Obama Uber Alles, Republican Whining and the Road Ahead

So I've had indescribable fun watching Fox News for the last few weeks. It's actually been more enjoyable than I thought it would be. In fact, it struck me as kind of creepy because Republicans in America are starting to sound exactly the same way that Canadian Liberals have for the last decade.

Back when Stephen Harper's supposedly Conservative Party was elected to its first minority government in January of 2006, Liberal stalwarts started muttering about a dark Tory plot to "destroy" the Grits forever. That reached a crescendo in 2011 when the party under Michael Ignatieff was utterly humiliated by voters. They still won't shut the fuck up about it.

Smart Republicans - and more than a few stupid ones - finally reached the obvious conclusion that November 6 presented them with an undeniable existential crisis. They either get their shit together and stop acting like lunatics, pronto, or they cease to exist within a decade.

Four years of GOP, Fox News and fuckhead blogger assertions to the contrary, Barack Obama isn't an idiot and he noticed this, too. He's been using the chaos and infighting in the Republican Party to do whatever the fuck he wants. Even as they hilariously say that he didn't win a mandate at the polls, Republicans are effectively giving Obama one in being unable to sensibly oppose or effectively deal with him. This has lead the usual suspects to decry the President's plot to "destroy" the Republican Party or reverse Reaganism.

One certainly gets that sense from watching and reading Obama's second inaugural address. It was a fantastical wishlist of liberal nonsense that would have little chance of passing a Democratic Congress, let alone the one that is there, but it does seem to ignore the very existence of the GOP. I will grant you that.

The obvious question is "What the fuck did you expect him to do?"

From the very first day of his presidency - and we know from Robert Draper's Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives that the Republican leadership discussed this while Obama was attending his 2009 inaugural balls - the GOP made the very deliberate decision to cooperate with him on nothing, regardless of what he actually proposed. If Obama decided to enact unedited the entire 1996 Republican platform, Republicans would obstruct him for the sole purpose of making him "one-term president."

Well, in Obama's own words, he won. And Republicans not only lost, they lost in the most humiliating way possible. Not only did a do-nothing community organizer kick the shit out of the Republicans twice, he left them divided against themselves.

So I'll repeat my question: "What the fuck do you expect him to do?"

Let's not pretend that the GOP was particularly magnamimous in victory. I remember how, between 2000 and '06, chronic dickheads like Karl Rove and Bill Kristol were crowing triumphalist nonsense about "a permanent Republican majority" to anyone stupid enough to listen.  And when Democrats timidly suggested keeping TSA workers unionized, Rove ran ads against Max Cleland - who left three of his fucking limbs in Vietnam - starring Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Can we please stop pretending that conservatives are victims here? It's embarrassing. No self-respecting person wants to identify themselves with a cabal of bed-wetting losers.

I'd like to tell Republicans exactly the same thing that I've been telling Liberals here at home for the last six years. The whole point of politics is beat the other side to the maximum possible extent. It's usually not possible to destroy them completely, but when the opportunity presents itself, you fucking well take it. And you sure as shit don't apologize for it afterward.

I've shit-talked the guy endlessly, so it's only fair that I highlight when Erick Erickson says something that I wholeheartedly agree with.

We have too many outrage pimps on both sides of the aisle whipping the respective bases into a frenzy and fury against the other side. I don’t have enough time or energy to be outraged about it all. There are things to be outraged by, but not everything, and certainly not with full energy dedicated to every perceived slight and grievance.

What I am finding is that among conservatives there is too much outrage, piss, and vinegar. It makes our ideas less effective. We have become humorless, angry opponents of the President instead of happy warriors selling better ideas. We are not even selling ideas.

Conservatives, frankly, have become purveyors of outrage instead of preachers for a cause. Instead of showing how increasing government harms people, how free markets help people, and how conservative policies benefit all Americans, we scream “Benghazi” and “Fast & Furious.”

We’re off key and off message. We’ve become professional victims dialed up to 10 on the outrage meter. Who the hell wants to listen to conservatives whining and moaning all the time about the outrage du jour? Seriously? Mitt Romney ran a campaign on just how bad things are, but he was rejected by a majority of Americans who felt like he really did not care about them and really had no plans to improve their lives.

I'd honestly like to congratulate Mr. Erickson on both his eloquence and his honesty. Given his audience, I imagine that he'll take endless shit for having written that. God knows that I've been saying exactly the same thing for far longer, much to the displeasure of some of my friends, who are several degrees of magnitude saner than the fans of Red State.

I could care less if the Republican Party survives the Obama years. But I do think traditional conservatism can and should. But a few things are going to be necessary for that to happen.

First, come up with governing ideas that don't sound like they were lifted from a tenth grader's book report of Atlas Shrugged. Only sexless geeks and the mentally ill take that kind of shit seriously. Moreover, the left will demagogue us to death with it, each and every time.

You know why geriatric Tea Partiers loved the Ryan Plan so much? Because it didn't affect them. They were exempted from it's harsher provisions, and it's pretty easy to tell everybody to go fuck themselves when they have no skin in the game. Before the second Ryan Plan, these same assholes were marching on Washington with "Government hands off Medicare" signs. The best ones spelled "government" wrong, too.

Second, if you believe as I do that the debt is an existential crisis, start fucking acting like it. That means that your goddamned political base doesn't get a pass. The GOP presented the War on Terror as an existential crisis, but only asked one half of one percent of the American people - those in the volunteer military -  to do anything about it. Everybody else could go shopping. And now they're doing exactly the same thing with the budget.

And please don't say that "at least we're better than Obama." All that does is convince me that nobody's serious.

Third, poll after poll after poll is showing that Americans are getting more libertarian on social issues. Not only that, they're getting that way faster than anyone could have expected. Just look at how attitudes have shifted on gay marriage and marijuanna legalization in eight years.

Conservatives can no longer say that government is the problem, but only until it comes out against something we don't like. You're either for a small government with limited powers, or you aren't. And you sure as shit can't be taken seriously about the size of government when your presidential candidates and media types are endlessly rhapsodizing about fuck pills!

Are you going to lose Evangelical Christians that way? Maybe. But you've already started losing everybody else. If American conservatism doesn't become younger, duskier, more libertarian and less religious soon, it will become a fringe.

Fourth, the American people couldn't have been clearer in preferring Obama to the perverted mess that American conservatism has become. You need to work with that and persuade them otherwise. Cooperate when you can, negotiate when you should and oppose when you must. You've had it your way for four years and what did it get you? A Democratic president and Senate and Republican House that's at war with itself is fucking where.

Fifth, not everything is an outrage or a threat to the Republic. Stop acting like it is. You sound like liberals. For example, the Affordable Care Act might be incredibly bad policy, but it isn't "an effort to destroy capitalism itself."  That's doubly true when you campaign saying that you're going to keep all the popular (and ungodly expensive) parts of it.

Unless somebody changed the literature when I wasn't looking, retarded hysteria is not a conservative virtue.

Sixth, "personal responsibility" is more than a goddamned slogan. When you fuck up, cop to it. When was the last time you saw a Republican take responsibilty for anything at all. And it's not like there's been a shortage of Republican fuck-ups in the last dozen years.

You can't, for example, say that the Goddamned Liberal Media is irrelevant and ineffective, yet capable of thwarting you at every turn. Well, I guess you can because you won't stop. But it makes you look like a shithead and no one will take you seriously.

Seventh, if you only do it once (and I wouldn't recommend doing it much more than that) listen to people like Jonah Goldberg when he says things like this.

The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.

A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument. Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right emulate that echo chamber helps no one.

We do ourselves no favors when we enrich and enable hucksters or reward the ignorance of our fellows. Unless and until we start calling out the shysters and the stupid among us, the left will continue to do it for us, and tar us all with that brush. Because we stupidly insist on embracing and defending idiot deejays and everyone ever associated with Brietbart.com, we give our opponents the club with which they beat us.

Eighth, it would be great if we stop defending the indefensible. There's nothing funnier to me than Canadian conservatives that take every shot they can at Obama, but defend Stephen Harper for doing exactly the same things he did, only more so. Canada's Conservative government is still running expensive television ads touting a massive stimulus program that ended four years ago. Over a third of the Obama stimulus was tax cuts, which wasn't true of Harper's old-timey "throw a blizzard of money at every pothole in the country" program. We don't just look stupid when we do this, we look dishonest.

It's also time to face the fact that Republicans are just as responsible for the debt explosion as Democrats, if not more so. Admitting that doesn't enable our opponents nearly as much as continuing to lie about it does. If you insist on hanging a Paul Ryan poster over your bed, you should understand that he voted for every single debt-creating bill Congress passed between 1997 and 2008. Period.

A wilderness period isn't just good for the soul, it's good for the mind. Richard Nixon said that losing the 1960 election made him a better president in 1968. Reagan almost certainly would have been a worse president if he was nominated and elected in 1968 or '76. Churchill also wrote pretty extensively about the virtues of a wilderness period.

Having said that, a wilderness period does you no good if all you do with it is build a bigger a echo chamber with which to feed some insane persecution complex. If this time is used to do nothing but humor those who see this as something other than satire, we're fucked.

A Fiscal Cliff Deal That Makes Things Worse

At least in financial matters, it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that the United States is governed by emotionally damaged and intellectually challenged children. All things being equal, it is not as different from North Korea as you might have been lead to believe. I'm only sort of kidding when I say that I hope that Pakistan is developing a plan to take control of America's nuclear arsenal because Americans can no longer be trusted with it.

I never had all that much faith in a fiscal cliff deal that accomplished much of anything, but what passed last night made things spectacularly worse. It's actually pretty impressive when you think about it.

You might remember that the fiscal cliff itself was a product of the 2011 debt ceiling clusterfuck. Just off  the top of your head, can you name the other grown-up countries that have a debt ceiling at all? The correct answer is "none." Has the ceiling done anything to control U.S debt? The answer to that is pretty clearly no. It's an archaic and dangerous tool that long ago outlived any usefulness it may have had.

This completely invented crisis began with the Republican Party's singular inability to tell the truth about the debt. Ronald Reagan tripled it and George W. Bush doubled it again, but it's all Barack Obama's fault. That set the stage for the GOP to hold the economy hostage in the summer of '11 and very nearly caused the first default in U.S history.

This week presented the last best opportunity for the United States to right its fiscal ship. Not only was the "sequester" - drastic, automatic spending cuts - set to take effect yesterday, the Bush tax cuts and Obama's payroll tax holiday were set to expire. Oh, and the debt ceiling limit was hit at midnight on New Year's Day. Never again will there be a chance as good as this one to make a serious effort to address the coming catastrophe. America is now guaranteed to hit an economic iceberg and they will do so soon.

The positions of both sides were childish, ineffective and based more on politics than economics. President Obama spent the last five years saying that he wanted to make the Bush tax cuts permanent for everyone making under $250,000 a year and cut almost nothing in spending, whereas House Republicans wanted all the tax cuts made permanent, sought "entitlement reforms" that took over a decade to be enacted and wanted further Pentagon spending. While the Democrats were slightly more serious than the Republicans, that isn't saying much, since it's almost impossible to be less serious than the Republicans.

House Speaker John Boehner is incapable of controlling the Tea Party mongoloids in his caucus, making him less than useless as a negotiating partner. So he insisted that a deal come from the Senate, despite the Constitutional dictate that money bill originate from the House. That left it to Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to hammer out a deal.

Here's what they came up with.

— Tax rates will permanently rise to Clinton-era levels for families with income above $450,000 and individuals above $400,000. All income below the threshold will permanently be taxed at Bush-era rates.
— The tax on capital gains and dividends will be permanently set at 20 percent for those with income above the $450,000/$400,000 threshold. It will remain at 15 percent for everyone else. (Clinton-era rates were 20 percent for capital gains and taxed dividends as ordinary income, with a top rate of 39.6 percent.)
— The estate tax will be set at 40 percent for those at the $450,000/$400,000 threshold, with a $5 million exemption. That threshold will be indexed to inflation, as a concession to Republicans and some Democrats in rural areas like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.).
— The sequester will be delayed for two months. Half of the delay will be offset by discretionary cuts, split between defense and non-defense. The other half will be offset by revenue raised by the voluntary transfer of traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs, which would tax retirement savings when they’re moved over.
— The pay freeze on members of Congress, which Obama had lifted this week, will be re-imposed.
— The 2009 expansion of tax breaks for low-income Americans: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit will be extended for five years.
— The Alternative Minimum Tax will be permanently patched to avoid raising taxes on the middle-class.
— The deal will not address the debt-ceiling, and the payroll tax holiday will be allowed to expire.
— Two limits on tax exemptions and deductions for higher-income Americans will be reimposed: Personal Exemption Phaseout (PEP) will be set at $250,000 and the itemized deduction limitation (Pease) kicks in at $300,000.
—The full package of temporary business tax breaks — benefiting everything from R&D and wind energy to race-car track owners — will be extended for another year.
— Scheduled cuts to doctors under Medicare would be avoided for a year through spending cuts that haven’t been specified.
— Federal unemployment insurance will be extended for another year, benefiting those unemployed for longer than 26 weeks. This $30 billion provision won’t be offset.
— A nine-month farm bill fix will be attached to the deal, Sen. Debbie Stabenow told reporters, averting the newly dubbed milk cliff.

Congratulations everybody! You just accomplished nothing!

Republicans say that America has a spending problem, while Democrats insist that the problem is with revenue. Anyone with any brains knows that the issue is with spending and revenue. This deal addresses neither.

Obama's insistence on returning to the Clinton tax rates for everyone making over a quarter million dollars raised negligible revenue. And he settled on $450,000 which raises even less.

Guess what this mess costs? Actually, you don't have to. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it'll be a fortune.

The extension of lower tax rates for a bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business, and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.

The CBO says the budget agreement will lead to an overall increase in spending of about $330 billion over 10 years.

When all is said and done, all the White House and Congress managed to do was increase the debt by $4 trillion.

Oh, and it was political clusterfuck for everybody involved, too! Liberals and conservatives are both furious with their own representatives. Pretty much everybody's credibility was destroyed yesterday.

And because the debt ceiling wasn't raised and sequestration was delayed for two months, the worst part of this mess is yet to come. More interestingly, neither side has a particularly strong hand to play. President Obama has shot his load on taxes and the GOP is still too rattled and scared from the November elections to be effective at much of anything. Nobody has the juice to make a Grand Batgain at the end of February. The Bush tax cuts are now effectively the Obama tax cuts, taking away the negotiating leverage he had on the revenue side.

As of Monday night, the United States has no authority to borrow. The Treasury Department can juggle around existing money until about the first of March, but that's it. After that, the federal government shuts down. At the same time, the sequester takes effect, automatically making excruciating cuts everywhere.

Since both sides have lost the trust of their respective bases, I can't see how a deal is made. I can't imagine that the GOP will give Obama a debt ceiling increase without drastic, non-defense cuts and the president would be a fool to give a weakened, scared and divided Republican conference anything close to what they want.

What is likely is the trifecta of ugliness: a government shutdown, brutal automatic sequestration cuts and a default on the national debt - all within about a week of each other.

If you think the markets are going to respond well to that, you're out of your friggin' mind. The stock exchange will crash harder than it has since 2008 and the international bond market may start to melt down. Treasury Bills will very probably become worthless overnight and the U.S government will have trouble funding itself when it resumes operation.

Both unemployment and interest rates could skyrocket, which might throw the country into a depression, possibly causing another round of bank failures. The meltdown of the European PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) would seem leisurely compared to a complete political and financial collapse in the United States. It's also important to remember that there's nobody capable of bailing America out.

Oh, and did I mention that the United States added $4 trillion to it's national debt last night? Because the United States added $4 trillion to its national debt last night. And they did that while accomplishing nothing more than delaying the apocalypse by 60 days.

Good work everybody!

Why am I the only one wondering why Americans hate america so much? I rather liked it when it was a serious country.

A New and Exciting Approach to Higher Education: "Don't Rape"

You ever see something that you know should make you angry, but makes you laugh so hard that you just don't have the energy to be outraged after the giggles stop? That's exactly what happened to me when I saw the picture to the left on a friend's Facebook page.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very earnest message but it's also a compelling argument that the great P.J O'Rourke was right when he said that "Earnestness is stupidity sent to college."

As hilarious as I think that this is, I'm also of the opinion that it's also somewhat dangerous in so far as it tends to trivialize something as serious as rape. In all seriousness, if a man is of university age and still a monster, I'm not comlpetely convinced that a lecture from a tenured professor is going to do a whole lot to change that.

I'm not going to discount entirely the possibility that I'm just a hyper-conservative whackjob and genetically wrong about everything, but it seems to me that the socialization process regarding sexual assault should start a lot earlier than when you're eligible for our first federal student loan. Again, I could be way off about this. I just don't think I am.

Look, I get that statements like this make everybody feel good, but I reckon that it's well past time that we recognize that things that make you feel good are often pretty stupid. Take cocaine as just one example. It makes you feel awesome, but it's a really poorly considered lifestyle choice unless, of course, you're me. Always remember that these are professional tricks, performed by a professional and not intended for home use.

The basic premise of this message is silly for practical reasons, as well. For those of you who spent too much time in school, I think it's necessary to point out that feminism is a philosophy. It might well be that it is among the finest philosophies ever devised, but that misses an essential point. So far as I'm aware, no philosophy is going to overwhelm a violent oaf with a hard cock that outweighs you by as much as 80 pounds. I have yet to see that in a mixed martial arts class. There comes a point when things like reason are pretty much useless.

Here's something else you might not know. Carrying around the collected works of Satre never prevented anyone from being shot to death, either. Just sayin'.

Having said that, a philosophy will make you feel better about yourself after you've already been victimized. I get that. Maybe I'm an oddball, but I'd emphasize preventing your victimization in the first place. I know, crazy, right?

I understand that you have the right to get drunk and pass out in the dorm room of some horny bastard that you barely know at 3 am, but that right doesn't necessarily immunize you from the consequences of your exercise of said right. You have the right to be free from rape, but you also have the right to vote. The only problem is that less than half the population chooses to exercise it.

Statistics show that nearly three out of four women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. However, attacks by a stranger are relatively rare, which is why they keep winding up in the newspaper. Assaults are always unforgivable and unjustified and, in some cases, unavoidable.

My point is that they're not always unavoidable. The odds are that you will be raped, and it'll be by someone you know. Rape is also, in most circumstances, a crime of opportunity. Deny the victimizer the opportunity and your chances of being a victim decrease dramatically. That's not always true, but it's true enough of the time that it should really be considered.

Just as the aforementioned Mr. O'Rourke implied, earnestness often carries the day, particularly in politically correct institutions such as universities. That being the case, I can pretty much guarantee you that common sense is going to go right out the fucking window and "Don't rape" is going to taught in college.

It therefore stands to reason that there's going to be a test of some kind. I can't be the only one who really looks forward to the questions on it, can I?

Please complete the following sentence. "It's right to force yourself sexually on a woman after a date .."

a) Never
b) Always
c) When dinner and the movie cost over $200.

Is that going to prevent a single act of sexual violence? Probably not. But it will make any number of dumb people feel better.

And if you ever wondered why I cheer the asteroid squashing the Aerosmith guy's kid in the great Bruce Willis movie that is life, now you know.

I'd be remiss if I didn't leave you good folks without a life lesson from the master of common sense, Adan Carolla.




But what about girls who aren't of college age yet? Doesn't popular culture have a message for them?

Truth and Consequences: Simpson-Bowles or the Fiscal Cliff?

One of my greatest personal joys in the aftermath of Tuesday's election is watching Republican shitheels bemoan the fact that "the American people voted to continue fiscal irresponsibility." The basic fact of the matter is that the American people weren't given a choice in the matter, other than possibly supporting Gary Johnson's Libertarian ticket.

President Obama never really had a plan and the GOP couldn't stop lying about theirs. Both sides were dealing in fantasy economics that were predicated on not ending a sixteen trillion dollar debt (which makes it important to remember than American GDP is only fourteen trillion) without touching their beloved middle class or current entitlement recipients, which is a recipe for disaster.

You can't say that you're going retire a debt of that size - or even significantly reduce deficits - in a reasonable period of time without going to where the money is.

The Romney-Ryan plan cut rates in ways that no mathematically literate adult thought they could pay for and was more than made up for with trillions in new defense spending. Furthermore, by cutting entitlement spending only for future retirees, they exploded the short-term deficits.

Republicans said that they oppose any tax increases because they would hamper future economic growth, which is another indication that they don't know what they're talking about if they're, in fact, telling the truth.

As I've mentioned before, what happened in September of 2008 wasn't a recession. The recession started in the summer of 2007. The collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated a financial panic, which is a very different breed of animal. History tells us that financial panics take a decade or more to fully recover from. The world's third-largest economy, Japan, still hasn't recovered from its 1990s financial panic.

There are other reasons to doubt a full American recovery. Most significantly, The economic superpower status of the United States was artificial to begin with. America grew the way that it did after World War II for the simple reason that all of its major competitor economies were destroyed by the war.

By the time that Europe and Japan fully recovered from the war, in the early 1970s, real American household income stagnated, which was hidden by massive borrowing, both public and private. By 1980, the frugality of the "Greatest Generation" was dead, American families began living on credit and inflation was rampant. President Reagan broke inflation by inflicting the 1982 recession on the economy, but his tax cuts exploded the public debt. Throughout it all, Congress ballooned both military and entitlement spending. Private business grew the economy in the late '80s with the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) phenomenon, but that further raised the level by which debt as a driver of economic growth.

Globalization aggravated the problem by almost entirely wiping out the U.S manufacturing sector. Without manufacturing, there was no way that America could sustain its already artificially high living standards, except through the debt of last resort: their home equity. As manufacturing died, the financial service industry replaced it, but only for a time. You can only grow an industry like that so long as there remains a window to create debt.

In the fall of 2008, the bottom fell out of the debt-driven economy that sustained everything for almost forty years and that window slammed shut. Worse, there's not going to be anything to replace it in the near or mid-terms. I have no reason to believe that the United States will ever return to the levels of its Golden Age.

Neither the Republicans or the Democrats are going to tell you the truth about that. Ever. To do so would burst the bubble of the American Dream that has kept Washington from ever being questioned in anything resembling a serious way.

All that leaves is debt. In perverse way, the death of American economic expansion creates the ideal atmosphere in which to address that debt. Even a really bad recession won't look or feel much worse than what the United States is in now, so Washington doesn't really need to worry about the political cost of structural economic reform that minimizes at least the pubic debt. Of course, that requires the political class finally telling people the truth for once in their fucking lives.

The Republican party, in particular, has been singularly unwilling to do that, instead relying on Paul Ryan's almost pornographic fantasies to save them. This brings me to The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which most of you know as Simpson-Bowles.

Contrary to Republican assertions, Obama didn't "walk away from Simpson-Bowles. The GOP strangled it in the cradle.

Any realistic solution to an intrinsic problem is going to cause pain and if there's one thing a democracy abhors, it's pain. That's why commissions like Simpson-Bowles are created in the first place, to do the job that Congress can't.

Simpson-Bowles was supposed to be modelled after the military base closing commission that was created after the end of the Cold War. Presidents Bush and Clinton, along with Congress, knew that base closings were to be an all or nothing proposition.

For that reason, Congress created a commission that severly limited its own powers. The commission's final report would be introduced and Congress could only give it "an up-or-down vote," meaning that amendments couldn't be attatched to it and it wouldn't be subject to the Senate's filibuster rule. It worked beautifully with base closings and it was supposed to be the model for Simpson-Bowles.

Then the six Republicans that had sponsored the enabling legislation to create Simpson-Bowles voted against it on final passage. That meant that if Obama introduced its final report to Congress, it would be amended to death in the House and filibustered in the Senate. Worse, the GOP would be able to demagogue all of the worst parts of it on the campaign trail this year. The President would have been crazy if he did that.

And the GOP continues to be singularly dishonest. On Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner took a break from crying to say that "We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions." That sounds great until you realize that what he means by "revenues" is closing loopholes through tax reform, but not raising new revenues with tax increases.  Basically, he's using the Romney plan as his negotiating position.

Now, I don't know how many of you were paying attention this week, but the Romney plan was pretty thoroughly discredited. Unless he's completely out of his mind, I can't see why Obama would bother to win an election only to pass the crown jewel of the loser's economic plan. Can you?

To be fair, the Democratic plan to raise taxes on "the top 2%" is also horseshit because it doesn't raise anywhere near the revenue needed to address the problem in a serious way. Also, the rich aren't driving the debt, the middle class is, with all of its insane entitlements and tax breaks. The Bush tax cuts need to expire for everybody. That alone raises about $4 trillion over the next ten years.

There's absolutely no chance of a "Grand Bargain" between now and December 31. And Washington should definitely not be allowed to kick the can down the road by passing legislation to defer the sequester by even a second. If you do that, you effectively make the Bush tax cuts permanent and make things even harder to negotiate down the road.

That leaves two choices: A clean vote on Simpson-Bowles or the fiscal cliff. I prefer either to waiting and seeing nothing get done.

The party's over

I had the distinct pleasure of voting against Bob Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP. He was a socialist (albeit a very soft one) and I was not. I instead voted for Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives in 1990 and '95 (and again in '99, those votes also turned out to be problematic for various reasons.) My loathing of the Liberal parties of both Ontario and Canada is world-renowned.

That being said, I do have a healthy respect for Mr. Rae. I do think that he's a decent and honourable man. More importantly, he recognized when he was wrong and sacrificed his political career in order to make it right.

As premier, Rae ran up a truly impressive debt, although nothing of the scope and size that Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill and Dalton McGuinty at Queen's Park have managed to create. It should be remembered that in 1990, we were in a fairly bad recession and Rae figured that he could spend his way out of it, which is precisely what Harper and McGuinty subsequently did and what federal Conservatives and anti-Rae Liberal partisans - some of whom also work for McGuinty -  now slam him for. After all, nobody said that intellectual honesty was required, or even desirable, in politics.

However, unlike Harper and McGuinty, Premier Rae attempted an economic course correction on the deficits he created that primarily impacted his own political base, the civil service unions. He knew that he was likely immolating his own career i doing so, but he went forward anyway because it was the right thing to do.

No one else in modern politics that I'm aware of has shown that kind of courage. After all, it's pretty easy for weapons-grade morons, like Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak or Tea Party shitheels like Scott Walker to take on public sector unions. For Rae it was political suicide and he did it anyway. I'd never actually vote for him, but he's earned my deep respect as a man of principle. If more politicians were willing to attack their own constituencies to reduce deficits, we wouldn't be as fucked as we are.

When both the federal and provincial NDP became too anti-Zionist for his liking, Rae publicly broke with them and joined the federal Liberals. Again, this was a matter of principle and not something that made his life any more comfortable. He could have just retired from public life entirely and devoted himself to making assloads of money in the private sector. Dippers despised him and far too many Liberal hacks described him as a "tourist."

Oddly enough, Bob stayed through the worst of it and the guy that those hacks supported, Michael Ignatieff, hasn't had anything to do with the party since.

Not only did the Liberal Party spend the last year doing a terrible wrong to Bob Rae, I'm pretty sure that they blew their own heads off in the process.

The Liberals love of situational ethics is storied, but never has it been so egregious as it has been over the last thirteen months. To explain, we have to go all the way back to the winter of 2008-'09, when Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff did their level best to make the Liberal Party of Canada virtually unelectable.

Dion had managed to throw away a perfectly good election that the Tories were actually born to lose. The Harper government had managed to piss away a healthy surplus that was left to them by Paul Martin, just as Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world started ending. Then Harper and his dickhead of a finance minister lied about there being a problem at all and suggested that it was an ideal time to get into the markets, which had lost half their value in a single day. If you followed Stephen Harper's financial planning advice, you'd be broke today because the markets continued bleeding money for months afterward.

Monsieur Dion took the reality of his loss the way only a Liberal can be expected to: He attempted a coalition coup with the NDP and supported by the treasonous Bloc Quebecois, which destroyed his leadership in less than a week. Michael Ignatieff was named interim leader by the party executive - none of whom are elected by the people -  who also expressly allowed him to run for the permanent leadership from that post.

I think we all know how well Ignatieff's leadership worked out. He managed to do something that Dion - or any other Liberal leader since William Lyon Mackenzie King -  couldn't pull off. He lost his own seat. And at least King twice lost his seat (in North York, Ontario and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan) while winning majority governments. Ignatieff did it as he lost over half of his party's seats. Ignatieff resigned as leader and fled to the safety his Yorkville condo before he could be butchered alive by his fellow Liberals.

The Liberal parliamentary caucus unanimously nominated Bob Rae as their leader. Unfortunately, the party's national executive board - which, again, hadn't been elected by the people -  remained staffed by Ignatieff flunkies that hated Rae for having the temerity for having twice challenged their guy for the leadership. They made him pledge that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership if he was interim leader, thus denying Rae exactly the same situation that Ignatieff enjoyed and virtually nobody bitched about. If you want to know why I hate the Liberals so much, that's as good an example as any.

Of course, everybody knew that the fix was in and, when the terms of Ignatieff's devious scumbags expired, the reality of Bob Rae's pledge would change. But that didn't stop the anti-Rae faction of the party, who didn't at all object to the constant and conscious lying of Jean Chretien, Dion (who pledged that he would never enter into a coalition) and Ignatieff, from holding him to a politically engineered promise that was expressly designed to hobble him.

Here's the sleaziest thing of all. If Rae had refused to serve as interim leader, despite the unanimous nomination of the caucus, because he wanted to be permanent leader, he would have been shithammered by his detractors for that. These people are just pathologically dishonest. Once they get kicked out of politics forever, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them running professional boxing.

There's just no winning in that goddamed party, which is why I think that being a federal Liberal is a genetic defect, sort of like Down Syndrome. Or a physcriatric disorder, like self-mutilation. Liberals are like teenage girls who cut themselves because no one wants to be their boyfriend, but don't understand that guys are even more a-scared of cutters.

If those assholes would act like halfway normal human beings, they might actually be able to resurrect themselves enough to form a government someday. I believe that Bob Rae was the clearest shot they had of doing that, and his record in Ontario was a plus, rather than the minus that chronic shitheads think it is.

He's uniquely positioned to respond to Conservative attacks. All he need do is respond with an ad that says "Did Stephen Harper engage in wild spending during a recession, yes or no? Is Stephen Harper now targeting the civil service to contain the deficits he himself created, yes or no? Yes, Bob Rae did both, but he did so against his political interest rather than to further it."

Rae could have easily called the Tories on their own bullshit talking points and used his own experience to do it. There isn't another single Liberal that can do that. Not one. Does anyone think that someone named McGuinty can pull that trick off?

If you want an election about the character of the leaders, Bob Rae would've been the guy who was born to make Harper sweat. Why in the fuck do you think that the Tories launched an attack ad against an interim Liberal leader? Has that ever happened before?

Notice how a giant "Not a leader - Just visiting" campaign hasn't been fired at Thomas Muclair? Why do you think that is? But they did shoot one across Bob Rae's bow because I think that Harper was fucking spooked at facing Rae. And the Liberals, being galatically dumb, fell for it. Again.

The one guy who could've fought the Conservatives on their own ground was taken out today because the Grits are too scared and too stupid to do anything but count on The Next Big Thing.

Would Rae have become prime minister? Probably not. The kamikaze factions in the party (which is to say all of them) wouldn't allow it. To a person, Liberals hate each other with a much greater intensity than they hate even Stephen Harper.

But I do think that Bob Rae would at least hold what the Liberals have now, and maybe even pick up a few seats. He's the only Liberal with a record capable of bringing the fight against the Harper Tories. Rae could define the Tories just as easily as the Tories define him.

So what happens now?

Well, I suppose that Justin Trudeau has no other choice but to renege on his pledge not to run for the leadership, his family be damned. And every other biological loser in the party that knew that Rae was the prohibitive favorite is now free to get in, all of whom are going to concentrate their energies and resources on killing Trudeau, which I'm pretty sure they will.

My guess is that we're going to see a re-run of the 2006 leadership convention. Ignatieff, the last leadership candidate without a political resume to speak of, was the frontrunner until he wasn't. Having suffered a death by a thousand cuts during the campaign, Iggy couldn't win on the first ballot and lost on the fourth, giving the leadership to someone no one previously thought possible. And that long-shot was beaten before he even got the furniture into his new office.

There's an extreme long-shot chance that the Grits give the leadership to a Quebec pro, like Denis Coderre, who could at least build a party base for the future. But the Iggy faction will almost certainly kill him, too.

The difference between 2006 and now is that there was a Liberal Party left for Ignatieff to inherit three years later. Chances are that there won't be one for Justin to inherit three years from now.

The Liberal Party of Canada saw their Last Best Chance for Survival and they raped it to death. I really shouldn't be surprised that they did it, but I sort of am. They sure picked an odd time to stand on principle.

I hope that Bob retires from politics before he loses his seat. The vengeful incompetents in his own party won't be happy until he's disgraced and defeated once and for all and use that to prove that he could't win, despite whatever misfit they finally wind up with as their leader.  As a good and honourable public servant and a deeply honest man, he deserves better than that.

The party's over. It might be a few years before the autopsy is conducted, but they're done. With the political mugging of Bob Rae, the Liberals have created a perfect storm where no Liberal can win. They can't trust the caucus or the party executive anymore because they seem to be in conlflict with one another in the leadership wars. The entire infrastructure of the party is, at best, dyslexic and incapable of being rebuilt. At worst, they're committed to killing their own in favour of cheap stunts.

For the record, I should point out - yet again - that I'm not a Conservative Party voter, nor do I work for them, nor would I. I doubt that I can say that about some anti-Martin, Dion or Ignatieff Liberals. 

The last time I voted "Conservative" was for Joe Clark in 2000. Since 2000, I voted for the Progressive Canadian Party, the Greens and finally, the NDP in 2011 because I hoped to destroy the Liberals without voting for Stephen Harper.

I'd be thrilled to vote for a conservative party that doesn't insist on pissing away all of the fucking money on stupid shit. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party doesn't run in my riding.

I'm terrified that without some competition, Harper will complete his life-long mission of turning the Conservative Party into the Liberals, a "natural governing party" that doesn't have to bother with being all that conservative. Frankly, I'd prefer the NDP, who are at least honest about wanting to ruin everything in their sight without caring about conservatism.  

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Conservatism and me, part three: Foreign policy and war

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Conservatism and me, part two: The structural seeds of destruction

Earlier I wrote about Allen West and the fundamental historical ignorance of his ilk regarding progressivism and its Republican roots. I only touched briefly on that topic because to go further would veer off from the specific point I was trying to make in that essay. Now, I'd like to elaborate on that point because the almost insurmountable problems facing the United States are political (as opposed to purely economic) in nature and they have their roots in the progressive era.

Because they proudly have no idea what they're talking about, West, Glenn Beck and the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members equate early 20th century progressivism socialism and communism. This couldn't be more ironic in so far as the institutions that allowed for the rise of the Tea Party were created by those very progressives a century earlier. Without the progressives, the modern populists would have been crushed in the gears of the political machinery that governed the United States at the time.

As much as populists love talking about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, they don't understand either very well. For example, the Second Amendment was written the way it was (beginning with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") because the Founders were unanimous in their belief that the new nation shouldn't have a standing military. This comes up several times in the Federalist Papers.

Being isolationist, they understood that a nation cannot have a standing army without deploying it on a regular basis. They created the United States as a retreat from the rest of the world, not as a military competitor in it. For that reason, the people would be armed and loosely organized in militias that could respond to any threat and disband when the crisis passed.

Aside from being isolationist, the Founders weren't especially democratic. They were all classical scholars and had studied pure Athenian democracy, ultimately finding it unworkable. For those reasons, they created a number of significant checks on the will of the people, including but not limited to, a division of powers between the political branches, the establishment of an independent judiciary and a Senate that was appointed by the state legislatures. In the strictest classical definitions of the words, they were republicans, not democrats.

Of course, there's no telling any of this to your average Tea Party member or Sean Hannity fan. Their famous love of tri-corner hats aside, they actually know very little about the political and constitutional history of the country they can't stop proclaiming their love of.

If you read the Constitution very closely, you'll notice that political parties aren't mentioned. This is because that some of them, most prominently George Washington, loathed the idea of what he called "factions", which impeded and retarded a republic as much as a standing army did. It was only after Washington retired to Mount Vernon for the final time that the first permanent political parties were established.

Because the Constitution didn't envision permanent parties, the parties were able to master the political machinery that the Constitution created and use it to their own ends. The parties themselves weren't any more democratic than were the Founders. Nominations to lower offices were handed out in the famous "smoky back rooms." Presidential nominations were taken care of national conventions, the delegates to which were controlled either by the state legislatures or the party "machines" that controlled a given city or state. In either event, "the people" were several steps removed from the process when they were involved at all, which wasn't often.

In the early twentieth century, the progressive movement began to change that. As I mentioned earlier, the progressives were generally Republicans. The GOP constituted much of the support for the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements and sought to bring more popular democracy into the political process than had existed at any time before in America. The Democrats entrenched as their machines were in the Deep South and urban centers like New York City and Chicago, liked things just the way they were. The progressives and the Democrats despised one another with an intensity that would shock people today.

The ridiculous and borderline retarded assertions of Allen West and Glenn Beck to the contrary, Woodrow Wilson was not a progressive. He was a creation of the Democratic political machines in New Jersey and New York. Unlike both Roosevelts, who came to power in spite of the Democratic and Republican machines, Wilson became governor and later president because of them.

The progressives began to change things before Wilson ran for office. First, created the primary system, in which the people were given a role in the nominating process for the first time. Different factions could challenge the party machines for the first time, although without much success. Until around 1960, the primaries were beauty contests that the mandarins and power brokers in both parties ignored. But during the first half of the twentieth centuries, the primary system spread across the country.

What broke the control of the party machines wasn't the primaries. It was the New Deal. There had been major reforms to the federal civil service in the late nineteenth century, but it didn't apply to the states or the cities. Nor was the government in the welfare business at any level before 1933. Both patronage and welfare were handled by the party bosses. If you or a family member needed food or a job, you went to your local party boss, who would arrange it in return for service to the party machine. When the Roosevelt administration established federal welfare programs, the influence of the party bosses (who FDR hated throughout his career) began to rapidly break apart and, outside of the Daley machine in Chicago, never recovered.

It was only after the breakdown of machine politics that the primaries took on any importance (albeit over the course of several decades.) The primary system, combined with redistricting, played a massive part in bringing America where it is today.

The Constitution gave the power to draw federal House districts to the state legislatures, who also elected U.S senators prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment (which was another gift from the progressives.) Unsurprisingly, the parties made deals with one another to draw the safest districts possible, which continues to this day. But because the nominations and not infrequently the election of candidates to office were controlled by the party machines, there wasn't much in the way of a challenge to the status quo, the progressives themselves notwithstanding.

The conquest of the primary system over the machine politics of old changed that, and activists in both parties slowly took control; the Democratic activists took over their party in 1972 and the Republican activists won theirs in 1980.

Because the system of redistricting made the overwhelming majority of congressional districts "safe" (there are currently maybe 50 truly competitive districts out of 435), the activists in both parties were able to nominate progressively more ideological candidates without fear of losing.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that this has had the effect over time of depressing voter turnout because ideologues rarely represent the interests of the broader - and more centrist - electorate.

One of the dirty secrets of politics, is that political professionals prefer low voter turnout. You can't predict or control what a large number of centrist, unaffiliated voters are going to do. But when an election relies on little more than turning out your activist base, it becomes much easier to predict and control a given race. It makes governing easier too, if only because once elected, you only have to work on behalf of that base.

Without the progressives creating the primary system and the New Deal destroying the party machines, the Tea Party wouldn't exist. Throughout 2009-10, the Tea Party existed only to challenge the institutional power of the Republican Party establishment, taking out as many veteran figures as it could and replacing them with lunatics like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. That wouldn't have been possible before. Had the historic power of party machines been available to it, the Republican establishment would have crushed the Tea Party insurgency into dust. Allen West would be selling life insurance somewhere were it not for the progressives.

It was only after the activists took over the parties that silly issues began to drive the national agenda. For example, neither Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford so much as mentioned Roe v. Wade in public while they were in office. After 1980 you couldn't get Republicans to shut up about it. Even with the American economy headed toward President Reagan's famous "dustbin of history", the GOP has spent the last two months howling about birth control.

Party insurgencies were also made easier by campaign finance reforms, such as McCain-Feingold, which eliminated the soft money the parties needed to maintain their relevance and even the appearance of control. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United effectively replaced the national parties with Super PACs, thereby liberating candidates and officeholders from any party discipline whatsoever.

Having said that, the rise of Super PACs are eventually going to destroy the influence of the activists. Without the national parties are moderating influences, the corporate and union donors that most benefit from Citizens United are going to give only to candidates that serve their interests. And because activists tend to be populist, the interests of corporate and union PACs are eventually going to collide with those of the activists in both parties. Who do you think is going to win that fight?

West and Beck are right, the progressive legacy is ruining America, but they're too dumb to understand that it is doing so principally because it allowed people like Beck and West to exist in the first place. Too much direct democracy was injected into a system that wasn't constitutionally designed to accommodate it, and the structures that were designed to contain it were destroyed over time.

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. 

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.