Rubicon

Quote of the Week: Grover Norquist

On Friday, from his blog War Room at Salon, Tim Grieve reported some interesting recent thoughts of the man who wants to drown government in the bathtub:

At a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Prospect, Grover Norquist was asked today what advice he had for the Democrats. Salon's Michael Scherer tells us that Norquist responded by saying that the Democrats should keep their focus on the Republicans' failings rather than on themselves. "Bush would have lost in 2004," Norquist said, "if he was running against nobody."

It's hard to believe that Norquist has the best interests of Democrats at heart. Therefore, any advice he gives is deeply suspect.

As for the 2004 campaign, if John Kerry had come out forthrightly against the Iraq War, at least to the extent he is doing now, he probably would have won. He did almost everything else right, but his timorousness about that issue may have cost him the election, by allowing Republicans to paint him as a flip-flopping nobody. In fact, his stand was consistent, but it was insufficiently radical to be clear to many voters.

As for Democratic electoral strategy in 2006 and 2008, certainly Republican failings should be mentioned, again and again: incompetence, criminality, fraud, waste, lies, warmongering, torture, and unconstitutional power-grabbing, just to choose a few examples. But a positive Democratic message, a clear narrative of government for the people and power to the people, is essential too. Man does not live by brickbats alone.

Quote of the Week: Donald Rumsfeld

Scandals keep popping up everywhere in the Bush-Cheney administration, and some of the old scandals are uncovering new players. The old scandal this time is the sweetheart deal the Defense Department attempted to consummate with Boeing in 2003–2004 to lease hundreds of jet tankers for nearly 30 billion dollars. The new player we've just learned about is Donald Rumsfeld.

Leasing new tankers was more expensive than buying them would have been, and Air Force experts said the service didn't need that many tankers anyway. But it was a good deal for Defense because the department could spread the cost out over many budget cycles, and a good deal for Boeing because it got the company more money. In short, this was the biggest military procurement scandal in history: the Air Force secretary and Boeing's CEO were forced to resign, while a government procurement officer and Boeing's CFO went to prison.

But somehow Rumsfeld, the Pentagon's man in charge, escaped blame. Obviously, the PR spin went, it must have been another case of just a few bad apples, certainly not corrupt policies from the top. The excuses were surprisingly similar to those for Abu Ghraib and the torture gulag, though these apples were somewhat higher on the tree than Private Lynndie England.

We now learn, however, that Rumsfeld was interviewed by investigators for the Pentagon's inspector general on April 1, 2005, and that he claimed (under oath) to remember very few details about the leasing deal. He was busy thinking about other things: conducting present and future wars, for example, and briefing George Bush about exciting new policy initiatives. True, weapons procurement does consume "nearly a fifth of the $410 billion defense budget, exclusive of expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan," as R. Jeffrey Smith writes in the Washington Post. And that entire system is dysfunctional. Smith provides details:

"DOD is simply not positioned to deliver high-quality products in a timely and cost-effective fashion," the comptroller general of the United States, David M. Walker, said in a little-noticed April 5 critique. The Pentagon, he said, has "a long-standing track record of over-promising and un-delivering with virtual impunity."

Walker based his blistering assessment on a detailed study of 52 different weapons costing a total of $850 billion, including five new multibillion-dollar weapons systems with cost overruns amounting to nearly 30 percent. "The all too-frequent result is that large and expensive programs are continually rebaselined, cut back or even scrapped after years of failing to achieve promised capability," he said. "A lot of it is because in the past, where there have been unacceptable outcomes, there hasn't been any accountability."

Some of the blame, Walker suggested, should be laid at Rumsfeld's office, which "does not seem to be pushing" for the dramatic overhaul of the Pentagon's system needs.

So if Rumsfeld wasn't paying attention, he should have been. The Post, after a year-long wait, just received a copy of the Rumsfeld interview, and it published excerpts of his testimony. Here's what the secretary of defense had to say about the enormous Boeing deal:

I don't remember approving it. But I certainly don't remember not approving it, if you will.… I may very well have said yes. I just don't remember.… I am not going to sit here and quibble over it.

My time basically in the department was focused on those things and certainly not on acquisitions or -- or what have you. Basically I spend an overwhelming portion of my time with the combatant commanders and functioning as the link between the president … and the combatant commanders conducting the wars.… I don't know what I knew then, compared to what I know now.… I am not able to go back and say … what did I know at a certain moment back in that period.

In terms of knowledge that -- that -- from that period, I am without it.

If Rumsfeld does remember, he has committed perjury. If he does not remember—if he is "without that knowledge"—he is not performing his job competently.

Fire Rumsfeld. Impeach Cheney and Bush. Everything is rotten in the ship of state.

Quote of the Week: Harry Harris

Three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, desperate after years of isolated incarceration and torture, committed suicide on Saturday. Whatever physical torture is still being inflicted on prisoners at Guantánamo, the psychological torture is worse: unending imprisonment without charge, without trial, without connection to any friendly human being, without hope.

These three, two Saudis and one Yemeni, finally gave up hope of ever resuming a normal life and killed themselves. The commander of the torture camp, Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr, in his fevered imagination, thought their suicides were a protest intended to produce a political outcome. Harris was so incapable of imagining their desperate state of mind that he said these words:

They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

Admiral Harris is deluded. Human beings, whether guilty or not of the crime for which they were arrested, can be driven to self-destruction—no matter how smart, creative, and committed they may be—if they are held without charge and without trial, in subhuman conditions, spied on every two minutes day and night, and made to believe that every subsequent day will be as bleak and hopeless as the last. They are slowly dying, they know, and there is no one to hear, no one to help. It is not surprising that some of them might wish to hasten their deaths.

Whether guilty or not—and now we will never know—these three suicides had great regard for their lives: they valued a normal life, and when that proved impossible, they merely wished to shorten their unbearable misery. They did not wage warfare against anyone but themselves—to suggest otherwise is ridiculous—because their will to live had already been defeated by years of constant torture meted out by Admiral Harris and his troops, in keeping with orders promulgated by Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush.

Harris, Rumsfeld, and Bush are the ones who have no regard for life. The American government, acting through its vicious jailers, is the entity that wages asymmetrical warfare against the weak and helpless.

June is Torture Awareness Month. Torture is by definition asymmetrical, because it is inflicted by the strong upon the weak. It begins with a disregard for the truth and ends with a disregard for life.

Quote of the Week: Tony Blair

On Thursday, Tony Blair appeared at a joint Washington press conference with George Bush, during which the prime minister demeaned himself by playing the role of a smart but loyal Gromit to the president's clueless Wallace. Blair expressed in articulate English the misguided ideas and false assumptions that Bush, with his repeated slogans, could only hint at. It was like having a fluent orator as translator for a person whose vocabulary is limited to the 850 words of Basic English.

Bush would do better to have Blair always at his side to explain what he means, as when the British leader spoke of his visit to Iraq:

I came away thinking that the challenge is still immense, but I also came away more certain than ever that we should rise to it.

And though it is at times daunting, it is also utterly inspiring to see people from all the different parts of the community in Iraq -- the Sunni, the Shia, the Kurds -- sitting down together, all of them democratic leaders, democratically elected by their people, elected for a four-year term, elected and choosing to come together as a government of national unity, and completely determined to run their country in a different way for the future.

Delusional, certainly, and not what most observers of the Iraqi situation see. Furthermore, it's hard to understand what Blair gets out of the asymmetric relationship. He repeatedly embarrasses himself to help Bush look better, but all he gets is an occasional smile and—as when Blair denounced terrorists—a pallid compliment: "I must say, that was a great answer." And the closeness to Bush certainly doesn't seem to help Blair's standing with the British electorate: his approval rating is now down to 31 percent, almost as low as his fellow warrior's.

On Friday, Blair delivered a speech at Georgetown University, during which he abased himself even further by changing the text, at Bush's insistence, on three subjects: Iran, international financial institutions, and global warming. In each case, according to Toby Harnden of the Telegraph (London), the prime minister toned down his intended remarks because White House operatives objected:

Only three hours before the speech was delivered, Downing Street officials were briefing journalists that the Prime Minister would stress that "change should not be imposed" on Iran, reflecting the British view that bombing or invading Iran is not a realistic option.…

By the time he made his speech, Mr Blair had significantly bowed to the American position, claiming "I am not saying we should impose change" and leaving the door open for a military attack.

On the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Blair intended to propose that the EU and the US open the organizations' leadership to other nations. But he deleted that section of the speech.

As for global warming, he planned to insist on acceptance of the Kyoto treaty and emphasize how crucial the issue is, but in the actual speech he referred only opaquely to something having to do with the environment:

And, finally, we need a U.N. environment organization, commensurate with the importance that the issue...

(CELLPHONE RINGS)

I hope that's not the White House telling me they don't agree with that.

(LAUGHTER)

I mean, they [act] very quickly, these guys. So I was just wondering if...

(LAUGHTER)

Finally, we need a U.N. empowerment organization commensurate with the importance the issue now has on the agenda.

You can almost see Blair flinch when the phone rings—and he did get confused, substituting "empowerment organization" the second time for "environment organization." Later, during the question-and-answer session, he managed to say, "I think that the Kyoto treaty was important. We will meet our Kyoto targets. We're signed up to the treaty." But the planned criticism of US intransigence was censored, and the importance of the issue minimized. Bush must have been pleased.

It's not easy being a good poodle, especially with a master who thrashes you for the slightest bark.

Quote of the Week: George Bush

George Bush hailed yet another "turning point" today in the Iraq War. These TPs are to Iraq as the many "lights at the end of the tunnel" were to Vietnam, often glimpsed by the true believers but never truly significant. Speaking (oddly enough) to the National Restaurant Association, Bush said:

We can expect the violence to continue, but something fundamental changed this weekend. The terrorists are now fighting a free and constitutional government. They're at war with the people of Iraq. And the Iraqi people are determined to defeat this enemy, and so are Iraq's new leaders, and so is the United States of America.…

Our progress is incremental. Freedom is moving, but it's in incremental steps. And the enemy's progress is almost instant on their TV screen.

If these words are not self-delusion, they're outright lies.  The boy who cried wolf has often cried before, as Peter Baker and Bradley Graham point out in the Washington Post:

Bush has declared turning points and milestones in the war before. He called it "an important milestone" when a temporary governing council was formed in July 2003 and "a turning point" when sovereignty was turned over to the interim government in June 2004. Elections in January 2005, he said, were both "a turning point in the history of Iraq" and "a milestone in the advance of freedom."

He called it a "milestone" in October when Iraqi voters approved a constitution and "a major milestone" two months later when they elected a parliament -- a moment he also termed "a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East and the history of freedom." The selection of a prime minister last month was "an important milestone toward our victory in Iraq" and, a week later, "a turning point for the Iraqi citizens."

Tantalizing hints of troop withdrawals are dropped like breadcrumbs, but they mark no escape path. As one turning point follows another, Bush and Tony Blair circle ceaselessly over the same barren ground, desperate. If each TP is 90 degrees, after only four TPs they find themselves back at the beginning. Everything ventured, nothing gained.

Quote of the Week: Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez is president of Venezuela, a country from which fifteen percent of  US oil imports are shipped, about 1.2 million barrels a day. Today he is in London, where Mayor Ken Livingstone opened a meeting of British leftists and trade unionists by accusing George Bush of running "a gangster regime." Chávez warned the US not to attack Iran, since Iran would respond by cutting oil production, and the resulting scarcity would roil world markets. He said:

If the United States attacks Iran ... oil could reach $100 a barrel or more. The English middle classes would have to stop using their cars.

If they attack Iran, the Iranians will cut off their supply of oil. We would do the same if we were attacked. We would cut off our oil. Moreover, Iran has said it would attack Israel, and I know they have the wherewithal to do so.

If they attack Iran I think it will be far worse than the situation is in Iraq, … [which is] the Vietnam of the 21st century.

Chávez is regularly demonized by members of the Bush administration, though he is extremely popular at home. In March, a White House report referred to him as a "demagogue" who uses Venezuela's oil wealth to destabilize democratic regimes, and the US ambassador publicly expressed concern over his growing ties with Iran. Chávez responded in his weekly radio address by calling Bush a "donkey," an "alcoholic," and a "drunkard."

Chávez is no diplomat, but his warning about an American attack on Iran is a sharp reminder of the fact that the US economy exists on a knife edge, importing much of its oil from unfriendly nations. With regular gasoline in California already at $3.29 a gallon, George Bush might want to try some diplomacy himself.

Update, 5/15: Good article on ZNet by John Pilger, reporting from Venezuela on why Chávez is a threat to the American empire (thanks for the link to John Taylor).

Quote of the Week: George Bush

George Bush was in Germany this week, letting everyone know that one goal he shares with Chancellor Angela Merkel is "a democracy in Germany." Presumably he meant to say "in Iraq," but his geography is as uncertain as his language, so we can't be sure. Perhaps he meant that the social democracies of "Old Europe" are not really democratic until they adopt American methods of stigmatizing and punishing the poor. Bush has probably been spending too much time with "Republican Jesus," who once explained corporate Christianity in these words: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle now that we've given Halliburton that multi-billion dollar needle enlargement contract."

But Bush also told the Germans that he does want to change in one area: torture. If only that muddled, desultory Supreme Court would finally get around to telling him how to deal with the prisoners, he would be able to realize his fondest wish, to close the detention center at Guantánamo. The 500 "enemy combatants" held there without trial, many since 2002, will be happy to hear that. Here are his words:

Obviously, the Guantanamo issue is a sensitive issue for people. I very much would like to end Guantanamo; I very much would like to get people to a court.

And we're waiting for our Supreme Court to give us a decision as to whether the people need to have a fair trial in a civilian court or in a military court.…

But in either case, they will get a trial which they, themselves, were unwilling to give to the people that they're willing to kill -- "they," the enemy.

Unclear on the concept. These detainees are held because Bush thinks they killed people (without first letting their supposed victims stand trial), but they have not been formally accused of anything, much less tried and found guilty by any kind of US court. No one knows which of them, if any, committed murder, because they have had no opportunity to defend themselves.

In the next breath, Bush says the US "is strong on human rights and civil rights.… That's why we try to liberate people when we find them in the clutches of tyranny." And place them in the clutches of a different tyranny? Bush could not even bring himself to say they were "unwilling to give [a trial] to the people they are accused of killing." People who look like terrorists are guilty until proven innocent, but they are not given a chance to be proven innocent. So they are guilty.

Actually, the Supreme Court has been clear in its decisions about the prisoners at Guantánamo that trials should have been held long ago, that justice delayed is justice denied. The attorney general of the UK, Lord Goldsmith, is equally clear. In a speech to be given this week, he plans to denounce the detention center as "unacceptable," as Jamie Doward and Mark Townsend report in the Observer:

Goldsmith will tell a global security conference at the Royal United Services Institute this week that the camp at Guantánamo Bay must not continue. 'It is time, in my view, that it should close.' An urbane lawyer who eschews the limelight, Goldsmith is not known for shooting from the hip in such unequivocal terms; however, it is clear he has harboured grave doubts for some time over the legality of Guantánamo under international law.

'There are certain principles on which there can be no compromise,' Goldsmith will say. 'Fair trial is one of those - which is the reason we in the UK were unable to accept that the US military tribunals proposed for those detained at Guantánamo Bay offered sufficient guarantees of a fair trial in accordance with international standards.'…

'I would suggest that the greatest challenge which free and democratic states face today is how to balance the need to protect individual rights with the imperative of protecting the lives of the rest of the community.'

That's a challenge George Bush is not up to.

Quote of the Week: Arlen Specter

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, was frustrated with his fellow Republican George Bush this last week. He couldn't get a straight answer about the National Security Agency's extensive wiretapping program, which is supposed to protect Americans against terrorists but seems instead to be directed against Americans who are opposed to Bush. I say "seems" because Bush refuses to tell anybody anything about the NSA. His mantra is: "Trust me." His stance is: "I am above the law."

On Thursday, Specter threatened to use the only power he still has, the power of the purse, and deny funding to the NSA until Bush is more forthcoming. Specter said:

Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment. If we are to maintain our institutional prerogative, that may be the only way we can do it.…

It is true that we have no assurance that the president would follow any statute that we enact.

In other words, implies a prominent Republican senator, the president believes he is above the law, and there may now be nothing we can do to stop him from assuming dictatorial powers. Specter's shocking final sentence, all but conceding Bush's blatant disregard for law and Constitution, did not get wide coverage in the American media. Most stories about Specter's frustration did not include it, and I would have missed it myself if my brother Frank had not alerted me to it. I quoted it in a note on Thursday, but it seems to have nearly disappeared elsewhere, so I decided to highlight it again today.

The sentence was included in update 3 of an Associated Press story by Laurie Kellman headlined "Sen. Specter Threatens to Block NSA Funds," but later updates of the story omitted it, and by Friday (except for other blogs) I could find it in only three places on the web: an MSNBC version, a Forbes version, and a Guardian version of Kellman's article. I did not conduct a LexisNexis search, so there may be a few other instances, but the principal US national newspapers and other TV networks apparently censored it. Did they do so because they failed to see the significance of Specter's statement? Or were they threatened by the Bush administration? Or were they merely careless?

In October 2003, historian Kevin Baker, writing in Harper's, expressed the concern that "we are not far from the day when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, our Congress will take its last meaningful vote and turn over power to a military dictator." If Specter is right, that day may be sometime in AD 2006.

Update: I have learned that on Thursday the Washington Post apparently included the "no assurance" sentence in an early version of an article by Walter Pincus and Charles Babington (headlined "Specter Wants More Debate on Spying") but omitted the sentence in later versions. A commenter to Joel Achenbach's Thursday blog on the Post website  ("Bush the Worst President?") quotes the sentence and references the URL to the Pincus-Babington article. If you follow that URL, you will no longer find the offending statement. Clearly, the Post thought the sentence was too hot to handle and removed it by Friday's edition. It's either censorship or extremely poor editorial judgment.

Quote of the Week: George Bush

On Friday, a friend and I drove to Napa for an exhilarating 55-kilometer bike ride through the beautiful hills and vineyards of northern California. Up Dry Creek Road, over the Oakville Grade, a northerly loop across the Napa Valley, and back along the Silverado Trail. It made us grateful to be alive on this planet, at this time.

We rode almost as far north as St Helena, where George Bush, famous mountain biker, was scheduled to arrive for a brief spa stay that night before proceeding with his campaign to destroy the planet.

Back in Berkeley that evening, about 7:45, I was sitting at home reading when I heard the helicopters approach from the south. They were much noisier than the usual Alameda County Sheriff's machines, so I strolled out to the front yard to see what was happening. At 800 feet altitude, three helicopters roared northward, one fat Marine troop carrier flanked by two attack choppers. I waved cheerily with both hands, displaying the appropriate digits. Bush, I thought, should have known better than to fly over the People's Republic of Berkeley (Bush support: 1.3 percent) on his way from the Hoover Institution to his wine-country spa, but clearly he wasn't worried. So far, his armor to deflect verbal missiles has been reasonably effective, and words are all we have to fire.

When Bush flew over, I had been reading some strong words on global warming by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. In the course of describing An Inconvenient Truth ("brilliantly lucid,… important"), a new documentary film about that prescient environmentalist Al Gore, Remnick mentions Bush:

[T]he audience-of-one that most urgently needs to see the film and take it to heart—namely, the man who beat Gore in the courts six years ago—does not much believe in science or, for that matter, in any information that disturbs his prejudices, his fantasies, or his sleep. Inconvenient truths are precisely what this White House is structured to avoid and deny.…

As President, Bush has made fantasy a guide to policy. He has scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming (a pact that Gore helped broker as Vice-President); he has neutered the Environmental Protection Agency; he has failed to act decisively on America’s fuel-efficiency standards even as the European Union, Japan, and China have tightened theirs. He has filled his Administration with people like Philip A. Cooney, who, in 2001, left the American Petroleum Institute, the umbrella lobby for the oil industry, to become chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he repeatedly edited government documents so as to question the link between fuel emissions and climate change.

On Saturday, after a muddy spin on his mountain bike, Bush helicoptered on to West Sacramento to repeat the lie that everything will be okay in 30 years, due to the development of hydrogen fuel cells. This is one of his standard misdirections, which he repeated on Earth Day to deflect attention from his lack of interest in conservation or renewable energy. (Hydrogen can store and release clean energy, but it cannot replace oil as a source of energy.)

During the morning bike ride, Bush unburdened himself to AP writer Scott Lindlaw, telling him how stressful his job is, and how cycling helps him remain calm in his bubble. On rides like these, Bush revels in his alpha-male role, insisting that he stay in the lead—some months ago, he told Lance Armstrong to stay behind him—and on this circuitous route over unmarked trails, he brusquely ordered the only agent who knew the route to "Drop back," gesturing "with a thumb over his shoulder." A take-charge kind of guy, even without the requisite information. Bush told Lindlaw:

I still ride the mountain bike primarily to help settle the soul and to burn off the excess energy one gets when you're living life to its fullest.

We're able to enjoy the beauty without really disrupting the pristine nature of the place. It's a classic way for mankind to enjoy God's gift. Plus, we get some exercise.…

I don't spend a lot of time chitchatting. But I get great pleasure in riding with a group of people, and afterward we shoot the breeze and have fun and laugh and go about our way.…

People learn to adjust and relax all different kinds of ways. For me, intense exercise, particularly on a mountain bike in a beautiful place, is a great way to keep perspective.

Bubble Boy's perspective on "the pristine nature of the place" was not disturbed by the fact that the muddy trail behind his bike was being torn to shreds, primed for later erosion. As Lindlaw reports, "A long convoy of SUVs and off-road vehicles rumbled behind the group, carrying medics and security agents with machine guns."

It's frat-boy weekend, all the time. Bush refrains from "chitchatting" with his entourage about anything of significance. He prefers to "shoot the breeze and have fun and laugh and go about our way." After all, he's "living life to its fullest," untroubled, as Remnick says, by "any information that disturbs his prejudices, his fantasies, or his sleep"—information, for example, that might link his actions to the callous destruction of the earth's biosphere. A few hot years from now, those beautiful bike rides around the Napa Valley may not be nearly so beautiful.

Update, 4/24: It seems that Bush never made it to the Hoover Institution on Friday. His meeting with Stanford panjandrums had to be moved elsewhere (to George Schultz's house), thanks to more than 1,000 protestors, as Amit Arora reports for the Stanford Daily (hat tip to Dan Froomkin). And today there were 250 protestors outside his hotel in Orange County. If a Republican president isn't welcome on the Farm or in Orange County, the times, I would say, are a-changin'. Well, as Bush concedes, "People learn to adjust."

Quote of the Week: Michael Kinsley

The old Wilsonian instinct is alive and well across a large part of the spectrum of American politics. Nearly everyone, it seems, from dingbat-right to center-left—we'll leave out Pat Buchanan and Noam Chomsky (and myself, thank you very much)—thinks the USA has a duty to spread the gospel of democracy, freedom, and capitalism to those who lack God's Washington's grace.

Yes, it's the white man's burden, in a new disguise, and despite the rocky record in Iraq, you can almost hear Congress as an Easter choir, led by George Bush, singing:

From Greenland's icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

When Reginald Heber wrote the hymn in 1819, he was thinking about spreading Christianity, but Bush has in mind something even more exciting when he sings Heber's words, "Shall we to those benighted the lamp of life deny?" He's thinking about spreading Americanism (including, of course, his version of Christianity) to many more exotic places, starting with Iran.

Michael Kinsley hates to give up on the missionary ideal, but based on the evidence he is more skeptical than he once was, and he doubts that the conversion of Iran is desirable right now. Even if the song is still good, he says, the singer leaves something to be desired. Here's Kinsley, in Slate:

So, after more than half a century of active meddling—protecting our interests, promoting our values, encouraging democracy, fighting terrorism, seeking stability, defending human rights, pushing peace—it's come to this. In Iraq we find ourselves unwilling regents of a society splitting into a gangland of warring militias and death squads, with our side (labeled "the government") outperforming the other side (labeled "the terrorists") in both the quantity and gruesome quality of its daily atrocities. In Iran, an irrational government that hates us with special passion is closer to getting the bomb than Iraq—the country we went to war with to keep from getting the bomb—ever was.

And in Afghanistan—site of the Iraq war prequel that actually followed the script (invade, topple brutal regime, wipe out terrorists, establish democracy, accept grateful thanks, get out)—the good guys we put in power came close, a couple weeks ago, to executing a man for the crime of converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, the bad guys (the Taliban and al-Qaida) keep a low news profile by concentrating on killing children and other Afghan civilians rather than too many American soldiers.

When the United States should use its military strength to achieve worthy goals abroad is an important question. But based on this record, it seems a bit theoretical. It's like asking whether Donald Trump should use his superpowers to cure AIDS. Or what George W. Bush should say when he wins the Nobel Prize in physics. A more pressing question is: Can't anyone here play this game?

Or sing this song? And by the way, if we ever get a competent singer, shouldn't we start looking for a different song too?