No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

The CHNN eastern desk reported recently that Harlan Harrington, the network’s go-to international correspondent and expert on Mediterranean scandals of all sorts, was skiing in Switzerland, accompanied by Lois Farnsworth, a former Miss North Dakota, and largely unavailable.

Until this week.

Harlan said he’s been overwhelmed, not to mention overdone, by the tempest in Italian politics, and has not been able to mount a massive,  Guernica-size report on Berlusconi’s titanic struggle to hold onto power.  Occasional thousand word pieces fail to do this story justice, Harlan said, and since the CHNN flying boat is in winter storage in Bismarck, he’s also had some difficulty just hopping down to Milan, as he is wont to do, to examine court briefs against the PM.

Still, Harlan does have a snippet of news, small beer though it may be to those ravenous readers of all things bunga bunga in Rome.

The prime minister, according to Harlan, met this week with a select group of Vatican leaders, ostensibly to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Pact of 1929.  The Roman Catholic church struck a deal at that time with then Italian leader Benito Mussolini, providing for official state recognition of Vatican City and it’s core structures.  The church built a village and people came, long before the idea occurred to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The meeting between the clerics and the prime minister was described by observers as “correct,” as the church, itself embroiled in a worldwide institutional sexual abuse scandal, appeared to be sensitive to the need to reach out to the prime minister, somehow or other, without appearing to ignore or condone the colorful contours of the premier’s personal life.

Back to the small beer.

Italian reporters helped Harlan out a bit with some details of the meeting, pointing out that church leaders still see Berlusconi as an ally on right to life issues, and as a possible source of money – direct, or, if need be, indirect.

A bill now before the Italian parliament,  and favored by the church, would include a one euro ($1.36) tax hike on commercial movie tickets.  Church-owned “family friendly” theaters would be exempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGkuyc2OmY

As picayune as such a negotiating point might appear to the uninformed, non-Italian political observer, Harlan emphasized the Machiavellian quality to the church-state dance now underway between Vatican leaders and Berlusconi.

Observers said Berlusconi, sitting in a large, blood-red upholstered, gold-leaf wing chair, appeared to wince slightly as the ticket issue was raised in whispered tones by a cleric assigned to the task.  The Leader then nodded as if in assent, conveying a confessional demeanor.

Harlan ended his report to the CHNN eastern desk with this quote from an Italian legislator:  “The church has an enormous influence on politics still,” says Italo Bocchino, a lawmaker who defected from Mr. Berlusconi’s party  last year (the political party, not the one at his Sicilian retreat with Vladimir Putin).  “If the church had said Berlusconi was incompatible with governing, he would have fallen.  But they didn’t.”

Catholic reporter Andrea Gagliarducci observed:  “It is diplomacy.  You take everything you can.  You make agreements even with people you don’t trust.”

Harlan told the eastern desk  he’s thinking of bringing that message personally – along with a large shipment of The Prince in paperback – to activists and leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, and maybe Ohio, as soon as he packs his skis and can get himself and Lois on a plane back to Bismarck.

They know there are known unknowns that I don’t know about; and I know I don’t know about them.  Nolo contendre.

Anyway, when one does at least realize that nothing – not credit card wars, not torture, not tax policy, not social welfare policy, not massive fraud in the financial and mortgage markets, not massive (and up to now, largely unreported) deficits in state treasuries, not historic rot in the nation’s public infrastructure (no high speed rail in the US!), not a high school dropout rate at 30 or 40 percent (possibly higher), not a jobless rate at 10 percent (probably more than double that in real terms, and climbing) - nothing, not even a mild rebuke from one of their golden boys, David Brooks, will dissuade those representing the right from their catastrophically appointed rounds  – well what can a poor boy do?

Yet, there is perversity in this I think, real perversity in a moral sense, if one cares to look rather casually at the “tip of the spear,” where it seems the same ideology has appeared “in the heat of battle.”

DON’T HAVE TIME FOR TOO MANY QUESTIONS!!!

Here is a tiny snippet which might show, in moral terms, what such hubris means to people we don’t even know.  Out there.  Over the horizon.  Out of sight and out of mind, well beyond the picket fences guarding our little castles in the shining city on a hill.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/12/03/wikileaks-u-s-ignored-british-concerns-over-secret-spy-flights-115875-22757887/

Oh never mind, children.  Nothing can be done, nothing can be corrected, no lives can be saved – anywhere in the world – until American tax policy is settled, to the satisfaction of the anointed ones in our midst.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann#40500189

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner.  That cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

- snip -

“We asked Halliburton to supply us samples of materials like those actually used at the Macondo well … Halliburton agreed that the Chevron lab (in Houston) was highly qualified for this work.”

- snip -

“Chevron agreed as a public service to test the cement slurry on behalf of the commission.”

- snip -

“Chevron’s report states, among other things, that its lab personnel were unable to generate stable foam cement … using the materials provided by Halliburton … This may have contributed to the blowout.”

- snip -

“The documents provided to us by Halliburton show, among other things, that its personnel conducted at least four foam stability tests relevant to the Macondo cement slurry.”

(Note:  the report indicates Halliburton did not provide BP with results from all four tests prior to the blowout.)

- snip -

“Taken together, these (the Halliburton) documents lead us to believe that:

(1)    Only one of the four tests discussed above that Halliburton ran on the various slurry designs for the final cement job at the Macondo well indicated that the slurry design would be stable;

(2)    Halliburton may not have had – and BP did not have -  the results of that test before the evening of April 19, meaning that the cement job may have been pumped without any lab results indicating that the foam slurry would be stable;

(3)    Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data; and

(4)    Halliburton (and perhaps BP) should have considered redesigning the foam slurry before pumping it at the Macondo well.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/spilldoc.PDF

In this astonishing video, multimillionaire radio and TV Huckster Glenn Beck speaks, solemnly and with laughably faked empathy, to a bunch of rubes about how “we” are going to have to make deep sacrifices to pay off the Republican debt that faces the country.  ”We” might lose our pensions.  ”We” might lose our jobs.  ”We” might even lose our homes.  It’s time to take our “medicine,” but at least we have “each other.”  Really.  He said that, and not as a laugh line, either.  Now, Fox watchers believe a whole lot of really stupid things, but if they believe that Glenn Beck, who made in excess of $30 million last year and is a global celebrity, is going to be sharing a shelter bed with them in the coming apocalypse, one has to marvel that they are capable of walking down a street without hitting a telephone pole, let alone have spare money to throw away on overpriced gold coins.

Long ago, Republicans realized that their rich-coddling, militaristic, and elitist policies harmed the great majority of Americans, so they cannily cast about for some stupid people to bring along for extra votes, and they found them in abundance; racists, Jesus freaks, and gun nuts, few of whom will ever see any  benefit for doing so, began to vote Republican when the GOP directed, with decreasing subtlety, their appeals to them.  When Nixon spoke of “regional discrimination,” Bush spoke of “Armies of Compassion,” or Reagan launched his campaign in the ironically named Philadelphia, Mississippi, the right voters got the message without requiring them to elaborate in a way that might offend the smarter.

Trouble is, to which Glenn Beck accidentally alluded in the clip, that when you validate and empower the stupid, they start feeling (with some justification) better about themselves, and thereby conclude that their even stupider ideas are pretty good, too, and thus ought be implemented as well.  All Nixon, Reagan, and even Bush had to do was make a few signals to the stupid and then quietly go about their business, which of course was always more focused on the money end, and they could have ridden the tide forever.  Trouble was, Bush looked a little too good in his dunce cap/ flight suit, and was so alarmingly less qualified for office than virtually all of his predecessors, that he actually decided to give the stupid much of what they’d always wanted, if only to (barely, as it turned out…) gain a real election in 2004, and we’re still living with the consequences of his “success” at this malevolent  but undeniably expedient endeavor.

Bush’s loud, proud embrace of his own stupidity was initially a diabolically clever means of humanizing an arrogant  underachiever who was both a legacy at Yale and Harvard and scion of a wealthy and powerful family, but still could barely utter a grammatical, much less substantive, sentence, and, unfortunately, it worked.  People obviously didn’t think he was smart, but they nonetheless wanted “to have a beer with him,” as the ever-fawning media put it.  (Yeah, right.  More like “I’ll have what he’s having”…)  Pundits from Peggy Noonan to Maureen Dowd waxed lyrical about the uncomplicated Manliness his stupidity revealed; choking on a pretzel was all in a day’s work for a guy who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear,” although he used the word constantly, and throughout his disastrous terms a supine media dutifully translated such obviously affected non-words as “wudn’t” and “idn’t” into fit-to-print Queen’s English for the newspapers.

But all this time the rubes were watching, and now they want more, much more.  Having seen one of their own bestride the earth like a Colossus, torturing, bombing, punishing, and sneering all the way, why not now move to eliminate, once and for all, the hated smarties, and then, dummies will finally Rule the World, under the leadership of professor/doctor/whatchamacallit Glenn Beck, oracular Rush Limbaugh, and Haiku authoress Sarah Palin?   Well, because that’s a little too stupid.  Big GOP donors don’t work for free, you know, and somebody’s got to pay for that Free Market, after all.

So today Republicans, to great fanfare, released their “Pledge to America,” a tired, rehashed pile of manipulative, war-mongering horseshit written by a lobbyist that only aims to increase the wealth of the wealthy and the suffering of everyone else, returning to the traditional Republican ignoring of the stupid, and it went over like a fart in church, literally.  Only the wealthiest of the religious nuts like Gary Bauer found much to love about it; Erick Erickson, Laura Ingraham, and many others denounced its lack of emphasis on something they call “moral values,” while remaining guardedly optimistic about how much cash the rich (like them) were slated to rake in if it became law.

Beck, of course, amply demonstrates that the stupid on which Republicans have long depended  has now gotten a bit out of hand….  How can Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, et al survive if we really went back to 1908 tax levels?   Is it considered smart to tell a lot of stupid people that imminent loss of their jobs and homes, if they haven’t lost them already, is somehow a good thing?

It’ a long way from “Morning in America,” it seems, but in the end you have to dance with the ones that brung ya.  Good luck with that.

Troops care for troops.  Veterans care about veterans, and family members care as best they can about those among them who serve, but I’m once again feeling like a dead man walking as reports about the aimless military effort in Afghanistan are filed, along with news this week that government officials have mishandled the remains of many of those killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States may be pulling substantial forces out of Iraq,  but analysts have suggested for some time that a residual force of about 50,000 will remain indefinitely.  The much ballyhooed Afghan surge, along with the promise of a showdown with the Taliban, sounds illusory.  There appears to be a falling out between U.S. officials and Hamid Karzai, such that the Afghan leader tends to look more and more these days  like Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States’ pick as first president of the former republic of Vietnam.  Karzai (and perhaps his wise guy brothers) is said to be disillusioned with American leadership in his country and doesn’t think U.S. military tactics are working.  Reports suggest he might want to cut a deal with the Taliban and Pakistan.

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=470

It’s said the American people are tuning out on the current wars.  Yet, thousands and thousands of troops serve.  Some keep getting killed.  There’s no end in sight, and as yet, no draft.  Afghanistan has gone on longer than Vietnam.

And now, it seems some of the recent fallen slated for burial in the “sacred ground” of Arlington National Cemetery can’t be accounted for.

http://www.salon.com/news/arlington_national_cemetery_investigation/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/06/16/army_says_deputy_spent_millions

James Carroll, a Boston-based author who wrote extensively about the Vietnam War, has a piece up today on the The Daily Beast.  Carroll’s father was an Air Force general, and both of his parents are buried at Arlington.  He says:  “A military force that does not faithfully care for its fallen members is in far worse shape than even its anti-war critics imagine.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-11/the-armys-graveyard-disgrace/?cid=hp:mainpromo3

During my most desolate time, working through the meaning of service in Vietnam – for well over ten years after actually being there – I was very aware that partisans along the divide then wanted to use veterans.  The left led the charge to pillory us, and the right wanted to wrap us in the flag.  I also experienced time and again people appearing in my face, to tell me what I’d gone through and what it meant, even though they had never been there.  And so it goes.

I can relate to Odysseus, and really, it might have been more fun being a mythical Greek king.

But I was not a soldier; I was an Air Force tech who spent a year on a combat flight line in Vietnam and happened to be there for the Tet Offensive.  A year, in and out.  Thanks for the memories.

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=468

My father though spent nearly six years in the Army, from December 1939 to August 1945.  He made master sergeant in the U.S., went to OCS, and then shipped to England as a second lieutenant.  He went through Utah Beach,  and, in addition to Normandy, is credited with taking part in engagements in Northern France, the Rhineland, the Ardennes, and Central Europe.  He was in Bastogne with George Patton’s Third Army, and was among the first Allied troops to open the German border, to see and deal with the Nazi-run death and slave labor camps.  He was awarded a Bronze Star and discharged as a captain.

I had never known the whole story about my father’s actual, detailed service, because he never spoke of it.  He couldn’t.  He drank heavily over many years and lost his family.

In just the last few months I have reconnected with a cousin on my father’s side.  Her father, and another brother besides my father – three of five brothers in all – served in World War II.

I met my cousin recently, along with her father and mother.  My uncle can’t easily get away from the memories of his service either.  It’s what he relies on for conversation.  Three times during my visit he showed me some German binoculars, and told me how a kid in in an Italian port city agreed to swap them for a pack of cigarettes.

These kinds of memories are very strong for people who served, as these men did.

They can kill as well.

Turns out my uncle, my father’s last surviving brother, now 87,  saved my father’s papers, and his daughter gave them to me.

They flesh out all that I suspected about my father’s service, which was very sketchy to me when my mother and I worked on his funeral over thirty years ago.

While preparing for this reunion, to get the whole story and, very likely, to pay final respects to my uncle,  I also spoke to a veteran’s agent in the Massachusetts town where my father grew up and is buried.

I was cross-checking records with the agent, and he confirmed my father’s service record, contained in the state’s database.

Then we talked a bit.  The agent said he knew which cemetery my Dad was in, and said he would be going there over Memorial Day weekend to stick flags into the ground next to veterans’ headstones.

So the picture of my Dad and his service is complete, finally; and this gives me a chance to refresh and restore his image in the family.  He was the real thing.  Whatever anyone might think of war, he did it.  And he paid for it.

I know where my father is buried.  My family knows too.  We’ll take care of it.

Cheating comes in many forms, of course, but clearly the most successful is to simply use the government, through its only legitimate power, enforcing contract law, to kill the competition and slough off one’s costs to others.  Naturally, this option is only available to the largest, most bloated, and welfare-dependent industries; normal people with a product or service to sell must endure the slings and arrows of both the “market” and regulation, a concept which is entirely foreign to, as Karl Rove put it, “history’s actors.”  Thus, say,  a successful restauranteur must provide not just good food, but also responsible and regulated waste disposal, sanitation, and such extra things as fire exits and occupancy restrictions if the unlikely disaster were to occur, although the disaster involved is, as we can see, pretty small potatoes.  On the other hand, an oil company or an investment bank, having been lucky enough to have had considerable input in deciding which laws governing its operation were desirable or not, needn’t worry about such paltry ephemera as customer satisfaction, or even corporate, much less human, survival.  Quarterly bonuses are based on different criteria.  Nice work if you can get it, but isn’t something wrong with this picture?  The restauranteur, under the constant and unrelenting thumb of Big Government, may make a nice living and even leave a thriving business to his children, if they work hard, while the relatively unshackled CEO of some rapacious behemoth might end up both a punchline and global villain, but still walks away with enough cash to provide for at least four idle generations and to put his trophy wife’s name on an opera house, thus garnering maybe a few extra blow jobs?  Yes, it’s good to be the king, but unfortunately only for the king, as we continue to see with thudding regularity.

The “free market,” a concept I would wholly endorse if it contained any semblance of reality, has long since been beaten to a pulp by its phony proponents, and all that remains is a shrinking and increasingly remote elite that has abandoned all useful endeavor in favor of gambling, flim-flam, and the unapologetic purchase of government.   Yet a disturbingly large number still believe in the stern discipline of the market to reign in the plutocrats, against all evidence, thanks to little more than a cynical and rather unsettlingly effective marketing campaign.  If such blind and self-destructive faith-based reasoning survives such a series of discrediting catastrophes of which BP is only the latest, we can kick the notion of Democracy to the curb, once and for all.

Mission Accomplished.

Honestly, though, a Piper Cherokee vs. the IRS?  Maybe now we’ll finally win the War on Terror because Osama bin Laden laughs so hard he gets unhooked from his dialysis machine.  Such obvious points, of course, are entirely overlooked in the media as the right maniacally blames liberals, the Democrats sheepishly call for more study, and the matter is thus settled.   Do we have any civil rights left to toss on the 9/11 funeral pyre?  One can only hope.

At any rate, what we have here is part of a drearily predictable pattern of rudderless losers who, just all of a sudden, neatly applied a few things from Glenn Beck’s chalkboard and the Mt. Vernon Statement, and were off to the races.    Just like the murder of the police officers in Pennsylvania and the abortion doctor in Wichita, none of this could possibly have anything to do with the violent rhetoric spewing forth in ever-larger doses from the organized right-wing media; they report, and the crazy people watching decide.  Expect the blatant journalistic malpractice of failing to connect the two to continue even after mass casualty and high-level assassinations follow in this effluent-laden wake.

As Saint Ronnie said, “Facts are stupid things,” and at this point the facts of the Austin bomber incident would seem to fall into that category, but rest assured that we’ll never know because of the cravenness and stupidity of our “free” press.  Whatever Stack expected to accomplish by his bizarre suicidal attack, it will remain a mystery, primarily because we don’t have anyone left smart or dedicated enough to dig in to such boring minutiae.  They need a missing blonde, and they need her NOW.

It makes no difference what anyone says about flying these days because you just have to suck up all the airport rules, or don’t fly.

Tell me about it.

Having flown last week-end, just before the little terrorist wannabe tried to detonate something between his legs on a flight into Detroit on Christmas Day, I just don’t think I want to do it much anymore – unless I have to.

I flew to Cleveland from LGA/NY on Friday the 18th for a niece’s wedding and came back (under a two hour snow delay) on Sunday night.

All in all, from start to finish, I felt more like a suspect than a passenger.

Still a tech dimwit (these attacks can come at any time) and not having flown for quite a while, I was knocked back momentarily, not just by fumbling around to enter my confirmation code into the computer (Oh, y’know, just another computer protocol I never did before!  Never mind.), but by having to put up with a half-strip and shoe removal to get through security.

Was it annoying?  You tell me.

I had (I thought) removed all metal and potentially dangerous fluids from my person and my small stow bag before I left home (including my new, key ring-size Swiss Army knife), estimating on a common sense level what the TSA hound dogs might take away (No, I didn’t go online and read the entire, bloody list of forbidden items).  Anything potentially threatening, no matter how innocent in appearance, was left on my desk.

Anyway, after getting my coveted boarding pass and entering the instant hullabaloo of partially disrobing and putting clothing and the rest into plastic tubs and walking through the body metal detector, I then moved to the table to get my stuff and put my clothes back on, except there were some things TSA felt they needed to seize anyway.

One guy, standing near the X-ray over the conveyor and poking through my wool jacket, waved a three-inch nail file at me and said, “Uh-uh, can’t have that!”  And while I was putting on my shoes, a TSA gal peered at a plastic bottle of hair cream in my bath kit and said,  “Oh, we’ll have to take that too.”

“What?  It’s hair cream!  In a squeeze bottle!”

“It’s eight ounces.  Too much.”

Down the rabbit hole it all went, as I imagined myself commandeering a flight to, of all places, Cleveland, Ohio – armed with a squirt bottle of hair cream and a three-inch nail file.  In the annals of American aviation, stranger things have happened.

Unfortunately, while all this was going on, I noticed that I couldn’t find my house key, which I had put on one – ONE – small key ring.  No car keys.  No keys to my five thousand padlocks.  No keys to my various safe deposit boxes, scattered in ten major international cities.  No keys to my several secret boudoirs and romantic hideaways.  No keys to the various steamer trunks which, back in the day, accompanied me and my entourage during my many first-class voyages on the Queen Mary – to Africa, the Continent, and the Riviera.

Just one key on one small ring, along with underwear and a change of clothes for two days.

By this time I was upset, starting to feel like a suspect; but I had to ask:  “Where is my key?”

All the TSA people looked at me as if I had three ears, and I very quickly got a response which seemed to imply that I had lost my keys.

I asked:  “Where is my key?  It went through X-ray and now I can’t find it.  Can you help?”

They kept looking at me strangely while searching other people.

“I can’t find my key!  It went through the conveyor, but I don’t have it.  Can you look, please?”

So they tried, while a supervisor asked me where I put it, and did I put it in my shoes?

“I don’t remember.  I took my clothes off, put my cell phone in the tub, and my key, and everything else.  It’s my house key!”

“Did you check your shoes?”

“I have them on.  I can’t feel anything.”

Back and forth it went for a minute or so, while the TSA guy who seized my nail file looked at the X-ray screen, saying there was a key detected.  The supervisor confirmed this sighting.

Other passengers moved along; some glaring at me.  I turned to another guy who was putting his shoes back on, and I said, “You know, I took the train from Connecticut, the subway from Grand Central, and a Queens bus to get here.  That was kind of fun.  This is not fun.”  He smiled.

I took off my shoes again.  I looked in one and saw the key, and realized it must have nestled under the arch of my foot.  I took it out and waved it at the TSA supervisor.

“I found it!!!  Never mind!”  As I smiled sheepishly, the entire TSA crew rolled their eyes.

I moved out, got a cup of coffee and a muffin and took a break.

A few minutes later, I went back to the supervisor to clarify how to get to my gate, which was on another level.  He was very helpful, though still somewhat defensive.

“Understand, sir, we know what we’re doing; we’ve had this sort of shoe incident happen before.”

“Oh no doubt.  Weaponized shoes and all that.  Right.  Thanks for the help.  Happy Holidays.”

I made my flight and the one back on Sunday night.  But with it all, and with the news that further security protocols may, for instance, prevent passengers from even reading a book or a newspaper within an hour of landing, flying is not something I’ll be wanting to do too soon.

I refuse to feel like a suspect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFW6NHbWX0E

No, he doesn’t sound sure of himself and, despite donning his CIC chain mail for a speech at West Point, he may be be projecting weakness, just as Dick Cheney, our great, snarling former vice president, says he is.

But there may be more to it than simply cowering under Cheney’s glare, or because of the messy table which Bush and Cheney left behind.

Oh?!!  Why?

I read a stray story over the week-end about the Kennedy assassination; and the writer put forth the “grassy knoll” theory, supported by the famous Zapruder film from that time, which seemed to show at least one other shooter than Lee Harvey Oswald that day in Dallas in November 1963, a shooter who blasted a hole in the front right of Kennedy’s head as he sat in his limo, cruising through Dealey Plaza – a wound which, according to the writer, suggested a CIA conspiracy to kill the president.

Here’s another take on the Kennedy/CIA dynamic from another writer, James Douglass:

http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/12/02/james-w-douglass/

So the question raised by some is whether, in the eyes of certain people in the government, Kennedy wasn’t tough enough at the time (thus, the assassination), and – considering Obama’s dilemmas and our current wars – whether the new Democratic president, and his CIA chief, Leon Panetta, are now fearful of the CIA.

Well, gosh, I don’t know about that; but, as far as Afghanistan is concerned, it sure looks like it’s in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Cheney, in his latest armchair generalisimo comments on Obama’s leadership, has denied that he or his former boss are responsible for any backsliding in Afghanistan, just as they keep saying they kept us safe and did everything right in Iraq, including, presumably, crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s legally.

And as the Obama war policy for Afghanistan is rolled out, sure-as-shootin’, the national media will treat it all in its usual “he said, he said” manner, giving Cheney his due, tit for tat.

Yet, about Iraq, there’s more going on today, debate-wise, than many Americans may be aware of (maybe even Cheney), since there are, even six years after the invasion, new questions being asked about that war.

But the questions are not being asked here.  Can’t have that.  They’re being asked in London, at the Chilcot hearings.

Over the week-end, Jeremy Greenstock, the former UK ambassador to the UN,  said the Bush administratoin was “hell bent” on invading Iraq and didn’t want to wait for a second UN resolution on the matter.  This is not news really, but Greenstock drove the point home that, even today, while the invasion might – might - be seen as legal in a narrow sense, it was not legitimate politically because a wider consensus within the UN was never established.

Also this week-end, the Chilcot hearings heard that the former attorney general to Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, wrote opinions in 2002 which questioned the legality of a proposed, preemptive US/UK invasion of Iraq.

http://www.docudharma.com/diary/17534/iraq-war-inquiry-day-four

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6938002.ece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/27/truth-uk-guilt-iraq-chilcot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/01/iraq-memo-smoking-gun-goldsmith

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/vickiwoods/6673300/Chilcot-Iraq-hearings-An-inquiry-with-everything.-.-.-except-answers.html

As Kurt Vonnegut would say:  And so it goes …