Armageddon, Revisited

We learned a number of interesting things during the End Times, that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, 2008. For example, we learned how much the banking business had changed in the previous decade. We also learned how blatantly people could just lie. 

The Tea Party types, who really don't know what they're talking about on any subject, suggested that the banks should've been allowed to fail, seemingly entirely ignorant that the phrase "Too Big to Fail" actually does have some real-world implications. 

The worst part is that I'm philosophically inclined to agree with them. But to this very day, no one has been able to adequately explain to me how you maintain a modern civilization without a financial services (or, as it pertains to AIG, insurance) industry. 

You see, banks are required to hold a given amount of money in reserve capital each night to do business the following day. More often than you'd suspect, they do this by borrowing from one another. This is what the papers mean when they discuss the "overnight rate", which is the interest rate the banks (or the Federal Reserve) charge one another on those loans. 

The government rescue of Bear Sterns allowed the remaining banks to believe that everything would be okay. But when Lehman was allowed to go under, they panicked, mostly because they knew that they all had the same balance sheet problems, to one extent or another. Not knowing who the next to go down would be - although pretty much everyone suspected that it would be Merrill Lynch, followed by either Morgan Stanley or Bank of America - they all stopped lending to one another. 

The banks wouldn't have just failed and vanished, either. Because deregulation allowed investment banks to become bank holding companies, they had commercial banks in their portfolios, the deposits of which were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The last time something like this happened - following Reagan's deregulation of the Savings and Loans in the 1980s - the federal government was on the hook for roughly $160 billion. 

After we just barely dodged the asteroid and the dust cleared, the Obama administration and Democratic Congress went about crafting the most tepid legislation they could without laughing out loud, like Harvey Korman used to on the old Carol Burnett Show. This became known as Dodd-Frank. The Tea Party went ballistic at the prospect of even this, not understanding that the underlying regulations of the act would be written by scumbag lobbyists, making them less than useless. 

I was watching a Canadian comedy show last weekend. An American comic got up and asked the audience, "Does Canada have banks? I only ask that because, in America, we don't any more."  That was the only thing I laughed at during that hour. 

As it turns out, the punchline might yet be stronger than I originally thought. 

Some of Wall Street’s biggest banks are bracing for fallout from a possible cut in their credit ratings.

Moody’s Investors Service, one of the two big ratings agencies, has said it will decide in mid-May whether to lower its ratings for 17 global financial companies.Morgan Stanley, which was hit hard in the financial crisis, appears to be the most vulnerable. Moody’s is threatening to cut the bank’s ratings by three notches, to a level that would be well below the rating of a rival like JPMorgan Chase.

Bank of America and Citigroup may also fall to the same level as Morgan Stanley, but those two are helped by having higher-rated subsidiaries.

Oh. That can't be good, can it? 

Why, no. No, it can’t.

Credit ratings are particularly important for financial companies, which greatly depend on the confidence of their creditors and the companies they trade with. A high credit rating enables banks to put up less money, which they can borrow cheaply, while a lower credit rating can mean they have to put up more money and perhaps pay more for their loans.

The three banks that stand to be the most affected by a ratings downgrade have already said that they would have to put up billions of dollars more in collateral to back trading contracts.

Having a substantially lower credit rating than rivals, however, could do much wider damage over time. It could affect billions of dollars in trading contracts that are an important business for Wall Street. Many of these contracts demand that the company on the other side of a trade have a high enough credit rating.

The country’s big mutual funds, asset managers and other institutions are reassessing their trading relationships in light of a possible ratings cut. In some cases, contracts are being rewritten. In others, big investors may walk away.

Weighing the creditworthiness and ratings of banks “is a major focus at Vanguard and at other buy-side companies who do business with Wall Street,” said William Thum, a lawyer with the mutual fund giant Vanguard, referring to institutional investors like his company.

Some of the funds that he deals with are prohibited from trading with banks that have a less-than-sterling credit rating.

The rest of the Times article goes on to minimize just how bad this can be, because it ignores what a credit rating downgrade can do to the stock price of the banks.

More than anything, what killed Lehman was the cratering of its stock. Past a certain point, it didn’t matter if someone took Lehman’s toxic assets of its books because the company was already worthless. The fact that the appropriately named Dick Fuld refused to sell Lehman at a discount only sped the collapse along.

Bank of America’s stock is already coming close to the point where it’ll be delisted as junk.  If it becomes too expensive or risky to trade with them, the same thing will happen to Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

If multiple enormo-banks become worthless overnight, God knows what that will do to the stock market. The same issues that prevented normal bankruptcy proceedings of the banks in the fall of 2008 still exist today.

Unlike four years ago, the Tea Party effectively controls the House of Representatives, making a congressional bailout impossible. Nor can it be guaranteed that Obama would sign one in an election year. That means that the Fed would have to run to the rescue, yet again.

Or it might not. Ben Bernanke must be getting tired of being demonized by pretty much everyone, and could decide to give everyone what they want. Liberals could punish the banks out of existence, and the Tea Party could have the Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior economy that it’s fantasized about ever since Rick Santelli told them to.

On the other hand, if you think that vicious predators like Lloyd Blankfein are going to any more benevolent when they’re riding motorcycles and wearing goalie masks than they are now, you’re in for a helluva surprise. 

Herman Cain has lost his fucking mind!!!

The Republican party has apparently forgotten the central lesson of Tropic Thunder: You never go full retard. The evidence of this is everywhere you look, but it's stands out the strongest in the Grand Old Party's field of presidential candidates.

Only the Republicans could see a discredited hack from twenty years ago and say, "Newt Gingrich? Why not?" For all of the folks on the right that have devoted their lives to defending her, I have yet to see one of them say that Michele Bachmann doesn't actually look crazy. In an election year that should be dominated by the economy, Rick Santorum can't stop lovingly describing his jihad against rubbers, pornography and, yes, even amniocentesis.

It's almost as if the GOP is deliberately throwing this election. Their hatred of Obama is so strong that they seem intent on condemning him to govern America as it declines into an irreversible morass of bankruptcy and stupidity. The only way the fix could be more clearly in is if they had a brokered convention and nominated George Zimmerman to run against the First Black President.

But the single most fascinating figure of the last year is Herman Cain. A more anonymous and singularly unqualified candidate is hard to come by, which explains why the Tea Party crowd fell instantly in love with him. A pizza man with a penchant for poontang, Cain achieved two things previously thought impossible: making Rick Perry look smart and Newt seem dignified. Amid multiple reports of sexual harassment and extramarital affairs, Cain took to campaigning in a pimp hat.

While he was always a cute haircut and an unwanted pregnancy away from being John Edwards, there was no previous indication that Mr. Cain was actually mentally ill. But the times, as Bob Dylan constantly reminds us, they are a-changin'.

His suspended presidential campaign has morphed, Kafka-like, into a PAC called Sick of Stimulus, which is running the single most hallucinatory ads in the entire history of politics.

 

Gadfuckingzooks! What in Christ's holy name is that?

Let's see if I understand this. Small business, which fast food mogul and mega-lobbyist Herman Cain has no direct experience with, is like a bunny rabbit that is launched into the heavens and blasted apart by a shotgun-wielding nerd. A creepy little girl, who would be perfect for a remake of The Exorcist, is considerate enough to ask if we have any questions. We then see Cain in a sweater vest on a cliff.

The best part of this nightmarish freakshow follows the final dissolve, when we are asked to help create S.O.S's next ad. Being nothing if not helpful, I'm fucking in!

We open on a tight shot of a hobo, naked, but for a ball gag and pair of torn fishnets. His eyes shift back and forth across the screen, showing his obvious terror. The creepy little girl intones off camera, "This is the federal budget." 


As the camera pans out, we see the geek in the Buddy Holly glasses brandishing a straight-razor. Creepy little girl appears to the hobo's left, and she says "This is the federal budget under the current administration." 


The nerd then carves a swastika into the hobo's forehead and a giant pentagram in his chest. Before the hobo can try to scream around the ball gag, the geek slashes his throat with the straight razor, an erection clearly visible in his Dockers. 


Smash cut to the girl, who now has specks of blood on the right side of her face. She asks "Any questions?" The camera pans down to the blood pooling around her feet. On the left hand side of the shot, we see fishnet-clad male foot twitching. The camera pans back up to the girl's face and she repeats without any indication of human emotion at the horror that surrounds her, "Any questions?"  The nerd stands behind her, panting, his hard-on even more pronounced and straining against his flies. 


We fade to black and dissolve into the sweater-vest wearing Herman Cain on a cliff with the Sick of Stimulus logo emblazoned on the sky, the sun setting in the azure sky behind it. 


Wow, I could do this all day! Not because I'm a twisted fuck, mind you. That's silly. I'm just that interested in fiscal policy.

Don't Bomb Iran, Part Four: What Would War Look Like?

Make no mistake about it, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel, the United States, or both, would be an act of war. And it’s about time that we start thinking about what that war would look like.

There’s something else that needs to be clarified; the difference between a pre-emptive war and a preventative war. As a matter of both international law and national honor, it is an important distinction. Too often, a possible attack on the Iranian facilities is described as pre-emptive, just as the 2003 war in Iraq was.

Pre-emption requires an imminent threat – something so immediate that it cannot be ignored. This was the case when the Syrians and Egyptians massed their forces on their borders with Israel in June of 1967. Israel struck before it could be struck first, which is what constitutes a pre-emptive war. Interestingly, Menachem Begin, himself no flaming liberal, is said to have believed that even the Six Day War didn’t qualify as pre-emptive, although Begin is in the clear minority on this.

Barring an imminent threat, such wars are properly described as preventative.  As I’ve discussed earlier, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq are all examples of preventative war.

Barring an imminent threat, such wars are properly described as preventative.  As I’ve discussed earlier, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq are all examples of preventative war.

As this is being written, Iran has no imminent nuclear capability, as even the most hawkish of voices are prepared to concede. They seek war - without actually describing it as that - with the stated objective of preventing such a capability. By definition, this would make any such military action purely preventative in nature.

Let’s assume that – as currently seems likely – Israel unilaterally launches a preventative war against Iran.  Given the hardening, redundancy and reported dispersal or Iran’s nuclear facilities, there is little chance that such an air strike would accomplish its objective. It’s entirely possible that Tehran has duplicated enough of its program in major population centers that Israel wouldn’t hit, or in hardened areas that it can’t hit, that an attack wouldn’t even significantly set back the program.  We already know that Iran hasn’t made the same mistake that Iraq and Syria did, placing all of their eggs in one easily destroyed basket.

The Israeli air force would have to travel further without refuelling than it ever has before, hit more targets in a larger area than it has previously attempted, evade Iran’s formidable air defenses without losing too many of its pilots, and fly over several unfriendly countries just to get there and back.

Let’s further assume that Iran didn’t presume that strike had American authorization, which they almost certainly would. If Israeli fighter planes crossed the airspace of Jordan, Iraq or Saudi Arabia without defensive manoeuvres by those countries, or their warning Iran of those planes headed toward it, Tehran could properly assume that they were complicit.

That being the case, Iran could treat those nations, and especially the Saudis, as belligerents. The most obvious place for Tehran to launch a retaliatory strike would be the Saudi oilfields, which are well within the range of Iran’s conventional short-range missiles.  While the United States might be able to reopen an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz in short order, they would be unable to rebuild the Saudi oilfields anytime soon. The destruction of those fields, combined with even a temporary closure of the Strait would cause the world price of oil to double or triple overnight, crippling he world economy.

The Shiite populations in Iraq, the UAE and eastern Saudi Arabia would also likely explode, further destabilizing all three countries and further driving up the world price of oil.

Iran would almost certainly retaliate against Israel with its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies, who would rain missiles and motors down on Israeli population centers from Lebanon and Gaza. Israel would massively respond to both, causing mass civilian causalities, and losing whatever support Israel had left in Europe in the process.

Fearing domestic unrest, Turkey might break off diplomatic relations with Israel completely, and any chance of peace with Syria and Iraq would be gone forever. Indeed, “democratic Iraq” might actively start supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, giving both groups greater legitimacy than they enjoy today.

At this point, there would almost certainly multiple resolutions introduced before the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly condemning Israel, which the U.S would be hard-pressed to veto. China and Russia could use this as an excuse to not only violate the existing sanctions against Iran, but to publicly and massively resupply Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria.

The democracy movement in Iran would immediately evaporate, possibly for as long as a generation. The only thing that they hate more than the mullahs is foreign interference in their affairs, and the country – including the opposition - would rally around the government, just as it did after Saddam Hussein’s invasion.  It’s much more than noteworthy that the Iranian opposition has never spoken out against the nuclear program. That seems to suggest that Iran’s strategic situation demands a nuclear capability, and that strategic situation would be highlighted by an Israeli strike.

This would be the result of an attack that didn’t end the Iranian nuclear program, or even set it back very far, if it all.

The above, again, is premised on the idea that Iran doesn’t blame the United States for the attack, which it most definitely would.

Hezbollah, which has long thought to have more deeply penetrated America than al-Qaeda ever had, could attack civilian targets deep in the homeland  Mass shootings or bombings in shopping centers or mass transit in a dozen or so U.S cities – such as Israel has seen for decades – would result in economic and political anarchy in the United States.

The heavily rumoured relationship between Hezbollah and the Mexican drug cartels - which Fox News actually reports as fact - could become fully operational on the southern border, causing violent chaos in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The Mexican government would almost certainly fall in such an eventuality, creating mass refugees and even more violence.  

A total breakdown in homeland security, combined with skyrocketing oil prices, would cause the stock market to crash in ways that it hasn’t since September of 2008, when it lost half its value.

Unless he went to Congress for an declaration of war, Barack Obama would-be defeated for re-election by almost any Republican that isn’t Ron Paul. Either way, the United States would be committed to war.

The problem is that Iran is three times the size of Iraq or Afghanistan, the wars in which have demonstrably broken the American military. And even more than Iraq and Afghanistan, a war against Iran couldn’t be won solely by air power. Nor do I believe that you could dismantle the nuclear program from the air. There would have to be regime change, which necessarily requires boots on the ground.

Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran lacks a significant ethnic opposition to the regime that could be counted on to support the American invasion. The military resistance, and subsequent guerilla war, can be expected to be unlike anything American forces have seen since at least Vietnam.

After nearly a decade of almost constant deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan, you should expect large-scale desertion in the event of a war with Iran. Because of the sheer size of the country and its population, you couldn’t just rotate between the regular Army and the National Guard and Reserves.  You would need a draft, particularly given how weakened the professional military is after the last decade of constant deployment. The United States would also need to devote significant military resources to homeland security, particularly along the southern border.

It’s also possible that under such circumstances, Iran would transfer chemical weapons to their terrorist allies for use against the U.S, Israel, or both.

The U.S isn’t like “Old Europe”, which used to name its wars after how many decades it took to fight them. After about 18 months of serious combat, American popular support declines precipitously, particularly when there’s no clear path to victory in sight. Since Iran is more militarily advanced – and would have a more unified popular opposition to invasion - than either Iraq or Afghanistan did, it stands to reason that such a war would last longer, and inflict even more in the way of causalities.

As we saw during the Vietnam era, there could be massive civil unrest and anti-war agitation. That could be worse, if combined with anti-government protests against security measures by the Tea Party right. If those people don`t want to get patted down before getting on an airplane, it`s reasonable to assume they`d like it even less just to get groceries.

War has a trajectory all its own. If, in 2001, you suggested that the United States would be in Afghanistan or Iraq a decade later, without actually winning, most people would have condemned you as a fool. Those folks don`t look so foolish now.

For the last thirty years, policymakers have been planning warfare based almost entirely on the best possible scenarios.  It strikes me as well past time that we begin to consider how things can go terribly wrong, if only because over the last ten years, they have.

And you know what the worst case scenario is? That we spend all of that blood and treasure creating a fully democratic Iran that still decides it needs nuclear weapons, because the regional strategic calculus hasn`t changed at all.



Barring a really cool fight in the comments that I feel deserves its own post, this should be the end of my Iran series. I know that it was really long and didn't involve sweet, sweet pussy in any way. I appreciate your indulgence.

Don't Bomb Iran, Part Three: On Containment and Deterrence

"A country that builds underground nuclear facilities, develops intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactures thousands of centrifuges, and that absorbs crippling sanctions, is doing all that in order to advance…medical research.

So you see, when that Iranian ICBM is flying through the air to a location near you, you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s only carrying medical isotopes.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then what is it?

That’s right, it’s a duck. But this duck is a nuclear duck. And it’s time the world started calling a duck a duck.

Fortunately, President Obama and most world leaders understand that the claim that Iran’s goal is not to develop nuclear weapons is simply ridiculous.

Yet incredibly, some are prepared to accept an idea only slightly less preposterous: that we should accept a world in which the Ayatollahs have atomic bombs.

Sure, they say, Iran is cruel, but it’s not crazy. It’s detestable but it’s deterrable.

My friends,

Responsible leaders should not bet the security of their countries on the belief that the world’s most dangerous regimes won’t use the world’s most dangerous weapons."

- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, Speech to AIPAC, 5 March 2012.

There is a widespread assumption that, whatever the motives behind the Iranian nuclear program, it actually canbe stopped. This flies in the face of over sixty years of history. Moreover, it flies in the face of common sense.

Before going further, I should note that I'm making these arguments based on the presumption that Tehran is attempting to produce and test a deliverable weapon in the near future, although this is far from certain. It is just as likely - and probably more so - that it is looking for weapons capability, not unlike that of Japan.

The fact is that nukes are horrible strategic weapons if your purposes are offensive. If your strategic goal is territorial expansion, which is the case for most belligerents, nuclear weapons leave no habitable ground to occupy. Moreover, their use invites a devastating response that would utterly annihilate the country that launches them first.

More importantly, recent weapons proliferation lowers the likelihood of "nuclear blackmail." If you assume that the United States and Israel wouldn't respond to Iranian nuclear blackmail, there's no guarantee that other potential rivals of Tehran, such as Pakistan or India, would follow suit.

Nuclear capability, on the other hand, is a superior defensiveoption. Everyone thinks long and hard before launching large-scale military action against a nuclear nation, so much so that it has never actually happened.

But the fact is that no country has ever been stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons once it has been determined that their possession is their strategic interest.

Many point to the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein's reactor at Osirak as an example of a preventative strike working, but they're wrong. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, IAEA inspectors found that Iraq was no more than a year from a successful weapons test.

Argentina and Brazil suspended their programs due to their costs and changing strategic circumstances. The need for the South African program - which was almost certainly aided by Israel - was predicated on Apartheid. Once Apartheid disappeared, so did the potential for conflict between South Africa and its neighbours and their Soviet sponsor. But most serious analysts believe that Johannesburg maintains a nuclear capability.

We live in a world today where North Korea - whose people subsist off of tree bark and whose smart people have been dispatched to either the gulag or the grave - can obtain nuclear capability. If they can do it, pretty much anyonecan.

But Netanyahu is simply fear-mongering when he suggests that there will be an "Iranian ICBM." North Korea's program is far further along than Tehran's, and they haven't been able to launch an intercontinental vehicle that hasn't exploded on the launch pad, or shortly thereafter.

Of all of the world’s nuclear powers, only a very few have managed to develop full intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities. China – upon whose missile designs the North Koreans, Pakistanis and Iranians are believed to rely - is thought to be only capable of hitting the west coast of North America. Israel only has intermediate capability. The only country currently believed to be making progress on full ICBM capability is India.

If Netanyahu doesn’t know this, he isn’t qualified to be prime minister of a nuclear power. And if he does know it, then he shows no compunction about lying in front of the entire world.

Much has been said about the sanity of the Tehran regime. Indeed, it has been described a “suicidal death cult.” This is commonly known as an assertion without evidence. If anything. the Ayatollahs  have been impressive in knowing how far to push without provoking a ruinous war, and no further. Kenneth Pollack lay this out in some detail in his 2005 book, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America.

At some point there needs to be a separation between the rhetoric of a country’s leadership – which is often designed for purely domestic political purposes – and its actions. If Iran wanted to attain paradise through the destruction of Israel, it has had the capability of doing so with chemical weapons for several decades now. More importantly, Ayatollah Khomeini was more than willing to accept delivery of Israeli (by way of the United States, although the first shipment had the Star of David on them) anti-tank weapons during the Iran-Contra affair, which coincidentally was at the height of Tehran’s anti-Israeli rhetoric and reckless adventurism.

Netanyahu, along with virtually everyone in the United States, consciously chooses to ignore the historically close relations between Israel and Iran. For a long time, Tehran under the Shah was the only Muslim capital to recognize Israel. Iran, along with Saudi Arabia, was a part of America’s “two pillars” security strategy in the Middle East, with nary a word of complaint from Jerusalem.

That, combined with the delivery of weapons during Iran-Contra, poses the very real possibility that Iran is angling for the best deal with Israel that it can arrange for itself. It should be remembered that both the Israelis and the Iranians both have good reason to fear and despise their Arab neighbours than they do one another. Islam itself was introduced into Persia at the end of an Arab spear, something that the Persians themselves aren’t ready to forget. And in the purported 2003 Foreign Ministry letter to Washington, Iran offered to recognize Israel within the 1967 borders.

It’s possible, however unproven, that Iran’s support of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad is designed to regain the influence it lost with the fracturing of relations Israel and the U.S following the revolution. If nothing else, Israel’s humiliating 2006 war with Hezbollah demonstrated the weakness of their influence on their own border.

But let’s assume that the preceding four paragraphs are all unmitigated nonsense. The fact remains that, despite having had ample opportunities over the last thirty-three years, the Mullahs still haven’t provoked a ruinous war with the United States or Israel. It can safely be assumed that if they were to do so with a nuclear capability, it would be nothing less than apocalyptic for them.

In modern history, there has been only one nation that can properly be described as suicidal: Nazi Germany. And Germany didn’t instigate the Second World War with the idea that it would be destroyed. Hitler only embarked on national suicide after Stalingrad, when he knew the war was lost and refused to sue for peace. On the other hand, Germany’s endless atrocities in the East almost guaranteed that they would be given no quarter by the properly vengeful Soviets even if Hitler begged for it.

Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were every bit the genocidal monsters that Adolf Hitler was, yet both developed nuclear capability. Those acquisitions were both deemed unacceptable by the United States before it determined that could accept them just fine. This is because American policymakers, beginning with George Kennan, determined that any grand ambitions those powers harbored could be contained.

The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China could have sponsored terrorism against the United States, just as they did throughout the Third World. But they didn’t because they knew that the consequences would destroy their ambitions and very possibly their chances of national survival.

That’s important to remember when you consider that international communism was once commonly described as a messianic death cult, just as Iran is today.

Moreover, it could be strongly argued that the Soviets and Chinese obtaining nuclear weapons directly led to American rapprochements with both. Washington recognized neither country for decades after their respective revolutions. After they attained nuclear capability and war was no longer an option, both developed much better relations with the United States than was possible before.

As it happens, not everyone is Hitler. In the last twenty-five years, dime-store thugs like Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein have been compared to Hitler. There is hardly a country in the Middle East that the Israeli leadership hasn’t equated with Nazi Germany. What no one seems able to understand is that when everyone becomes Hitler, Hitler loses all historical relevance. It strikes me as the height of perversity that Israel and those that declare their love for it would minimize Hitler and his apocalyptic impact on the Jewish people in such a way. Hitler remains such a frightening lesson for humanity precisely because of how monstrously unique he was.  

More importantly, when any security challenge is presented as a confrontation with a reinvigorated Nazism, the only reasonable conclusion is that nothing short of an Armageddon is acceptable in defeating it. Nazi Germany was not to be denied until Nazi Germany was physically destroyed and over half its people condemned to bolshevism. Say what you will about even the most fervent believers in the Twelfth Imam, but even they haven’t culturally romanticized the concept of their doom the way the German people did Gotterdammerung well before the rise of the Third Reich.

Even if the Iranians are the living embodiment of Nazi theology in the world today, there is still no reason to believe that they cannot be contained.

Firstly, there is nothing in their 4,000 year history – nor in their 33 year post-revolutionary history – that suggests that they’re inclined toward national suicide. And they have had no shortage of opportunities. They could have passed chemical or biological weapons to terrorists for use against Israel or the United States, and they could have done so well before September 11, 2001.

The idea that any state would pass WMD to terrorist elements in the absence of severe provocation is silly beyond words. Given that they are motivated by religion or ideology more than states are, terrorists are difficult to control at the best of times.

Then there’s the matter of blowback. As I write this, serious WMDs are only capable of being produced by states. As soon as once is unleashed, it is only a matter of time before it traced back to the state that produced it. And that state can face furious retribution, if not complete annihilation.

The only way that any state, even the most irrational of actors, would pass along a weapon like that is if it was already facing foreign invasion with the objective of regime change. At that point, it would have nothing to lose and could at least get retribution from beyond the grave.

If anything, Iran is far more temperamentally conservative today than it was thirty years ago, when the regime was assassinating its opposition in Europe, particularly France, without any consideration for the consequences. But Paris reached an accommodation with the mullahs and the havoc stopped, which suggests that it’s a rational actor.

Secondly, the regime is fighting a losing battle from within. At the time of the 1979 revolution, the Iranian population was older and more rural than it is today. The repression of the Shah and SAVAK, particularly in the countryside, fed much of the energy behind it.

As we saw in the 2009 Green Movement, the population is younger, more cosmopolitan and more open to Western ideals. They’re also frustrated with the stagnant economy (prior to recent international sanctions) and the growing influence of “state capitalism” by the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The demographics suggest that the hardliner Mullahs are not long for this world. That is unless there is some kind of foreign intervention that unites the Iranian people against the outside world.

In this, Iranians and Israelis are not dissimilar. Israel conducts policy the way it does because the outside world ignored the plight of the Jews before the Jewish state was established. Iran is xenophobic because foreign powers, from the Mongols, to the Arabs, to the British, Soviets and Americans imposed their will upon their national aspirations at every available opportunity.

A containment policy – which the Obama administration has inexplicably abandoned before it has even been tried – would allow the regime to implode, just as the Soviet Union’s did.

But intervention will retard that demographic revolution, probably by decades. The Iranian people may increasingly hate the mullahs, but they remain haunted by the ghost of Mohammad Moseddegh. In ways that most countries haven’t, Iran has already seen its internal progress stymied by foreigners. And the likelihood that they want to see it again is approximately close to zero.

Given the current confluence of events, the West is heading towards a war with Iran. The results of that war are going to as disastrous as they are predictable.

Don't bomb Iran: Part Two: Why do they want the bomb?

If you're going to bomb folks, it stands to reason that you know a little something about them. That's where our free press has always fallen down. Our historians haven't done much better.

For example, did you know that Imperial Japan was hostile to the United States in 1941 (when the United States was by law nuetral in foreign affairs) in large part because the Roosevelt administration placed an oil embargo on Japan in response to their brutal invasion of Chinese Manchuria?

Did you also know that the United States produced 50% of the world's oil at the time? It was the world's largest producer by far. Now how do you suppose the U.S would react to having its fuel cut off in the middle of armed hostilities?

It also wasn't a secret that with the Lend-Lease program, the administration was angling to enter the European war on Britian's side. Eventually, it stood to reason, that war would come come to Japan's shores. It could have been years away, but the Japanese knew it was going to happen. Pearl Harbor didn't just come out of nowhere, folks.

Once you understand that, you understand that Pearl Harbor wasn't exactly an unprovoked attack. It was an example of preventative warfare, not at all unlike the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the current debate over attacking Iran. Japan knew that it would eventually face war with the United States, so it sought to cripple the Pacific fleet first. Granted, no American policymakers and very few in the media or academia will actually tell you that.

Our historical understanding of Iran isn't much better. Everyone knows, or should by now, about the 1953 CIA coup against the only elected government Iran ever had. But that wasn't the first instance of the western powers interfering with Persian governance.

Reza Shah Pahlavi was basically the father of modern Iran. It was he forced the international community to stop referring to it as Persia. He modernized the country during the '20s and '30s and established a new Parliament.

Much as they did in Afghanistan a century earlier, Great Britain and the Soviet Union were engaged in a Great Game in Iran in the years between the First and Second World Wars. To counter this influence,  Reza Shah became closer to Hitler's Germany. After Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R, the Soviets and British jointly invaded and occupied Iran to ensure an Allied supply route to the Russians and forced the Shah to abidicate in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Reza Shah was forcibly exiled by the British to South Africa, where he died in 1944.

After the war, the junior Pahlavi Shah was a close ally of the United States and the United Kingdom. As a matter of fact, the only time the U.S openly threatened anyone with a nuclear attack was when Stalin refused to evacuate northern Iran after the German defeat. That threat caused the Soviets to redouble their efforts to get the bomb for themselves, which they finally did in 1948. Other than that, things were going swimminingly. That is, until the Iranians got it into their heads that a little democracy would do them good.

In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister and he nationalized the wildly exploitive Anglo-Persian Oil Company ( known to modern Gulf of Mexico enthisiasts as BP). The British, as you might imagine, didn't cotton to this. After Mosaddegh closed the British embassy in October 1952, fearing a coup directed from London, Churchill implored President Truman to remove him. Truman refused.

During this period, Mossaddegh moved to limit the extraconstitutional powers of the Iranian monarchy, which convinced the British and the newly sworn in Eisenhower administration that he was a communist. It should be noted that in the early days of Ike's presidency, the Dulles brothers (John Foster and Allen, respectively the Secretary of State and Director of Central Intelligence) thought that pretty much everyone was a communist. President Eisenhower approved Operation Ajax and dispatched the alcoholic grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit, to Tehran to carry it out.

Even the Shah was leery about overthrowing Moseddegh, agreeing to Ajax only after Kermit Roosevelt told him that his opinion was irrelevent to the United States, although it would be just cricket if he was on board. The Shah agreed to sign a decree firing Moseddegh, but only after he fled to Rome, by way of Baghdad. In August 1953, Moseddegh was finally removed from power.

The United States sought to protect the Shah from any further challenges to his reign. To further that end, the CIA financed and trained his vicious secret police force, SAVAK. You know the brutal torture methods that post-revolutionary Iran employs? They had been used on the revolutionaries by SAVAK, who very possibly learned them from the CIA.

Make no mistake, the Shah was perhaps the first and most successful serious reformer in the Middle East. He was the first - and for a good long time, only -  Muslim leader to recognize Israel. Education and women's rights grew by leaps and bounds during the later years of his rule. Unfortunately, his reforms were more than the domestic traffic would bear, particularly in the deeply religious countryside. So he pushed through his reforms by force, never hesitating to to torture or murder anyone who challenged his authority.

While the American people were spared the details of Operation Ajax for decades, Iranians had a pretty good idea who sponsored the reversal of their democracy and the murderous excesses of SAVAK. It should come as no surprise that the Iranian Revolution took such a stridently anti-American tone. Republicans love to decry President Obama's "apology" (which was actually little more than an acknowledgement) for the overthrow of Moseddegh, but the fail to learn the most important lesson from its history. As the great Dan Carlin put it, "When you get rid of Moseddegh to have the Shah, you wind up with Khomeni."

Operation Ajax also had a devestating effect on America's popular reputation in the region.

United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who visited Iran both before and after the coup, wrote that "When Mossadegh and Persia started basic reforms, we became alarmed. We united with the British to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honored one in the Middle East."

This is what intelligence professionals call "blowback." You might accomplish your short-term goals through a given operation, but you're just as likely to suffer unforseen, long-term drawbacks because of it.

At the time of the 1979 Revolution, Iran hadn't formally sent its military beyond its borders in centuries. But the world - from the ancient Greeks, through the British, Russians, and finally the Americans with Ajax - never stopped infringing on Iran's sovereignty.

Then on September 22, 1980 things went from bad to incalcuably worse. Fearing that the fervor of the Iranian Revolution would spread to its Shi'a majority, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran, begining a savage eight year war that would kill a million people. Iraq repeatedly used chemical weapons on Iran, prohibited since the end of the First World War, some sixty years earlier. And the world did nothing.

Actually, that's not true. President Reagan dispatched former (and future) Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with Saddam. The United States restored full dilpomatic relations with Iraq, and gave them both financial and intelligence aid in their war against the Iranians.

By the end of the war, both sides resorted to human wave fighting, more common to the 16th century than the modern era. And a plurality of the soldiers at the point were in their early teens.

After the Iran-Iraq war, Iran's geostrategic position continued to deteriorate. When the 1991 Gulf War ended, it was discovered that Saddam was within six months of testing a nuclear weapon. In 1998, both Hindu India and Sunni Pakistan detonated weapons. Iran's eastern neighbour Afghanistan had been a festival of chaos since the Soviet-sponsored coup against the monarch in 1973. In 1999, Iran very nearly went to war with Afghanistan after the Taliban butchered a number of Iranian diplomats to death. Oh, and Israel has had nuclear weapons for forty years. Most accounts have their stockpile at about 200.

Then came 9/11 and it's aftermath, which history will show as a squandered opportunity of monumental proportions.

Seeing a chance to dispatch their Taliban enemy and quell the anarchy on its border, Tehran cooperated fully with Washington during the initial invasion of Afghanistan. During the 2002 loya jirga in Germany, Iran is said to have used its influence with various Northern Alliance factions to name America's choice for president, Hamid Karzai, to office.

In the spring of 2003, a letter purported to have come from the Iranian Foreign Ministry was delivered to the United States by the Swiss. In the letter, Iran stated it was willing to negotiate the following;

US aims: (Iran accepts a dialogue "in mutual respect" and agrees that the US puts the following aims on the agenda)

1. WMD: full transparency for security that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD, full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols)
2. Terrorism: decisive action against any terrorists (above all Al Qaida) on Iranian territory, full cooperation and exchange of all relevant information.
3. Iraq: coordination of Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilization and the establishment of democratic institutions and a non-religious government.
4. Middle East:1) stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad etc.) from Iranian territory, pressure on these organizations to stop violent action against civilians within borders of 1967.
   2) action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon
   3) acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration (Saudi initiative, two-states-approach)

Let's review, shall we? Iran possibly offered to end both its WMD program and sponsorship of terrorism, and said that it would recognize Israel and bring peace to Iraq. Essentially, all it wanted in return was a security guarantee from the United States. If true, that could have been the most stunning development in the post-Cold War era.

Sadly, we'll never know if it was true. The United States ignored the letter and the Bush administration doubled down on its "regime change rhetoric. Tehran's nuclear program, which even the American intelligence community concedes had been suspended, would soon resume.

Even if the worst case scenario was the case, and the letter was unauthorized, it could not have resulted in a replay of the 1986-'87 Iran-Contra scandal. The veracity of the letter could easily have been verified through the Swiss diplomatic back-channel. It should also be noted that at the time American diplomats were sitting across the table from the Iranians during the Afghan negotiations.

This was not a case of Iranian "moderates" seeking high-tech arms, and completely a product of Michael Ledeen's fevered imagination. Ledeen, it should also be noted, was also implicated in the distribution of the forged Iraqi "Yellowcake" memo. The presumed Iranian letter could've been easily verified with a minium of embarassment to the Bush administration.

If the letter was real, the fact that it was ignored sent a powerful message to Tehran. A peace offer had been spurned by a country that held regime change as official policy for thirty years and would soon have a quarter of a million troops on two of its borders.

That, combined with the increasing nuclearization of potentially hostile powers in the region and the long history of foreign interference in its internal affairs, makes the motives of the Iranian weapons program very easy to understand.

What would any country in Iran's strategic and historical position do? There are no shortage of suggestions that Iran is crazy to want nuclear weapons. But any objective look at the situation makes it easy to argue that they'd be crazy if they didn't.

A Two-Legged Cancer: Another Post About Lobbyists and Why Conservatives Should Want Them Destroyed

In his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig posits that money is the root of all political evil and that money must be strictly controlled and regulated. Professor Lessig also makes the interesting point that conservatives will never get their fondest wish, tax reform in a "flat" or "fair" system, without systematic campaign finance reform.

Lessig's basic theory is that you cannot have serious tax reform with Washington lobbyists throwing money around wildly at the relevent congressional committess, specifically Ways and Means in the House and the Senate Finance Committee.

As Ronald Regan's first budget director, David Stockman, pointed out on Moyers & Company a couple of weeks ago, that would require a constitutional amendment given repeated Supreme Court rulings equating money and speech. Obviously, that isn't going to happen anytime soon, if ever. The triumph and continued celebration of institutional ignorance makes it a virtual impossibility. Even if that weren't the case, ratification would be a challenge that probably couldn't be overcome.

John McCain said on Meet the Press this past Sunday that Citizens United would lead to a scandal so catastrophic that serious reform was inevitible. As he is on any number of issues lately, McCain is terribly, terribly wrong and displays a pathetic understanding of history.

The first significant revisions to campaign finance were made in the wake of Watergate and President Nixon's resignation on 9 August 1974. It should be remembered (if anyone understands it in the first place) that there would have been no Watergate witout Nixon's campaign "slush fund" that consisted of several million dollars. The White House Plumbers Unit was financed through that fund, which is how Congress was unaware of it. And the hush money that constituted the main (and by far most important )obstruction of justice article of impeachment came from there as well.

During a recorded conversation on 20 March 1973, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that the silence of the Watergate burglers would "cost a million dollars." Nixon replied, "You can get a million dollars. I know where it can be gotten", by which he almost certainly meant his campaign slush fund.

And Watergate did lead to comprehensive campaign finance reform. Unfortunately, it didn't take. Beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, the Supreme Court knocked laws down on First Amendment grounds just as quickly as they could be written. If Watergate and the forced resignation of a president that had won 49 states less than two years earlier didn't make reform stick, what scandal does McCain forsee that will? In the decade after Watergate alone, the money spent in House and Senate races exlploded by some 400%.

Money will always (and, in my opinion, properly) be equated with speech. Scandal will only change things temporarily, if it doesn't actually accelerate the cascade of money. And a constitutional amendment is a hill far too high for anyone to be reasonably  expected to climb.

Nor do I think campaign money is even the problem. President Theodore Roosevelt financed his 1904 campaign with giant wads of cash from a very exclusive combine of industralist millionaires. That money in no way stopped TR from screwing his contributors with the hot poker of anti-Trust laws when the mood struck him. That suggests that money isn't as much of a problem as the character of our current politicians is. And no law is ever going to change that.

I just started reading Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform by Allan Murray and Jeffery Birnbaum. Showdown chronicles the passage of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the signature legislative accomplishment of President Ronald Reagan's second term, which was passed over the strenous efforts of Washington's army of lobbyists with fairly impressive bi-partisan support.

The '86 law is the foundational basis of most current Republican tax plans. It lowered rates fairly dramatically and closed corporate loopholes. Sound familiar? What modern Republicans don't like, but liberals loved, is that it also took some four million low-income earners out from under the federal tax burden entirely. In any event, it was widely considered a triumph over the lobbying class.

One of the great things about reading history is that you usually know how the story ends. While Showdown at Gucci Gulch had a happy ending - tax reform passed and the lobbyist scumbags were vanquished - things became decidedly unhappy after the book's 1987 publication.

By 1990, or thereabouts, the lobbyists had most (if not all) of their client's loopholes restored, which essentially meant that you had fewer people paying taxes at a lower rate. That threw the budget even more out of balance, necessitating the 1990 and '93 tax increases under George H.W Bush and Bill Clinton. Since then, tax rates have been even more drastically cut as loopholes have broadened.

Forget something as dramatic as serious tax reform, you won't even be able to balance the budget as long as this persists. So long as the political system stays as it is, tax rates will continue to remain static (or head further downward) as loopholes expland, meaning that government will have less and less revenue to do more and more. Iran, as you might have figured, has a very poor history of bombing itself.  

Nor willl spending cuts accomplish much, at least not by themselves. You can only cut so much in a democracy before people start to realize that they're losing services only to preserve the goodies in the tax code for their social betters. This almost never ends well, as you might well imagine.

No amount of campaign finance reform - outside of full public financing - is ever going to change this. Moreover, there's no guarantee that public financing would be upheld by the courts because of free speech considerations.

But it can be handled nicely through lobbying reform. Specifically, the revolving door of politics, government and lobbying.

Let's be real. Political types are practically unemployable, which is how they got into politics in the first place and why so many of them go into lobbying when they finally get booted out of politics forever. And lobbying firms know that.

On the other hand, those firms also know that those layabouts, both at the elective and staff levels (both campaign and governmental), have built relationships and know how to work the system to their ends. Why else would they be hired, if not to exploit that? It's not as if these people were especially good lawyers. If they were, they'd be making more money in white-shoe law firms and investment banks, and never would have darkened democracy's door in the first place.

Worse, these people, while still registered as lobbyists, are allowed to still "volunteer" on campaigns and "advise" members of the government. Those people exist to play the government - and by extension, us - to the fullest extent that they can. If you want to know why the 1986 Tax Reform Act didn't solve all of the world's ills, and may have actually made the budgetary situation worse, now you do.

The best part is that you don't even need a law to fix this! Under the constitutions of the United States and most of the Commonwealth, legislatures are given the freedom to pass and enforce their own rules. Better still, the courts rarely, if ever, interfere with that right, if only because they want to preserve their own independence to maximum possible extent.

The way I see it, you needn't restrict the right of former politicians or their staffs from registering as lobbyists. Congress or Parliament could simply pass a rule prohibiting current members (and their current staffs) from interacting with them if they do. This also wouldn't violate anyone's association rights because the member always has the option of resignation. Being a member of a legislative body isn't a right. It is something that comes at the pleasure of the people.

How long do you figure lobbying firms would continue to hire these people if their ability to trade influence was retricted? Sure, some of them would survive as "consultants" or "legislative strategists" but you would see their numbers decimated simply because the market couldn't bear that much dead weight for very long. 

One of the reasons that I don't write about liberals very often is that I know that they're impractial idealists, and that there's very little reasoning with them. Until very recently, conservatives were different. 

Besides, the most important legislative goals - like fundamental tax reform - are directly tied to minimizing the power of lobbyists, and that's simply not true of the left. Moreover, it would probably be far better politically for conservatives if liberals were left to be the exclusive domain of animals like the folks at Goldman Sachs. More importantly still, there haven't been very many liberals over the last fifteen years that have been ensnared in (or imprisoned because of) lobbying-related scandals. But the list of conservatives who have been is virtually endless.  

There are any number of reasons that conservatives should do this, but I hardly think that they will.

First, as we've seen in recent years, conservatives benefit as much from the revolving door as liberals ever did, and the criminal dockets show that they've benefitted from it even more. Second, it would require conservatives to actually do something, instead of  merely opposing stuff, which has become our legislative default position.

Long story short, conservatives are never going to get the things that their hearts desire most. And it's going to be their own fault.

Stephen's Harper's risky ploy

Up until fairly recently, I thought that, if nothing else, Stephen Harper was at least a competent politician. Sure, he's a jabbering dupe of a prime minister, and his party has come to embody all of the worst excesses of his Liberal blood enemies, but at least he was a better than average campaign strategist.

That's changed over the last year. He won his long-awaited majority after running what was easily the worst of his four national campaigns. He won because the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff self-destructed. Towards the end of the campaign, he wound up running against the idea of an NDP majority, which no one would have thought possible even a month earlier. As the Dippers rose, they split the Grit vote in enough ridings to allow the Conservatives to come up the middle. Winning because the other side falls apart is hardly an accomplishment to be very proud of.

As it happens, the Tories may have still had to cheat to win, even as Canada's Natural Governing Party was busy committing collective suicide. In recent weeks, there have been credible reports of robocalls being made in dozens of ridings. Those calls, which were fraudulently identified as coming from Elections Canada, told Liberal-leaning voters that there polling place had changed. And that, as you might imagine, is a fucking crime.

Those calls almost certainly originated with the Conservative Party, and Stephen Harper almost certainly knew about them. To suggest otherwise is to entirely ignore the last six years.

Harper has famously micromanaged both his party and the government to such an extent that Tories everywhere are afraid to say or do anything at all without first clearing it with the Prime Minister's Office. Entire books have been written about his top-down management style, for Christ's sake.

If the robocall scandal is even half as widespread as is currently alleged - and I'd be awfully surprised if it doesn't get a lot bigger - there is no credible way that Harper didn't know about it. Nothing happens that the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO doesn't know about, and if the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO knew about the robocalls, you can bet your ass that Harper knew about it. The suggestion that the spending required to launch calls as widespread as what we're hearing would escape Harper's notice, or that of his top campaign people, is ludicrous. And if his top campaign people knew, he knew.

If I were the Prime Minister, I'd be looking for a very good criminal lawyer right about now. I just can't see a scenario where the Tories can avoid a public inquiry on this one. If they refuse to initiate one, they look guilty. But if they do, the chances are pretty good that they'll be found guilty. And once the small-fries start looking at the prospect of going to jail, they'll start trading up with prosecutors. Once that starts, it isn't likely to stop. One of the drawbacks of Stephen Harper's management style - as opposed to, say, Brian Mulroney's - is that it doesn't inspire much loyalty.

The In and Out scandal dragged on for years, but no one really cared about that because to even understand it was to get so far into the weeds of Canadian campaign finance law that no one could be bothered. By the time the Tories admitted their guilt, no one noticed.

This is different. If true, this is voter fraud carried out across the second largest country on Earth. As things currently stand, it stretched across multiple time zones and could have affected tens of thousands of voters. That's really easy to understand. This is far more like the Sponsorship Scandal - or even Watergate - than it is In and Out.

I will credit Harper for one thing. He's smart enough not to play defense. He knows that once you go on the defensive, as Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff learned to their sorrow, you're dead.

So he's going on the offense, as he usually does. What's newsworthy is his target: Interim-Liberal leader, Bob Rae.

 

Rae is a strikingly odd choice of a target. After all, he's the temporary leader of the third party in Parliament. The Grits are so wholly discredited that it's hard to see them winning a national election ever again. Rae is also the only halfway credible or smart figure in the party, but he agreed when he accepted the interim leadership that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership. Should he renege on that, he'll re-ignite the decades old civil war in the party that destroyed them in the first fucking place.

The hyper-smart, "small c" conservative, Gerry Nicholls, has a theory about why Harper's doing this, but I disagree with him.

While the Prime Minister is the living embodiment of everything that's truly wrong with the Human Spirit, he's not actually retarded. And while he's more than willing to piss away a grand fortune in public money in hucksterish, electioneering nonsense, he doesn't have a history of doing so with party money.

Historically, Harper has only gone jihadi on those that he perceives as a threat. You'll notice, for example, that he hasn't dumped a ton of money shit-talking the NDP, even though they happen to be Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

And you know what? Harper isn't wrong. If Bob Rae can overcome the mortal handicap of leading the fratricidal and cannibalistic Liberal Party of Canada, he is the clearest threat that Stephen Harper has ever faced. Assuming that the NDP doesn't swallow the Liberals whole before the next election - which almost certainly won't happen - Rae is the only saviour the Grits have.

Firstly, Rae's alone among prominent federal politicians in being not only smarter than Harper is, he is also the only guy who has more experience, both in politics and governing. No other Dipper or Grit has Bob Rae's resume, or anything close to it.

Secondly, he's managed to get through life pretty much free of scandal. Say what you will as his time as Premier of Ontario (and I've said the most horrible things imaginable, and voted against him on two seperate occasions. I'll always regret that I was only born in 1970 and haven't lived in the ridings of Toronto Centre, York South or Broadview, so I could I have voted against him more often.), but his government was shockingly clean.

I'm not going to pretend that he's not a credible threat to Harper, and perhaps the only one out there. If anyone can take out Harper, it's Bob Rae. The Tories aren't just right to try to take out Rae, they're smart to do it when he doesn't the money or the media spotlight to respond.

Having said that, the line of attack is confounding, unless you really appreciate lying.

If I had Harper's record, spending and deficits would be the absolute last thing I'd hit Rae on. This is because Harper himself has surpassed even Pierre Trudeau as being the spendingest prime minister in the peacetime history of Canada. His per-capita deficits certainly reflect that.

Stephen Harper is maybe the last person on earth that isn't George W. Bush that should be hitting Bob Rae on being a shopoholic communist. After all, what in the fuck do you suppose that Harper himself has been doing for the last three years, if not trying to spend his way out of a recession? If Harper can magically get himself around that argument, Rae can then ask him what he was doing in pissing away a $13 billion surplus by turning the tax code into a middle-class giveaway before the world started ending.

Like him or not, Rae displayed an almost heroic level of political courage in attacking his deficits by confronting his own strongest constituency, the civil service unions. And that cost him his job, which he must have known it would. And few things are as dazzling hypocritical than nu-conservatives shithammering Bob for Rae Days while celebrating weapons-grade fuckheads like Scott Walker and John Kasich for essentially doing the same thing.

If I was Bob Rae, I'd be using this Harper ad in my leadership campaign because it highlights his strengths. Rae can run those 30 seconds and respond with "Yes, for the first half of my term, I was a socialist. What's Stephen Harper's excuse? When I saw the error of my ways, I tried to rectify the situation on the backs of those who had supported me. Will Stephen Harper do that?"

This ad is a big bad mistake because it allows Bob Rae to hit Harper from his own right. Rae spent a shitload of money because he was ideologically inclined to do so. And when he saw that he was wrong, he blew himself up trying to right the situation. Harper, on the other hand, spent a shitload of money to try to buy elections, and then cling to power. And absolutely no one thinks that he's going to try to balance his budgets on the backs of the people who brought him to power.

It should be fairly easy to merge the second half of Rae's Ontario term with the Chretien-Martin austerity budgets that eventually balanced the books. And then compare them to Harper's record of being proudly allergic to money, sucking off everyone who might potentially vote for him like a three dollar crack whore, and voter fraud.

If the Liberals can stop being Liberals for fifteen fucking seconds, Stephen Harper just handed them a platform that they almost can't help but winning with.

But I know the Liberals far better than I'd like to. And I know that they'll see this ad, get scared stupid and suffocate Rae in his sleep tonight. That's why they're useless and better off fucking dead.

The Girls in John McCain's Life

I try not to write very much about John McCain anymore because I get very, very sad when I do.

Those of you who have been long-term readers might remember that I couldn't have been more supportive of McCain for the better part of a decade. I wanted him to be the Republican nominee - and president - in the summer of '07, when everybody else was writing his obituary. For years, the only living politician I held in higher esteem than John McCain was President George H.W. Bush.

One of the reasons that I revered him was for his strength of character. But that strength seems to have left him forever. I understood that he had to placate the fuckhead Republican base during the '08 primaries. Really, I did. But their distrust of him meant that he couldn't tack to the centre during the general, which - as Mitt Romney is soon going to find out - is lethal in politics.

The reasons for McCain's are many for they are legion. But it's everything that happened after election day that made him a fallen hero.

Not quite a month after losing a very winnable election, Senator McCain announced that he would be running for reelection to the Senate. Republicans being Republicans, this took a strange and deeply disheartening turn.

Barack Obama came within 8 points of beating McCain in his home state, which is something that people have tended to forget. The mass GOP freak-out over the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill - which President Bush himself sponsored - cost them heavily amoung Hispanics. As you might have noticed, there are all kinds of Hispanics in Arizona, what with having been formerly part of Mexico, and all.

But Tea Party fever had overtaken both America and common sense. And John McCain was being challenged by a disc jockey shithead who had once been voted among the very sleaziest folks to have ever darken the corridors of Congress. So McCain did the expedient thing. Specifically, he shot a commercial with a closet-case of a sheriff with an illegal immigrant lover and whose jurisdiction was a hundred miles from the border. McCain implored Sheriff Fabulous to "complete the danged fence", as if local sheriffs had anything to do with international borders.

And that's where he lost me forever. If McCain was so fucking a-scared of an electoral prison-punk like J.D Hayworth, there's absolutely no reason to believe that he'd be able to stand up to an actual serious adversary, like Vladimir Putin. When I saw John McCain simper like a little fucking girl before a half-witted scumbag like Hayworth, I knew that the right guy probably won two years earlier. The man who was tortured by the animalistic Vietnamese and still told them to go fuck themselves died a long time ago. In his stead stands exactly the kind of guy that would endorse Mitt Romney.  The Tea Party crowd is always going to loathe McCain, but in sucking up to them, he lost the respect of everyone else.

On the other hand, I'm endlessly fascinated with the women in his life. His wife Cindy, remains one of the hottest political spouses in all of democracy (although no democratic politician will have a wife as smoking hot as Queen Rania of Jordan or Princess Dalal bint Saud bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. Never let it be said that being a despot doesn't have some advantages.)

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of McCain's daughter, Meghan.

Firstly, I think that she's generally right about the state of Republican politics. It astounds me that so many of those retards think that they can continue winning national elections with a diminishing share of Hispanics, homos and broads. It's as if those shitheads don't know anything about demographics and seriously believe that old white men are going to be a plurality of the vote forever.

A lot of "conservatives" like to berate Meghan for not being the most articulate girl in the world, but these are usually the very same people who idolize Sarah Palin  and Michele Bachmann, two chicks that can't let three sentences pass their pretty little cocksuckers without something clinically insane spilling out. It makes me almost not to want to fuck them. Almost.

But Meghan has enormous, beautiful tits, is very young, and agrees with almost everything I've been saying since she was in high school. And that impresses me to no end. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that all the girls out there have giant tits and agree with everything I say. And for Christ's sake, stop being over forty and spouting crazy shit every time you're on camera, okay? It's annoying and a lesser man than I probably couldn't keep his cock hard through it. Not everyone's as superhuman as I am, y'know?

Anyhow, here's Meghan talking about my favorite subject: Her funbags.

 

Tittygate, as I like to call it was huge deal on the internet, and the conservative blogosphere, in particular. This is largely because the conservative blogosphere is almost entirely a humourless, sexless place that wouldn't know Joy if it slowly nibbled on the head of it's cock while looking up at it with fawn-like eyes and calling it "Daddy." This is why we need Wonder Woman to resume blogging soonest!

Social conservatives have caught up with the sexual revolution, but only to the point where they're Gloria Steinem; tsk-tsking every hot piece of ass or guy that likes to put his almost mystically big wonderputz into the above. This is why they're arguing nonsensical horseshit, like contraception, which the rest of the fucking country settled in 1965. They're worse than assholes, they're killjoys. And who in the fuck wants to vote for that when the the economy sucks and their mortage is underwater?

Anyone that wants to send Meghan McCain to thereapy for having giant jugs and a nice big ass is out of their fucking minds. And they all tend to be Republican bloggers that tend to be mortally afraid of a tight young vagina.

Which, I guess, brings me to Sarah Palin, who tends to bring comfort to these sexless retards.

As you might have heard, HBO ran their adaptation of Game Change this weekend. I read the book, and thought that the Republican outrage to the alleged Palin-bashing in it was hilarious. Anyone who actually took the time to read it themselves would know that John Heilemann and Mark Halperin really portrayed John Edwards as History's Greatest Monster. Moreover, most of the intial news accounts of the book focused on that savage saga.

All things being equal, it would've been a much better movie if it was about Edwards.  It would've been a fantastic comedy. "I have a mistress while I'm running for president. Okay, now I'm losing and my mistress is knocked up. Can I be someone's vice-president? Shit, now the bastard girl is born. Attorney General?"

Something tells me that if that was the movie, Republicans wouldn't be pissing and moaning about Hollywood Jews so much. Instead, it's about Sarah Palin being an emotionally retarded half-wit, so the moron outrage machine gets cranked up once again.

The most interesting response to Game Change happened to be Palin's own. She made a big show of going on Fox News and declaring that movie was a non-issue that she intended to ignore. Then this came from her political action committee, which she fully controls and even bears her name;



So, during the time that her PAC ad refuting the movie had to be in production, Palin was pretending that she didn't care about the movie. Which makes her a liar, an idiot. a figurehead for her own PAC, or all three; thereby reinforcing the narrative of the movie.

Shit, if HBO really wanted to fuck Sarah Palin over, they would've adapted her own first book "Nothing Is My Fault Ever! Tales of How Nicole Wallace is a Bitch!" You might know it as Going Rogue. If you're a "personal responsibility conservative", which I am. Going Rogue is far more damaging to the cause than Game Change could ever be.

Speaking of Nicole Wallace, she was on This Week with George Stehoanopolousexpalidocious yeasterday, and in it, I saw one of the most remarkable fucking exchanges ever!

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Palin campaign didn't like it. How true to life?

WALLACE: Well, true enough to make me squirm. But, you know, look, this isn't a movie about campaign staff, and this isn't even really a movie about McCain and Palin. This is a movie about the vast gray area in which 99 percent of our politics actually takes place. And I think that what gets boiled down or sometimes the fights or the instant analysis or the black and white, who's up and who's down.

But the truth is -- and I think everyone around this table has had some experience in their political careers -- where you're just feeling your way through a very gray area and you're doing your best. And this campaign was certainly one of those instances for me.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No question. And, you know, there has been a bit of a backlash, Mary, but there are a lot of points in that movie that's very sympathetic to Sarah Palin.

MATALIN: Mark Halperin, who's the co-author of the book, but -- came down to teach James' class in Tulane and said it was not in total, but large sympathetic. The movie is not that. A lifelong Democrat called me and said "Game Change" is a channel change for me. So it's not RJ Cutler, Pennebaker, "The War Room" or "A Perfect Candidate." It's just a fictional movie. And to that end, it's meaningless, other than I like your hair in the movie, Nicolle.

Waitafuckingminute! Really? Mary Matalin - who I generally like - gets to say that a movie is "fictional" even though one of the people sitting across the goddamned table from her just said that it was "true enough to make me squirm."?

Nicole Wallace isn't the only real-life being played off as fictional in the Republican bubble machine, so is Steve Schmidt, who was McCain's chief strategist and instrumental in picking Palin in the first fucking place.



And then there's this.

“I think it was very accurate,” Schmidt said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “For all of us in the campaign, it really rang true. It gave you a little bit of PTSD at times. It did for me. But, look, I think it’s a story of when cynicism and idealism collide. When you have to do things necessary to win, to try to get in office to do the great things you want to do for the country and I think it showed a process of vetting that was debilitated by secrecy, that was compartmentalized, that failed, that led to a result that was reckless for the country.”

(...)

“I think the notion of Sarah Palin being President of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that. And played a part in that because we were fueled by ambition to win.”

Okay, given the disparity of views here, it's important to consider who would have a motive to lie.

I think that everyone can agree that Sarah Palin has a motive to resist being portrayed as a borderline personality and possible moron. And I don't think that John McCain would like to be remembered as the 72-year-old cancer net that played chicken with the country.

But if Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace are telling the truth, they're destroying their careers in politics. And since neither of them were hired by big-time campaigns or the White House because of their stupidity, it's safe to assume that they know that. Smart people with an interest in a future career would lie, wouldn't they?

And please don't tell me they did it for the money. The millions that both of them would make in future campaigns far exceeds the few hundred grand (at best) that they would make as consultants on an HBO movie.

Of course, I don't expect any of that to puncture the Republican fantasy bubble that they so happily live in. But I do expect that it's what's going to ruin them. Ultimately, a conservatism that isn't grounded in reality isn't conservatism at all.