachau and the survivor who protests the comparison is the “Newest, most current tool of the sick, perverted, racist, anti-Semitic Democrap party.”

There are no words.

Sullivan adds this – “And the GOP leadership, with the sole exception of Eric Cantor, says nothing.”

Of course everyone is as how long it will take Eric Cantor to apologize:

“The Republican Party in its roots is a party of inclusion and we ought to be promoting that and making sure that voices are heard,” Cantor, of Virginia, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.

Cantor, when asked about Limbaugh’s comments that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate” and his comparison of the administration’s health-care logo to a swastika, said Limbaugh was wrong.

“Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?” Cantor said. “No, I don’t, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

He’s toast. Limbaugh will eat him alive.

But the relationship of the right and the Jews is a tricky business, as Andrew Sullivan also notes:

Because of my horror at the inhumanity of, the Gaza assault, my support for a two-state solution soon enough to rescue Israel from becoming South Africa, and my desire to see the US-Israel alliance become less suffocatingly one-sided, I am deemed an anti-Semite. This is the fate of most goyim who question the Israeli government on any grounds in Washington, so I cannot complain (at least I am not called a self-hating Jew as most Jewish American critics of Israel’s government are).

But when real anti-Semitism emerges, it is hard not to miss it. And if American Jews do not see it in the current Populist right, a faction that loves Israel primarily to bring about the Apocalypse, they need to open their eyes.

Well, the big news on Sunday after the House vote was Joe Lieberman, the one Jew the conservative right just loves, saying two things.

First, he announced he will personally lead the filibuster in the Senate to stop all healthcare reform because someone has to be the hero who stops all this madness. It the public option thing – if a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote.” It is somehow immoral to take the profit motive out of the equation, even for a small bloc of the uninsured. It’s un-American.

Second, he announced his Homeland Security Committee – the Democrats let him keep his chairmanship even after he campaigned for McCain – will, under his orders, open hearings on the Fort Hood shootings, because it was obviously part of the 9/11 thing, and obviously a well-planned plot to infiltrate the military and kill our guys, and not one crazy guy. He will uncover the plot. It was a terrorist attack you see, no different than 9/11.

Well, the guy was trouble:

…a day after classmates who participated in a 2007-2008 master’s program at a military college said they complained to superiors about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and what they considered to be his anti-American views, which included his giving a presentation that justified suicide bombing and telling classmates that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “He should have been gone.”

There’s no question about that, but that doesn’t make it the terrorist attack Lieberman posits, and Army Chief of Staff George Casey warned Sunday against reaching conclusions about the suspected shooter’s motives until investigators have fully explored what the heck happened – “I think the speculation (on Hasan’s Islamic roots) could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” In short, Joe, you’re making trouble, and making things worse.

But there was this NPR piece:

…he psychiatrist [who worked alongside Hasan] says that he was very proud and upfront about being Muslim. And the psychiatrist hastened to say, and nobody minded that. But he seemed almost belligerent about being Muslim, and he gave a lecture one day that really freaked a lot of doctors out.

They have grand rounds, right? They, you know, dozens of medical staff come into an auditorium, and somebody stands at the podium at the front and gives a lecture about some academic issue, you know, what drugs to prescribe for what condition. But instead of that, he – Hasan – apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don’t believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You’re set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.

And I said to the psychiatrist, but this could be a very interesting informational session, right? Where he’s educating everybody about the Koran. He said but what disturbed everybody was that Hasan seemed to believe these things. And actually, a Muslim in the audience, a psychiatrist, raised his hand and said, excuse me. But I’m a Muslim and I do not believe these things in the Koran, and then I don’t believe what you say the Koran says. And then Hasan didn’t say, well, I’m just giving you one point of view. He basically just stared the guy down.

Sullivan comments:

So he was actually challenged on these grounds in public and yet no one monitored him or disciplined him for this. He may not have been in any way connected to al Qaeda. But the point is: he didn’t have to be. This kind of Jihad requires no sleeper cell – just a murderous, fundamentalist psyche.

But Jeffery Goldberg has some warnings about that:

Elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack?

Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

And Sullivan leaps back in:

I did not leap to that conclusion in this case as the primary reason for the attack because we didn’t fully know the entire picture – and still don’t. But as the pieces fall into place, it seems increasingly clear that Nidal Hasan’s faith – and the conflicts it presented in the context of the war on Islamist terror – was absolutely relevant in this horrifying massacre of service members. It may well have been combined with individual stress, exposure to others with PTSD, fear of deployment, psychological disturbance, etc. But that it was a critical factor seems to me important to note.

But every case is unique.

If the man is not part of any wider conspiracy or terror group, it is silly to treat him the way we would a Qaeda cell, for example, as Lieberman seems to want to do. And the random murder spree was not designed to wound the US militarily in any strategic way. But religion is poisonous when it fuses with politics and deploys violence to control or punish others – and Hasan’s increasingly Wahabbist version of Islam is about as crude a conflation of religion, certainty and violence as one can imagine.

So maybe Lieberman should look into the crude conflation of religion, certainty and violence everywhere, even on the right:

This applies to the extremes of Christianity and Judaism as well, of course. I do not think you can understand the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller without grasping the religious motivation of his killer, just as I think a brutal gay-bashing by a thug with Leviticus tattooed on his arm gives you a good idea of the religious motivation for the beat-down. Ditto, I might add, when we discover that it was a fanatical Jewish settler – transposed from America – who gunned down people at a gay walk-in center in Jerusalem.

Religious fanaticism – in Texas or the West Bank or in Gaza – is a dangerous, dangerous impulse in an increasingly fundamentalist age. …

Maybe this one weekend’s news was ever about healthcare reform. The general consensus seems to be that the House bill will die in the Senate, and that everyone will agree Lieberman and the Fox News folks, that what happened in Texas wasn’t one mad man – that’s just politically correct fools’ wishful thinking – but Islam itself out to kill us all, scheming and plotting, scheming and plotting, scheming and plotting.

None of this is very cheery, and it seems that Joe Lieberman wants to prove he, not anyone else, is the key guy who controls America, for the Likud Party or something. It’ll be interesting to see how the Democrats react. Take his chairmanships away? Boot him out of the party? He may switch parties in a day or two anyway. Stay tuned.

But some of us have this uncomfortable feeling that soon there will be a third political party in America – Palin-Bachmann led, with the full support of Beck, Limbaugh and Murdoch’s Fox networks and his Wall Street Journal, with Joe Lieberman as elder statesman. And they’ll call themselves the American Likud Party – nuke Iran to protect Israel, one of the original thirteen states of course, to bring on End Times and the Rapture, and also, in any spare moments, eliminate capital gains taxes and privatize Social Security. And stop healthcare reform at all costs.

How did Joe Lieberman become the most powerful man in America? On the other hand, it really is only halftime.

Sure it was a cultural shock – imagine growing up in Pittsburgh then attending a small liberal arts college in Ohio in the last four years of the sixties, then heading off to graduate school in the South, or close enough. Durham, North Carolina, was sort of the south. Folks there still had a problem with the Civil War – that was always the Late Unpleasantness between the States – not a civil war, really, as they had been right about states’ rights – and the North had been pushy assholes. Driving down the way to Chapel Hill on Saturday mornings – there was a great bookstore there – the first stretch of road was the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. You learned you didn’t make jokes about that.

You didn’t get used to it. It was like being in a time-warp, or in a foreign country – and the odd red clay and miles and miles of dark loblolly pines, thick to the hazy horizon, just made it all the more surreal. And grocery shopping at The Piggly-Wiggly or Winn-Dixie didn’t help matters. But somehow that was the real America, and it has been for a long time.

Over at the Economist, where the bloggers use pseudonyms or no names all, “Democracy in America” explains:

I’m a southerner myself, but I’ve spent the past twelve years outside the region (in Britain and in New York). When away, I realized in a visceral way, watching news from home, just how southern the top tiers of Washington had become. Everyone had the drawl of my high-school teachers. Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee) duked it out with a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich (Georgia, who admittedly has no drawl), Dick Armey (Texas) and Trent Lott (Mississippi). Then Mr. Clinton gave way to George Bush (Texas), and after the Senate went briefly Democratic, it went Republican again, with Mr. Lott giving way to Bill Frist (Tennessee) and Mr. Armey to Tom DeLay (Texas). It was southerners in every position of power for an unusually long time.

Maybe they had won the Civil War.

But things have changed, as discussed here back in early August in The Ascendency of the South and Its Sad Decline:

Nixon had had his Southern Strategy – write off the black vote and win over the white Southern Democrats, so pissed off after Johnson had rammed through all that civil rights and voting rights legislation. That worked – they all came across to the Republicans. But Johnson had been a southerner too – Texas is close enough. After Nixon (and Ford) it was Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia (with a degree in nuclear physics from Annapolis who should have commanded a nuclear submarine). The first Bush was an outlier, as was Reagan, but Bill Clinton was from Arkansas after all, and the second Bush pretended he was a good old boy from Texas. In all of this the North didn’t matter much. The South was at the center of everything. That was where America could be found.

Yep, forget the North – full of Jews and fags and people pretending to be all European or something, watching French art films and impressed with the likes of Woody Allen. And there were all those bleeding-heart liberals up there, all worried about how minorities felt about being mistreated, and worried about people owning guns. That wasn’t the real America. They didn’t even follow NASCAR.

And now we seem to have elected a black president, from a northern city, Chicago, the former star of the Harvard Law School (in Cambridge, on the edge of Boston). This wasn’t supposed to happen.

And then he put Sonya Sotomayor on the Supreme Court. Damn.

But that was August, and this is November. You’d think people would have settled down and accepted, or made do, with the new reality. Heck, nobly enduring your unfair and unjust exile, playing the oppressed and abused victim of The Man, has its rewards too. It’s a Southern thing. And it’s where most of the conservative right in America seems to be at the moment, over there with that other persecuted, abused and outnumbered tiny minority, evangelical Christians. They’re the last of the real Americans, in a country taken over by the riff-raff, uppity colored folks, sneering Mexicans, and communists and all that. It’s unpleasant, but it makes Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin rich. And playing the victim is its own reward.

But the months passed and you really didn’t expect the Flower of the South to sadly and silently fade in the shadows, did you? Of course not – and now Curt Levey, executive director of the rather far-right Committee for Justice say he really doesn’t approve of President Obama’s judicial nominees. There are the usual conservative reasons he is displeased – judicial activism, or insufficient recognition that the constitution is wholly based on the Bible and whatnot, on the part of those nominated so far – but his real issue is that there is a an appalling lack of southern white males among Obama’s selections.

Once again we have to wonder whether a Democratic bias against southern white men serving on the federal appeals courts is at work.

You see, this sure seems like racism:

Does President Obama or his advisors believe that southern white men are likely to be bigoted, making them unfit to serve on the second most powerful court in the land? We hope not and readily concede that it is difficult to know if any such stereotype lurks in the White House. The absence of southern white male circuit nominees could, instead, be an innocent coincidence or the not-so-innocent byproduct of a judicial selection process dominated by racial and gender preferences.

But regardless of the reason for the pattern we noted in 2007 and again now, even the appearance that Democrats are biased against southern white men is a potential problem for the party generally, and for President Obama’s goal of transcending old racial divisions. At the very least, the pattern merits further thought and discussion, both outside and inside the White House.

Levey specifically points to the southern circuits – the Fourth, Fifth and Eleventh. Southern white males need not apply. They are being unfairly excluded, or it feels as if they are, and that makes Obama and the Democrats look bad, which is the same thing that happens when the uncaring and brutal majority steamrolls a helpless minority.

Of course, over at Right Wing Watch, someone decided to look at the relevant numbers – of the thirty-seven seats in these circuits, twenty are already filled by white guys from the region, who would be actual southern white men. Of the one hundred fifty-seven circuit court seats nationwide, ninety-five seats are filled by white dudes. That adds some difficulty when you try to make the case that the president is neglecting an unrepresented “minority” – white guys – when they already represent a majority. But of course he’s not saying whites are a minority, just being treated like one, and it doesn’t hurt to try. Someone always wants to be angry, and you can help them out by telling them they’re being passed over. Well, not them specifically, but someone like them is getting screwed by the new uncaring and brutal majority, of people who look funny and talk funny.

At American Prospect, Adam Serwer adds this:

Just to put this in perspective, a whopping 18 percent of judges on the federal bench are people of color. But in the eyes of this conservative group, assigning more white men to the federal bench “transcends racial divisions” and that doing otherwise reflects a selection process “dominated by racial and gender preferences.”

Conservatives regularly try to cast affirmative action as racially discriminatory, but rarely does someone openly admit that their only issue with the process is simply who is being discriminated against.

But it almost had to happen. A rift opened up, as Andrew Sullivan here flags some startling numbers from the Daily Kos State of the Nation Poll – Barack Obama’s favorability/unfavorability rating is 28/67 in the South, compared to 68/23 in the “rest of the USA.” As Sullivan says, “America is not just two countries right now; it sometimes feels like two universes.”

So how and why is the South so badly out of step with the rest of the country?

For that, another Economist blogger without a byline but writing from Austin, down in Texas, offers this:

Another way of looking at the poll numbers linked above is that the South isn’t just sour on Mr. Obama. They’re disaffected about everything. Unsurprisingly, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are unpopular; they actually fare worse than Mr. Obama. But so are Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, albeit to a lesser extent: Mr. Boehner gets 26% favorable / 36% unfavorable. Congressional Republicans are at 30/47. The only thing that southerners favor more than disfavor is the Republican Party, and even that isn’t getting majority support (48/37).

So what is going on here, what has put the South “into this season of discontent” or whatever?

This writer offers a few suggestions:

First, obviously, the South skews Republican and both the White House and Congress are Democratic. (During the Bush years the Northeast would have suffered from similar malaise.) Second, a lack of national leadership. None of the key players in the health-care debate, for example, are Southerners. Outside of DC, you occasionally hear the name of Newt kicked around, but with Rick Perry focused on his gubernatorial campaign, and Bobby Jindal still laying low, and Mark Sanford doing the same, you don’t see a lot of Southern leaders onstage these days.

But mostly he sees “a muted national profile” here, where the South doesn’t much matter:

An issue like climate change affects all of us, but it does not have a particularly southern angle. And the states that are getting the most individual attention are places like Michigan and California and Nevada. Not that you would want to be in the news for having an especially bad economic meltdown, but it does seem that the South has been largely ignored for about the past year. Maybe even longer, as states in the Deep South were not battlegrounds in the last presidential election.

Maybe that’s it, but “Democracy in America” adds more:

In 2006, things started to go wrong. Nancy Pelosi (California) and Harry Reid (Nevada) took over the top jobs in Congress. Then Barack Obama (Illinois) was elected president, and declined to balance his ticket regionally by picking a southerner. …

But the Republican leadership shifted too. The party ran two non-southerners for president and vice-president in John McCain and Sarah Palin. The RNC is now run by a black Marylander, Michael Steele. The House minority leader, John Boehner, hails from Ohio. The whip’s job has gone to Eric Cantor who, though Virginian, is an atypical southern Republican in being Jewish. Only Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, is the stereotypical white Protestant southerner. His whip and assistant, John Kyl, comes from Arizona.

Everyone knows where that led:

“I want my country back,” has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won’t last, either. But it’s a painful reality right now for a region that once reveled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.

See Kevin Drum from just after the election last November:

For many years, the Democratic Party controlled the agenda of American politics and Southerners controlled much of the Democratic Party. So the South had enormous political influence.

Later, most Southerners switched to the Republican Party, but by then it was Republicans who controlled the agenda of American politics. So the South still had enormous political influence.

As of January 20th, however, the Democratic Party will control the American political agenda once again. But Southerners are still Republicans, which means that their political influence will be nearly nonexistent.

In other words, for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power.

At the time, Drum considered this a big deal:

There are still a few liberal Southerners who belong to the Democratic Party, of course, but the reactionary, traditionalist South is, for the time being, nearly powerless. They will not control anything, their caucus is a discredited rump, and their influence will be negligible. There is no reason to fear them or to care what they think. Their power to filibuster, itself guttering and only barely alive following the 2008 election, will be all they have left.

This is the first time this will be true in well over a century. So say it again: The South will have essentially no influence over the course of American politics for the next eight years.

We live in momentous times.

And now, a year later, with Curt Levey and his Committee for Justice making their noble stand for the Sothern White Man, Drum says this:

Despite the oceans of ink spent analyzing the electoral shift in 2006 and 2008, I continue to think this transformation has been underappreciated. The Old South has punched above its weight in American politics ever since 1787, and during the few times their influence has temporarily waned (Reconstruction, the 60s) it drove them crazy with fear and persecution mongering. So it’s not really surprising that it’s happening again.

Drum just can’t see what happens next:

Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest pretty strongly that they can’t, which means that eventually the South will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This means acknowledging that they’re just another region, one with influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their population.

I wonder how long it will take for them to do that.

Kevin Drum lives down the coast in Irvine, California. He doesn’t get the South at all.

Think of the South as just another region? They will never acknowledge that. The South will rise again.

And oddly, that’s a matter beyond politics. It’s a matter of a long-standing mythology. You know Gone with the Wind:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South… Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow… Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave… Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind…

How are you going to fight that? Common sense is powerless when you’re dealing with a mythology that may be the only thing left to cling to these days. Challenge it at your peril. Or ignore it, as that works just as well when you’re dealing with those seduced by it, and who just aren’t that important these days.

Yes, some of us end up in Hollywood, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Sure, this apartment building just off the Sunset Strip, which looks like the set of Melrose Place and is sometimes actually used in films, has the young folks who come and go, those who arrive hoping for the big break and move out in a month or two. They all go back home. The rest of us are the old folks. We’ve been here forever and we simply note who’s new and pretty, and then gone. You get used to it, and then you hardly notice. The rest of us are here simply because we’re here, and not someplace else – there’s no glamour and hipness involved. The weather is fine and the Hollywood Hills looming over everything are pretty, here at the mouth of Laurel Canyon. It’s a good place. It’ll do.

But for some of us there’s the feel of the place. A few doors down the street is where F. Scott Fitzgerald ended up – long after the Gatsby novel and the years in Paris with the Hemingway crowd, out here on this street in a small apartment, working on The Last Tycoon. And he never finished it. He had that heart attack at Schwab’s Drugstore on the corner, now a small mall with a Trader Joe’s, and that was that. Two blocks west is the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi overdosed and died, and where the photographer Helmut Newton was killed in a car crash in July 2004. At the bottom of the hill is Barney’s Beanery, where Janis Joplin had two screwdrivers, walked up the hill, did a show, and then dropped dead. And when Joni Mitchell sang about how they paved paradise and put up a parking lot, she was singing about how they tore down the old Garden of Allah complex on the corner here and put in a strip mall, with a McDonalds and all that. Hey, she was living just up the hill in Laurel Canyon at the time. This is an odd corner of Hollywood.

Yes, some of us end up here because it’s an end of the world kind of place. And over on Ivar is where, in the mid-thirties, Nathaniel West wrote that famous novel Day of the Locust – all alienation and desperation, the tale of a disparate group of people whose dreams of success have, in fact, failed – Faye the starlet, Claude Estee the big-time producer, Homer Simpson, the hopelessly clumsy “everyman” – yes, that’s where they got the name – Abe Kusich, the tiny, vicious gangster, Earle Shoop the cowboy and Miguel the Mexican his sidekick, Adore Loomis, the child star and major prima donna, and her doting stage-mother. The novel ends with a giant riot and massive fires that destroy Hollywood and then all of Los Angeles. It’s a metaphor for America, you see.

But it seems you don’t have to move to Hollywood for that special end-of-the-world feeling. It has spread. All of America is now where people whose dreams of success have, in fact, failed – and as the week ended on Friday, November 6, the evidence was clear. The stock market was doing fine, the Dow actually holding above ten thousand, but the Friday morning news was that unemployment finally topped ten percent and the evening news that five more banks had failed – that’s one hundred twenty this year, compared to twenty-five the year before and seven the year before that. This is bad, and there are a lot of desperate people out there, although the president signed another extension of unemployment benefits into law in the morning. Conservatives can ask, as they always do, why, with unemployment so high, we are paying people not to work. But there are no jobs out there. What do you want them to do, riot and burn everything down?

Actually this leads to dark places:

A man so broke that he said he didn’t have the money to visit his son 30 minutes away opened fire Friday at the engineering firm that fired him two years ago, killing one person and wounding five, authorities said.

As officers led a handcuffed Jason Rodriguez into a police station, a reporter asked the divorced 40-year-old why he had attacked his former colleagues.

“Because they left me to rot,” said Rodriguez, who recently told a bankruptcy judge he was making less than $30,000 a year at a Subway sandwich shop and owed nearly $90,000.

The shooting on the eighth floor of an office tower paralyzed downtown Orlando for three hours. Police tracked Rodriguez to his mother’s home, spotted him through a window and ordered him to come out.

He surrendered peacefully and was in custody Friday evening. Police said he apologized as officers handcuffed him.

“I’m just going through a tough time right now. I’m sorry,” officers quoted him as saying.

He will be charged with first-degree murder, and it feels like a Nathaniel West tale.

And there was this:

Former Citigroup chief John S. Reed apologized for helping create the behemoth bank, which has so far required $45 billion in bailout funds. “I’m sorry,” Reed said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it’s not easy to see what’s happened.” Reed played a key role in creating Citigroup, at the time the world’s largest financial company, in 1998 from Citicorp (a commercial bank) and Travelers Group (which owned a large investment firm). Now he says he’d like to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, the law that had banned such mergers until its repeal in 1999. The government, Reed said, should divide banks that grow too large, such as Citigroup, into separate entities. “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” Reed said. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel.”

Yes, it was a sorry-I-sank-the-economy thing. It happens.

And there was the main story of the week, from Fort Hood in Texas, winding down on Friday:

As if going off to war, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan cleaned out his apartment, gave leftover frozen broccoli to one neighbor and called another to thank him for his friendship – common courtesies and routines of the departing soldier. Instead, authorities say, he went on the killing spree that left 13 people dead.

Investigators examined Hasan’s computer, his home and his garbage Friday to learn what motivated the suspect, who lay in a coma, shot four times in the frantic bloodletting. Hospital officials said some of the wounded had extremely serious injuries and might not survive.

The 39-year-old Army psychiatrist emerged as a study in contradictions: a polite man who stewed with discontent, a counselor who needed to be counseled himself, a professional healer now suspected of cutting down the fellow soldiers he was sworn to help.

What’s this, the Nathaniel West novel Miss Lonelyhearts? You might know that one:

In the story, Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As “Miss Lonelyhearts” reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional bar fights. He also suffers from the pranks and cynical advice of his editor at the newspaper, named “Shrike”, which is also a type of predatory bird.

Miss Lonelyhearts tries several approaches as a way out of this depression (including religion, escaping to the countryside, and sex) but only ends up more confused. Miss Lonelyhearts has an affair with one of his readers but ends up striking her in an effort to fend off her advances. In the last scene, the woman’s husband comes to kill the columnist, but he, in the grip of a kind of religious mania, fails to understand this. The man shoots Miss Lonelyhearts, and the two men roll down a flight of stairs together. It is implied, but not stated outright, that Miss Lonelyhearts is killed in this encounter.

But it’s not exactly parallel:

Relatives said he felt harassed because of his Muslim faith but did not embrace extremism. Others were not so sure. A recent classmate said Hasan once gave a jarring presentation to students in which he argued the war on terrorism was a war against Islam, and “made himself a lightning rod for things” when he felt his religious beliefs were challenged.

Investigators were trying to piece together how and why Hasan allegedly gunned down his comrades in the worst case of violence on a military base in the US. The rampage unfolded at a center where some 300 unarmed soldiers were lined up for vaccines and eye tests.

It’s a thematic thing – give advice to the damaged and go mad, and people die.

But the week ended in the absurd – Chunk of Baguette Stalls Swiss Particle Collider. What?

Of course that wasn’t as absurd as what Andrew Sullivan explains:

Unemployment is over ten percent; economic insecurity is profound; we have been occupying two deeply Muslim countries for eight years with no end in sight; we are grappling with massive debt and an attempt to provide some basic health insurance for the working poor. There are perfectly reasonable and important debates to have about all this – whether this is the time to expand health insurance, whether we should have done it years ago, whether a public option is a good thing, whether Medicare can be cut enough to save enough to make this affordable. But the Republican right has not engaged such a debate in a meaningful way.

He says that is because the House Republican leadership gave their blessing “to a raggedy bunch of extreme anti-government fanatics.” That would be this crowd:

The angry folks at the protest – which attracted several thousand conservatives – held up signs with messages of hate: “Get the Red Out of the White House,” “Waterboard Congress,” “Ken-ya Trust Obama?” One called the president a “Traitor to the U.S. Constitution.” Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” – a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann set it all up, and somehow Obama was both Hitler and the all-controlling Jew that Hitler wanted to eliminate, or something. It was a bit confusing, and Sullivan adds this:

This kind of rhetoric – on the same day that the Fort Hood massacre took place – is gasoline on a fire of atavistic hate. Someone in the GOP leadership needs to call it out – before its logic propels us toward more violence and social division.

Well, no one was chanting Lynch the Nigger and His Wife and Kids. Perhaps that comes later, as Sullivan claims what came next “is simply unacceptable for a major political party to institutionally embrace in a civil democracy.”

But you decide:

Boehner, for one, declared that the health care bill is the “greatest threat to freedom that I have seen.” That’s some statement … And at one point during the rally – call it a Bachmannalia – when John Ratzenberger, aka Cliff Clavin from “Cheers,” claimed that the Democrats were turning the United States into a land of European socialism, the audience shouted, “Nazis, Nazis.” No Republican legislator left the stage in protest. Boehner and his fellow GOP leaders should be asked how they feel about mounting a rally that attracted intense hate-mongering.

One of Sullivan’s readers adds this:

The question I have been wrestling with over the past 6 to 8 months is how best to push back. I have written letters to the editor, I have started my own blog, I have tried to engage people who accept lies as fact, but to little avail. Ultimately, it seems that the far right wing is not interested in facts, in attempting to find out what is happening around them, or even engage someone like me in civil conversation. The people I have spoken with just get pissed off, and move away. They are “know nothings” in a very real sense.

Knowledge is the work of the devil, it seems. It goes far beyond anti-intellectualism. It teeters on the brink of some sort of mutated religious fanaticism: it is an act of faith, a bizarre and dangerous belief that the country is being run by fascists, communists, atheists, Jews, Blacks, all distilled into one person, President Obama. Anything and everything they believe is a “right” guaranteed by the constitution and god. So what to do?

My guess is that someone or some group will fall into the abyss and turn on one of their own who has strayed from some imagined orthodoxy. They must purge their group before than can proceed with their ambiguous mission. It will play out in a tragic way. Only then will people stop and reflect upon our degenerating state of affairs. What happens after that reflection, I cannot guess. Perhaps the violence and destruction that occurred in Europe and Asia during the last century will visit our relatively tranquil shores, and the American psyche will change for the better. I have been an unredeemed optimist my whole life, but for the first time dark clouds are all I see.

I think I will drink more over the next years.

Well, you could move to Hollywood, as West and Fitzgerald did. But Sullivan says something really struck him in this comment:

What a perfect epitome of know-nothings than a candidate who literally knows nothing – which is why Palin remains their candidate, and a Peronist threat to democratic life and discourse.

But as for the idea that someone in the Republican leadership needs to call this out – “before its logic propels us toward more violence and social division” – another reader scoffs:

But they won’t call it out. They’ll embrace it, use it, and then lapse into a carefully-scripted victimology - as feigned as it will be ferocious - should the fringe activists they are now currently whipping into a frenzy erupt into violence and people start to point fingers at the enablers in the GOP establishment.

We have seen this before. Gingrich spent the better part of a decade, and the entire two-year election cycle leading up to the 1994 GOP route, inveighing against “sick”, “pathetic”, ”traitorous”, “cheating”, “radical”, “permissive”, ”anti-American” elements in the government, the Clinton White House, and the Democratic party. Bill and Hillary Clinton were “the enemy of normal Americans”. Dick Armey compared the New Deal and the Great Society to Stalin’s Five-Year Plan and Mao’s Great Leap Forward – two of the most murderously destructive state experiments in human history.

GOP congressmen openly sympathized and courted anti-government “militias”. The hated, amorphous, ill-defined, all-purpose “bureaucrat” that Clinton (or Obama, or Carter, or the Communists, or the blacks, or the gays - take your pick) controlled with diabolical precision existed for no other purpose than to keep the selfless and God-fearing Southern Man, and his fellow “Real Americans”, from enjoying his beer, his NASCAR, and his guns. One man finally decided to do something about it and killed 168 people. When gently questioned by Tim Russert as to whether the white-hot vitriol he rode to power might have contributed to a political climate which made Oklahoma City possible, Gingrich of course reacted with the wounded pride of the professional mountebank - ”How dare you?”, such comparisons are “grotesque”, and on and on.

Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Steve King, John Boehner - they’re calling the same plays from 15 years ago. Same nuts. Same squirrels.

And we get another Timothy McVeigh? Nathaniel West would understand.

As for the business at Fort Hood, here were some of the reactions to that.

James Fallows (The Atlantic):

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went – Don’t mean nothing.

Jason Zengerle doesn’t buy that:

To ignore the circumstances of this particular shooting would be like saying Oswald was just some random wacko whose actions occurred in a total vacuum, that the Cold War, his Marxist sympathies, the fact that he lived in the Soviet Union for a time, were all basically irrelevant. They weren’t. And while there are many things we don’t yet – and may never – know about Nidal Malik Hasan and what drove him to commit such an evil act, we can’t ignore the things we do know. If only because, by ignoring them, we allow others, like Malkin and her ilk, to try to define them for us.

Rod Dreher:

No matter how badly the media try to spin it another way, or to ignore the religion ghost in this story, Hasan’s religion was to all appearances a key factor in the mass murder he committed. You don’t have a Muslim shouting “Allahu akbar!” as he executes people one by one, and conclude that religion is incidental to his crime. You have to be a moral idiot to draw that conclusion, a politically correct nitwit.

So: how should we regard the role of Hasan’s religion in this infamy?

Spencer Ackerman:

Ft. Hood’s commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, said today that there are unconfirmed reports that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “God is great” in Arabic before opening fire yesterday at the Army base. … Even if he shouted such a thing, it would no more reflect on his co-religionists than does the fanatic who murdered Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and who happened to consider himself a devout Christian does on his co-religionists. It’s worth remembering that nearly all mass shootings in this country are committed by white men. Do we have a white-man problem on our hands?

John Infidelesto (at Gateway Pundit) – “This was jihad.”

John Nichols (The Nation):

Enlightened Americans – at least those who trace their patriotism to Thomas Jefferson, a man fascinated by and respectful of Islam whose library contained copies of the Koran – should be unsettled by the rush to judgment regarding not just this one Muslim but all Muslims.

Reihan Salam (the Daily Beast):

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 45 percent of Americans know a Muslim. Of those who have a high level of familiarity with Islam, 57 percent view Muslims favorably while 25 percent view them unfavorably. For those with a low level of familiarity, 21 percent have a favorable view, 35 percent have an unfavorable view, and 44 percent, a significant plurality, have no opinion. The Pew survey also found that 58 percent of Americans believe that Muslims face a high level of discrimination, while 64 percent believe the same is true for gays and lesbians. These numbers suggest that a large majority of Americans are open-minded about Muslims. And though there are pockets of distrust, far more Americans worry that Muslims face discrimination than hold negative views of Muslims. The danger is that Hasan’s despicable crime will subtly and slowly change these perceptions for the worse.

John Cook:

The above would seem to confirm what many on the wingnut right seemed to positively hope was the case last night – that Hasan’s rampage was an act of Islamist terrorism, as opposed to the result of a breakdown or mental illness or the garden-variety insane rage and alienation that has inspired what seems like a mass killing every other month. We all know what first came to mind when Hasan’s name was released yesterday. But we suppose a handy guide for finding the line that divides the Glenn Becks of the world from the rest of us is whether you reacted with dread at the idea that it may have been related, however murkily, to Islamism, or if you were filled with smug delight.

Adam Serwer:

Michelle Malkin, whose book In Defense of Internment advocated for the use of racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims, quickly recycled a 2003 column suggesting that there was something wrong with allowing Muslims to serve in the armed forces. “Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror,” Malkin tweeted.

Don’t you see? If we had just listened to her, and treated those people as enemies to begin with, this would never have happened. There are thousands of Arab-Americans serving in the armed forces, and many have given their lives defending this country – Malkin would have us see all of them as potential traitors.

No good will come of this. And Sullivan adds this:

Reading Malkin, Dreher and Bawer and listening to Mark Steyn almost gloating on Rush today about how the Fort Hood shooting unmasks a Jihadist threat from within, one has to ask: what, even if this is true, do they expect the US government to do about it?

More vigilance toward troubled cases like Hasan – not unlike the greater vigilance that could have avoided the Virginia Tech massacre – is certainly and rather obviously a good idea. If political correctness is preventing this vigilance, it needs to be pushed back, and hard. But it is equally important not to do this crudely, to avoid impugning the overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans who disdain violence, to sustain the civil, non-sectarian bonds that keep this country together. Because a failure to do so would surely only give Jihadism more strength, not less. …

So to foment the notion that every Muslim-American is now suspect, or that the military, already disproportionately controlled by Christianist forces, should monitor Muslim service members as rigorously as they do, say, gay ones, would surely hurt, not help.

Yeah, but no one cares, even if what most bothers Sullivan about the right is that it is becoming a pure protest movement:

They know what they are against, and they keep describing one issue after another as a Manichean contest – freedom or slavery, good or evil, Muslim or American, libruls and “real Americans” – in ways that do nothing practically to move the country forward. It is pure rhetoric, talk-radio politics, and dangerously contemptuous of its social consequences. When they offer us plans to balance the budget, plans to insure the uninsured, strategies to defeat Islamism, we should listen with all ears. Until then … it’s painfully immature.

But that is a sign of the times. And times are tough. And things are getting out of hand, and there’s an end-of the-world feel to it all.

Of course that’s just another day out here in Hollywood. Welcome aboard.

America was always the New World, and that was always the problem. Everything was fresh and bright and there was all the endless space out west. As Gertrude Stein once said – “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.”

She was onto something there, that mysterious and magnetic emptiness out there to explore. No one else had that.

But that empty space generates insecurities. We were always the kids, bumping around in a world where all the European nations that our parents and grandparents had left had centuries of complex history and centuries of traditions, and all that culture too, and the cool old buildings, and the interesting cuisines. We could scoff at all that, and say we’d willingly walked away from all that nonsense to build something new, that we’d tear down and replace with something even newer and better, that we’d then replace again – but much of that was bluster. Everyone knew we had a bit of an inferiority complex, a big one that we covered over with sneers and bragging. That is also what makes America what it is.

But we pretty much had zilch. There wasn’t an American literature until Mark Twain and maybe Walt Whitman, and no American music until King Oliver begat Louis Armstrong who begat jazz – just pallid imitations of European stuff. Gertrude Stein, born in Pittsburgh and raised out here in Oakland, ended up in Paris, and captured the conflict in her famous quip – “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” Only psychotics and those with senile dementia live in the world of the perpetually new, and that’s an Alzheimer’s nightmare. Hang around Paris and you’ll get it – there you slow down and all the tension and defensiveness will fall away, as it always feels as if you’ve finally, really come home.

So we like the Old World, and do the Old World things – we love our French wine and Italian restaurants and odd Bergman movies from Sweden, and we read Dickens and Sherlock Holmes stories and listen to Mozart. And every Christmas every American city has at least one production of The Nutcracker running – the Tchaikovsky ballet, composed in 1891–92, from Alexandre Dumas père’s adaptation of a Hoffman story. You take the kids to see it. It’s an American tradition.

Of course, after they helped us with our revolution, we decided the French were useless. Lafayette must have been the exception, as they become the effete cheese-eating surrender-monkeys who would rather discuss the existential implications of all the possible perceptions of an issue rather than just doing something about it. We preferred the Italians.

Back in 1953 there was that pleasant movie Roman Holiday – Audrey Hepburn on a Vespa and that sort of thing. She won the Oscar – she was delicious as the sheltered young princess who sneaks out and discovers the real world – and Dalton Trumbo won the Oscar for the screenplay, although, given his politics, the fellow who fronted for Trumbo got the award. There was that Black List thing, you see. That was all fixed in 1993, when the Academy re-awarded the Oscar in question to Trumbo’s widow – Joe McCarthy was long gone and it was finally safe to admit what every in town knew all along, even if Trumbo was long dead by then. Such things happen.

But all that nonsense aside, the movie just had to be a hit. Hollywood, and thus America, has always been fascinated with all things Italian –not just young Audrey Hepburn buzzing around Rome, but all the gangster films with the oddly fascinating Mafia, reaching a peak with the Godfather epic and then the Sopranos. So of course there are ultra-high-end Italian restaurants all over the place out here and, from the Sunset Strip through Beverly Hills, some days every other car you see is a shiny new Ferrari or Lamborghini – and of course there are the tailored Italian suits and thousand dollar shoes these folks really must wear. Italian is good. And Frank Sinatra is still cool.

Of course we also turn Italians into cartoons. You get your pneumatic sex goddesses like Sophia Loren, and all those flawed mobsters from the Godfather through the Sopranos, and the eccentrics like Fellini and his literary equivalent, Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum is as strange as Fellini’s Satyricon). And there’s Bugs Bunny as Arturo Toscanini – the fat absurd tenor is always Italian, just as the fat contralto with the metal bullet-bra is always German. Italians provide comic relief – for every Benito Mussolini there’s a Silvio Berlusconi.

But then the loveable Italians go and mess it all up. The item was buried in the avalanche of news stories about our November 2009 elections, which marked the stunning resurgence of the Republican Party, or its contraction into a mean-spirited party of spite, or something. The story got lost in the shuffle, as also at the same time the Yankees won the World Series and the healthcare reform stuff got even more complicated. But the news was startling – the criminal conviction of twenty-two CIA agents, and also two Italian intelligence officers, by an Italian court.

This was for the 2003 kidnapping of an Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, right off the street in Italy, and his “rendition” to Egypt, to be tortured, to see what he knew. You don’t go doing that sort of thing – kidnapping anyone you’d like in someone else’s country, without even telling anyone in the government about it, much less asking for permission, and then packing the guy off for what is a war crime, but one you want someone else to commit for you. The Italians are neither thugs nor buffoons – that’s for the movies. They know right from wrong. They’d have nothing to do with this, thus the trial and convictions.

At salon.com Glenn Greenwald has a few things to say about this, as he comments on CNN’s account of what happened:

First, illustrating how these matters are typically distorted by the U.S. establishment media, note that CNN – in the very first paragraph of its story – claims that the CIA agents were convicted “for their role in the seizing of a suspected terrorist in Italy in 2003.” What did Nasr allegedly do that warrants that “terrorist” label? Did he participate in the 9/11 attacks, or plan attacks on “the American homeland” or U.S. civilians? No. According to CNN, this is what makes him a “suspected terrorist” – “He was suspected of recruiting men to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Well, at least they covered the story. They are thorough, or actually journalists. But Greenwald wants us to think about how they framed it – “So the West invades, bombs and occupies Muslim countries, and when Muslims attempt to find people to fight against the West’s invading armies, those individuals are deemed ‘terrorists.’”

Well, maybe the idea is to make it easy for their viewers, using a kind of shorthand. But the shorthand itself creates its own problems.

Greenwald prefers a bit less compression, and recommends this 2005 Washington Post article. That one details how the CIA’s kidnapping derailed the Italians’ criminal investigation of Nasr, on legal grounds, without blowing off any laws:

Nasr was wanted by the Egyptian authorities for his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, a network of Islamic extremists that had sought the overthrow of the government. The network was dispersed during a government crackdown in the early 1990s, and many leaders escaped abroad to avoid arrest.

The Italians were already working on getting the guy, and even sending him back to Egypt, at their request. But we stepped in with our secret shortcut:

The Egyptian government, long propped up by the United States, is one of the most tyrannical and brutal in the world. But Egyptians who work to overthrow that government are deemed “terrorists” by the US, and we’re apparently willing to kidnap them from around the world – including from countries where they’ve received asylum — and ship them back to our Egyptian friends to be imprisoned and tortured.

Well, either way, it got done, although the definition of just what a terrorist is gets loose here. It is someone out to attack American and Western interests, or someone just pissed off at the current Egyptian government and doesn’t much think about blowing up subways in London or shopping malls in Cleveland?

Greenwald says we use the word rather indiscriminately:

For many Americans – probably most – the word “terrorist” conjures up images of the people responsible for the 9/11 attack. For that reason, labeling someone a “suspected terrorist” can justify doing anything and everything to those individuals (after all, other than civil liberties extremists, who could object to the “seizing of a suspected terrorist” – or their indefinite detention or torture?). It’s therefore unsurprising that the US Government would use the term “terrorist” so promiscuously and selectively… It’s a powerful term that can justify almost any government action.

Greenwald recommends John Cole’s contrast between what we deem to be “terrorism” when it happens to us here versus what we deny is “terrorism” when done by us, comparing we how reacted to those anthrax letters long ago and Hillary Clinton’s defense of our drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that tend to kill a lot of unlucky civilians:

So, to review. When Pakistani citizens watch their friends and neighbors blown up by missile strikes, it is the position of this administration that they should not view it as terrorism. On the other hand, when we receive a letter without a stamp, we shut down a portion of the most powerful government in the world out of a general hysteria over terrorism.

I’m even going to go out on a limb and wager that more Af/Pak citizens have been killed by missiles than Americans have been by unstamped letters.

Greenwald agrees, and just hates sloppy thinking, caused by sloppy use of language:

… the US media’s willingness to mindlessly apply the term “terrorist” in exactly the subjective, self-serving way the U.S. Government dictates – starkly contrasted with their refusal to use the far more objective term ”torture” on the ground that the term is in dispute (i.e., disputed by the US Government torturers) – illustrates the establishment media’s principal function: to serve American political power and justify whatever our government does. That’s a major reason – perhaps the primary one – why the U.S. Government has been able to get away with everything it’s done over the last decade. Those unseen victims of torture, rendition, indefinite detention and other government crimes are all just “terrorists,” so who cares? In reporting on these convictions, CNN immediately and helpfully proclaims Nasr to be a “suspected terrorist” in a way that guts any meaningful definition of that term and – in many minds – justifies whatever was done to him, no matter how illegal.

It’s worth asking this question: which sounds more like actual “terrorism”: (a) kidnapping people literally off the street and shipping them thousands of miles away to be tortured with no legal process, or (b) what Nasr is “suspected” of having done?

Well, that may be a little harsh on CNN. They are hardly alone. But they are not blameless, as Greenwald points to this discussion on CNN where Wolf Blitzer and Jeffrey Toobin discuss what the Italian court had just done:

TOOBIN:  This is a real criminal conviction in a country where we tend to honor reciprocal legal arrangements. So they are in a – they are in no jeopardy as long as they are inside the United States, but, if they were to leave, they are potentially at risk for being jailed and brought to Italy.

BLITZER: Because even if they went to a third country, like England, let’s say, or France, Interpol could have a warrant out for their arrest. They have been convicted by an Italian court.

TOOBIN: That’s why this is such – so troubling. It would one thing if they only had to stay out of Italy, but, because of Interpol, because of the reciprocal nature of these agreements, they are potentially at risk almost anywhere they go.

Greenwald suggests this shows that “our political and media elite” simply do not believe in the rule of law or accountability for high government officials, and, in fact, they explicitly believe that such officials should be entitled to break the law and be exempt from consequences:

So according to Toobin, this is all “so troubling.” Why? Because the people who were found by a duly constituted court to have committed a serious crime are faced with the risk that there might actually be consequences? After all, these are Americans who were part of the US Government, and consequences for lawbreaking are simply not meant for them. Echoing Joe Klein’s infamous Orwellian claim that torture shouldn’t be prosecuted because the CIA is “asked to behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation,” Toobin added that “one of the things you do when you are a CIA agent, at least in part, is break the law of other countries” - Toobin says that as though they have the right to do that without accountability, and without mentioning that causing people to be tortured is also a violation of US law. …

And he goes on to discuss the appellate court ruling that American government officials are immune from consequences even when they abduct an innocent man and knowingly cause him to be tortured – even after the Canadian government publicly disclosed its detailed investigation of that matter, publicly apologized to the victim, a Canadian citizen and paid him nine million dollars. The appellate court said they just couldn’t get involved in presidential decisions. After all, who knows where that might lead? And Greenwald covers our attempt to compile a “hit list” of Afghan citizens we intend to murder because we suspect them of drug trafficking that prompted angry objections from Afghan officials that our plan violated due process and the rule of law. And Spain continues to pursue the possibility of criminal prosecution of our high government officials for war crimes, but, as Greenwald notes, Obama wants to look forward:

And now an Italian court demonstrates actual judicial independence and adherence to equality under the law by holding American and Italian government kidnappers liable for their complicity in torture – something our own government institutions have repeatedly failed and/or refused to do…

But we’re not saying anything:

The State Department yesterday expressed ”disappointment” with the Italian court ruling – just as it did when a British High Court recently ordered the disclosure of evidence of American torture. The DOJ continues to insist that no American courts can examine past rendition and torture cases on the grounds of secrecy. The Obama administration has explicitly decided to continue the “rendition” policy which led to Nasr’s illegal kidnapping, albeit with the addition of  anti-torture “safeguards” similar in language if not effect when compared to those in place under Bush (it remains to be seen to which countries these “rendered” suspects will be sent, and whether the renditions will be the illegal kind practiced by Bush/Cheney or the arguably “legalized” form that took place before that, beginning with Reagan through Clinton). And most notably of all, we continue to be a country which – in the name of secrecy and national security – insists that the rule of law and accountability simply do not apply to our highest government officials when they break the law.

No one else seems to think that way these days. We’re special.

You can find more in the Greenwald item – with links to other details and observations – but you see what he is arguing here. We’ve become untethered from the rest of the world, and from its values. And we seem proud of it, as we prefer the perpetually new, where perhaps there are no values yet, nor much sense, nor much real law, nor much of anything. So maybe Gertrude Stein was right. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. And that really is what makes America what it is.

The day after the off-off-year elections – previously discussed here if you must obsess about them – the nation moved on to other matters. That was over. The Republicans picked up two governorships and the Democrats picked up two House seats, and Maine became another state that will not agree gays should be allowed to marry each other. The only surprise was that matter up in New York’s 23^rd Congressional District, where the tea-baggers and the combined forces of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks outfit, and the Family Research Council, and Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, swung into action and backed the rather hapless but ideologically pure candidate from the Conservative Party, and forced the moderate Republican candidate out of the race. Yes, as Maine was flooded with Mormons from Utah, spreading the word on the importance of traditional marriage, and not mentioning that polygamy thing, every hamlet from Oswego to Plattsburg was filled with the Beck-Palin acolytes, and the press. Of course that helps the local economy – hotels and restaurants were filled, and the news vans needed fuel and so on. But it didn’t amount to much in the end. The gay marriage thing in Maine had always been a long shot, and the voters in NY23 seemed a bit irritated with the outsiders from Alaska to Texas telling them how they should vote, and they elected the Democrat, somewhat by default. And the safe Republican seat, since years before the Civil War, flipped Democratic. And that was that.

Can we move on now? It’s over.

But Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, sent this along:

So what do the NY23 results tell our conservative friends about how things are going to be different now, anything? No, probably not. But maybe you can extent our thanks to them anyway for our new congressman. We’re always in the need for another one of those. In fact, I hope they’re right about purity on their side, and this whole little scenario repeats itself on a nationwide basis next year.

Not that I’m singing in the streets about Virginia and New Jersey, of course; those do, I think, portend something that Democrats need to heed concerning 2010. But at least the exit polls show it wasn’t about Obama, as so many Republicans seem to think it was.

As for NY23, a morning-after survey of the blogs showed an odd thing. That was actually a “victory” for the Beck-Palin crowd. They really showed the Republican “moderates” (Limbaugh says a moderate is anyone with no principles at all) that they can punish them for their lack of backbone. Handing the Democrats this seat shows those wishy-washy moderate establishment Republican bastards a thing or two – see Red State and Michelle Malkin.

But the Democrats picked up two more house seats (add CA10) thank you very much. That makes healthcare reform just a little more likely. Their “purity purge” is pretty cool for the Democrats. As for New Jersey and Virginia, well, yes, local, but a warning of sorts.

Rick added this:

Speaking of Sarah Palin, is this not a great example of that old “putting lipstick on a pig” thing Obama was talking about? And speaking of Michelle Malkin, just this morning I reread Frank Rich’s pre-election take on NY23 in which he says – “Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as ‘global warming czar.’ She’s quite the wit.”

Those last four words are such an economical comeuppance that I just had to laugh.

As for Glenn Beck’s reaction, see Alex Koppelman:

If it weren’t for Glenn Beck, Doug Hoffman and his unlikely insurgent third-party candidacy in New York’s 23rd Congressional District might never have happened. Hoffman did, after all, recently name Beck as one of his mentors, and the Fox News and radio host gave the candidate a boost by putting him on the air.

So it was only natural that Beck would weigh in on Hoffman’s loss to Democrat Bill Owens during his radio show on Wednesday. And it wasn’t particularly surprising that Beck, like some of his ideological allies, would say the defeat was really a win. In fact, he said it was “setting the stage” for something next year that would “dwarf” the midterm elections of 1994, when Republicans swept back into power in Congress.

Yep, the next time, 2010, the people who believe in him and his values will sweep all Democrats and all impure Republicans from office – anyone can see that. He’s started the revolution. Someone had to do it. He, and Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, supported by the impassioned writing of Michelle Malkin and Bill Kristol (the man who made Dan Quayle vice president and almost pulled it off with Sarah Palin), are the future.

Well, maybe – or maybe not. Koppelman has the transcript of what Beck was saying about how this loss in upstate New York would mean certain victory in 2010 at the link, if you want to be convinced. Koppelman also notes that during this day-after-the-election radio broadcast, Beck suffered an attack of appendicitis – Beck didn’t make it to Fox News studios for his afternoon television show, as it was off to “an undisclosed hospital” to have his appendix removed. When it rains it pours. Times are tough.

But enough is enough, and the next elections are a year away. Other things are happening – curious things, startling things. For example, the Supreme Court is in full session again, hearing oral arguments on thorny issues. And you know that when any matter gets bumped on appeal from district court up to circuit court, and then on appeal up to the Supreme Court, that’s because there are good arguments on both sides, and the final thing to do is to look into the matter and decide how the constitution actually applies. That’s their job, to be the final arbiter, to settle things one way or the other.

And what they do affects us all. In Plessy v Ferguson (1896) they decided that “separate but equal” was just fine, upholding segregation, and in 1954, in Brown, they decided that, well, nope, that made no sense, and they ordered that public schools be desegregated. That caused no end of trouble. You have to pay attention to these folks. It’s not for nothing that people get all hot and bothered when one of these nine lifetime appointments falls open and the president has to nominate someone new, and the Senate must confirm the appointment. It’s a big deal – bigger than who will be the congressman from an odd and obscure district in upstate New York for the next two years, or who, other than Tony Soprano, now runs New Jersey.

And Obama, with a Democratic Senate, managed to get that Hispanic woman, Sonya Sotomayor, on the court, over the howls of much the same crowd that flooded upstate New York – she said she believed in empathy, and God knows where that could lead. Scruffy dark people who talk funny would so be getting things they didn’t deserve. And she thought her background, as a woman, from a minority, might add some needed perspective. That was even worse – the wealthy white male pro-business anti-labor praise-Jesus perspective might get lost in the shuffle, and such wealthy white males “built America and deserve more” – or so Pat Buchanan argued.

It didn’t do any good. She was confirmed, and she is on the court. As they say, elections have consequences, and America elected Obama.

And on Wednesday, November 4, an odd case came up for oral argument at the new and less white Supreme Court – Pottawattamie County v. McGhee. This is not a minor congressional race in an odd corner of nowhere, of course, but it is interesting. And Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick attended the oral arguments and reports on that event in The Framers on the Framers.

And this one matters, as Lithwick say the case is one of those “instances of shocking constitutional wrongs that cannot be corrected by constitutional courts.” It was a mess.

The facts, as she summarizes them:

In 1977, two young African-Americans – Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee – were arrested for the murder of John Schweer, a retired police officer in Council Bluffs, Iowa. They served 25 years in prison until it was revealed that police detectives and the prosecutors in the case may have set them up. Among other things, the prosecutors, Dave Richter and his assistant Joseph Hrvol, failed to turn over evidence showing that their initial suspect, Charles Gates, had been seen with a shotgun by other witnesses at the crime scene and failed a polygraph test. Instead, the prosecutor and cops relied on the testimony of Kevin Hughes, a 16-year-old accused of stealing a car. The police promised to help him with his various criminal charges, and possibly offered him a $5,000 reward, for his assistance with the Schweer investigation.

You could say that they suborned perjury, but that wasn’t exactly it. But it was close, as the flaky Kevin Hughes was an eager fellow:

Hughes’ helpfulness evidently knew no bounds. It ranged from naming all sorts of culprits with solid alibis to changing his recollections about the murder weapon until it fit the crime. Hughes eventually settled on Harrington and McGhee as the murderers and testified against them at trial. Police knew Hughes’ story was fishy. Nevertheless, both defendants were sentenced to life in prison. Some 25 years later, after the misconduct was uncovered, the Iowa Supreme Court overturned both convictions, and the men were freed.

But that wasn’t enough. Even if they let you go and say, oops, sorry, twenty-five years in jail can make you grumpy, and Harrington and McGhee sued state officials. Lithwick cites the code they used – 42 U.S.C. § 1983 – which provides for civil suit against “every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States … to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.”

Actually, it’s pretty simple. If you have the authority to use the law, you can’t use it to take away people’s rights, which in this case was putting them in the slammer for twenty-five years. It’s an abuse of power, you see.

But the question in this case is whether the two prosecutors are entitled to absolute immunity from such suits. And that, it seems, has been the rule since 1990, although it’s a little complicated:

The Supreme Court has held that while cops have only limited immunity from lawsuits, prosecutors enjoy what’s known as absolute immunity for their conduct under most circumstances. (Otherwise every conviction would end in a lawsuit.) But Harrington and McGhee claim that a prosecutor’s immunity should not extend to helping the police long before the trial, by, say, collecting false statements and coerced testimony. The district court denied immunity to the prosecutors, and the 8th Circuit agreed that they were not absolutely immune for the misconduct that happened before the trial.

So the lower courts said that while prosecutors enjoying an absolute immunity for their conduct is a very practical arrangement, in this case that was bullshit. They may not have participated in the actual trial itself, but they set these two up. Something should be done. There should be redress. The courts should not just shrug and say too bad, but sometimes it just sucks to be you, doesn’t it?

But when things get to the highest court, there’s always an argument the other way, that absolute immunity is what the Supreme Court established long ago, and the law is the law.

Lithwick relates what happens next:

Stephen Sanders, an associate at Mayer Brown, represents the two prosecutors this morning. He garners – by my count –five questions that begin with the phrase “that makes no sense” or something to that effect. Unfortunately for Sanders, the most important iteration of this phrase comes from Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose vote generally tends to be decisive in the whole “Sucks to Be You” class of cases. It is Kennedy who interrupts him to ask whether the court was merely “wasting our time” or “just spinning our wheels” in a 1990 case that gave prosecutors immunity for misconduct if its fruits were not introduced at trial. Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia also get Sanders to concede that if a police officer passed along fabricated evidence or another prosecutor – one not involved in the trial – did so, that conduct would not be immune from suit.

Kennedy looks annoyed. “So the law is, the more deeply you’re involved in the wrong, the more likely you are to be immune? That’s a strange proposition.”

Adds Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “It’s strange to say a prosecutor who wasn’t involved in the trial would have liability, but as long as the prosecutor turns the investigatory material over to himself, there’s absolute immunity.”

You can see how complicated this gets, but the defense, trying to get the two prosecutors off the hook, makes it even worse:

Sanders explains that fabricated evidence itself doesn’t constitute a constitutional violation because that can happen only when it’s introduced at trial. Justice Sonia Sotomayor – sporting earrings the size of small saucepans today – cuts him off. “But that makes no sense, because neither a police officer nor a different prosecutor who fabricated evidence would be liable,” if the constitutional violation only happens at trial.

And then Ginsburg can’t understand how the prosecutor cannot be said to have caused the original constitutional violation – “If this fabrication had not occurred, there never would have been any trial.”

And on and on it goes. An attorney on the side of the prosecutors says the prosecutors may have fabricated evidence, but they didn’t actually participate in the trail itself, so stop picking on them. And really, Harrington and McGhee are asking this court “to announce for first time ever that there is a free-standing due process right not to be framed.”

Well, yes, they are. That’s the whole point. But the conservative strict-constructionists go on to argue that, damn, that wasn’t written down way back when, so there is no such right. The guys in the powdered wigs didn’t mention it. And Justice Breyer gets pissed at that, saying that of course “there is no free-standing right. There is just a right not to convict a person with made-up evidence.”

And on it goes, in even more detail. But it comes down to former Solicitor General Paul Clement representing the two wrongfully convicted defendants:

If the court’s going to go back to first principles, let’s look at the statute Congress passed in 1871. … This is one of the great civil rights statutes. I think it’s clear, from this court’s cases, that the police officer that engages in misconduct has committed a grave, grave constitutional violation and ought to be liable. I think the prosecutor who engages in the pretrial misconduct and then doesn’t participate in the trial is just as liable as that police officer. And I can’t think of a single reason why the only reason a prosecutor would get absolute immunity is if they not only participated in the pretrial misconduct, but completed the scheme by committing further misconduct at trial.

Well, the ruling on this will come in a few months, as is usually the case. But this is serious stuff. In the Beck-Palin world it may not merit a comment, as it is complicated, but in another way it’s quite simple. It has to do with your basic right to fair treatment. Should you have a right not to be framed, by the government, for something you did not do? It doesn’t get more basic than that. And it makes a scattering of off-year elections seem like small beans.

Some perspective would be nice.

Ah, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 – the day of the off, off-year elections. Yep, every four years it’s the presidential madness, and every two years, when that’s not happening, the off-year elections, when all of the House is elected, or reelected, or not, and one third of the Senate is up for grabs, what with their staggered six-year terms. And then we have the off-off-year elections like this time around, between the two. They’re usually not very important – scattered special elections to fill suddenly vacant seats and odd referendums here and there – and certainly not interesting. But this time around people said they mattered, a whole lot, because we live in turbulent times, in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression. And, yes, we’re still fighting two wars on the other side of the world that have gone on far too long and to the American people seem to have become rather pointless. And we have our first black president, odd enough, with his progressive agenda, odder still – affordable healthcare for all and his notion that the government should do things to make things better, like stimulate the economy with massive spending to be paid for at a later date, in installments, and government intervention to save key industries and major banks and that sort of thing.

This is so very new, not at all like the neo-Reagan Bush years, where everyone simply knew that all the government was supposed to do, really, is step back and get out of the way, so the genius of the free-market billionaires could be let loose to make things better for everyone. Regulations stifled the creativity that created wealth. Taxing the rich discouraged them, from doing cool things, things that one day might employ some of the more ordinary, mundane little people.

But that didn’t work out, and when McCain ran on a platform that in hard times the government should shut down all but essential core services, spend nothing, and let the captains of industry rescue us, no one was terribly impressed. Obama won on that one – someone had to goose the economy back to life, and things had so horribly collapsed that by that point only the government could. It was pretty simple. You don’t let key industries across the country go under, one after another after another. That’s stupid, and cruel. Tens of millions of more of the ordinary, mundane little people would be out of work, they would lose their homes and most everything else. And even if you think they’re worthless people, on moral grounds or something, those are the people who buy the things America produces. You really don’t want them living in the streets, panhandling. You want them spending money on your goods and services. McCain, on the other hand, boasted that he would balance the federal budget by the end of the first two years of his presidency. You know what people said. Yeah, that’s nice, but so what?

But after Obama’s first eight or nine months things aren’t that much better, and those who came out on the short end in the last election have framed the few, scattered 2009 races as a referendum on the whole Obama idea that the government is not entirely useless and stupid. They say it is. Unemployment is around ten percent, millions have lost their homes and millions more will, and incomes, where there are incomes, are flat, and everyone is hunkered down wondering what the hell happened, and whether anything good will ever happen again. Only the stock market is up, significantly, and the GDP finally turned slightly positive. Economists say the recession seems to be over. Yeah, that’s nice, but so what?

So you can see why the party out of power did well:

A Republican Party that struggled in the wake of recent Democratic landslides sprang back to life Tuesday with wins in hotly contested races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, according to CNN projections.

In Virginia, 55-year-old former state attorney general Bob McDonnell will be the first Republican to win the state’s highest office in twelve years, CNN projects. Republicans will win races for Virginia’s lieutenant governor and attorney general as well.

In New Jersey, former federal prosecutor Chris Christie will oust first-term Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, CNN projects. Christie will be the first Republican to win the top office in heavily Democratic New Jersey in 12 years.

The two gubernatorial contests have been deemed by some analysts as the first major referendum on President Obama’s administration.

In the 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville had this simple message for his candidate, Bill Clinton – “It’s the economy, stupid.” That became a favorite political cliché. It seems to be true. When times are tough, and they’re not getting better, no matter who caused the mess, throw the bums out. And in an off-off-year, when you cannot do that, do something vaguely analogous.

The only exception to this seemed to be that odd congressional race up in northern New York, a very complicated situation.

That too was a throw-the-bums out sort of thing, a solidly Republican district, since 1854 or so, where the Republicans ran a woman who was middle-of-the-road pro-business practical, as Republicans used to be in the northeast, when they had them. But the Beck-Palin crowd decided to make this a test case for the whole government-is-entirely-useless-and-stupid way of looking at things, and poured in their resources to back the Conservative Party candidate. Fox news championed him, as did the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and Dick Armey from Texas. He appeared on the Glenn Beck show and Sarah Palin urged voters up there to vote for Palin Values, which he represented – he vowed to vote against subsidies for anyone, including the dairy farmers up there, and would never seek an earmark, which would mean no federal projects for the area and its largest employer, Fort Drum. He was pure. The job of the government was to get out of the way, no more. The Republican Party candidate just gave up.

And he lost to the Democrat.

But the exception proves the rule. The Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, may have been ideologically pure as the driven snow, but those people up there know all about snow, and snow jobs. They seem to have preferred to have someone down in Washington who would help keep the district from total economic collapse. They’re not stupid. And times are tough. They may still love Palin and Beck, and watch Fox News endlessly, but there is self-interest.

Andrew Sullivan comments that we easily forget the basics, and that it is the economy:

We get caught up in the health insurance fight, we game the Beck-Palin subculture, we chatter about Israel and Iran, we obsess about marriage equality … while the voters who do not do politics for a living are simply trying to survive one of the worst downturns in history. The votes tonight are anti-incumbent votes in protest at economic crisis and the slow pace of recovery. And they are not – it seems to me – some national referendum on Obama’s first nine months. In fact, Obama’s approval ratings in both Virginia and New Jersey are respectable and strong, with unemployment headed to ten percent.

And he cites this, from ABC News:

About half the voters in Virginia and a majority in New Jersey – 49 and 58 percent, respectively – approved of the way Obama is handling his job. Most in both states, moreover, said the president was not a factor in their vote. Perhaps most striking – though simply confirmatory of national polls – were economic views. A vast 89 percent in New Jersey and 85 percent in Virginia said they’re worried about the direction of the nation’s economy in the next year; 56 percent and 52 percent, respectively, said they’re “very” worried about it.

Voters who expressed the highest levels of economic discontent heavily favored the Republican candidates in both states – underscoring the challenge Obama and his party may face in 2010 if economic attitudes don’t improve. The analogy is to 1994, when nearly six in 10 voters said the economy was in bad shape, and they favored the out-of-power Republicans by 26 points, helping the GOP to a 52-seat gain and control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.

So the Republicans did well, but that had little to do with Obama, and Sullivan goes on to argue that the Democrats have a year “to get economic recovery reflected in the polling” – and that their key effort may bear fruit:

And the point about health insurance reform – the critical point that needs to be hammered home – is that it will reduce insecurity in very troubled times.

There too it is the economy. Keeping ourselves pure and far away from anything like government involvement in healthcare, and trusting that the free-market for-profit insurance cartel will make everything come out right in the end, is fine and dandy – in theory. And theory is way cool. But in real life there are all sorts of awful things that happen all the time. Mitigating insecurity around how the hell you’ll pay for any sort of treatment when you get sick trumps theory. Being a free-market supply-side government-is-stupid true believer isn’t much fun if you’re dead.

But aren’t economists saying that the recession is over? That would mean that abstract ideological theory is safe again. Everyone could talk about purity of principles and doing the right thing, and drowning government in the bathtub. Beck and Palin and Fox News would be at the center of everything, vindicated. And the market got all better on its own, not counting the seven hundred billion bailout on Bush’s watch and the seven hundred billion stimulus package on Obama’s, along with the tens of trillion dollars in loan guarantees (not real money until it’s called in, of course). Free markets work, you see – as long as you feed and care for them.

So, if the economy’s stagnant, why are stocks up? What do you say to that?

Actually, Daniel Gross has a few things to say about that in The Mystery of the Rising Stock Market:

Here’s a puzzle: The stock markets are doing very well, yet the performance of the underlying economy doesn’t seem to justify optimism. The buoyant S&P 500 has risen 53 percent since the March bottom. And while the economy expanded at a 3.5 percent rate in the third quarter, unemployment is high, incomes are stagnant, and consumers are shaky.

It’s possible that the stock market is just getting it wrong again. After all, the markets, which are supposed to process investors’ attitudes about the future, hit record highs in October 2007, just as the U.S. economy was about to pitch into recession. But it could be that the notion the stock market is an accurate gauge of the domestic economy’s temperature is outdated.

But he doesn’t think that’s it. He sees those three indices tracking large companies conveniently based in the United States, but not main street businesses. And they do something else entirely, the international stuff, as they are “more Davos than Chamber of Commerce.”

All you have to do is look at how they make money:

These increasingly cosmopolitan firms have been busy globalizing and expanding their operations overseas. In 2006, according to Standard & Poor’s, 238 members of the S&P 500 broke out revenues between US and non-US sales. These companies notched about 43.6 percent of sales outside the United States. For large companies that had already saturated the US market, the home market was something of an afterthought. In the second quarter of 2007, 66 percent of Coca-Cola’s beverage business came from outside North America.

And of course, given our long recession, demand for products and services of all types in the United States has shrunk, even since 2006, so they did this to survive:

Yes, the global economy in 2008 experienced its first year of shrinkage since World War II. But growth has resumed, and in some places – Peru, China, India – it never stopped. As a result, the globe’s economic geography has continued to change, with the United States accounting for a smaller chunk of global output and demand each year. For much of the past two years, virtually all growth in economic activity has taken place outside America’s borders. As a result, US-based companies are becoming even more reliant on non-US customers and operations for sales. S&P last summer updated its numbers. In 2008, the figure rose to 47.9 percent (with 253 of the 500 companies reporting), up from 43.6 percent in 2006. Put another way, in two years, big companies’ proportion of sales coming from outside the United States rose 9.8 percent. It’s likely the 2009 figure will be something very close to 50 percent.

Of course that would be fine if we made the stuff they’re selling, but we’re not doing that:

In fact, in the months after the global credit meltdown, US exports plummeted. They bottomed in April, at $120.6 billion, and though they have been rising, the August 2009 total is still 20 percent below the August 2008 total. Globalization is changing the way we do business. It’s not a matter of US companies exporting goods – burgers, soda, cars, software – made in the United States to Beijing but rather, making goods overseas and selling them overseas.

He points to General Motors:

GM’s sales in China are rocking. In the first nine months, the company sold 1.3 million cars in China, including more than 181,000 in September. By contrast, GM in the United States in the first nine months sold 1.5 million cars in the United States, down 36.4 percent from the year before. And in September, GM sold just 156,673 cars in the United States. That growth in China is good for GM’s shareholders and for some of its executives. But since most of the cars sold in China are produced there, with parts produced by suppliers in China, rising sales in the Middle Kingdom won’t translate into jobs for unionized workers in the Middle West.

He has other examples, but it comes down to a strong stock market and a weak, slow-growing consumer sector here at home not really being in contradiction. This may be the new world order, and we may have to get used to it, which now means “a sustainable rally in American stocks without a sustainable rally by American consumers.”

So if you are one of many hunkered down wondering 1) what the hell happened, and 2) whether anything good will ever happen again, well, the answers are 1) it doesn’t matter much now, and 2) no.

But someone is doing well. The Wall Street Journal reports on how the captains of industry have responded to tough economic times:

Pensions for top executives rose an average of 19% in 2008, with more than 200 executives seeing pensions increase more than 50%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. …

Executive pensions rose even as the share prices at the companies declined an average of 37% in 2008 and many firms froze employee pensions and suspended retirement-plan contributions.

As Kevin Drum says – “My friends, that’s what we call shareholder value.” Or you can put it another way. The more ordinary, mundane little people just don’t know how to play this game. They’re losers.

What this means in elections to come is hazy, but the general outline is clear. Traditional Republicans are pro-business, and mainly pro-corporate. They talk free markets, but the aim is to unburden the corporations from regulation and taxes, and the wealthy from taxes, to assure a thriving economy, as each will make a ton of money, and some of the more ordinary, mundane little people will probably get some of it, so they should be happy, damn it. Their bumptious base, on the other hand, is all evangelical and big on social and moral purity, and took Reagan quite seriously – government is useless, Palin just resigned, to prove it, and actually they think Bush was an idiot who spent too much money and got us into stupid deficits, and stupidly added drugs for the elderly to Medicare when that wasn’t his business and broke the bank. They’re trouble for the traditional Republicans. And then there are the Democrats, trying to use government to fix things, for the ordinary, mundane little people, who they think count too.

We’ll see who votes for whom in another year.

Greg Jaffe is a rather well-respected defense correspondent for the Washington Post, and he has won the Pulitzer Prize and all that, and his latest book, co-authored with David Cloud, is The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army. That sort of thing might not be your cup of tea, but Thomas Ricks calls it “the best book I’ve read on the military in a long time.” And of course it’s probably not a bad idea to try to understand the military, as it could be said that they’ve become the fourth branch of government.

The current request by General McChrystal for forty thousand more troops for Afghanistan made that clear. Led by John McCain, Dick Cheney and Fox News, all you heard was that of course you give the generals what they ask for, as they know best and no one else knows squat about what’s really happening on the ground over there. George Bush liked to say that a lot, although all the requests for more troops for Afghanistan on his watch got lost in the system and never answered, as Iraq was more important. Still, generally, one school of thought is that no matter what civilian politicians and diplomats think, with their measured and carefully thought-out judgments on geopolitical aims and when to use force and when not, and in spite of a constitution that explicitly gives elected officials control of the military, we should defer to the military, as they may be the last competent and honorable Americans left. The individual soldiers are heroes, to a man, and we venerate and honor them, as the best of us – they are so far above us, what we would be if we weren’t the cowardly slugs that we are.

All of that comes down to one thing – you support the troops, or you don’t. You give them what they ask, or you don’t. That Obama wants to step back and think about what we’re doing in Afghanistan, and why – and then how we might do it better or differently, for larger aims in the region related to our national security – drives many people into a white-hot fury. You support the troops or you don’t. Who does Obama think he is? No pointing at the constitution will do you any good. The matter had been settled. The military, the generals specifically, know best. They ask. You give them what they want, no questions asked. Otherwise, the next thing you know, someone like Obama will be telling General McChrystal that he’s McChrystal’s boss, and the decision is his, not the general’s. Sure, that’s true on paper, but doesn’t Obama support the troops? What’s wrong with him?

Of course a lot of that is political, the party out of power must find a way to undermine and discredit the guys who won the last time around, and this sort of narrative helps. Obama hates the troops, and thus hates America. That is what Rush Limbaugh and that crowd is always saying. You hear it all the time. Obama’s recent midnight visit to Dover to salute the coffins of the fallen was, as Liz Cheney said, just a publicity stunt – to cover his cynical indifference, to hoodwink everyone, as George Bush did that all the time and never told anyone (and also hid all records anywhere that he ever did such a thing, ever, it seems). So Obama hates the troops. He won’t send help. He wants them all to die. You keep hammering away at that narrative, and maybe the next time around the voters will choose your side.

But of course there is a commercial element to this. You can sell a lot of books about the wonders of the military to a nation that trusts only the military. And McChrystal has his wonderful new counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) that needs to be explained to the general public. Thus you get books like this one from Greg Jaffe, which one reviewer called COIN-porn. That sums up something about the market for such things.

As for what’s in the book, there’s the product description:

They were four exceptional soldiers, a new generation asked to save an army that had been hollowed out after Vietnam. They survived the military’s brutal winnowing to reach its top echelon. They became the Army’s most influential generals in the crucible of Iraq.

Collectively, their lives tell the story of the Army over the last four decades and illuminate the path it must travel to protect the nation over the next century. Theirs is a story of successes and failures, of ambitions achieved and thwarted, of the responsibilities and perils of command. The careers of this elite quartet show how the most powerful military force in the world entered a major war unprepared, and how the Army, drawing on a reservoir of talent that few thought it possessed, saved itself from crushing defeat against a ruthless, low-tech foe. …

In an institution that prizes obedience, the most effective warriors are often those who dare to question the prevailing orthodoxy and in doing so redefine the American way of war.

Yeah, it is hero worship, almost fan magazine stuff, although scholarly and well-researched, and a bit arcane at times. But writing in the New York Times, Dexter Filkins called it “a very good book, readable, detailed and rich.” And you get profiles of four generals – Abizaid, Casey, Chiarelli and Petraeus – that are “nuanced and well drawn.” And of course “the generals really come to life, as does the Army itself.”

That is want people want, isn’t it? It’s not exactly like gossip about the secret life of movie stars, but it is a distant cousin of that. The only caveat is that Filkins says the implication is clear – “The future of the Army is up for grabs.”

Stay tuned. Don’t touch that dial. This is important, as the Army is America. Of course it is. Thus you get editorials like that recent one suggesting that it’s a good thing that some in the military are secretly discussing a military coup to solve the Obama Problem – these guys know how to run things, and are obviously good at nation building, and God knows we need a bit of that here at home. The column was withdrawn, as that would sort of end America as we know it, but it didn’t come out of nowhere, although there is no evidence anyone is planning a military coup. Call it wishful thinking, or wishful civilian thinking.

As for the McChrystal request for forty thousand more troops for Afghanistan, and whether he should get them, to implement his new counterinsurgency strategy, there are some issues. His COIN strategy is new, or irregular if you will, as it involves maintaining security and undermining the insurgents by providing safety and stability, and basic, real government services, not empty promises, so no sees much point in hooking up with the insurgents and prefers the local government, which it discovers is legitimate and caring and competent after all. Yes, in Afghanistan, the last part has become exceedingly difficult, as now we need to explicitly explain to the Karzai government that they need to stop being a bad joke. But the strategy has its merits.

The conventional strategy is to eliminate the insurgents – kill them, get rid of them.

Which will it be? Each strategy calls for different troop levels and different tasks. That seems to be the issue at the moment. It’s a more a bit more complicated than just “Supporting the Troops.” It doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, and it involves not just troop levels, but what technology they use, and what you buy in term of planes and tanks and such, and how you plan. Maybe the future of the Army really is up for grabs.

And that lead to Andrew Exum’s interview with Greg Jaffe, who knows his generals, where he says this – “This whole conventional vs. irregular debate is stupid.”

Jaffe wants to keep things simple:

War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it. I think most lieutenants, captains and majors are beyond this false conventional vs. irregular frame that we try to impose on war. I wish I could say the same for the more senior people in the Pentagon.

Matt Yglesias finds that rather odd:

I think there’s a lot of truth to that. At the same time, just because things look one way to “lieutenants, captains and majors” and another way to “senior people in the Pentagon” doesn’t mean we should take a dismissive view of the senior people’s outlook in a rush to celebrate the insights of the practical war-fighter.

There are bigger issues:

And when you get down to the guts of defense budget politics, these high-level strategic concepts matter a great deal. Nobody, of course, is going to say that the U.S. should somehow completely abandon its ability to fight conventional wars. But the choice between a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to scare China & Russia” – or a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to intervene effectively in third world backwaters” – has very real implications for what kind of hardware purchases look cost effective.

Jason Sigger picks up on that:

There is no doubt in my mind that the issue of “hardware purchases” looms very large in the minds of senior military and civilian decision makers. Conventional warfare means lots of tanks, armored vehicles, stealthy jets, next generation bombers, submarines, destroyers, and aircraft carriers. And let’s not even get into the care and feeding of that massive military machine. Counterinsurgency operations, or COIN, are completely the opposite, with a focus on maintaining security and diminishing the insurgent grasp on the population without destroying real estate. Also a no-brainer is that the DOD budget is already too bloated, and that in managing two wars, protecting the homeland, and trying to modernize its equipment, there’s going to be some in-fighting.

But it may be that what really matters is the theory and execution of national strategy:

The basic idea of military doctrine is that small military units execute tactics on the ground that must support the overall plan of operations within a theater. The theater commander needs to ensure that he has adequate numbers of personnel, that operations continue toward a particular set of goals, and that the logistics support those operations – and his operations must support the overall national strategy for that region. If your tactics and operations don’t align against the strategic goals and expected outcome, then you’re doing something wrong – even if you’re General McChrystal.

Is he allowed to say that? Does he hate the troops too?

No, he seems to look at what has happened:

Now under the Bush administration, strategic goals and outcomes changed every Friedman unit (six months), which made it difficult to effectively plan operations or execute tactics. But one thing that was certainly clear was that conventional tactics that destroyed the Taliban in 2002 and that took the Iraqi army out in 2003 didn’t support the post-conflict goals. You can’t prosecute military operations with a conventional frame of mind when what one really needs is an approach to irregular warfare. That’s why we failed in Lebanon in 1983.

On that last point, he suggests you see this lessons-learned item in Foreign Policy, one more of those analyses that suggests that after you win by brute force what comes next is where brute force fails. Can we imagine, then fund and man and support post-conflict occupations with a military organized around one key principle – apply brute force and win the day. Other less dramatic days will follow. They always do.

Sigger adds this:

Greg Jaffe is a good journalist, and I look forward to reading his book. On the other hand, making a statement like “War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it” is a remarkably stupid statement. Nuclear war is not the same as conventional war. Conventional war is not the same as irregular war. Our military needs to be able to operate across a range of different operations, and needs to be equipped properly to execute its operations quickly and efficiently. But what we really need is national leadership that understands the nature of war, that knows how to develop a strategy that is executable, and that knows when it’s time to go.

And he quotes Sun Tzu:

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

It seems all we’re hearing is that noise.

But will the McChrystal new way of doing things actually work, with or without a functioning local government in Afghanistan? The answer to that might be unclear. On CNN you might have caught Fareed Zakaria interviewing former Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh who recently resigned as a Political Officer in Afghanistan. You can watch the entire interview here. But some key points:

The first place where I really had – where this was codified for me and where I started to understand what we were doing and how we were involved – the Korengal Valley, which I’m sure a lot of your viewers are familiar with. It’s been on the cover of TIME Magazine. The “New York Times” refers to it as the valley of death. Off the top of my head, unfortunately, I can’t remember how many American soldiers we have lost there, but it’s probably 30 or 40.

This is a valley, I don’t know, 15, 20 kilometers long. There are only 10,000 people in it. They speak their own language. They speak Korengali. In the year 2009 we have a valley with people who speak their own language. Their only trade is the timber trade. And when they move their timber, they don’t even leave their valley. Most of the time, I believe, they just take it to the Mazar Valley, and a middleman picks it up and brings it to Pakistan for them.

We show up. We enter their valley. We occupy the richest man’s timber mill. And then we bring in Afghan army and Afghan police, who aren’t from there.

And then what do we do? Then we have the Afghan police and Afghan army. They say to the Korengalis, they say, “These Mountains here that your families have been cutting trees down, sustaining yourselves for hundreds of years, you don’t own them. The central government does. And you have to pay tax on that.”

I’m not sure how many people anywhere else in the world wouldn’t take up arms against something like that.

And so, and for every Korengal we’re in, like I said before, there’s a hundred we’re not.

In short, we’re here with our guns, to protect you, and here are the guys from your Karzai government, the good guys, who will now tax you. This may not go well.

And this:

Why are we doing this? What are we getting out of it?

It’s not going to defeat al Qaeda. It’s not going to – if you take our two goals as being the defeat of al Qaeda, and then, because of its nuclear weapons and because of the relationship with India, the stabilization of the government in Islamabad, 60,000 troops taking 50, 60 dead a month in this country, and how many wounded and killing how many Afghans, as well, it doesn’t accomplish either of those goals.

And this on our real enemy:

My belief is that, after 2001, al Qaeda evolved. They became, as I like to say, an ideological cloud. It exists on the Internet. They don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan. They’ve got safe havens in five, six, seven other countries. …

And they recruit worldwide. The attacks over the last bunch of years, to include our own attacks on 9/11, were conducted by non- Afghans, non-Pakistanis. They were trained and prepared and planned for outside of the region, for the most part. Everyone knows that the flight training took place here in the United States.

This is an organization that is very ephemeral. It doesn’t really exist. Occupying a country is not going to defeat them. It’s the proverbial fly versus the sledge hammer.

And furthermore, if we keep 60,000 troops – well, let’s look at it this way. If there are 20 or 30 million people in the Pashtun belt of Afghanistan and Pakistan, how many recruits does al Qaeda get from there a year? We don’t know, but it’s probably in the hundreds, at the most, by far. It’s probably not even that many.

Well, in a population of 20 or 30 million, how are you going to keep 100 people from being disaffected and joining some fringe group? That’s impossible.

Furthermore, occupying a location only provides justification and only lends credence to the goals of that organization. It only inspires young Muslim men to want to defend their culture against an occupying army, which is what we are.

But other than that McChrystal has his wonderful new counterinsurgency strategy that could work. Yeah, yeah – trust the military. And ignore that noise Sun Tzu mentioned.

Okay, it is a bit arcane, but some of us now in our sixties, when we were young men, found ourselves picking up extra money playing music. And yes, that would mean, back in the late fifties and early sixties, playing the rudimentary rock ‘n’ roll of the time. But there was no money in that. Everyone had a crappy band doing covers of Green Onions and Tequila and Runaway (only Del Shannon made money on that). The money, such as it was, was getting a combo together to play wedding receptions – polkas for the Polish weddings and the Tarantella for the Italian ones, along with sloppy old standards like Come Rain or Come Shine and the Hawaiian Wedding Song. You got your fifty bucks and they fed you after everyone had left. New Years Eve you’d find yourself playing in a forties-style big band, bored to tears, watching blue-haired old women in red dresses dance with each other while their husbands told jokes to each other in the corner. It wasn’t exactly glamorous. And at the time Glenn Miller had been dead for twenty years.

But the oddest thing was playing Cocktail Piano, as they call it. You’d find yourself in a fairly nice restaurant or lounge twiddling away at the Great American Song Book – Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen and that sort of thing. You knew all these old standards inside and out, or really, they’d been committed to muscle memory – your fingers knew what to do and your mind drifted. And it didn’t really matter if you messed up here and there – people where talking and laughing and the glasses and plates and platters were clattering. You were the background, the guy at the piano with the giant brandy snifter, off above your right hand, primed with a little cash, where folks would drop a few bucks and smile at you. You smiled back.

And of course there were the requests, where you learned about how folks see life. Someone would always ask for Stormy Weather or I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues, or But Not for Me – or that Sinatra song where it’s quarter to three and there’s no one in the place except you and me, so set ‘em up, Joe. You know, the songs about loss, things that will never come back, mistakes made that can’t be fixed, and lost love. People seem to love that sort of thing. Sometimes someone rather worldly would ask you to play that Billy Strayhorn tune Lush Life. That made your day, as that one was full of those Debussy meets Puccini harmonic progressions, even if the lyrics are pure existential despair.

This was a learning experience. Enough of those evenings would convince you that Americans are maudlin lot, and crying in your beer is our lot in life. But that wasn’t it. You were seeing the flip-side of American can-do sunny optimism. That was a pose. It always had been. Everyone really knew better. You can do what you will, with a smile on your face and hope in your heart, and generally, nothing really works out the way you want. You don’t win the lottery. Your ship doesn’t come in. Life is loss, and you pick up the broken pieces and make do. Many an American songwriter made a fortune providing us with the means to express that, what we knew in our bones. The happy songs like High Hopes were for kids. You grow up, you know better. And of course all of Country and Western seems to be of this sort – your woman left, the pickup truck died, and so did your dog, so what the hell, you’re drinking again, and thinking of when… It all blends together.

So, given all this, Americans should be ready for our natural fate, and not be too upset with articles like this one at salon.com for Michael Klare, America the Superpower Melts Down. It seems that American preeminence is disappearing fifteen years earlier than anyone predicted and, George Bush and Liz Cheney notwithstanding, we should get ready to be an ordinary nation. American exceptionalism too was a pose.

Yes, when Obama up and said “I believe in American Exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” Liz Cheney got very angry. But someone here should grow up. What Obama said wasn’t that odd and subversive. People have their pride, but claiming we’re the exception, the best that ever was or ever will be, is kids stuff.

And what Michael Klare is up to is pointing out that even if that were possibly true, at one time, things do change. He bases that on Global Trends 2025 – a report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency. That was issued in November 2008 and predicted that America’s global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next fifteen years, due to the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. And Klare adds this:

The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” it stated definitively, the country’s “relative strength – even in the military realm – will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

But here’s the kicker. That was eleven months ago, just after the global economic collapse, or near collapse. That changed things:

Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was under way, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment’s 15-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China’s stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already.

Yep, time to ask the piano guy to play something sad. Set ‘em up, Joe. Hell, maybe some torch singer in a slinky dress can sing a breathless chorus of The Man That Got Away. We’ve certainly lost something, and Klare holds that we’re fading, and the broad, down-the-road predictions made in that CIA report are playing out now, not later:

Brazil, Russia, India and China – collectively known as the BRIC countries – are already playing far more assertive roles in global economic affairs, as the report predicted would happen in perhaps a decade or so. At the same time, the dominant global role once monopolized by the United States with a helping hand from the major Western industrial powers – collectively known as the Group of 7 (G7) – has already faded away at a remarkable pace. Countries that once looked to the United States for guidance on major international issues are ignoring Washington’s counsel and instead creating their own autonomous policy networks. The United States is becoming less inclined to deploy its military forces abroad as rival powers increase their own capabilities and non-state actors rely on “asymmetrical” means of attack to overcome the U.S. advantage in conventional firepower.

The days of America’s unquestioned global dominance have come to an end:

It may take a decade or two (or three) before historians will be able to look back and say with assurance, “That was the moment when the United States ceased to be the planet’s preeminent power and was forced to behave like another major player in a world of many competing great powers.” The indications of this great transition, however, are there for those who care to look.

They are? No, your woman still loves you and she is coming back – one day she’ll walk through that door and life will be good again. There are lots of those kinds of songs too, although they’re sad and wistful, like We’ll Meet Again.

Klare does not buy such sentimental nonsense, and sees clear signs of what is happening, like this one:

At the global economic summit in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and 25, the leaders of the major industrial powers, the G-7 (G-8 if you include Russia), agreed to turn over responsibility for oversight of the world economy to a larger, more inclusive Group of 20 (G-20), adding in China, India, Brazil, Turkey and other developing nations. Although doubts have been raised about the ability of this larger group to exercise effective global leadership, there is no doubt that the move itself signaled a shift in the locus of world economic power from the West to the global East and South – and with this shift, a seismic decline in America’s economic preeminence has been registered.

And he quotes Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in the Financial Times – “The G-20’s true significance is not in the passing of a baton from the G-7/G-8 but from the G-1, the U.S. – even during the 33 years of the G-7 economic forum, the U.S. called the important economic shots.” And Sachs goes on to say that declining American leadership over these last decades was obscured by the collapse of the Soviet Union – that made us look cool – and an early American lead in information technology, But he says there’s now no mistaking the shifting of economic power from the United States to China and other rising economic powers.

Yes, Liz can cheerlead all she wants. It won’t make a damned but of difference.

And Klare notes this:

According to news reports, America’s economic rivals are conducting secret (and not-so-secret) meetings to explore a diminished role for the U.S. dollar – fast losing its value – in international trade. Until now, the use of the dollar as the international medium of exchange has given the United States a significant economic advantage: It can simply print dollars to meet its international obligations while other nations must convert their own currencies into dollars, often incurring significant added costs. Now, however, many major trading countries – among them China, Russia, Japan, Brazil and the Persian Gulf oil countries – are considering the use of the euro, or a “basket” of currencies, as a new medium of exchange. If adopted, such a plan would accelerate the dollar’s precipitous fall in value and further erode American clout in international economic affairs.

Well, that has been in the news, as has this:

One such discussion reportedly took place this summer at a summit meeting of the BRIC countries. Just a concept a year ago, when the very idea of BRIC was concocted by the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, the BRIC consortium became a flesh-and-blood reality this June when the leaders of the four countries held an inaugural meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

And yes, we weren’t invited. But Klare notes that Brazil, Russia, India and China “jointly possess about 43 percent of the world’s population and are expected to account for 33 percent of the world’s gross domestic product by 2030 – about as much as the United States and Western Europe will claim at that time.” They don’t need us. They will coordinate efforts to develop alternatives to the dollar and to reform the International Monetary Fund in such a way as to give non-Western countries a greater voice, thank you very much.

And there’s more.

One month after President Obama canceled plans to deploy an anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe in an apparent bid to secure Russian backing for a tougher stance toward Tehran, top Russian leaders are clearly indicating that they have no intention of endorsing strong new sanctions on Iran. “Threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive,” declared the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, following a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Moscow on Oct. 13. The following day, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that the threat of sanctions was “premature.” Given the political risks Obama took in canceling the missile program – a step widely condemned by Republicans in Washington – Moscow’s quick dismissal of U.S. pleas for cooperation on the Iranian enrichment matter can only be interpreted as a further sign of waning American influence.

Are you crying in your beer yet? No? Klare also covers a high-level meeting in Beijing in October between Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Iran’s first vice president, Mohammed Reza Rahimi – cooperation in trade and energy, and they didn’t consult with us at all.

From Washington’s point of view, efforts to secure international support for the allied war effort in Afghanistan have also met with a strikingly disappointing response. In what can only be considered a trivial and begrudging vote of support for the U.S.-led war effort, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced on Oct. 14 that Britain would add more troops to the British contingent in that country – but only 500 more, and only if other European nations increase their own military involvement, something he undoubtedly knows is highly unlikely. So far, this tiny, provisional contingent represents the sum total of additional troops the Obama administration has been able to pry out of America’s European allies, despite a sustained diplomatic drive to bolster the combined NATO force in Afghanistan. In other words, even America’s most loyal and obsequious ally in Europe no longer appears willing to carry the burden for what is widely seen as yet another costly and debilitating American military adventure in the Greater Middle East.

And then there losing the Olympics to Brazil. Don’t even ask. It was minor, but symbolic.

Klare argues that it is becoming “increasingly clear that other powers – even our closest allies – are increasingly pursuing independent foreign policies, no matter what pressure Washington tries to bring to bear.” Add independent economic policies if you wish, but don’t cry in your beer just yet:

Of course, none of this means that, for some time to come, the U.S. won’t retain the world’s largest economy and, in terms of sheer destructiveness, its most potent military force. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the strategic environment in which American leaders must make critical decisions, when it comes to the nation’s vital national interests, has changed dramatically since the onset of the global economic crisis.

So we are not over and done with just yet. We just need to be careful about how we make decisions, like with ramping up in Afghanistan, which is why Klare doesn’t mind what Dick Cheney calls Obama’s dithering on the issue, as Obama may see “the folly of expanding America’s military commitments abroad at a time when its global preeminence is waning.”

Klare likes that approach:

One senses Obama’s caution in other recent moves. Although he continues to insist that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is impermissible and that the use of force to prevent this remains an option, he has clearly moved to minimize the likelihood that this option – which would also be plagued by recalcitrant “allies” – will ever be employed.

On the other side of the coin, he has given fresh life to American diplomacy, seeking improved ties with Moscow and approving renewed diplomatic contact with such previously pariah states as Burma, Sudan and Syria. This, too, reflects a reality of our changing world: that the holier-than-thou, bullying stance adopted by the Bush administration toward these and other countries for almost eight years rarely achieved anything. Think of it as an implicit acknowledgment that the U.S. is now descending from its status as the globe’s “sole superpower” to that of an ordinary country. This, after all, is what ordinary countries do; they engage other countries in diplomatic discourse, whether they like their current governments or not.

Yeah, but as George Bush would probably say, that’s no fun. But Klare is arguing that’s reality:

For many Americans, the loss of that preeminence may be a source of discomfort, or even despair. On the other hand, don’t forget the advantages to being an ordinary country like any other country: Nobody expects Canada, or France, or Italy to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 68,000 already there and the 120,000 still in Iraq. Nor does anyone expect those countries to spend $925 billion in taxpayer money to do so – the current estimated cost of both wars, according to the National Priorities Project.

You might not like the world of 2025, but then again, you might. It’s cheaper, and there’s less stress. Ordinary is okay. High drama and heroics just make you tired.

And as for the idea that for many of us the loss of preeminence may be a source of discomfort, or even despair, there’s no need to worry about that. We already have the soundtrack for that, tens of thousands of cry in your beer songs. Tip the piano player and he’ll play one of them for you. Pick one.