“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.

First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one.  Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President.  Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.”  Well,  that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq.  He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague.  (Unlikely to happen…  Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…)  This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.

My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.”   You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you.  No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity.  Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)

Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”

She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook.  Who said there’s no honor among thieves?

As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting.  As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly.  That’s why they call it fiction.”  Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.

Really.  Is it news anymore when President Obama morphs into a smarter and more polished Bush, and the media eat it up?  Admittedly, he chooses his sets and costumes more understatedly, and avoids the sort of mangled and often unwittingly inflammatory scripts that eventually made Bush the most hated President in decades, at home and abroad, but the message, and certainly the outcomes, haven’t changed a bit.  As Glenn Greenwald and many others have tirelessly pointed out, in many ways on matters that are always called “National Security,” but are really merely covers for the militarization of America, Obama is every bit as bad as Bush, and often worse when it comes to toleration of dissent (from anyone who doesn’t happen to be a Joint Chief, that is…).  Obama’s acquiescence to these policies, given that he ran against not a few of them, was bad enough, but his later gleeful embrace of them as he headed into what he obviously thought would be a cakewalk reelection, has put him off his game.

On matters large and small, Obama has cast aside the concerns of “The Professional Left” for so long that even a purely theatrical gesture like this one comes as something of a gift at this point, and a tacit admission that the most rabid chickenhawks can be crossed for once is certainly welcome, but is it enough?  The plain fact is that Obama’s worst failures that endanger his reelection all have to do with his constantly surrendering to and thereby legitimizing the worst and stupidest of Republican policies from the Bush years.  Bad policies do, in the end, make bad politics, and Obama is reaping the whirlwind, deservedly, for failing to repudiate them each day.

Had he chosen to look both backward and forward involving the myriad crimes of his predecessors, many of today’s loudest and most strident critics would be in jail.  Had he chosen to prosecute the banksters, same thing, with the added benefit that all Americans, even teabaggers, would have benefitted substantially.  Had he forthrightly and openly backed Medicare for all, he might not have gotten shellacked in 2010.  But worst of all, out of either foolishness or cynicism, he inexplicably adopted the ridiculous rhetoric about the Federal Budget being just like the Family Budget, and therefore couldn’t buy just any old thing in tough times, and the public bought it.   Sadly, for him and the Military Industrial Complex he so ably leads, what the long-suffering public decided it didn’t want to buy anymore was more wars.

Since he can’t run on the economy, healthcare, civil rights, choice, or what have you, he has decided, rather oddly, to run on Peace, and fear of the Republicans.  I suppose it’s better than nothing, but is it really any different, with 70,000 troops still there for at least two years, than Dick Cheney saying, “So what,” albeit  a bit more delicately?  I don’t think so.

Maybe that’s why they’ve joined the new Republican Peace Movement; as a belated gesture to the literate Americans that sorry publication has lost in droves over the years, and in so doing confidently assuming that a left-handed show of abandoning its tiresome warmongering might do the trick.  I’ve got news, you craven, snobby Brits….  It won’t work, and that’s only half the story.

In terms of being wrong about everything, The Economist has given Bill Kristol a run for his money over the last ten years, and as Bob Haldeman memorably put it, that toothpaste is hard to get back in the tube.  At least over at Fox News, they have the advantage of appealing to the stupid, who are a lot more forgiving of even the grossest errors, but The Economist heretofore relied on its snobby, faux-erudite, well, elitism, to put the exact same contemptible bullshit over.  To the wrong people.  I can’t be the only one who, halfway the third long and boring essay about the wonders of the Bush Tax Cuts and/or the evils of regulation, sorely regretted buying such a crummy piece of low-rent propaganda and vowed never to do so again. Their annoying and intrusive advertising at Salon and elsewhere further cemented my undying hostility and lack of respect for them, even from a marketing and business standpoint, since their undoubtedly expensive advertising would be more wisely placed in the Murdoch media.  (They’d probably get a discount, to boot.  Especially on Beck’s show…)

Previously, I was inclined to be opposed to this, as all other, wars.  As a rule, I don’t believe in American Exceptionalism raining from the skies in the form of bombs.   But now that the Economist has put on the love beads and patchouli, I’m tempted to buy a Hummer, adorn it with flags, and go out cruising for hippies to run over.

Well, it seems that those danged Libyans are perhaps already the next grateful recipients of America’s Love Bombs, as we’ve brusquely pushed aside the momentarily dominant cheese-eating surrender monkeys themselves, the French, within a few hours, to “take the lead” in the latest attack on perennial enemy of all that is white and gas-guzzling, the dreaded BPWO, or Brown People With Oil.  That is, the US military, led by Constitutional Law Professor Barack Obama, has once again abruptly noticed some transgression or other that we routinely commit ourselves, and used that excuse to have the US military go in and make sure the oil stays in the right hands while they tend, as it were, to the  faux “humanitarian” crisis.  Bombs are, as you’d expect, involved.  Yee haw.

Doesn’t this stuff ever get old?  I mean, old in the sense of the two other wars we’re busily and expensively losing that everyone suddenly seems to have forgotten?   Unlike new consumer products that have lost their charm and are thus headed unmourned for the landfill, wars never go away these days; they just accumulate, like the plastic Texas (or Rhode Island, depending) size island floating somewhere in the Pacific.  Meanwhile lives are ended and/or shattered, terrorism gains new fuel, resources are irretrievably wasted, and a once-great society descends into ham-fisted, penny-pinching oligarchy for no apparent gain, outside of a few already large fortunes increased.  Oil always prices keep going the same way, generally at an even faster rate.  Mission Accomplished?

At least in the earlier wars, a little more effort, and certainly much more time, was put into making people feel good about sacrificing their future to enter, prosecute, and some conveniently distant day, make the middle class and poor pay for the glory of it all.  Contentious UN votes and speeches created some semblance of popular involvement in such a drastic choice, and large peace rallies were held, all to little practical, but at least some comfortingly symbolic, effect.  This time though, they didn’t even bother.  We’re just once again at war, and why and for how long is really none of our business, and even on Al Jazeera, where I got the news, nobody questioned this.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have repeatedly noted, war is just another of the many major public policy decisions that have been, informally during the Bush years, but increasingly aggressively during the tragically misnamed era of Hope and Change in which we now live, simply removed from the realm of things about which ordinary Americans have any say.  Tax policy, always favoring the rich and well connected, are just as sacrosanct as programs that actually benefit anyone are suspect; indeed the very concept of what government really is has been utterly lost as the monster that has replaced it just rumbles along despite wide disapproval from its citizens.  At one time not all that long ago, it was still possible to believe that a single person’s vote could make a difference…  Later, in 2008, it briefly seemed that at least a whole lot of people’s vote could.  But as we roll into 2012, we find, maybe with pained resignation, that no matter what the voters think, government has already long since chosen its course, and if we don’t like it, we can pound sand.

Austerity at home, and bombing abroad, year ten.

UPDATE: Well, I of course had to go to AlJazeera again to see it, but in an otherwise smarmy, dismissive and infuriatingly unenlightening presser with some Pentagon flack named William Gortney, I found out not only that a bunch of things in the “battle space” had been “flattened,” but that one of our dizzyingly numerous missiles now being deployed is called, “The Growler.”

Despite its millions of inhabitants, L.A. is one of the loneliest places on earth; life’s greatest triumphs and tragedies are more than likely to occur in one’s car as the palm-dotted urban blight rolls past like the scenery in a dystopian Fred Flintstone cartoon.  The fact that it’s sunny and 70 at Thanksgiving is cold comfort indeed, when few bother to enjoy it anymore as they run themselves ragged trying to keep up with the daunting costs, both financial and spiritual, of living in a place never meant for human habitation and, like New York, overpopulated with rich celebrities and the social corrosion and inequity they always produce.

On Christmas Day I put the pedal to the metal (traffic was unusually light) to get out of there and go home, and I’ve never regretted it.  Unfortunately, no matter where we lived, neither Counting Crows nor I could point to any evidence that, since 1996 anyway, “this” year ever turned out to be better than the last; it’s been kind of downhill from there by any measure.  Who can forget the impeachment, the 2000 elections, September 11, the “War on Terror,” the 2004 elections, “impeachment is off the table,”  FISA, and Hope and Change turning, inexorably, into neither.  The list goes on…  No year of the last fifteen has been anything but worse.  But as I always say, the only thing you can control about this situation is your attitude.

As the New Year dawns, I look somewhat guiltily to the fact that, for me at least, business is good (though it may never return to Boom levels), I’m back in the town that I love, and though it’s colder than a witch’s tit, at least it isn’t raining sideways, and I do have furs.  More broadly, the so recently ascendant “small government” crowd has already been laid low by its ineptitude at handling a few global warming-induced blizzards, is cracking up over letting “teh ghey” invade CPAC, and is headed for an epic FAIL in uniting its corporatists and populists once in power.

There is a possibility, however slim, that “this year will be better than the last,” and I’m holding onto it.   Stranger things have happened.

Hag — (Gotta give him credit for calling me by my first name, anyway…)

Moments ago, the Senate voted to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Well, thanks to crusading liberals like Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Robert Gates, and the overwhelming majority of all other Americans supporting such an overdue effort, they did.  And?

When that bill reaches my desk, I will sign it, and this discriminatory law will be repealed.

Whew.  Given your recurring capitulations to the right, I was afraid you might finally make a veto threat, about five too late, but thanks for taking pen in hand.

Gay and lesbian service members — brave Americans who enable our freedoms — will no longer have to hide who they are. The fight for civil rights, a struggle that continues, will no longer include this one.

Yeah, but thanks to you, everyone but the very rich are still well and truly fucked, as well as anybody who gives a rat’s ass about “our freedoms,” but I know you never liked me for my brains in the first place.

This victory belongs to you. Without your commitment, the promise I made as a candidate would have remained just that.

You mean, like all the other ones?

Instead, you helped prove again that no one should underestimate this movement. Every phone call to a senator on the fence, every letter to the editor in a local paper, and every message in a congressional inbox makes it clear to those who would stand in the way of justice: We will not quit.

We?  You’re including yourself in this group?  I hope the Secret Service is about to walk in with a great big silky garment bag, because otherwise, this shtick isn’t going over.

This victory also belongs to Senator Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and our many allies in Congress who refused to let politics get in the way of what was right.

Also?  For your information, like everything else you’ve “accomplished” over the last two years, those two were the ones who stood up for “politics” in the real sense, that is, representing the people who elected them.  You, on the other hand, have squandered your mandate, alienated your base, and made permanent the horrendous policies of your universally despised predecessor, because you’ve chosen “politics” over what was “right,” or even potentially effective, every time, and boy oh boy, did that turn out to be dumb.  (See Shellacking, The….)

Like you, they never gave up, and I want them to know how grateful we are for that commitment.

They haven’t given up yet, which says a lot more about them than you.  Both have been politically damaged, and Pelosi lost her speakership, due to your utter failure to use your bully pulpit and your self-destructive servility to their, and the American people’s,  political enemies.

Will you join me in thanking them by adding your name to Organizing for America’s letter?

No, I’d prefer to thank them personally.

I will make sure these messages are delivered — you can also add a comment about what the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” means to you.

Ah, you’re suddenly allowing comments?  It’s tempting, admittedly.

As Commander in Chief, I fought to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because it weakens our national security and military readiness. It violates the fundamental American principles of equality and fairness.

As Commander in Chief, you could have eradicated the policy in January 2009, if you felt so strongly about it.  You didn’t.

But this victory is also personal.

Really?  This better be good.

I will never know what it feels like to be discriminated against because of my sexual orientation.

But I know my story would not be possible without the sacrifice and struggle of those who came before me — many I will never meet, and can never thank.

Uh, a lot of the people you could thank happen to be (inconveniently) still alive, but you’re already in their spam files, so they’re missing this little missive.

I know this repeal is a crucial step for civil rights, and that it strengthens our military and national security. I know it is the right thing to do….

That may well be, but since you also think that it’s just dandy for our military and our “national security” that we should continue to expand our wars all over the globe and bomb, torture, and kill whomever we please, for whatever (usually secret) reason, I naturally take your opinions with a rather large grain of salt.

Thank you,

Barack

Barack?  Thanks, but I’d prefer to call you Mr. President, if only you’d help me out and act like one.  Otherwise, get thee to the furrier.

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

Trouble is, of course, that mass genocide is problematic, both logistically and politically, and as such a whole lot of human beings unworthy of consideration stubbornly continue to exist, seemingly out of spite.  Take the world’s billion or so Muslims:  ”They” attacked us on 911, and as such no threat of national bankruptcy can deter us from teaching them a lesson, using bombs, drones, invasions, broomsticks, and buckets of water  as visual aids, and when they’re slow on the uptake, bring in the dogs.  War is peace, and don’t you forget it.  Chickenhearted fretting about the inevitable blowback is dismissed out of hand, and the cost, what cost?  Apparently, the “small government” righties so relentlessly fetishize can afford to have lots of wars going on while enforcing deep austerity at home, even though thousands of years of history say no.

In an interesting little video speech of Jay Rosen talking about Fox News that Balloon Juice linked to over the weekend, Rosen outlined the ease with which right-thinking Americans are taught to forget what happened five minutes ago, at five-minute intervals, and thus continue to hold their rather counterintuitive but yet startlingly consistent beliefs.  Though Rosen lapses into a lot of boring self-indulgence in his 15-minute lecture, he hits on an important truth:  what is actually happening on any given day is incidental to the right, since the story told will always be the same.  Those elitist liberals and dirty darkies are at it again, and here’s why you should be resentful, and continue watching Fox to feel better.

Some sharp-eyed liberal smarty called this drearily familiar phenomenon “epistemic closure,” and ought to be permanently silenced for it.  What it is, you don’t need a sheepskin from Harvard to see; a bunch of craven and self-interested malefactors of great wealth have bought up huge chunks of the public discourse and with it a thriftily  slim majority of our elected officials, and they have a neat and ever expanding fairy tale to explain why this is a good thing for people who think “epistemic” has to do with boils or something.  These people are being systematically taught to reject all “facts” as some sort of liberal plot, and keep clicking their heels and visualizing Kansas, even as their puppet masters laugh all the way to their eighth vacation  home (via Gulfstream).

Republican policies, which above all favor the wealthiest over everyone else, always tend to make most Americans angry and insecure, so Republican politics, since they’ve been in such ascendance these past dozen or so years, are now about channeling that understandable anger into electing more Republicans, usually by declaring that non-Republican people are just bad, and no attention should be paid to them.  They call liberals naive Utopians and whatnot, but yet their own unbroken and provable record of failure is airily dismissed because the despised and un-American liberals stood in the way of their greatest achievements, and next time they’ll get it right, you’ll see.

No Republican has ever balanced a budget in my entire lifetime, and no Democrat has ever markedly increased it, but the Republicans are the party of Fiscal Responsibility.  The stock market, under Democratic Presidents, has performed markedly better than under Republican misrule, but the Republicans are the party of prosperity.  Abortions go up under Republican Presidents and down under Democratic ones, but the Republicans are the “pro-life” party.  No Republican has ever won a war (since that man, Lincoln, anyway), but the Republicans are the biggest, baddest, thing going on the world stage.   No Republican has ever advanced a policy whose benefits would even peripherally redound the the non-rich majority, but they call the Democrats “elitist.”

It isn’t easy living with so many flagrant contradictions, but it is easier when you believe, as the Red Queen said, many “impossible things” before breakfast.  That’s why God made “Fox and Friends.”  If Miss America believes it, it must be true, especially so early in the morning.

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.