So the Wolfowitz quote was out of context. Still, he's essentially saying that because Iraq has oil reserves we had no other way to influence them other than taking over the whole damn country. This is still bull-poopie. And of course it's about the oil. It's not only about the oil, but it is about the oil. Our country has a geopolitically debilitating addiction to foriegn energy. That's the reason "stability in the middle east" matters and "stability in the Congo" doesn't.

Look, there are two ways to deal with this. One is to do whatever is necessary -- lie, cheat, steal, despoil, rob, bomb -- to feed that addicton. The other is to get off the juice. I think we know which track of action this administration prefers. Their policy can be summed up as "A Hummer in every driveway and a Marine base in every oil-rich nation."

A seriously progressive national energy policy is a critical step toward real national security. I've been thinking this for a long time. If we can't free ourselves and our economy from its dependence on cheap gasoline, we're going to be wedded by necessity to an increasingly vulnerable imperial resource-gathering policy going forward. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Brother brother brother, we don't need to escalate...

Well friends, things are getting weirder and weirder. Here's what uber-hawk and Pentagon deputy Paul "Wolfie" Wolfowitz had to say about Iraq at an Asian security summit yesterday. He was asked about the US policy towards N. Korea and why it was so different from Iraq. As the Guardian Reports, his response was:

"Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Frankly I'm flabbergasted. This basically confirms the most over-simplified "no blood for oil" counterarguments which were dismissed as utter bunk in the run up and execution of the war. No matter that we protected the oil fields better than the water treatment plants. No matter that we kept the ministry under marine guard while hospitals, schools and museums were looted. All this happened and still I thought they had the blood for oil meme licked, and here comes the wolfster throwing more gas on the fire. Either this is some truly diabolical Rovian machination, someone turned the man on to some high-quality stuff, or he's angling for an early retirement. It will be telling to see if the American media picks up on this or not.

In other news, the President seems to be making an earnest effort to get some peace pie cooking in Israel and Palestine, but hard-line settlers and Hamas have different ideas. Settlers are pledging civil disobedience over having their new holdings taken away -- which may or may not mean gang-beating anyone who looks at them crosseyed -- and the terrorists have said they won't relent until the Palestinian state is "liberated" -- which may more may not mean "until Israel is destroyed." It all depends on who you ask.

From my perspective the onus is on Sharon to be a big man and resist striking back when the next fit of violence inevitably occurs. If he can manage to do this and prevent the fringe-elements among the settlers from going vigilante, this thing might work. The current intifada has been dragging on for more than three years, and it's been nowhere near as politically cool as the last one. The first uprising was largely about youths demonstrating in the streets and throwing rocks. The current one has been largely about suicide, which is not really a long term winner as a revolutionary tactic. Beyond the basic moral question of blowing up more or less innocent people to get your point across, it really implies that you movement doesn't have its shit together when they can't even manage get-away schemes which would allow operatives to plant bombs rather than blowing themselves up. Palestinians would rather have jobs, to be honest.

In fact, the majority of the people who live around there are ready for peace. The question is whether they can resist being provoked by the loonies on either side. Bush for once is doing The Right Thing(tm) by leaning on them to get off the mark, but it's really up to Sharon to make this process work. Of course, some right-ring radical might blow him away ala Rabin if he really does seem to be pursuing this in earnest. Let's hope the cool heads prevail.

Another politics view has come surging forth from my crackling, caffeine-stoked synnapses. How about this one: Bush as a dangerous power-junkie.

The Mother Of All Glass Dicks

Bush had fucked the country. He was a mean enough drunk back when his poison was cocaine and whisky, and now he was born again and raging with the thrill of his own agency. Being a president at war has got to make pure uncut coke look like non-prescription sudafed, and he'd let the buzz get out of hand. He'd started lying to cover for his habit, claiming that we needed this war to protect us from a very bad man who could unleash the worlds worst know poisons and plagues at a moment's notice.

Of course, this was total bullshit.

This was a bad guy who'd tried to kill his dad, who gave money to families who's kids were killed trying to kill jews, who purged and tortured his political opponents and wore a mustache just like Joseph Stalin -- but he was also tired, old and running a third-world country, hemmed in on all sides by superior military numbers and blockaded by layer upon layer of sanctions. He was no threat. Still, he kind of looked scary. He looked like the kind of bastard who would hurt you if they could and all it took was some fudged evidence to put the still-terrorized public into full-bore war mode. Powell stood up and covered for his boss and with that the war was on.

I remember being baffled at the time by the talking-heads and their insistence that Powell's UN presentation was "very persuasive" and "highly professional." It was a second-rate powerpoint show full of hearsay and conjecture. And while these are kinds of evidence, it's not the sort of thing decent people start a war over. It was smoke and mirrors -- something Hans Bliz pointed out a week or so later. Blix was one of the few true professionals in this mostly amateur clusterfuck, but Wolf Blitzer's travel arrangements were already in the works so the event was spun as convincing.

But now the whole web was unravelling. Like most junkies, Bush didn't think much past his fix. He's gotten some bright-looking fast-talking British kid involved in his scam, and it turns out over there they hadn't completely privatized the press and sold all the media off to their cronies. There was some public dissatisfaction. Blair was more or less busted. He might squeal soon, and if he did it would be the turning point for this cheerleading MBA.

All the dots were there to connect. Power-addicts always fall to pride; this tragedy is older than recorded history. He'd said "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out," in front of a few senators back in March 2002, when the official story was that war wasn't even on the table. He'd pushed obviously fake documents as rock-hard evidence. Whistle blowers were starting to pop up and damage-control meetings were underway as a few journalists with some vestigial alliance with the truth (and one economist who couldn't believe what he was seeing) started ruminating out loud that the emperor had no clothes.

In a fit of hubris, they'd planned their convention right here in New York City, even moved it back closer to the fateful anniversary, forcing three states to change their primary election laws so everything would be procedurally accurate. It was looking more and more like Bush's Waterloo. The freaks would be back out in the street, millions of them from around the world like just before the bombs started dropping -- half a million on the street in New York City; freaks and old people and upper-east-side trixies -- except this time they would know it was war and instead of asking nicely to be heard they'd be calling for the boy king's head. The bigger they are the harder they fall.

I, of course, am watching all this play out with perverse delight. Bush is a crook and a power-junkie and his friends are even worse. It's time for them to go. They're all hitting the empire pipe, sucking the mother of all glass dicks. Once you taste that sweet rush you'll be chasing the dragon one way or another for the rest of your days. They aught to be carted off to some obscure B-minus think tank where they can rave about American military supremacy, world domination, space wars and the potential of the international petro-dollar, just generally detox in a cool dry place mercifully outside the public eye. Decency damn near demands it.

Everyone with brains knows we have to turn around. For a while the more level-headed conservatives were delighted because their team was winning, because their guy was walking tall and kicking ass, but now there was a little sick knot in every thinking man's stomach. This had gone too far.

The whole world was watching, and for some this only stiffened their spine. They wouldn't back down. They would support the leader to the bitter end. They would go out in a blaze of twisted glory like the last waffen SS who kept the swastika flying over the Reichstag for more than a week against the will of more than a million Soviet shock troops.

For most though they knew the folly of empire. They could see the lunacy in the tax cuts. They understood that this man was leading the country into a century of ruination, a bitter dark corporate future ruled by fear and greed and the worst aspects of human nature. They've seen what lies ahead and they know we need to change course. The worm has begun to turn.

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I welcome your feedback on anything. My next work of political framing keys off of this phrase: "Invading Iraq is like sleeping with a crazy person. There's potential there, but it's not something you do when you're drunk out of your mind and you don't have any of your friends backing your play." Wow... seems my man Billmon has already felt-out that meme: invasion as sex (and it has Dr. Dean too!). Until next time...

There's a profile of my man Howard Dean in this weekend's NY Times Magazine. I'm starting to hate the times, with their limp-wristed editorial support for the war, their idiotic pay-per-view archives and their insipidly elitist yuppie bullshit television ads. If it weren't for Krugman and a few other voices there, I'd stop checking it on any kind of basis. The war was enough to stop me from going there for daily news (and forget cnn.com... havn't seen that bitch in months), I now rely on various meta-filters to tell me what's up in the world.

Anyway, the profile is crappy, a lot of the same old misconceptions that Dean can't win, that Dean's a protest candidate, that Dean's a moderate in liberal clothing, that Dean's a liberal in moderate clothing. I'm also waiting for my girlfriend to wake up and call me so I can see her for the first time in a week, so I'm in a cranky mood too. I wrote a letter to the editor of course, and then I went looking online for some solace. I happened upon this gem in the dean2004.blogspot.com comments. By "Eric":

Bai [the author of the profile] was right about one thing--many Democrats weren't happy with Clinton and perhaps some of those same people are now supporting Dean. For a few, the discomfort with Clinton derived from policy disagreements. But most disliked Clinton for the same reason Republicans hated him: He used (sometimes hokey) personal charm to avoid taking a clear position time after time--and co-opted Republican policies in the name of "winning" as he went. Without Clinton's force of personality, this approach (now apparently favored among other Democratic candidates) comes across as either lame or blatantly disingenuous. And in hindsight, it's not at all clear that Clinton's unwillingness to, say, pursue campaign finance reform or scrutinize padded Pentagon contracts did the party or the electorate much good.

So what many Democrats see in Dean is someone with conventional values who isn't afraid to tells it like it is. After Clinton's triangulation and Gore's awkward evasiveness, how can this be anything but a breath of fresh air? You have to be completely bollixed up in rationalizing one of the weirdest, scariest periods in American history to see Dean's blunt declamations of common sense as anything but mainstream. At this particular moment in history, when so much has been so recklessly put at risk by a cadre of radical right-wingers making it up as they go along, we need someone like Dean more than most of us realize. It's been a very long time since the Democrats had, to quote Rob Reiner, a "tough mother" as a candidate. He'll need that backbone to confront fearful pseudo-Democrats almost as much as he'll need it to battle Bush in 2004.

This pretty much summs it up for me. One last link: One Father For Dean and his response to intellectually weak conservatives at his school reunion. And now I've gotten the phone call and I'm off to brunch.