Isilion

The war has given the American mainstream media a brilliant opportunity to prove its essential worthlessness. It has shown itself to be little more than a circus of entertainers and cheerleaders for whom every season is the silly season. Tragically, the media has failed in its sacred duty to keep a vigilant, skeptical, critical eye on the centers of power. Who is the American Robert Fisk, Gideon Levy, or Amira Hass? Whoever they are (and Sy Hersh proves they exist), why are their writings not filling the op-ed pages of the great American newspapers? How can the nation that produces the bulk of Nobel prize winners be stuck with such a sullen bunch of journalistic mediocrities? The sycophantic enablers of the Fourth Estate have blood on their hands.

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No, Incurious George has offered no new strategy, nor new course, nor even a plateau on the downward course of our two lost wars and failed grand strategy. He has chosen instead to escalate failure, speed our decline and expand the scope of our defeat. Headed toward the cliff, his course correction is to stomp on the gas.

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On Dec. 6, 1975, Ford and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, were in Jakarta, Indonesia to meet the country’s dictator, General Suharto. Ford was fully cognizant of Indonesia’s plans to launch an imminent invasion of the former Portuguese Timor… (But no one wants to hear this stuff. He was a “healer.”)

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Shrinking the mission – choosing some path other than the imperial one (in part by redefining what exactly our national interests are) – would, of course, address many problems. It would make paying young people thousands of dollars to test their leadership potential or thinking about scouring Central America for a future Foreign Legion far less necessary. But no one in Washington – not in the Bush administration, not in James A. Baker’s Iraq Study Group, which recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway “middle ground” on Iraq policy, not in the Democratic leadership – is faintly interested in shrinking the American global mission. No one in Washington, where a kind of communal voting does go on, is about to vote “no” to that mission, or cast a ballot for democracy rather than empire.

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“We have mentioned many times that there is a world of difference between a New England town meeting and the U.S. federal government. The size of the New England town meeting is one that the human brain is prepared to deal with. At the town meeting, a man can know which of the people he is dealing with is a moron and which is a self-interested hustler.

“But when it comes to national politics, the same man is totally ill-equipped…like a mechanic who shows up with a pair of pruning shears…or a veterinarian with a wrench in his hand.”

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Well documented synopsis of both U.S. culpability and hypocrisy in Saddam’s ascension and demise.

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The largest employer in the world announced on Dec. 15 that it lost about $450 billion in fiscal 2006. Its auditor found that its financial statements were unreliable and that its controls were inadequate for the 10th straight year. On top of that, the entity’s total liabilities and unfunded commitments rose to about $50 trillion…

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The past year has been destructive for George W. Bush, his staff, his political party, the defense department, and the finances of this country. It has been a hard year for the puppets and the talking heads at CNN and Fox News, on Clear Channel radio, and in the editorial offices of large and small town “conservative” newspapers. It has been a hard year for the ethical and moral among us, as we wonder how much more blood will be required to get the United States political leadership, Democrats and Republicans, to do the right thing, and how we ourselves should live in opposition to it all. Clearly, the love and warm feelings displayed across the aisle so far in Washington means that constitutionalists, libertarians, populists and patriots will wait a bit longer for the coveted gridlock that pushes governments towards the wise and accountable.