“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” said the diplomat. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

Well, then.  The “diplomat,” who doesn’t sound particularly diplomatic to me, is Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to the EU.  Earlier, in response to Iran’s hardly surprising threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to even stiffer sanctions, he said this:

“The strait of Hormuz needs to remain open and we need to maintain this as an international passageway,” he told the BBC. “We will do what needs to be done to ensure that is the case.”

Of course, Daalder justifies such acts of war against Iran because of its still-hypothetical nuclear program, and the force of the related “Killin’ Habibs for Jesus” foreign policy from George Bush and Fox News that Obama has eagerly adopted for his own.  No matter the vast majorities of Americans opposed to any more wars, the Hope and Change campaign is in an election year, which means, ironically, no Hope and no Change, when it comes to chicken-hawkery.

Since no other American media figure will do so, with the notable exception of Glenn Greenwald and a few others, let’s look at this, just for a moment, from Iran’s perspective, if only hypothetically:

CHNN: So, Abdul, why do all you dusky-hued sand niggers want nukes?

ABDUL: So you fat whiteys won’t bomb us and steal our oil.

CHNN:  That couldn’t possibly be the reason.  Isn’t it really because you hate our freedoms?

ABDUL:  What freedoms?

CHNN:  Never mind about that.  Next, we go to Pamela Geller….

It’s useless.  Now that “American Exceptionalism” has become our national religion, even the ostensibly “liberal” politician pretending to be president must beat the war drums until we as a nation are left limbless and caterwauling like the guy in the Monty Python movie.  Unlike politicians, ordinary people can see that we never “win” wars, we just have them, and pay for them with our futures.  And unlike media stars who “cover” our overlords, we actually care if their ballooning expenses are bankrupting us.  Sadly, wars, like every other major decision we as a country make, have been moved upstairs, and nobody has any say in the matter except those who profit from them.  Democrat, Republican, it doesn’t matter; the latter will loudly demand more wars and more money for them, while the former will do so too, only more, uh, diplomatically.

One dreadful consequence of the current Republican disarray, for ordinary people anyway, is that it leaves Obama free to pick useless, unwinnable fights hither and yon while everyone’s busy snickering at his opponents.  The worst is that nobody cares, and why would they?

Orwell must be rolling over in his grave.

“Why would you normalize trade with a country that sponsors terror?” the candidate asked a crowd of supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “There is (sic) reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you are 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. ”

Really? Hezbollah, a ragtag band of lightly armed Habibs scattered across a few faraway repressive countries, is going to team up with Iran and and go all Kruschev on us, putting MISSILE SITES from the nukes Iran may or may not ever have a mere ninety miles away.  Not to offend Sarah Palin or anything, but the very idea is, well, retarded.  Close to the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard; is there no bottom limit to the utter implausibility of things Republicans say?  I watched the clip of her entire demented and excruciating ten-minute speech, and I have mercifully decided not to post it, but more on that later.

You see, to people on the over-the-cliff right like Bachmann, Cuba is the sponsor of terrorism, despite the fact that we harbored for many years the actual Cuban terrorist, CIA flunkie Orlando Bosch, who killed 73 people on a Cuban airliner, just to show that nasty Fidel a thing or two.  (President GHW Bush even pardoned the poor thing in 1990 for his 1976 bombing).  But to Bachmann and her rapt audience, terrorism has a color, a mixture of red and brown, and the only answer is to continually kick it to the curb, no matter how ridiculous the persecution fantasies you have to indulge to get there.  In her world, Islamofascists can turn overnight into Islamocommies, and it’s just tomato, tomahto.  They’re bad, alright?

As is so often with Bachmann, she is just spouting the latest loony thing she heard from the craziest righties in America who flock to her appearances; she bragged about how she just spent time with the (increasingly nursing home-bound) anti-Castro Cubans in Florida, who will continue to party like it’s 1959 until they go to their graves, and thought they must be onto something as they gummed their jello.  In the real world, of course, most Cuban Americans would favor reduced travel and trade restrictions, and at any rate Fidel will soon tip over, but though it is unlikely that Havana will turn into Houston overnight, is this something the right still needs to wax apocalyptic over?

Of course it is.  At this point, the political and economic orthodoxies of the Republican Right are so toxic, destructive, and demonstrably calamitous, that the only way to continue to sell them is to blame their inevitable results some hated brown people or other, and then go after said other with guns (literally, often) a’blazing.  Everything, and I mean everything, is a racially-tinged apocalypse these days, with the glaring exception of the real apocalypses unfolding before our eyes, like the global looting of public treasuries by an unaccountable elite, the systematic destruction of the environment by that same elite, and corrupt governments throughout the “free” world regularly turning to police state tactics against their suffering citizens.

But Michele Bachmann thinks we ought to worry about the Second Coming of the Cuban Missile Crisis, instead.  Worse, her supporters have an entirely different Second Coming in mind, and they’re clearly dumb enough to believe in both.  To illustrate, she points out, accurately, that before Ronald Reagan was President, we were a creditor nation, but yet now we’re a debtor nation because Obama is President, confident that her audience has no clue what happened in the intervening years to change that, since they’ve been so fully narcotized by FOX, Limbaugh et al, that they just nod approvingly.

If you have the stomach, watch:  The video is up at Raw Story. (She looks disturbingly attractive and may even have false eyelashes on; she means business….)  Would she be the running mate for Romney that could pull in the stupid vote?  I fear the answer might be yes.  She’s dumb enough, she’s crazy enough, and dammit, people like her.

Suddenly every right-wing think tank is casting about for new wars and the rich vein of taxpayer money that can be tapped with them; one day it’s the dangers of the new START treaty with Russia, the next it’s sticking it to the Chinese, and every so often, they reach for the real gold ring of full spectrum dominance, War with Iran.  They try to keep this on the down low, of course; one is reminded of the universally negative reaction to then-presidential candidate John McCain tonelessly croaking “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” before an addlepated, warmongering supporter in 2008.  Lindsay Graham, that pasty and effeminate Fox News “liberal” Republican, though, is finally coming out (no, not that way…), and just like in the disco song, he wants the world to know; he wants to let it show:  (h/t Raw Story for AFP article…)

The United States faces a possible war with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions and a “period of confrontation” with China over its currency, a top US lawmaker warned Saturday.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said his fellow conservatives, fresh from their historic elections romp this week, support “bold” action to deal with Iran.

Always watch out when Republicans propose something they call “bold.”  As we learned during the Bush years, “bold” tends to be synonymous with “stupid,”  which would be like, say, proposing to take on the Chinese while simultaneously asking them to finance another of our losing vanity wars, but no matter.  Lindsay goes on from there….

If President Barack Obama “decides to be tough with Iran beyond sanctions, I think he is going to feel a lot of Republican support for the idea that we cannot let Iran develop a nuclear weapon,” he told the Halifax International Security Forum.

It’s official.  The Republicans, who have jealously guarded made-up Executive Supremacy regarding foreign policy, feel that way only when they’re running it, and have thus, well, changed their minds about that now that Obama is President, which last time I checked, he still is.  Of course, Graham is also in the Senate, where he remains in the minority, and even the craziest teabaggers elected in the House largely avoided the subject in their campaigns, but these are Republicans, after all, and they just like wars, the more the better.  Never mind that the wars are about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse, to which Graham vaguely alludes, even as he dismisses such chickenhearted naivete:

“The last thing America wants is another military conflict, but the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran… Containment is off the table.”

According to Lindsay and his ilk, the “world” always “needs” us to keep bombing parts of it forever, even if it means we have to live like Somalians to pay for it.  He has no plans to participate personally, natch.

The South Carolina Republican saw the United States going to war with the Islamic republic “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.”

Now, if I were half as big of a fruitcake as Miss Graham, I wouldn’t run around tossing out the “n” word, but as you can see, the chickenhawks are on a roll here, and they’re throwing caution to the wind.  It’s as though they really want us to live like the Soviets did in the 70′s, sacrificing a decent standard of living for the Imperial pipe dreams of a bunch of discredited theorists who don’t give a tinker’s damn what happens to anyone but themselves and their cronies, and they think people will tolerate grinding austerity at home to pay for lavish misadvantures abroad, indefinitely.  Recent history, which includes the current cranking up of the Legacy Project with Bush’s inane and self-justifying “book,” certainly could lead to such bizarre delusions, but the military realities couldn’t be more clear.  As much as Americans seem to love war, we can’t afford any more of them, and we always lose, anyway.

If this is the Republican 2012 strategy, I would say “Bring it on,” but with the ever-capitulating Obama Administration, it just might work.

That’s what’s so remarkable about the situation we’re in right now; pretty much all of our problems that we face as a country stem from the simple fact that we spend HALF of our money each year trying to (often successfully) kill people we don’t know, in case they might try to kill us, and getting a lot of our own people killed in the process.  Is that smart?  Is this a country, or a mink farm?  As usual, in both wars, arms we sold to our last best friend got turned against us, so we showed them what’s what by buying a whole lot more.  Children conduct snowball fights with a more sophisticated strategy, and snow is, unlike the weapons we employ, free, and nobody dies.

Murtha, unlike his many Republican critics that suddenly emerged when he “prematurely” called out the Iraq War as a fraud and a disaster with no conceivable goal in sight in 2005, was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam, and although defense contractor dough had long since gummed up his spending priorities, he still could spot a deadly, pointless meat-grinder when he saw one, and then by defending himself against their cowardly attacks repeatedly revealed the neocons as the chickenhawk pussies they were and are.  And he did.  Sadly, the Democrats, who owe their 2006 and 2008 victories in part to outspoken antiwar Democrats like Murtha, clearly didn’t listen to him, or to the rest of the people who are quite aware that war costs a whole lot of money that might be better spent elsewhere, no matter what nonsense you read in the Washington Post or hear from David Gregory.

As a country, we’ve simply been sold a pig in a poke so obvious that we have to either admit our error now or literally go down the tubes trying to apply lipstick.  Sarah Palin has some experience in that area, and look… here she is.  She says Iran ought to be next, and didn’t even have to write that one on her hand, which I find rather disturbing.  Evidently, the current wars haven’t bankrupted us quite enough for the evergreen Republican Utopia to look good by comparison, so Sarah has spit out the teabaggers and reached for the Kristol Pistol and the Cheney Dick.  For Sarah, this is pretty much a lateral move, but for the teabaggers, not to mention normal Americans, it sucks.  (I hereby promise not to carry that metaphor any further…  CHNN has had a run on barf bags lately…)

Wars are now bipartisan again, just as they were when Murtha opened his jowly mouth, and worse, the right has decided that even two couldn’t possibly be enough, and no Democrat has yet called them insane.  If you ask me,  Murtha picked a good time to die.

Iran, of course, is the current target, but does it even matter?  Wars no longer function in the traditional sense; to be fought and won or lost, then ended.  Wars today are media events designed to gin up false patriotism and media acquiescence, while enriching those who’ve invested in them.  As Orwell predicted so presciently, they aren’t intended to be won, only to be permanent.  Old wars, never to be won, but merely not ignominiously lost, must be out of necessity periodically rebranded, and when they finally get too shopworn for even that, the cheerleaders roll out the new season, with its same cast of suspiciously familiar villains, just like on Dragnet.  What happens on the battlefield is immaterial; wars have become our televised bread and circuses, and the elites who plan and profit from them care little about such minutia, in the deliciously “heads we win, tails you lose” game they have going.

Dick Cheney is perhaps the apotheosis of this genocidal bet-hedging; the oil would be nice, but even if he doesn’t get it, it can’t hurt to get rich trying.  Huge military contractors like GE “diversifying” into owning television networks is almost as transparent an outrage, but equally uncommented upon, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  Though the Selling of the Pentagon is a practice, consuming an ever-escalating budget and ever more elaborate deceptions, that is as old as I am, it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that it is so, well, out of the closet these days.  The sell job has obviously worked entirely too well.

Today, Gen. McChrystal essentially defied the current and even prospective decisions of his ostensible Commander-in-Chief, and said that he would neither reduce troops or redefine the latest hothouse-cultivated “objective” in Afghanistan, because he quite evidently assumes that this is “his” war, Obama and the American people be damned.  And the media gasbags, so overcome at the effrontery of Rep. Grayson’s impermissible truth-telling yesterday that they were still noticeably under the influence of smelling salts when a military coup like that just passed them by, are undoubtedly clucking in eager assent.  Wars, you see, which will henceforth start when somebody says so and last until we’re told they’re over, are clearly no longer our business as Americans, who know what our pay grades, and theirs, mean.

This reality was disturbing enough when it could plausibly be attributed to a rogue administration that would inevitably be checked by our vaunted constitutional “system,” which would surely turn out the miscreants electorally, and prosecute them criminally in the fullness of time.  (Like in Iran/Contra, right?)  Now that we have found, with dumbfounding swiftness and finality, that it is no longer possible through mere elections not only to stop the current wars, but even attempt to prevent additional ones, you have to wonder whether it was worth the bother  to participate at all.  No majority is large enough to stop the wars, but no amount of PR hogwash will ever win them, either, so the only answer is to keep starting them, forever.  And here we are.  You’re next, Iran, but please don’t take it personally;  we need you more than you need us.

It’s days like these that I wish I believed in the Rapture.*

*Somewhat differently configured…

It started off in the usual way, her “quarry,” Reza Pahlavi, a less handsome ringer for his dictator papa, the Shah, was just the sort of vermin you’d find scurrying around the mop boards when things are “in play” in Iran, and he looked more than ready to play Bugs Bunny to Solomon’s Elmer Fudd.  But then, things went off the rails.  Solomon asked actual questions.  Even some rather rude ones, by which I mean relevant.  I could hardly believe my eyes when her first question, which pretty much pegged him as the Ahmed Chalabi of of the “real men go to Tehran” set, finished with, “What do you do on a day-to-day basis, exactly?”

Of course,  ol’ Reza then coughs up some laughable drivel about democracy and separation of church and state, things the heir to the Peacock Throne obviously takes about as seriously as Dick Cheney takes a subpeona, but never mind.  Reeling, because everybody told him all she’d ask about was his dog, or maybe his shoes, Pahlavi must have just about tipped over when the next three questions basically nailed the glaringly obvious fact that he was, of course, continuing a decades-long, CIA assisted, intermittently US government supported, campaign for somebody, anybody, to get him his damned throne back.  He lied of course, and rudely, but danged if Solomon, in what must be a career first, called him on it.  ”Why would you call your decades of living near Washington ‘temporary’?”  This time he told the truth, he was so gobsmacked.  ”Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.”  And Washington is the only place on earth so kooky and corrupt as to actually make that happen.  Though on a roll, Solomon does not point that out, but she doesn’t have to.

At this point Pahlavi was probably already on his cell phone calling out the remnants of dad’s secret police to haul this impertinent bimbo off to Cheney’s now-vacant undisclosed location and teach her a thing or two, and Solomon clearly senses this, so she goes back into Solomon mode.  Since Pahlavi evidently doesn’t have a dog, she asks about a nice subject on which they agree, that bad, bad, Ahmadinejad, religion, and blah, blah, blah.  His cheesy, rehearsed answers for this crap are what he had on his note cards, so he can hang up the phone.  Things seem back on track.

But then Solomon asks about the secret police.  Really.  Like Obama, Pahlavi wants to focus on the future and not that icky past, but incredibly, Solomon persists, quite unlike her White House counterparts. “You don’t feel obligated to acknowledge your father’s misdeeds?”  (admittedly, “misdeeds” is a mild term for it, but this is Deborah Solomon….)  Pahlavi says his dad did the right thing by going into exile, and if only Ahmadinejad would do the same, everything would be great.

But just when I was absolutely convinced that Solomon had been taken over by a pod person who was an actual journalist, she went one better, making for TWO followup questions, on the same day.  Get this… “When your father fled Tehran and went into exile, he reportedly took a lot of money with him.  Would you describe yourself today as a billionaire?”  Of course Pahlavi lies, evades, and misdirects, but it’s obvious he’s as surprised at the question as I am.

Solomon wraps up thusly:  ”Do you feel bitter about not getting to be Shah?”   Granted, the question is worded in the curious, touchy-feely sort of daytime TV-speak for which Solomon is famous, but it’s a damned good one, and you can tell he doesn’t like it one bit.  He lies, of course, but pathetically, “This is not a personal matter.  This is not about me.”  Right.

Today, Charlie Brown finally, and rather unexpectedly, kicked the football straight through the goalposts.  That’s news that’s fit to print.

I’m trying to think of a place where American bombs have resulted in anything but an embarrassing disaster for those who financed it, usually on credit, and I can’t.  When the bill comes, it’s nicer to have at least the unaffordable purchase to comfort the unwise spender.  ”I can’t afford heat, so it’s a good thing I got this mink coat.”  ”I just lost my health insurance, but at least I have a TV so big that Bill O’Reilly’s mouth looks like Lake Erie.”  Instead, we have wingnuts previously and subsequently utterly hostile to such ideas suddenly turning into feminists for Afghani women, ACT UP activists for Iranian gays, and “Fair Election” zealots who nonetheless helped Bush steal two elections and govern as though he’d won a landslide.  Bombing is good for this bunch, since it minimizes American casualties, which are the only ones that even slightly matter, looks good on TV, and makes a lot of defense contractors generous come election time.  Still, its popularity with the public remains a mystery.

Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Mogadishu, Iraq, Afghanistan…..  the list is long of pointless bombing campaigns that cost us dearly in terms of both money and moral standing, and delivered the precise opposite of their many shifting “goals.”  The last two are still costing us billions, slaughtering (albeit unimportant) things a sane person might call “people,” and doing exactly jack shit to help us, even if our only goals are grabbing power and money, which of course they are.

What’s the answer to this dilemma?  Bomb Iran.  The neocons are bored with their old war porn and need something else; we all know the feeling, but is Bill Kristol’s boner really enough to start a war for?  Sadly, a lot of dimwitted and dehumanized people seem to think so, and maybe they have a point.

By spending all our money bombing things, we won’t have any money for schools, roads, clean water and air, healthcare, or prosperity, and that immigrant problem will be solved in a big hurry.  Hell, some of the places we bombed might start to look good.  Mission Accomplished.

That’s the best I can come up with.