State Fair

Yesterday, NPR had some studio yahoo out at the Iowa State Fair, yucking it up about those crazy fair-goers and their crazy contests. He-Man liberal that I am, it may surprise you to learn that I grew up attending the Fayette County Fair in rural Southwestern PA and even played in a few old-time fiddle competitions way back when, and though I say mean things about the rubes and boobs of America, I do respect a man who can raise a hog or grow a field of corn. So I felt a degree of vicarious rage when the reporter started laughing about the cur-ay-zee things people do at state fairs, like holding contests to see who produced the best and biggest produce. This being, of course, the entire purpose of a fair. Its raisin detruh, as a Frenchman once said of something else. What did he expect to find them doing? Discussing the current Biennale?

But rubes and boobs they are, for it appears that Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Mormon, leads in the Iowa straw poll. I like a Tony Kushner play as much as the next guy, but I really don't want to find myself living in one for the next four years.

Whistle While You Work

Via C&L, I see that Robert Mugabe just legalized an expansive program of electronic surveillance by citing, among others . . . the recently passed electronic surveillance bill right here in These United States. Well, it's like the French always say: Liberté, égalité, securité.

I dreamed last night that I was on a boat to heaven, and by some chance, I had brought my dice along . . .

Hey. Didyasee Markos Massimo's op-ed in the Post. Turns out that thanks to progressives, habeas corpus has been restored, the war ended, the President impeached, the Lord Risen, the lion lain down with the lamb, grazie tante, glory, glory, glory, shantih, shantih, shantih.

Ha! Just foolin! But they did

[push] the party so far left that we positioned it squarely in the American mainstream and last year won a historic, sweeping congressional victory, something the "centrist" groups had been unable to accomplish for decades--not even in the DLC's glory days of the 1990s.

If they push any farther they may tip the dinghy over on the port side.

Moulitas and Co. have never never gone in for elegant prose, and "workmanlike" implies a facility with plain, expository language that's also notably lacking in the hothouse atmosphere of the electoral revolution. But after listing some perversions of the process made possible, one notes, by the participation of plenty of Democrats who still sit in the chambers of Congress, we get:

The American people, infinitely smarter than Washington insiders, had had enough. Unapologetic, muscular Democrats swept into office in dramatic numbers in state and local races nationwide.

Now it was the same American people in an only slightly different statistical arrangement who twice returned the Crawford Kommandant to his plenipotentiary playroom, so invocations of their infinite collective wisdom are naturally suspect. As for what follows, what can I say but in the words of the late, great Myron Cope: Mmm-hah! Muscular! Apologetic! Her heart beat plapably against her chest. Ka-ching, ka-ching. She exhaled as he entered her. She had never felt so full.

TV Agonistes

I don't have a television, so I'm always thrilled at the bar when I get a chance to see what the rest of the world is up to. Consider, for instance, that CBS is about to launch a primetime series about a vampire who is a private investigator, or, as we're supposed to say about them these days, a private investigator who happens to be a vampire. Read the promo copy and weep:

Mick St. John is a private investigator who has truly seen it all after being bitten by his vampire bride on their wedding night 60 years ago. He now lives between two realities, fighting his adversaries among the undead while being in love with a mortal woman. St. John must cautiously balance these two lives before they clash, proving that life's gravest dangers are found in the moonlight.

Imagine the pitch. It'll be like CSI. But with a private investigator. Like Chinatown. But without Faye Dunaway. With some other chick who looks less like a space alien. And here's the hook. The guy's a vampire. Not like Tom Cruise was, nothing faggy like that. Like Buffy, or that Angel Spinoff. But with more Blade to it.

Hey, it beats politics.

Free, Fair, and Unanimous Elections

How did it escape my attention that Who Is IOZ?-endorsed Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani has been claiming that he was at the former World Trade Centers site more than rescue and search workers?

Funny--if highly apocryphal--story, which I might have mentioned here before. Things have not been going well for the Thousand-Year Reich. Hitler and his top generals and advisers walk in the woods outside of Berlin. His generals try to talk some sense into him, but the Fuhrer, by now, is lost entirely to reason. As they try to make him understand the Napoleonic magnitude of their situation in the East, Hitler bends down and picks up a hand-sized stone. "Gentlemen," he announces, "It is the Fist of Odin! It is a sign. We are destined to triumph!"

Excuses, Excuses

You'll pardon the absence of the usual Friday fun, but we're currently without power, and there's a lot of expensive cheese in the goddamn fridge which, it turns out, runs on electricity. Of course, the neighborhood convenience store has no power and no ice. So it's off in the car, an eventuality that I try hard to avoid.

This is proving, however, to be a great pleasure for my friends and loved ones, who've turned my own dismissals of their whims, gripes, and complaints against me: "What are you complaining about? You could be in Baghdad."

REM

There are more despicable liberals than E.J. Dione, but are any others quite so useless? Here he stumbles through the series of misapprehensions and venalities that led our Democrats to their latest and most ignominious defeat. Then Dr. Livingston stumbles out of the fevered, malarial jungle to proclaim, "This is no way to run a superpower."

Needless to say, it's exactly the way to run a superpower. It's the way we've always run this superpower. It's the way that every superpower before us was run. It's the way a particular consensus about the opeartion of state outside its own borders seems inevitably to triumph over the divisions between domestic factions. It's the way that even a newly empowered and occasionally vocal minority can with total predictability accede to demands about security. It's the way that factional discipline is never quire sufficient to prevent the business of fighting, policing, and spying from going and growing. You don't become a superpower without certain shared assumptions about, oh, let's see. What are the going terms? "America's place in the world."

So here you have a man with a sliver of access to the inside scoop. A guy who, more than you or I, sees this operation with a modestly less obstructed sightline. A guy who gets the basic mechanics. A guy who could put the puzzle together and say, "Maybe what this scene of shameful capitulation that I've just described to you indicates is that we need to rethink our national narrative in the most fundamental of ways." Or, of course, you could bitch that the operations of empire keep waking you from your sweet dreams.

Crazy Like A Fox

My blabbering about the nuttiest thing ever to appear on the WSJ op-ed page--no minor homerun record, that--inspired my friend Crusader AXE to opine on the fate of the WSJ itself, a subject I haven't mentioned here. So, in my own immortal words, let me just say this about that.

It's true that the Journal has some top-notch reporters. But then again, so does the Napa Valley Register, yet no one imputes the fate of men and empires to its fiscal or fiduciary stewards. What will we honestly suffer from the loss of the A-page of the Wall Street Journal? Some honest reporters may go work elsewhere; some dishonest ones may arrive or remain. It will be a shame to lose a consistent source of excellent reportage, but then again, the Journal's news reporting was more about depth and specificity than scoops. I don't believe that the next abu Ghraib will fall through the cracks because Murdoch's boys are now reporting on a chicken that tried to mate with a goat, or a Lohan, or whatever it is that Murdoch's boys are supposed to report on.

As for the rest of the Journal, I think Murdoch can do nothing but improve it. It is, was, and has for many decades been the carnival heaven for the barkers, buskers, and sideshow frontmen of State Capital. That's to say that it will probably benefit from more alliteration, brighter colors, and the atmosphere of a discount cruise. The paper was built and operated as an ongoing advertisement for its own necessity, anyway. It helped pimp the position that the purpose of auto makers is not to make autos, the purpose of grocery stores not to sell groceries, the purpose of energy companies not to produce energy, the purpose of telecommunications not to . . . telecommunicate? It helped usher in the great era in which every company and every corporation serves the same mission: "maximizing shareholder value." And indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find a company this side of John Mackey that hasn't reinvented itself as a financial-service firm that just happens to spit widgets out one end of a dilapidated factory.

The deranging influence of Financialized America, which owes greatly to the success of the Journal as a national paper, passes on perversions to all of us. I work for a non-profit, for instance. Our entire mission and purpose is to lose the money of our donors and supporters in pursuit of worthy causes. And yet how many times have I heard our CFO intone somberly about maximizing value for our stakeholders. Our what? Our product, such as it is, is a better, more beautiful more viable community. It can neither be maximized nor subdivided nor split nor sold. Yet here we are, nevertheless, spouting off like a CEO before the rubes at the annual stockholders meeting, even among ourselves.

People complain about Fox News, but it frankly doesn't bother me. In fact, I admire it. Murdoch took cable news infotainment and made it what it already was anyway, but he made it so much more obvious. Personally, I think he must be a closet leftist. He stripped away the veneer and pasted it over with big tits, bigger smiles, and aerial bombardments set to music. Nothing before or since has so subverted the respectability of the so-called Fourth Estate. Bill O'Reilly has done more than a thousand Chomskys to teach us precisely the value of the things we read and hear.

Bref

Hwæt! In the 1920s, following the first World War and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the British took over territorial Iraq under a League of Nations Mandate, imposed a Sunni Hashemite monarchy, dropped white phosphorous on the Kurds, and enacted a series of land reforms that allowed Sunni tribal leaders to consolidate property, wealth, and political power. For the next fifty years, Iraq was governed by a Sunni monarchy, a Sunni-dominated pseudo-republican military regime, a Sunni-dominated technocratic elite, and finally a Sunni strongman in the form of Saddam Hussein. Five years ago, the United States invaded Iraq, deposed its Sunni dictator, stripped the Sunni minority of its sinecures in goverment and largely of its right to participate in government, and, bowing to pressure from a now-empowered Shi'ite majority, sponsored parliamentary elections which, unsurprisingly, resulted in a Shia-dominated goverment. The Shi'ite government naturally allied itself with the coreligionist government of neighboring Iran. The remnants of the Sunni government and military apparatus began an insurgent campaign. Shia groups organized militias and began to exact revenge for past repressions as well as to enact their own repressions of the remaining Sunni population. A variety of terrorist groups, some with ties to major Iraqi factions, others loyal to more radical, less nationalistic agendas filtered into the cracks and began blowing shit up. The United States, fixated on Iran as its next great enemy, began to identify Shia groups with Iranian affinities as its principle enemy in Iraq. The Shi'ite government with its many ties to both Iran and to Shia militias, began supporting the idea that terrorists were the principle enemy in Iraq. The Sunni insurgents, seeking to arm themselves against their Shia masters, began cooperating with the Americans in combating "al Qaeda" in order to gain weapons and funds. The Americans, reacting to domestic political opposition to the idea of refereeing a civil war between Sunni and Shia acceeded to the idea that it was "al Qaeda" and "foreign fighters" causing the most damange in Iraq. This had the added benefit of allowing American politicians to blame perpetual bogeyman Iran. Iran, after all, is foreign to both America and Iraq. Who cares if the terrorists are or are not separated from the Iranian government by a thousand-year-old religious schism? America, in any event, gave everybody even more guns than they already had. This, my friends, is the strategy.

Second Verse, Same As the First

The emerging debate--evident in an array of new reports, conferences and commentaries--is still in the early stages, but some of the language urging the Bush administration to be more aggressive during its final 17 months is reminiscent of arguments from think tanks and commentators that shaped the case for invading Iraq. The Washington Post

Oh, good. Let's see. Unverifiable assertions about Iranian intentions and weapons programs? Check. Narrow range of quid pro quo policy options? Check. Michael Rubin, William Kristol, and Podhoretz? Check, check, check. Um, what else? Suggestion that Iranian President with no control of his own military and no authority to conduct independent foreign policy is Hitler? Check. Appeasement anaolgy? Check. Buried lede?

As with Iraq, however, they do not question that Iran is working on weapons of mass destruction and is intent on dominating the region.

Check and mate.

What's On Second

Follow me if you will.

An American raid and airstrike killed 32 people in the Shi'ite stronghold of Sadr City today, in what American military officials described as the latest assault on a network linking Iraqi militants with money and deadly roadside bombs from Iran.

But Shi'ite militias are the armed wings of the Shi'ite blocs in the Iraqi parliament. The Shi'ite blocs in the Iraqi parliament are the fickle power base of supposed American ally, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And Nouri al-Maliki is "on a trip to Iran . . . for discussions about security." Interestingly:

Colonel Garver said military intelligence indicated that at least one of the initial targets of today’s raid — 12 of whom were detained — acted as a “proxy between” the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Quds Force, and the Shiite Iraqi militias responsible for killing American troops with lethal roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s.

There are many ways to read this, but all of them point to the underlying fact that the American military does not, in fact, know whom it is fighting or whom it just killed.

Aux Barricades!

Extraordinary. For your crazitude of the day:

I’m not sure whether most of Europe, even all of Western Europe, will fall to Islam in the end. Worst case scenario: Muslims will create several smaller Pakistans or Kosovos, for instance one stretching from parts of France via Belgium to the Netherlands, one in regions of England and another one in southern Sweden. The situation in France and England is difficult to predict. France does seem set to become a Muslim country by now, but it is also a nation with an unpredictable revolutionary legacy. England sometimes appears lost, but my gut feeling tells me that there is still some residue left of the old warrior spirit there, which means that they will put up a fight at some point. France and Britain now both face the choice between becoming Islamic or engage in devastating civil wars.

Yes. France. The most resolutely secular nation on earth. Will become. An Islamic theocracy. Because some kids burned cars in the ghetto.

This is like the time I predicted that the crack epidemic and hip-hop culture were a sure sign that the United States would soon devolve into a loose confederation of African-animist Hoodoo states. Turns out I was wrong about some of the particulars, but I think the broader point remains valid.

The Times Goes Trotsky

What I want to know is how these radicals of the He-Man Left can be allowed to publish their clearly racist, sexist, classist rants about Democrats!

White Train

Another brilliant plan in what our friends at LG&M the War Against (Some Classes of People Who Use) Drugs:

The Bush administration is close to sealing a major, multiyear aid deal to combat drug cartels in Mexico that would be the biggest U.S. anti-narcotics effort abroad since a seven-year, $5 billion program in Colombia, according to U.S. lawmakers, congressional aides and Mexican authorities.

Let us all recall with fondness and admiration the success of Plan Colombia at effecting the ongoing decline in the street-price of pure cocaine. [Sotto voce] I'm sorry, what?

Let us all recall with fondness and admiration the success of Plan Colombia at interdicting the majority of north-flowing cocaine and significantly reducing consumption in the US of A!

Laff-line:

The Mexican government cringes at comparisons with Colombia, which unlike Mexico is locked in a 40-year-old guerrilla war and also is the world's largest cocaine producer.

2007 minus. 40-year-old. Colombia. That makes. Let's see. Hang on.

So the late sixties. Why, it's almost as if the twin imperatives of the War on Drugs and the "rollback" of communism have for forty years further destabilized an already unstable South American polity by funneling gazillions of dollars into a sometimes simmering, sometimes boiling conflict.

Blahhhhhh(g)

My faithful spies have noticed some anti-IOZ propoganda out and about Netrootsia, and one of the gripes strikes me as meriting a response. And it goes a little something like this, though you'll have to imagine the various looks of supercilious glee attending those who pronounce it: "IOZ always talks about his rich daddy." Oh, for the days when people just called me a fag!

Although I choose to maintain a veil of anonymity here for both personal and writerly reasons, it seems to me to be only ethical that I identify where I'm coming from. For the cultural critical types who've descended into this boring line of heel-biting, you could say, all perfersser-like, that I'm "implicating my position" or "interrogating my privilege" or whatever. This is not to identify my bona fides as some sort of American aristocrat, but to note with that trademarked blend of egoism and self-deprecation that as a person and a member of a class, I have vested interests and a certain perspective.

Now I am not especially well-to-do myself, but class is often as much a matter of education and upbringing as it is of actual personal fortunes. I grew up in a close "nuclear" family and a large extended family, and those interactions shaped my present beliefs. Accounting for that lineage is important. Let no man claim disinterest. If he does, he's a liar.

Jack Leon Ruby, Ubermensch

Is this is, or is this ain't the craziest thing you've ever read? It's the craziest thing I've ever read. Did you know, for instance, that the entire history of the Vietnam war was Soviet Propoganda? Neither did I! Anyway, the thesis, such as it is, is that since Soviet subjects understood their nation as the physical extension of a deified leader (sic), and since they therefore erroneously applied that same rubric to their view of the United States (sic), ergo propter hic august heretofore voilà, we can all admit that America can be understood as the physical extension of its own deified leader. Seriously:

For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts.

Shit. Why don't we just elect Amon Ra the next time around?

In any event, as I read this article, I thought to myself, "What sort of street-corner paranoiac could concoct such a crazy worldview out of his own memoirized, egoistical stream-of-consciousness?"

And that would be this kind of street-corner paranoiac.

Well. It's back to our shape-shifting Reptilian genetic overlords for me. Tah-tah.

But What About the Torture, Brother IOZ?

Much talk about Jane Mayer's new essay on America's global gulag and the various depredations carried out therein. Mayer reveals nothing new about practices already widely reported, but the essay shows the power of detailed accretion to create context.

So what of it? I got started this morning on a long piece looking at the moral distinctions between physical and psychological torture. I was going to talk about the routinization of "black site" torture in the context of the historiography of Discipline and Punish. I was going to talk about the way that Cartesian distinctions between body and mind provide torturers with moral justifications for psychological tortures that "leave no permanent damage," even as they destroy a person more fully and irrevocably than the most hideous of physical abuses. I was going to look through the lens of the American experience with torture-as-policy in Latin America.

I threw it away. Why academize it? Here we have a practice of driving people out of their minds in order to extract false confessions in order to justify a policy of driving people out of their minds in order to extract false confessions, etc. Everything else is casuistry. And what's especially demoralizing about it is how perfectly inept we world-conquerers have proven even at that. To use a phony confession here and there in order to divert attention from some political scandal--that's all! We have routinzed a pseudoscientific torture regime that would warm the cockles of Doc Mengele, all in order to distract the press from our nitwit attorney general's moronic troubles with Human Resources. We tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed until he admitted he was the Lindbergh Baby in order to bump Alberto Gonzales to the Metro section. Couldn't we just snatch some Bangladeshi cabbie in Manhattan and chain him naked to a rock where vultures will pick at his flesh until he confesses that he was the one who fired those attorneys?

Let's Lose

"Antiwar Democrats," caught up in the Washington Two-Step, rise quickly to outraged denials when anyone suggests that they're hoping the United States loses in Iraq, or loses in Afghanistan, or loses the so-called war on terror. Propoganda, they call it. Unsportsmanlike questioning of patriotism. We Love The Troops™!

But--stipulating that loss is a state as ultimately indefinable as victory here--isn't loss precisely what an antiwar position requires? If opposition to the occupation is predicated on the idea that the war is illegal and immoral, based on deception, and an act of aggression, then from what moral standing does one advocate even marginal success? Let's all put aside the humanitarian pap about leaving the Iraqis no worse off than they were before, about the impossible task of rectifying our fuck-up, and about the practical possibility (not likely) of making physical reparations. Wouldn't the ideal end state at this point be a significant, and moderately debilitating loss? I'm talking about unrealized base and embassy infrastructure. I'm talking about high-tailing the army out of the desert with a substantial loss of materiel. Concluding this misadventure without some kind of significant shock will just guarantee that it reoccurs somewhere else and soon.

Come, Nuncle

Oh, Caroline!

I've always been partial to the reading of Lear as the darkest of black comedies. (Titus Andronicus comes close, but veers into Grindhouse.) It is so unremittingly bleak, populated by such imbecilic losers, carried along like a feather on a breeze of madness. I recalled Lear's descent into insanity as occupying much more of the play than a recent re-reading revealed it to occupy. He's pretty much crazy from the get-go. Cordelia says she won't try to out-flatter her sisters and cheapen her true love for her father, but what harm would it do to flatter the vanities of proud, senile old man unless her own pride were a bit overweening. It's all rage, prophecy, speechifying, curses, cries, sermons, storms. "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench d our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" It's the sort of soliloquy the Coen Brothers put in the mouth of John Goodman. So cosmic, so vastly grandiloquent--what can you do but laugh.

So it is with Rudloph Giuliani. Beset on all sides by scams and scammers, undercut by scheming family, past and present, given to craziness. We all recall the Clinton dramas, but despite their educational pedigree, the Clintons managed to convince our tellers of tales that they were a little hayseed, and so Clinton never really escaped his reputation as a County-Fair lothario. Giuliani, meanwhile, has convinced our narrators of his belonging to that class of people whose habits of marriage, reproduction, and coastal Real Estate confer the status of Clan. Wives. Ex-wives. Rebellious daughters. Prodigal sons. Girlfriends. Mobbed-up cronies. Rages and tears. Messianism and depression. Towers of ego. Striving women and corrupted men. Oh, how I hope he's the next president just so that I can write about it!

Foreigners!

So I'm reading about the recent slumber party for the dauphin and his bosom buddy Hamid. And I'm struck by:

Afghan officials have charged that the government of President Pervez Musharraf has not done enough to prevent the influx of foreign fighters into Afghanistan to aid the Taliban and has tolerated a Taliban and al-Qaeda presence on Pakistani territory.

And:

"I'm confident that with actionable intelligence we will be able to bring top al-Qaeda to justice," [Bush] said. "We're in constant communications with the Pakistan government. It's in their interest that foreign fighters be brought to justice. . . . And I'm confident, with real, actionable intelligence, we will get the job done."

Dear readers, you have surely also noted that the various bloody goings-on in Iraq are also imputed to "foregin fighters," as were many of the vicious shenanigans in Southern Lebanon.

One begins to suspect that this phrase constitutes what our structuralist friends might call a signifier without signification. Or what you and I might call a mighty herd of bull.

The article goes on to reproduce another odd assertion:

Questioned about those remarks today, Bush said, "It's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon."

After all.

Iran has denied accusations by the United States that it's designing a nuclear warhead capable of triggering a massive blast. ABC Local Radio, Australia

"No. Absolutely not. Iran is a member of the Non Proliferation Treaty. We have safeguard agreements with the IAEA. Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction do not have a place in our defense doctrine. We have stated that clearly. And we have shown it." Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to United Nations, speaking to CNN.

Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons, as the West suspects, saying its program aims purely to generate electricity. Reuters

The West has accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, a charge Iran denies. BBC's The World

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, has rejected any accusation that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons saying it would not do this for fear of sparking a regional arms race. CCTV

Huh.

Leaving the Keys in the Car

Let's say I'm a continental superpower. Call me, oh, the Federal Commonwealths of Vespucci. And let's say that I've invaded and occupied a fractious, multiethnic, religiously divided country. Let's call it, oh, Husseinistan. And let's say that through a series of circumstances, I find myself in the unenviable position of trying to craft a modicum of stability in a situation where political reconciliation is clearly not in the offing. I suppose, then, one possible project would be to seek a balance of arms. What could possibly go wrong?

The only hitch I see is that any perception of favor in the distribution of arms, especially in distributing them to groups perceived as bad actors, could result in a lot of unfavorable backlash. Of course, there's a simple, practical solution. I could just unintentionally, you know, distribute them. Misplace some pallets. Lose a convoy or two. Mix up some transit orders. Forget to lock the shed.

A Transitional Stage

Recently, I noted this:

This morning, I discover at Hullaballoo that:

The goal, however, has to be to change the composition of the Democratic Party. There is no alternative that has a better chance of success. The only other choice is to give up. Why do that?

We need better Democrats. There are too many right now who are totally worthless.

And thence onward Donkle soldiers to a post entitled (I wouldn't kid!):

More and Better Democrats

Emphasis not ours.

I love the smell of sunk costs in the morning. It smells like victory.

Lazy writing has at least this much to commend it: it reveals lazy thinking. So consider:

The goal . . . has to be to change the composition of the Democratic party.

That's the goal, you see.

There is no alternative that has a better chance of success.

Success at what? Why, success at achieving the goal! Which is changing the composition of the Democratic Party. And so we discover ourselves at the center of a tawdry little tautology, whereby the only means of changing the composition of the Democratic Party are to change the composition of the Democratic Party.

Of course, that's not what she means by success. What she means by success is something like, "Roll back expansions executive power; roll back the power of the Executive to wage wars; mitigate damage to civil liberties caused by expanded surveillance; establish rule of law; withdraw as quickly as possible from Iraq."

These are admirable goals, but her category confusion speaks poorly of her committment. The admirable, external goals are subsumed by the goal of electing more Democrats. After all, that's the ongoing endeavor. After all, they've already given so much time, money, and effort. After all they've sunk into it . . . Why, to do otherwise would be to "give up."

How child-like. How naive. Consider instead the sentence: "To do otherwise would be to cut our losses and preserve what capital remains."

Don't tinker with the menu. Don't hire a new chef. Don't mess with the advertising campaign. CLOSE THE RESTAURANT. Sell off the stock. Auction off the hardware. Put the building on the market. Liquidate, and move on.

Work In Progress

While I troll the Information Super Highway Bridge, ahem, please note that Arthur Silber has begun posting again.

The Defeatists

Now on a gray-rained Sunday I refuse
to care at all.
The record I’ve put on has some small voice
entangled in the blues.
How did the poet put it? Dying
with a dying fall.

The coffee’s good. The fruit is sweet.
The fan goes overhead.
Conscience says why worry when you know
that you, like all of us, will meet
an end wherein you’re irrevocably dead.

Once a Patrician breakfasting in Rome
chewed a date
and plucked a passing berry
from a slave-held plate.
He’d once met Caesar, who was not
quite as statuesque as everyone had thought.

And once in warm July a chubby Louis wrote
Aujourd’hui, rien.
Undressed himself and went to bed.
He dreamt of his pale wife’s expensive throat.
And then.

All the Way from Washington

The style book here at Who Is IOZ? typically demands that we wrap our ad hominems in wordy, literary hoo-de-doo, but sometimes you've just got to ask: Lady, are you really this fucking dumb?

Obviously, I'm not the only one who can't for the life of me figure out why the congress is doing this.

To which we reply, no, dear. You are the only one: the only breathing creature left on this hurtling ball of rock, water, and bad karma to fail to grasp that the Democrats, just like the Republicans, keep voting to increase the powers of government and of the Executive in particular because they believe in and desire a more powerful and ubiquitous government and a more powerful executive in particular.

And what's particularly delicious is that your Hillary Clintons and your Barack Obamas and your Democratic Congresscreatures all see the plain future of 2008, in which yawning fools like Digby and chirping careerists like Markos Moulitas and a whole passel of other Netrootsian Democrats, all of whom are ever and always along for the ride, doing their damndest to put a Democrat in charge of it all! They're front-loading everything and the kitchen sink into the swollen gift-bag of Executive power so that the Clinton dynasty can expand magisterially into its role and worry about important things, like new rugs and china. The Democratic candidates all understand that they could rape babies in Times Square, and Glenn Greenwald would write a post about how the George W. Bush administration has done unprecedented damage to the convention against baby rape; Digby would write a post beginning with "I can't for the life of me figure out . . ."; Atrios would write a one-sentence post that says, "Remind me why we're raping babies again?"; FireDogLake would ignore the baby raping to live-blog "Joseph Wilson has totally hot sex with his hot wife"; DailyKos would explain to us how electing John McNobody in the Million-and-First district of rural Northern California will prove that Joe Lieberman is a bad man; the folks over at The Poor Man will blame it on "The New Naderism"; Lawyers, Guns, and Money will explain that Libertarians R Stoopid; and Josh Marshall will surprise us by pointing out that this one Republican, he totally, like, lied one time, and we can prove it!

If I might crib shamelessly from the Progblog book of stock phraseology: These are not serious people. I mean, who has to goose-step down fucking Main Street before they understand that there are no Democrats; there are no Republicans. There's only the government, and it's not your friend.

In Which IOZ Reminds You that He Has Been Right About Everything

Friends and countrymen, babes in the woods, pigs in blankets, vestal virgins and leather daddies, I do believe that this means we've been right all along.

On a side note, I'd like to welcome "Chuck" in cubicle 46 C at NSA headquarters to the conversation. Chuck is a Pisces, enjoys boating, video games, Italian food, and college basketball. He's gained a few extra around the middle, but he's working on it. He'll be listening in on everything, but don't worry. He just doesn't care anymore.