Worse, just like lackluster turncoats in other minority communities, guys like Sullivan, if they played their cards right, could parley their demented but nonetheless outspoken opposition to their own claims to full citizenship into lucrative and influential spots in the burgeoning Wingnut Welfare industry, at think tanks, the Supreme Court, or somewhat less glamorously, as editors of formerly respectable magazines.  Out of nowhere, a fresh-faced upstart like Sullivan could be the toast of the town, or rather, Village, because even though he was as power-fellating and contemptuously dismissive of the concerns of ordinary people as the Washington Post editorial page, he was, well, gay. My sister and I used to joke about how cynically, say, Clarence Thomas was initially marketed to to the neoconfederate Republicans who so love him today; “a darky with a difference,” we called it, and it seems to have reached its comic apogee with Herman Cain today.

In Sullivan’s case, though, he was never very different at all.  Like most queens minted in the late 70′s or early 80′s, he was smitten by Reagan and Thatcher, dripping in elitism, and reflexively opposed to the hippies who, through their (by him) unappreciated earlier efforts, had done a whole lot to make his charmed, improbable life even possible, despite what he continues to decry as their unfortunate fashion choices.  In that sense, he’s just another bitchy queen making fun of somebody’s outfit.  Yawn.

But, unlike Clarence Thomas, he does occasionally have to look out the window, and grudgingly admit error a times when it  becomes too unseemly and discrediting not to.  There are no lifetime appointments, after all, in our increasingly pathetic and ultra-consolidated media, so Andrew (full name; so unusual for a gay man…) has had to recant his support, always much too late, for everything from George W. Bush to the Iraq war.   But now, for what I think is the first time, he had to recant his contempt for something quite central to who he is, by his own admission.  In a Daily Beast posting over the weekend, he left me gobsmacked when he wrote:

At the opening of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell describes Scarlett O’Hara thusly: “…she wasn’t beautiful, but everyone thought she was.” Now, before you start thinking I’m going to bring up the battle axe of the borealis, I’m not, because my argument isn’t really about beauty (or lack thereof).  It’s about the deep and abiding character flaws that develop when people are encouraged by those around them to think they have gifts they simply don’t have, and how such delusional self-confidence leads people like Scarlett to repeatedly make drastic and irreversible mistakes which harm others and ultimately, themselves.  The plot is hardly new; would somebody please alert the (liberal) media?

When you look at today’s Republican party, today coincidentally centered in Scarlett’s old Confederacy, they might as well all be wearing hoop skirts at Twelve Oaks, perhaps even showing their bosom before three o’clock, against Mammy’s sage advice.  As such, a sneering, self-entitled jackass saddled with a lifetime of failures big and small like George W. Bush could simply step onto the national stage and magically become a “moderate”  regular guy you could “have a beer with,” but even more implausibly, a man who would never deficit-spend and would also pursue a “humble” foreign policy.  When Condi Rice made the laughable assertion, repeatedly, that “no one could have predicted _______,” you have to admit she had a point, she just defined “no one” a little differently than most of us would, meaning “no one who matters.”  The media fell for it, after all, along with enough credulous Americans, and just went ahead and put an erratic, destructive ne’er-do-well into an office where he could do quite a bit of damage, which of course he did.  By that time, though, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could have seen this coming.

Remember Newt Gingrich, the Historian and Intellectual?  How about Dick Cheney, the Statesman?  Colin Powell, the Incorruptible?  The New Nixon?  So confident that the media is as shallow and dumb as the Tarleton twins, for all of my adult life Republicans have built their success in getting people to believe they’re beautiful, against all evidence, and then screwing them over later, just like Scarlett.  Perhaps because he’s a fellow Georgian, Newt Gingrich even takes her fiddle-dee-dee a step further and marries someone better.  That always shows ‘em.

The competition for the new belle of the ball seems to be heating up of late: there’s the ravishing Scott Walker of Wisconsin (whose Mammy has unfortunately not suggested a hair piece yet… maybe she’s short); the elegant John Kasich of Ohio; the statuesque Paul LePage of Maine; the, well, striking Rick Scott of Florida; and pleasingly plump Chris Christie, who would no doubt benefit from some aggressive corset work.  As you’d expect, the media thinks they’re all so beautiful that it’s really too hard to decide, even as their regretful supporters have seen them once too often in curlers and cold cream to go there, even drunk.

The good news is that now there are a lot more profiteering Rhett Butlers to go around these days, and they have so much money they can afford a whole passel of Scarletts, so few of these worthies expect to be making any dresses out of the drapes anytime soon.  The bad news is that there’s a new Scarlett in town, out to avenge the burning of Atlanta and such, by the name of Paul Ryan, and with his prominent widow’s peak he even, disturbingly, looks the part.

The Kochs and their ilk  have already factored in a few millions lost here and there with their state-based “investments” that won’t pan out; when you’ve got $40 billion, that’s less than the dry cleaning.  The big goal was to grab the federal government, which is, as Willie Sutton put it, “where the money is,” and Paul Ryan and the Republican majority are the getaway vehicle.  Touted endlessly as “courageous” (even among Democrats), Ryan’s latest “plan” is the expected toxic combination of naked reverse Robin Hood horse shit, which is anything but “courageous” in our Foxified political environment.  Remember, the last time a President attempted to do anything but cut taxes was in 1993, and though that produced a surplus and unprecedented economic boom, to the media it was still the grave mistake they called it at the time because it resulted in Clinton losing Congress.

But in a way they may be right.  It is courageous to say, outright, that you plan to do away with Medicare while lowering taxes on wealthy corporations, just as it is equally courageous to say you are also going to do away with collective bargaining, give back direly needed federal transportation dollars, hand fancy jobs to unqualified cronies (and/or their predictably worthless children), rip art off the walls and call justices bitches (to their faces, to boot, not like Barbara Bush), and tell people to “kiss my butt.”   Few Republicans I can think of have ever been quite so courageous, especially with an election coming up, and I’m delighted to think they think it will work out for them.

What they’re saying is, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Even Scarlett got that message….  Will the voters?

CH: Kloppenburg/Prosser results tomorrow….  Keep your fingers crossed.

Think about that.  I know I’ve told this story before, but when my brother was born his scalp hadn’t closed, but the doctors were able to peer into his brain and thus assure my mother that, yes, he could be President some day.  ”That was before Ronald Reagan,” my German friend told me, “I bet they don’t say that anymore.”  Nixon required all the PR efforts of no less than Fox News’ Roger Ailes to make him seem likable enough to be elected, but even his many detractors never thought he was stupid, just icky.  Reagan, on the other hand, was generally liked, but thought (not entirely correctly) to be a lightweight.  His handlers, to whom he was merely a means to an end, didn’t care.  They knew that none of their plans could be accomplished by appealing to anybody’s intellect, unless they were wealthy, so they went forth to find out where dumber Americans could be peeled off from the Democrats.

Nixon had already blazed this trail with his Southern Strategy, a cynical attempt to exploit racial resentments for political gain among the white working classes in the south and middle America, and Reagan’s team spotted another rich vein of all-American slack-jawedness in the then-nascent “Christian” Right.  All these years later, we now have a black president, abortion is still legal, and gay marriage is on the cusp of becoming reality, but nonetheless the Republican Party, which remains devoted as ever to the wishes of the malefactors of great wealth, has been miraculously recast as the party of the “little guy” while racking up such populist triumphs as ever lower taxes on the rich, ever fewer regulations on larcenous banks, and further environmental degradation.  It was a neat trick, but let’s just say its stunning success started thinning the blood flow to the brain amongst its officeholders, as we now clearly see with Governor Walker.

By creating the alternate reality of its own media and “think” tanks, the right no longer has to worry as much about constantly being proved not only wrong, but dishonest, but it’s now become a victim of its own success. Once you’ve relentlessly exalted your bumbling string of standard-bearers for “achievements” like firing 11,000 air traffic controllers, barfing on the Japanese Prime Minister, allowing the country to be attacked by terrorists then losing two wars, busting the budget, or what have you, who can blame, say, Sarah Palin for thinking she might one day end up on Mt. Rushmore?  Like Walker, Palin is the product of an era where “don’t confuse me with the facts” is no longer a punch line, but a way of life.

The right has been so successful in drowning out inconvenient facts over the years that its younger “stars,” and I use the term rather loosely, are as bone-headed and clueless as the rubes they’re sent out to hoodwink.  Dick Cheney may have demanded that all TV’s be tuned to Fox before his arrival, but he knew better than to believe any of it.  He watched in the way a director might attend his own play again near the end of the run, to look for little errors in presentation, certainly not to learn anything.  He also didn’t jabber away to random phone callers in his undisclosed location; he didn’t even use email.

At the top, those on the right know that everything they say in public is essentially the opposite of the truth, and are as such compelled to at least periodically peek outside the bubble, if only to check whether the lie of the day is still going over.  Lower down the food chain, such pointy-headed thoroughness is now seen as a sign of weakness.  In Walker’s Fox-addled world, the protesters are “almost all” from out of state, and busting unions will surely get his name on an airport someday; if Sean Hannity says so it must be true.  Good luck with that, Scooter.

It would be nicer, of course, if America’s courts would do the job, but being previously occupied declaring health care reform unconstitutional, they left it to Old Europe to point out that George Bush, by his own admission, behaved something like Idi Amin and Augusto Pinochet, put together.   But with his cowardly withdrawal from a routine Israel First conference in Switzerland that he thought he could waltz right into, Bush finally felt the whip hand he so routinely and proudly brandished for others; in effect, he’s now on a no-fly list, without ever having to fly commercial.  Better yet, he’s afraid of an honest trial, not the sort of medieval, tyrannical punishments he wreaked upon others.

This mute gesture speaks volumes about the man who in eight dreadful years wrecked a relatively prosperous and powerful nation for, essentially, nothing, except perhaps his own Daddy issues.  He recognizes, on some level, the fact that many of those imprisoned, tortured, and even killed under his administration could never be convicted in a court of law, and he could, even with all the king’s money and all the king’s lawyers that would surely stand behind him, distinctly unlike his many victims.   If you’re Bush, you just say, “Fuck Switzerland…  The weather’s better in Dallas, anyway.”   Well, usually.

In his new book Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, writes that even he questioned the wisdom (if not the motivation, unfortunately), of Bush’s immediate post-9/11 Iraq fixation, and also states he should have quit after the first torture revelations at Abu Ghraib.  Revealingly, both statements directly distance him from Bush’s most controversial policies, and clearly indicate that perhaps Rummy and the Missus have a favorite restaurant in Paris that they’d rather not say au revoir to just yet.  Rats by the dozens have left Bush’s sinking ship, and this is only the latest, but certainly not the last, example.

Bush’s Legacy Project is still beginning, and if it’s anything like Reagan’s it will be disturbingly effective, but only at home, as we will no doubt see again and again, if his storied dumbness overtakes his famous bravado.  Those Swiss, and the rest of the civilized world, are just too danged fussy.

“International law?  I better call my lawyer,” an earlier Bush once infamously blustered.  This time, the lawyer must have called him back, and given a somewhat different answer.  Mr. “Bring it on” suddenly becomes Miss “Never mind.”

Makes me want to yodel.

To no one’s surprise, Holy Joe Lieberman’s “Joementum”  has turned out, once and for all, to be a wet firecracker; the universally despised “Independent” has, somewhat belatedly, decided to pull the curtain on his embarrassing “career,” by, naturally, leaking the news of his retirement while denying it.  Of course, few of his constituents will miss him, but Fox News will, and so will I, but for the same selfish reasons that have nothing to do with being a Patriotic American.  What right-wing network could fail to miss a “Democrat” who has come to dedicate his dreary, venal life to vilifying other Democrats, and what lefty blogger wouldn’t shed a drunken tear or two at the thought of losing such an easy (and cartoonish, to boot) target on a slow news day.

As most Hag readers know, I come by my loathing of Joe Lieberman honestly, despite its undeniable advantages; the moment he stepped up to denounce Bill Clinton for his notorious but obviously irrelevant tart problems, he gained a place in my heart as not only the Senate’s Dumbest Democrat, but as the Senate’s Dumbest Politician, which is a considerably higher bar to clear.  The rest of them were all porking their subordinates, too, and therefore understandably wanted to focus, primly, on “the rule of law” and whatnot, but ol’ Holy Joe, with whom no woman, likely including his long-suffering wife, has ever willingly disrobed, chose to focus on the sex thing; just the sheer horror of it all.  He positively gloried in being  Ken Starr’s homelier twin, and we all know how that turned out when it was presented to the American people, nearly all of whom have gotten laid, deservedly, considerably more often than guys like Ken and Joe, and as such see things a bit differently.

But like the party he would soon embrace, the unappealing and schoolmarmish Holy Joe fell improbably upward after the Democratic rout of 1998, and over the years he got to like the treachery thing a little too much for even his own good.  His nomination as Vice President in 2000 probably sealed Al Gore’s political fate, just as surely as Sarah Palin’s sealed John McCain’s eight years later, but neither of these two fatal and tone-deaf choices ever blamed themselves; quite the opposite, to the continuing consternation (and, I might add, diminution) of their disappointed political benefactors.  But Holy Joe wasn’t done.  His heretofore dormant libido having been put in overdrive after making out with George Bush, he decided to go bareback with Dick Cheney and Bill O’Reilly, rather than get thee to the STD clinic like a more responsible whore would, and his infections predictably blossomed.

Soon, he was beaten in the Democratic Primary (thanks in part to donations from your humble correspondent) by political newcomer Ned Lamont, and quickly became the embodiment of everything that was wrong with not just the Democratic Party, but the country at large, by running as an “Independent.”   You see, in today’s world, an “Independent” means that you emphatically embrace the most bonkers and ruinous policies of the Republican Party, especially on war an tax cuts for the rich, but even on things like reproductive rights (of which Joe would know nothing), and Health Care, which, thanks to Joe, includes no public option and is thus, (with a couple of minor exceptions) a typical pile of corporate-vetted crap.  This strategy, in the old days, could make you so rich even Republicans couldn’t beat you, but thanks to his old boyfriend’s court appointments, oops, Citizens United came along, and suddenly there’s many millions of dollars that says ol’ Holy Joe is just a shorter, uglier version of Hugo Chavez.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Holy Joe has indeed done a lot in his career, but today he has, at long last, finally done something worthwhile.  Quit.  Thanks, Joe.

.

Poor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fresh off the end of his last term as governor of California, he told an Austrian newspaper that his time in office cost him at least $200 million in expenses and lost income that he could have otherwise made from acting.* (*CH:  That’s what they call it?)

But don’t pity the former governor just yet. “It was more than worth it,” he said.

Whew.  I was so worried.  But seriously, the first time I became aware that, say, being Secretary of Defense or Governor of California were alright, except for the low pay was during the Reagan era, when numerous political appointees lamented the temporary “pay cut” they would have to take in order to, well, loot the treasury and give the money to their buddies.  Talk about that famous inability to delay gratification that supposedly infects the lower orders.  Now, such arrogant, selfish nonsense is the order of the day for all politicians, even the nominal “party of the people,” the Democrats.  You see, salaries for government officials, quaintly, still bear a vestigial relationship to the America of yore, wherein the fact that the median income is around $50,000 is taken into account when setting the salaries of its higher officials.  The private sector has long ago abandoned such antiquated egalitarianism, as it has any semblance of the oft maligned “meritocracy,” as Arnold inadvertently reveals.

Ever since the Class War ended (and you know who won…)  crappy Hollywood actors, larcenous banksters, and halfwit media celebrities pretending to be journalists, among others, wouldn’t even get up in the morning if they were only paid as much as, say, the President, and thus are inclined to treat politicians as, if not total slackers, a bit addlepated.  The recent discussion of Robert Gibbs departure as White House Press Secretary provided a drearily familiar example of this mindset; and entire panel of overpaid know-nothings mused that due to his disastrous two-year tenure in that post, he ought to be making in the tens of millions, failing up as they did to the never-fly-commercial set.  All were horrified that he had heretofore been scraping by on a mere $176,000 annual salary; they spend more than that on tooth whitening and hairdos.  They are also, clearly, as incompetent at performing their “jobs” as he is, so they naturally sympathized.  Months earlier, we were treated to the spectacle of other cosseted “journalists” lamenting that $250,000 wasn’t as much as you’d think, either.  What’s next?  Andrea Mitchell devotes a full hour to the Servant Problem?  The mind boggles.

The disconnect between the corporate and media elites who control the government and the great majority of the people they are intended to serve has been building for a long time, but it reaches a high point when utter failures like Schwarznegger (or George W. Bush, for that matter) have the audacity to whine that their idle and misbegotten forays into government “service” ended up costing them money they didn’t deserve in the first place, if their performances in their previous “careers” were taken into account.

And complaining about how much these misadventures “cost” them isn’t going to go over too big with the millions whose lives they destroyed along the way.   Get over it, Arnold, even if California might not.

AUSTIN, Texas — Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay — once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress — was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.

After the verdicts were read, DeLay hugged his daughter, Danielle, and his wife, Christine. There was no immediate comment from him or his attorneys.

Well, I’ll be.  At least Texas’ creaky court system finally brought down ONE of the villains of the Bush era, ol’ Tom “the Hammer” DeLay, and with little fanfare, DeLay has finally gone the way that the whole lot of them ought to, even as Karl Rove waxes triumphant from his handy sinecure at Fox News.  I’ve always had a special loathing for DeLay, who took typical Republican corruption and election theft to previously unscaled and blatantly anti-democratic heights and was disturbingly and lastingly effective at it, and evidently a Texas jury felt the same way.  DeLay’s crimes, of course, weren’t any different in kind or degree from what has since been admiringly approved by the US Supreme Court, in its execrable Citizens (!) United decision; the Republican platform, and only possible route to electoral success lies in the ability of secret corporate malefactors financing deceptive and divisive ad campaigns to beat back the opposition.  DeLay got this, and early, and without this conviction, would have towered over George W. Bush as the most successful right-winger of a nauseatingly right-wing era.

Heinous, vulgar, and venal though he was, Tom DeLay got things done, and they were kind of big things: turning the Texas legislature red, redistricting the state to put more Republicans in the House, and using his expanded majority to help ram through policies that would lead to the devastation we enjoy today.  As far as fucking up the country completely, only Bush and Cheney can hold a candle to ol’ Tom, but at least he didn’t get away with it like they did. He’s going to jail.

I have to think that because of this long delayed (no pun intended…) conviction, this will also be a happy Thanksgiving for Ed Schultz, who long before he was an MSNBC star was just a radio host from Fargo, North Dakota, but was at least as obsessively anti-DeLay as I was.  He led every story about Tom DeLay with the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by strains of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack,” and in those days the likelihood of such a thing happening were near zero.  What a difference a few years, and a relatively depoliticized (Texan!) justice system, makes;  DeLay will, perhaps, be hitting the road… on a chain gang.

Pass the gravy; I’m feeling thankful all over again.

Would that the rest of us had such forgiving performances reviews as George Bush did in 2004.  ”Well, as a country we went financially quite a way from the black to the red already, with no end in sight , but your two other big initiatives, the wars, will at least provide us loss carryovers so we won’t have to pay taxes until 2125….  Great job!”   Or the bankster, “Well, you did crash the world economy and cheat your own best customers for personal gain in the process, but the way you got us all that free Fed money shows that you’re a real team player….  Here’s another billion, and a bigger plane!”  Sadly, those poor guys in the oil industry, who actually do something, or are at least supposed to, always get the short end of the stick.  Unlike Presidents or Wall Streeters, who ruin lives so subtly and at such a discreet distance that it almost seems genteel, and certainly tolerable, the oil boys do have to produce something to get paid, and unfortunately that thing is messy.

Years of playing “Battleship” with the American military, however, and being lavished with tax breaks and lax oversight by fawning politicians and compromised regulators started to make Big Oil think that they, too, had stepped out of the dreary and dangerous basement of heavy industry into the rarified, risk-free penthouses of magic money, but they’re finding out to their considerable chagrin that this isn’t so….   George W. Bush, never much of a believer in Murphy’s Law, nonetheless wisely chose politics when he found out that oil was too hard.  Then, in office, he set about making oil easier, with horrific results for all concerned.  Watch what you wish for, and all that.

There’s something intuitive, really, about the idea that poking holes 20,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth, in rough seas, to bring up flammable gases and liquids is a little tricky, and no matter how widely liability were spread, one good hit with Murphy’s Law and your company, industry, and reputation, not to mention vast swaths of aquatic life, are completely shot to hell for multiple generations.  It takes a particularly blind arrogance and an astonishing sense of personal infallibility utterly foreign to most of the real world to simply not bother to dot every “I” and cross every “t” before proceeding with something so risky.  What does, say, an engineer, or for that matter a waitress, think of people who show up for such highly paid work so dismally unprepared?  Not much, I’m guessing.

For this reason, I hold some hope that Americans will finally get some admittedly petroleum-scented oxygen to their brains from this incident and start to call a halt to the relentless abandonment of accountability at the top that has plunged so many of us into debt, destitution, or despair, while the perpetrators are complete strangers to the harsh and unforgiving retribution we would receive for such shockingly incompetent performance.  Apologists like Mary Landrieu (the Republicans have been uncharacteristically quiet…) only drive the point home further…   She talks endlessly about the importance of “jobs,” when everyone listening knows that had they done their “jobs” like BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, or for that matter George Bush or Citibank, did, they would no longer have them, and they would have a tough time finding another.  For real Americans,  Murphy’s Law has not been repealed, and sympathy for its deniers is pretty hard to come by.

The first chapter, ironically entitled “Unity,” is eerily prescient of the airy dismissal of the “reality-based community” that we heard about so recently:

The Nixon Administration’s apparent ability in the summer of 1969 to establish an image of itself, and even of national life as a whole, that was sharply at odds with the facts marked a new stage in the public-relations revolution that had been underway in American politics for many years.

Bush’s “ranch” and “just folks” demeanor, along with a numbing series of photo ops, one during a terrorist attack, showed that early on Bush had adopted more than just Nixon’s Southern Strategy.  Schell adds:

They all soon realized that the resources for image-making available to a President were incomparably greater than those available to a candidate….  By using the resources of government to compose scenes rather than to solve real problems could build up an illusory world that not even the most determined reporters could tear down.

Fortunately for Bush, you could drop a bomb on Washington and not harm a “determined reporter” these days, but nonetheless we were continuously bombarded with Mt. Rushmore, Lady Liberty, the codpiece, and Jackson Square, to name only the most infamous, all of which were nothing but spectacles hoping to make Americans believe the opposite of the truth.  The lawlessness of Nixon and his successors, to Schell’s mind, came down to this same curious approach to reality.

The law is concerned with facts and substance.  But the Nixon Administration was concerned with appearances-with images.  The spirit of the law is impartial.  But the Nixon men were partisans to their bones.

Here one sees the seeds of the notion that brought forth the US Attorney scandal; it was just inconceivable to these men that their hirelings owed any authority to anything other than to the Decider, law or no law.  Continuing in this vein, Schell points out how Nixon’s men, like Bushes, had in their minds inverted the definition of rights, which are granted to the people, and powers, which are granted, in specifically limited terms, to the government.

… the officers of the Nixon Administration had fallen into the habit of defending their “right” to take this or that governmental action, as though they were put-upon citizens, not powerful figures in the government.

No wonder the same minds have now conceived of the “right” of torturers not to be prosecuted, in the same breath as they extoll the wisdom of wiretapping and preventatively detaining ordinary citizens.  Later, Schell writes something that had me tearing out my hair all during the Bush years, that is the formidable power that comes from lying.

The public had grown accustomed to deception and evasion in high places, but not yet to repeated, consistent, barefaced lying at all levels.  The very boldness of the lies raised the cost of contradicting them, for to do so would be to call high officials outright liars.  Another effective White House technique was to induce semi-informed or wholly uninformed spokesmen to deny charges.

This tactic was still working well into Bush’s second term, and it was telling that a good part of the “You Lie” controversy was not about the substance of the claims and counterclaims, but about the propriety of calling someone a liar.  Nixon must have been doing a little jig in Hell.

But finally, what Schell has to say about the use of war for political purposes, really the heart of the book, is the part I find most riveting and timely today, when the military brass is now in open rebellion against its own commander in chief.  According to this mentality, now so many decades old:

….a disastrous war effort was better than no war effort, because even a disastrous war effort would demonstrate a crucial “willingness” to use force in a nuclear age, and would advance American credibility.  ”We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly.”

Those who fail to learn from history, and all that….  This book was written in 1975.