Is the juvenile cluelessness and stupidity of HBGary’s Aaron Barr’s IM exchange with an unnamed (but clearly smarter) coder, with his poorly spelled assertions that despite the math, he was still right, any different than G. Gordon Liddy’s elaborate charts with plans to hire hookers and blow up the Brookings Institution?  Only in scale; both were flagrantly illegal and potentially disastrous if exposed, but they both served the purpose of further empowering the powerful at the expense of everyone else, so they were, shall we say, “on the table.”  Both were immediately showered in a hail of non-denial denials from the faux-horrified higher-ups, and scapegoats were duly chosen and dispatched.

Unfortunately, 2011 is not 1974, and today one could drop a bomb on Washington and not injure anyone who is even surprised, much less outraged, at such chilling, multimillion dollar hijinks against ordinary citizens and journalists.  After all, planting fake documents with their adversaries and then loudly “discovering” they were forgeries worked pretty damn well in the more capable hands of Karl Rove when he needed to get rid of Dan Rather, so why not try it again?  Smearing progressive groups with guilt by association and doctored “evidence” was a great success in killing ACORN, so why not get the SEIU and all the rest of them next?  We can make fun of the childish bravado of Mr. Barr and and the absurd melange of venom and pearl-clutching pouring out of the Chamber of Commerce, but who laughs last?

As Glenn Greenwald, one of the operation’s chief targets, points out, the only thing unusual about this story is that we actually found out about it before the damage was done.  That generally isn’t so, as careers are ruined, punitive lawsuits are filed, and voices of dissent are routinely crushed as the comfortable, well, get comfortable-er, and the media gazes on approvingly.  After all, if it’s good for the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, only a dirty America-hating hippie could possibly be against it…   The Obama DOJ even recommended the ridiculously well-connected (scoff) law firm, Hunton and Williams, who assembled Barr’s team of Merry Pranksters, to BofA to aid in its preemptive attack on WikiLeaks, and is currently arresting hackers faster than HBGary was ever able to find them.

While it’s heartwarming to see the other firms involved in this skulduggery, like Palantir and Berico, denounce such behavior in the scathing terms their lawyers undoubtedly concocted for them, anyone who believes for a moment that they are chastened by this little episode ought to consider that this is the new normal, and nobody involved is going to jail, or even go help Jimmy Carter build houses or something.  ”Security,” devoted to squelching public opinion when it conflicts with, or worse, impedes however slightly, the aims of the elite, is the only growth industry left in post-Bush America, gobbling up the budgets of governments and corporations alike, and as everyone but the rich continue to be squeezed it will only become more “necessary.”

For a moment, the whores have been dragged into church, and as you’d expect, they’re a little nervous there.  But Saturday night is always just around the corner, and there are plenty more customers waiting.

The outright lies are always a little riskier, but not by all that much.  Take, for example, the idea that our Wall Street fellating, oil-driller coddling, war escalating President Obama is, somehow in his heart of hearts, a Kenyan anti-colonialist.  Lots of people, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were unembarrassed to pretend they believed such garbage, but Forbes Magazine, quite understandably, took quite a bit of heat for publishing Dinesh D’Souza’s execrable and delusional cover “story” about how Obama’s  (unfortunately nonexistent) “anger” stems from the sinister influence of his father, whom he barely knew and quite clearly doesn’t come within a mile of emulating.  Though even some conservatives quietly distanced themselves from such baffling nonsense, the Fox-addled, who pride themselves on never reading such elitist (and wordy, too…) publications as Forbes, undoubtedly nodded their jowly heads in hearty approval.  Ditto the horseshit about FEMA Camps, gun confiscations, reparations, and on and on.  So a few cops got killed here and there; the rich got their tax cuts, which was the important thing, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

The conjectural lies are by far the bigger problem.  From Mushroom Clouds to World Government, these cannot ever be exposed for what they are because, well, you never know, and no one in the media has the common sense and professional standards to come right out and say that whatever drastic and stupid action Republicans are about to take is based upon pure fantasy of things that will never, ever, happen.  After all, it’s conjecturally (if not exactly theoretically) possible that global warming is a myth, low taxes on the rich create prosperity, and “small” government means spending a trillion a year on “National Security,” so why not let a bunch of Republican charlatans so obviously beholden to those who profit from such ridiculous notions repeatedly say so, unchallenged, on television each day?  Fox went to court in the 90′s and won a landmark case that established that knowingly lying to one’s audience was protected under the First Amendment, and after that, Republicans were off to the races, as we’ve seen.

The best kind of conjectural lies (from the Republicans’ standpoint), and the ones that inevitably turn out to be the most damaging to Americans, are the “Opposite Day” conjectural lies, because they’re front-loaded to put Democrats into their seemingly favorite political dilemma: heads we lose, tails Republicans win.  These tend to turn out predictably, as they did when Sarah Palin, defending the current Death Panelists of the health insurance industry, said Democrats, sometime in a future of her own imaging, would cut off care to the gravely ill the way for-profit insurance companies do every day, facts be damned, and it worked.  To this day, a substantial number of people still think we have the best  health care in the world, when we’re 37th, and spend more than anybody else.

Health Care Reform lies, of course, are relatively minor in their harmful effects compared to much more insidious opposite day lies like, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”  Ever since those words were so repeatedly uttered, the wars they credulously cheered on have, not for nothing, radicalized a generation of Muslims around the globe, just as surely as the first Gulf War radicalized Osama bin Laden, and the resulting deadly spiral of violence inexorably worsens year after bloody year.  Never mind that it was the peaceniks, the Unserious hippies and civil-liberties absolutists who dismissed such war-mongering xenophobia as the contemptible proto-fascism it was who were right in the end; no one remembers any such helpful facts because all of them, from Ashleigh Banfield to Phil Donahue, were summarily hounded off the airwaves by the end of 2003, only to return when it was far too late.

The mother of all opposite day conjectural lies, of course, is being rolled out as we speak, in part I think to cover up for the rest of them, which is that Julian Assange of Wikileaks has “blood on his hands.”    Like most opposite day lies, this one attempts to paper over its absurdity by choosing a person who can be conveniently demonized, rather than the less-refutable principle they stand for, because that’s a lot easier.  You know the drill:  if Michael Moore/Al Gore/Insert Truth Teller Here are for it, I’m agin’.   And just like any other under-60 male (older if you’re Republican) Assange does have a sex life, which must be ripe for exploitation in some way or other, at least  if nothing better comes up.  As usual, creating comic book villains beats coming up with arguments to refute them, and thus the bloodiest hands around are now feverishly clutching their pearls at the horror of it all.

Why things that haven’t and probably will never happen are to be feared and prevented at any cost, while things that are happening, every day, are dismissed as the errant rantings of people who just don’t know any better is a question our media ought to answer, but for obvious reasons, won’t.   No one could have predicted, we’ve heard ad nauseam, what actually happened, but yet they predicted, with disastrous consequences, a lot of things that didn’t, but well, you never know.  Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but that’s still a considerably better record than most Republicans boast.

Someone ought to alert the media.

In light of the Wikileaks fiasco, I’ve gotten to thinking a lot about good ol’ Ike, who chose to use his final speech as President, a mere two and a half minutes long, to warn America that we’d end up, well, how we have ended up if we didn’t watch out.  Clearly, we didn’t watch out.  We have given up both liberty and prosperity to fatten America’s War Industry, which is, globally, about the last place where our products still rule, and the threat to Democracy  Ike warned so darkly about is no longer some faint, distant possibility, but a plain fact we live with each day.  Both parties are War Parties now, and America only survives, albeit haltingly, on war.

Take our media….  Please.  Stung by the reality of their death-dealing credulity over the last decade, the pancaked know-nothings that pollute the airwaves are in angelic unison touching manicured hands to their fevered foreheads at the audacity, the noive, if you speak Bugs Bunny, of people they don’t even know, like that Assange person, running around behind their backs and committing actual journalism.  Everyone who’s anyone knows that sort of thing simply isn’t done anymore; it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted these days, which is quite evidently a lot less work than that old way.  (see Gregory, David and Mitchell, Andrea, just for starters…)

I have to wonder what would happen on the Sunday talk shows today had, say, President Obama delivered something like Eisenhower’s 1961 speech.  Naturally, the panel would include Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and/or David Brooks, with maybe Joe Lieberman for balance.  Ike’s words, though demonstrably true, would have gone over like a fart in church in that crowd, whose very existence in such a public square not only owes itself to the military industrial complex, but to the complete capture of the purported Fourth Estate by it.

It was inevitable, really, that virtually all government spending would eventually end up in the hands of the military; no other government function is so immune to oversight and performance review, and like a bunch of Willie Suttons (selling guns instead of toting them), the sharp operators went where the money was.  You see, unlike the previous plutocrats the government lavishly sponsored from the railroad, oil, and infrastructure industries, the war industry doesn’t even have to do anything to scoop up deficit-financed dollars by the truckload; the tedious tasks of, say building a dam or a bridge that won’t fall down or getting an actual product to market have been completely eliminated.  They’ve already gone Galt, simply taking the money and running, leaving the corpses behind.  Ike, who unlike the chickenhawks of today abhorred war as one who experienced it must, saw the danger and tried to warn us, but was utterly drowned out by the  McNamaras, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Powells, (and the medal-hungry generals who served them) in the ensuing decades.

Now, we’re faced with increasing economic hardship and dire  predictions of national doom without so-called austerity for everyone but the richest, but yet the half of our “discretionary” budget that goes to fighting failed and never-ending wars remains so sacrosanct that only Ron Paul and a few lefty Democrats in congress dare to question it, even as poll after poll shows that most Americans want the wars to stop, now.  The media religiously gloss over this inconvenient truth, in increasingly crazy and obvious ways, of which Wikileaks is only the most recent example.

Just as Eisenhower predicted way back in 1961, the military industrial complex would, if left unchecked, first destroy our Democracy, and then go on to destroy our prosperity.  While Ike may have spent more time on the golf course than President Obama (despite what you hear on Fox), he clearly did a little more thinking out there.

Few politicians are as consistently revolting as Joe Lieberman, but this little display really takes the cake.  Notice how the loathsome little Likudnik fumbles over the patently ridiculous Fox charges of treason, and instead mutters something about “espionage” as he barrels forward like Brezhnev in the old commie days, sure that any excuse could be used for tossing somebody in the Gulag; never mind the law.  Laws are whatever Joe “Leonid” Lieberman thinks they are, any given day, and they are always there solely to punish his “enemies.”

Funny, isn’t it, that here in the good ol’ USA we used to make fun of the hated commies for lying when the truth would sound better, and resorting to such clumsy and obvious efforts to control the press, but now in Privatized America, the government (and people like Lieberman) can now make a few phone calls and bring Interpol, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Amazon, and some Swiss (!) banks along to silence whomever they please, and be CHEERED ON by our utterly captured Fourth Estate for their toughness.  Hell, Joe, let’s bring in Blackwater, to boot, unless they’re too busy with all their no-bid contracts everywhere else.  Who knew you could run a police state so much better on the capitalist model?

Of course, we know that Freedom Isn’t Free, so already beleaguered (non-rich) taxpayers can expect a big bill in the mail from each one of these globe-trotting corporate behemoths for their hooker-like favors, but nobody who pals around with Joe Lieberman will ever get one.  And nobody in the green rooms of the media would ever deign to take the sorts of risks Assange and Wikileaks did, so it’s their right to be smug; it compensates for the fact that they haven’t come close to doing their jobs for at least twenty years, and some uppity nobody came along and did it for them, making them look like asses.  That alone deserves a drone attack, according to our intrepid Watchdogs of the Press.

As many others have written on this subject, including Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald, the scary part about all this is that it appears to be the global elite’s final assault on what remains of press freedom across the world; like the commies of yore, they know that their candle is burning at both ends, and like any Vegas gambler, all they need is one more chance at the table to cash out for good.  Asking them to not try it would be like asking fish not to swim.  It’s their nature.

Thomas Jefferson, who was constantly and viciously hounded by his opponents in the press, once declared that, given the choice, he’d still rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers.  Fortunately, television had not yet been invented, so that Sally Hemings story took a couple of hundred years to take off; maybe he’d feel differently today.  Nonetheless, now we find ourselves in 2010, muddling along with the latter system Jefferson decidedly didn’t want, whether or not we’d ever been asked to choose, and the “newspapers” themselves created it.

Paradoxically, the death of the Fourth Estate began with Watergate, which though it’s often considered to be a triumph of a free press over an increasingly lawless and secretive government, turned out, in the end, to be the opposite.  As a lifelong scholar of that particular scandal, my three shelves of Watergate books (not a few written in jail…) told the story we all know today: time and again, the Nixon administration used every legal tool and many illegal ones to bring a truth-telling press to heel, and they failed.  Later, though, I expanded my research into magazines of the era, and they told a different story: throughout Watergate, Nixon and his henchmen coasted to reelection, and nearly survived, by successfully stopping any number of unflattering stories, typically by going over the heads of news divisions to publishers and network executives, and this created a palpable chill in newsrooms that has reached its apotheosis today: no one today’s overpaid and heavily concentrated media even remembers what real journalism actually looked like, and those who do are too busy with the plastic surgeons to care.

The July 8, 1974 cover of Time pictured above, dated exactly one month before Nixon’s historic resignation, graphically demonstrates that even in that heady time for the power of the free press, corporate boots were already starting to stomp on journalistic heads for their failure to sufficiently “support” the government by not being so darned critical all the time.  A disturbing number of letter writers, then as now, agreed that the media had gotten out of hand, and that was all the increasingly corporatized media needed to hear; every merger (the first wave of which were spawned by Nixon’s ironically named “Newspaper Preservation Act), made the growing media monopolies less and less comfortable speaking truth to power, a tendency which has culminated in the embarrassing media uproar over Wikileaks.  Now the media have, practically unanimously, come out firmly against the very practice of journalism epitomized by Wikileaks, in favor of whatever it is they do these days to draw their unprecedentedly hefty paychecks.   Katharine Graham, who was willing to go to jail to defend her paper’s right to challenge the government, must be rolling over in her grave.

Therein lies the rub…  The most fanatical denunciations of Wikileaks come not just from the usual suspects, i.e. right-wing politicians who depend on media indulgence of lying, but from the media itself, which in recent years has been caught more times with its pants down than Bill Clinton could ever hope to.   They are, clearly, more invested in the lies they’ve been telling that the politicians (and donors) who benefitted from them, and they’d sooner piss on an electric (border?)  fence than admit how they’ve actively helped to fuck up the country by relentlessly doing the exact opposite of what the First Amendment presumes is their job.

The story is depressingly familiar; the truth wafts into the room like a bad smell, and the media rushes in to open the windows, and breathlessly spray lies around as though they were a can of air freshener, and the “story” becomes a parable about how everyone should just shut up and, say, give up their Social Security, cut taxes on the heiresses, and support a new war, while ostentatiously plugging their noses to the palpable stench.  Heck, it’s worked before, and it pays the hairdresser bills.

Sadly, after all these years a lot of people, numbed as they inescapably are by the steady drip of this brain-destroying anesthesia pumped into their eyes and ears, are just as reluctant to accept the truth as the pancaked boobs who have avoided it like the plague for all this time, and by the time you read this, Wikileaks may already have been extinguished, to cheers from all around.

Nice work if you can get it.

Mr. Assange’s own fate seems as imperiled as Private Manning’s. Last Monday, the Swedish Migration Board said Mr. Assange’s bid for a residence permit had been rejected. His British visa will expire early next year. When he left the London restaurant at twilight, heading into the shadows, he declined to say where he was going. The man who has put some of the world’s most powerful institutions on his watch list was, once more, on the move.

Or, in plain English, the Grey Lady says, “off with their heads.”  As Glenn Greenwald wrote today, the article demonstrated the degree to which the supposed liberal media is fundamentally against journalism itself, when it comes to, say, informing the public about the activities of the government.  John Burns really, really doesn’t like that sort of impertinence, and isn’t the least bit embarrassed to say so on Page One; nor, evidently, are his editors.  After years and years of pointless casualties in the pointless wars Burns has been covering, he’s gotten more, not less, trusting of the Pentagon, and he sees this disturbing credulity as the proper model for others.  Why does the public want to be bothered with all that torture and slaughter of civilians?  Barbara Bush doesn’t worry her “beautiful mind” about such ephemera, and neither does Burns.  He thinks that Assange must be crazy, and sets out to prove it.

As Greenwald points out, it’s certainly understandable that a discredited Pentagon toady like Burns would go after Assange with such unseemly gusto, since he managed to do in a few months on a shoestring what Burns couldn’t do in nearly ten years with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men:  in this case the kings are the NYT and the Pentagon, who seem to have split Burns’ tab.  Still, the overkill is pretty startling.  I’m a little surprised Burns couldn’t find somebody who disliked Assange when they were in Boy Scouts, or whatever the Australian equivalent would be.  It seems that deep down, there is still a tiny journalist lurking within Burns and his collaborators, and they’re pissed because they’ve been scooped, but their strategy for dealing with their hurt feelings must be something they picked up from Maureen Dowd.

While Greenwald accurately compared Burns’ article with the work of Nixon’s plumbers, and the irony that the Times, which successfully beat the Nixon Administration in Supreme Court to publish the Pentagon Papers, had so clearly moved to the other side when it came to Pentagon secrets, it’s actually worse than that.  The plumbers committed multiple crimes in hope of finding real dirt on their enemies, to then take to the media, which in those days required evidence of sensational smears.  No evidence is required anymore, as long as the “enemy” is someone outside the corridors of power, whether those corridors be at the Pentagon or the New York Times.  Doubters of wars will always be smeared, so John Burns’ grandchildren can grow up to be little war correspondents, and David Petraeus’ grandchildren can grow up to be little generals, and only the truly little people will die and all that icky stuff, while they keep their secrets and burnish their resumes.  They aren’t worried about their “fates.” Nice fucking work if you can get it.

What was missing from Greenwald’s excellent analysis was the sheer, unadulterated imperiousness of the article, as exemplified in the closing paragraph I quoted.  Though Burns repeatedly calls Assange “imperious,” he also manages, in every other sentence, to darkly intone that it is Assange who should take responsibility for any of the remotely possible but nonetheless plausibly scary repercussions of his work, while Burns is, by definition, to be held blameless, seemingly because he was following orders, and Assange wasn’t.  Burns, who never questioned two disastrous wars tainted by torture, corruption, and lies that led to the deaths of at least a hundred thousand people, when he was in a position to do so, cannot justify himself, so he seeks to silence Assange, instead.  It’s like Nuremberg, reverse-engineered.

In the perfumed chambers of such mendacious, war-loving elitists as Burns, there are certain things never to be said in front of the servants, and the fact that the two intractable and catastrophic wars bankrupting the country morally and materially were lost before they begun is pretty much on the top of the list.  Who, pray, is calling whom imperious?   The well-paid “journalist” who argues, vehemently, against the peoples’ right to know, or the powerless outcast who had the temerity to disagree?   We report, you decide.

In a SPIEGEL interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 39, discusses his decision to publish the Afghanistan war logs, the difficult balance between the public interest and the need for state secrets and why he believes people who wage war are more dangerous than him.

It is evident that the German press is now nearly as dumb as ours, “dangerous than him?), and just as automatically pro-secrecy, as you’ll see.  How convenient.

SPIEGEL: You are about to publish a vast amount of classified data on the war in Afghanistan. What is your motivation?

Assange: These files are the most comprehensive description of a war to be published during the course of a war — in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good. They cover more than 90,000 different incidents, together with precise geographical locations. They cover the small and the large. A single body of information, they eclipse all that has been previously said about Afghanistan. They will change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars.

SPIEGEL: Do you think that the publication of this data will influence political decision-makers?

Assange: Yes. This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence.

Time to take the curlers out and head for Assange’s undisclosed location.

SPIEGEL: Aren’t you expecting a little too much?

Wars, you know, aren’t supposed to ever either end or even be talked about unduly by the small people; they just are.  Get with the program, you commie.

Assange: There is a mood to end the war in Afghanistan. This information won’t do it alone, but it will shift political will in a significant manner.

SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren’t you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?

The treason card, just like ol’ Nixon, and from a supposed “journalist?”  Did Murdoch buy Der Spiegel while I was passed out or something?

Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources.

SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?

Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.

SPIEGEL: Is there anything that you consider to be a legitimate state secret?

You know, we journalists stopped doing, well, journalism a long time ago.  Why don’t you?

Assange: There is a legitimate role for secrecy, and there is a legitimate role for openness. Unfortunately, those who commit abuses against humanity or against the law find abusing legitimate secrecy to conceal their abuse all too easy. People of good conscience have always revealed abuses by ignoring abusive strictures. It is not WikiLeaks that decides to reveal something. It is a whistleblower or a dissident who decides to reveal it. Our job is to make sure that these individuals are protected, the public is informed and the historical record is not denied.

Hands off, he’s mine.

SPIEGEL: But in the end somebody has to decide whether you publish or not. Who determines the criteria? WikiLeaks considers itself to be a trailblazer when it comes to freedom of information, but it lacks transparency in its own publishing decisions.

You know, not like the WaPoo.

Assange: This is ridiculous. We are clear about what we will publish and what we will not. We do not have adhoc editorial decisions. We always release the full primary sources to our articles. What other press organization has such exacting standards? Everyone should try to follow our lead.

What he said.

SPIEGEL: The problem is that it is difficult to hold WikiLeaks accountable. You operate your servers in countries that offer you broad protection. Does WikiLeaks consider itself to be above the law?

You know, those laws about consent of the governed and a free press are so “quaint” these days.

Assange: WikiLeaks does not exist in outer space. We are people who exist on Earth, in particular nations, each of which have a particular set of laws. We have been legally challenged in various countries. We have won every challenge. It is courts that decide the law, not corporations or generals. The law, as expressed by constitutions and courts, has been on our side.

That he didn’t just say, “no wonder you have such a crappy job,”  but got the idea across anyway means I could start drinking earlier once we’re married.

SPIEGEL: You have said that there is a correlation between the transparency for which you are fighting and a just society. What do you mean by that?

Hitler showed us fascism “doesn’t matter.”

Assange: Reform can only come about when injustice is exposed. To oppose an unjust plan before it reaches implementation is to stop injustice.

I’ve got a ring all picked out.  I’ll buy it myself.

SPIEGEL: During the Vietnam War, US President Richard Nixon once called Daniel Elsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the most dangerous man in America. Are you today’s most dangerous man or the most endangered?

That would be the latter.  This Foxy Der Spiegelite clearly thinks somebody ought to, and probably will, snuff Assange, but soon.  That’ll come in handy if I get tired of him later, so the nuptials are still on.

Assange: The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped. If that makes me dangerous in their eyes, so be it.

Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah.  You tell them, Honey.

SPIEGEL: You could have started a company in Silicon Valley and lived in a home in Palo Alto with a swimming pool. Why did you decide to do the WikiLeaks project instead?

Gee, Mother Theresa, you could have joined a nice teaching order and avoided all that icky death and despair, and lounged poolside like Paris Hilton as a Good American should.  What’s wrong with you?

Assange: We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.

Imagine that.  And he’s picked the right bastards, too, in this case in the Obama Administration and the Neocon and Christianist-tainted military-industrial complex, who are reacting no better than Nixon did in a similar situation, revealingly.  Sadly, interviews like this show that Assange has a tough row to hoe in our world of Permanent War, but he’s on the right track.

A reporter once asked Zsa Zsa Gabor how many husbands she’d had.

“You mean besides my own?”

I know just how she feels.