Two solitudes: Why Canadians will stay richer than Americans

I'm constantly amused by people who have no idea what they're talking about getting on TV, which you see a lot of on Fox News. The obvious pride that Fox stuffs into its ignorance, combined with great production values and hot chicks, is what makes the network essentially viewing for me.

Just this morning, I was watching something called Cashin' In, a business affairs show with M*A*S*H's Wayne Rogers as a panelist. Rogers used be Trapper John and is now a Republican mouthpiece who pretends to be a financial analyst.

This week's report that Canadians are wealthier than Americans for the very first time in history was the main point of discussion.

While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug.

For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

As U.S News points out, this isn't the old Canadian dollar, which was only worth about 60 American cents, either. Due to a spectacular free fall of the greenback that began in 2002-'03, the two currencies are at about par and have been for about three years.

By the way, a high Canadian dollar actually hurts our economy. Given that we're an export economy, a higher dollar increases the price of said exports. We're doing better than the Americans in spite of a high dollar, not because of it.

Trapper John was able to hijack the debate by issuing a ton of GOP talking points about corporate taxes that are sort of true, but only sort of. The Cashin' In folks that passed for liberals, and pretty much everyone in the Canadian media, decided that they were only going to tell half the story, as well.

For that reason, Canada is very probably going to stay richer than the United States, which I figure is about five years from the point of no return.

Yes, the Canadian government has cut corporate taxes fairly significantly in recent years, and there's a lot to be said about the competitive edge that those cuts give an economy. On this, Trapper John is actually right, while telling not quite a third of the story. I'm seeing this talking point throughout the American media and blogosphere, so I thought that I'd address it. But I warn you now, it's gonna take a while to explain.

One of the major differences between the United States and Canada is that we could afford to cut corporate taxes. We weren't crazy enough to think that they would spur enough growth that they would they would pay for themselves, which tax cuts by themselves almost never do. Even classical supply-siders will tell you that but modern Republicans won't.

Canada got where it is today over the course of nearly thirty years. It caused a lot of hurt, unspeakable amounts of political upheaval, and intelligent decision making from both of the major parties at the time.

When the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney came to power in 1984, our debt problem was as bad or worse than America's is today. The outgoing Liberal Minister of Everything (and future prime minister) Jean Chretien said in public that "we left the cupboard bare." Consecutive Liberal governments between 1963 and 1984 vastly expanded the role - and therefore the cost - of the federal government. They just couldn't be bothered actually paying for it.

Mulroney tried cutting spending, but the opposition Liberal Party made that politically toxic. He instead focused on the revenue side of deficit reduction. First he signed the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which grew the economy and therefore the tax base. Then he instituted a national 7% sales tax, the Goods and Services Tax.

While the constant dollar size of the debt and deficits grew, they began shrinking as a percentage of GDP. They were still unacceptably high, but trending in the right direction.

Of course, the idea of a national sales tax was about as popular as you'd think it would be, and Mulroney's government was reduced to two seats - a drop of 154 out of the then-295 seat Parliament - a few months after his 1993 retirement.

When Chretien took office that year, the international markets forced his hand on the spending side. The Economist was calling for Spain to replace Canada in the G7 and there was a very real fear of a confidence crisis in the market. That would have driven interest rates up and made the situation impossible to correct without a major devaluation of the dollar.And Canada's credit rating actually was downgraded during Chretien's first term.

Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, took an axe to everything, cutting ministries by roughly 25% each. Between those cuts and the Mulroney revenue, not only was the budget balanced by the turn of the century, the government was running surpluses.

And those were real surpluses, not the imaginary ones that Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress created out of whole cloth in the late 1990s. Those were the product of the tech bubble and accounting fraud. Even if Bush hadn't passed stunningly large tax cuts and gone to war with everybody, the U.S government still would have gone back into deficit because Clinton and the Republicans hadn't factored unfunded liabilities into their budgets. Plus, they raided the Social Security trust fund to create the mirage of a balanced budget, thereby increasing the unfunded liabilities.

It was only after dramatic revenue enhancements under Mulroney and draconian spending cuts under Chretien that subsequent prime ministers Paul Martin and Stephen Harper even thought of cutting corporate taxes. Had it been done during the Mulroney or early Chretien years, it would have only ballooned our crippling deficits and shaken market confidence to the point that we couldn't service our debt anymore.

Then there's the more recent history to consider. Unlike the United States, the Canadian government didn't allow the banking and housing markets to become huge under-funded and over-leveraged casinos that were born to fail.

Like most conservatives, I supported the push for Canadian banking deregulation a decade ago. I was wrong and Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were right. Canadian banks are temperamentally more conservative than their foreign counterparts, so I doubt that they would have over-leveraged themselves in a whirlwind of idiotic derivatives trading that even they didn't understand. But the proposed mega-mergers at the time would have created Too Big To Fail institutions that would have dwarfed even America's as a percentage of our economy.

What the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act did wasn't so much "unleash the economy" as it let the banks become really fat guys who had to be taken out of their apartments by a crane because they were stuck to the couch.

Nor did Canada ever get the insane idea that absolutely everybody in the country had to own their own home, regardless of their ability to actually pay for it. I was raised by a banker, so I can tell you that things like NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assests) loans would have been unthinkable here, even if they were magically legal. And remember, NINJA loans were a creation of the lenders, not the borrowers. Despite what Republican talking points tell you, there was proportionally very little borrower fraud in the housing crisis.

Canadian law also didn't allow for what amounts to "no money down" mortgages, and those rules have only gotten tighter since the Great Collapse of Ought-Eight. Canadian homeowners can't even deduct their mortgage interest from their taxes. Granted, no other sane country on Earth allows that, either.

We didn't reap the benefits of the housing and banking bubbles, but we didn't lose our shirts when those bubbles burst.

Exactly no one in the United States is proposing anything close to what the Canadian experience demonstrably proved can work. Even the most liberal of Democrats are suggesting minuscule revenue increases by the letting the Bush tax cuts expire only on the wealthy, when they should all expire, including those for the middle class. And Republicans are demanding huge, unaffordable tax cuts up front and not cutting real program or entitlement spending for more than a decade.

When proposed spending cuts and entitlement reform are that far in the future, one can safely assume that they'll never happen at all. The idea of trusting a kid to eat his broccoli after he has his ice cream is so idiotic that even those most negligent parent knows it. And yes, I do understand that I just compared the American government to a spoiled child.

Worse still, the short term (ten-year) cost of entitlement reform would be so high that it would negate the possible (and incredibly optimistic) benefits of the tax cuts. Remember that George W. Bush's Social Security reform plan would have cost a trillion dollars over ten years, and there's no reason to believe that Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms would cost less.

Former President Bush's institute this week put out a laughable book that suggests that America can just grow it's way out of the problem. The only problem is that it assumes a significantly higher average annual rate of growth (4-5%) than the United States has enjoyed since the end of World War II (3.2%.) And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of wishful thinking that put America where it is today.

Unlike what Republican politicians tell you, this isn't 1980. The problem then was unsustainable inflation, which was only broken by dramatically high interest rates that caused a brutal recession. The Reagan tax cuts might have spurred growth after the 1982-'84 recession, but they did so at the cost of tripling the deficit.

For my liberal friends, it isn't 1932, either. Revenue generation alone, as we saw during the Mulroney era in Canada, isn't going to do the trick. Things on your end of the ledger are going to have to change in a big, bad way.

Unless you want them to disappear entirely, entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security are going to have to be means-tested immediately, accompanied with an increase in the retirement age to at least 70. Both are going to have to treated like the middle-class welfare that they are, since the contributions being made to current retirees only barely match the costs. If you want to avoid outright privatization, costs are going to have to dramatically cut.

Oh, and don't look to everybody else for sympathy. Their 401(k) plans got annihilated in the market meltdown four years ago, including those right on the threshold of retirement.

In the very near future, public employee contracts regarding pensions and health care - which are rapidly bankrupting the states - are going to have to be renegotiated in good faith. Public workers going to have to pay dramatically more into their benefit plans. If they don't, current retirees, who really can't fend for themselves, are going to take it in the neck soon.The fact that mid-size American municipalities and counties are already going into bankruptcy is a bad sign. It's just a matter of time before enire states follow them into the rathole. And stop pretending that you can make more in the private sector. That hasn't been true in quite a while now.

You know what? Unlike what most politicians will tell you, now is precisely the time to do it. No politician is going to attack the free lunch mentality when times are good. Any time reform is mentioned in a time of prosperity, that reform s said to threaten an economic downturn. The way I see it, consumer demand isn't going to rebound the the U.S economy for probably a decade, so now might be an ideal time to go with austerity.

But that's never going to happen. As opposed to the Canadian experience in the 1980s and 90s, no one party is going to have the political majority needed to enact a holistic reform of the taxation and entitlement system. The reforms then necessarily have to be bipartisan, and that just isn't going to happen.

Canada gave its governing parties the electoral mandates to carry out the reforms that it did, and it had fifteen years in which to do them. Even then it was painful and politically unpopular. It wasn't easy for the Progressive Conservatives to create a national sales tax, and it lead to to the biggest political debacle in history that I'm aware of. The only reason the Chretien Liberals survived making the cuts that they did was the absence of a unified opposition at the time. God knows that Harper spent enough money once the Liberals fell apart.

No one in the United States, of either party, has the time or the will to do what's necessary before it's too late.

Trapper John won't tell you that. I just did.

Salim Mansur's "Little Eichmanns"

When writing for a newspaper primarily marketed to people who don't know how read, it's amazingly easy to trick people into thinking that you're saying something other that what you actually are. The Toronto Sun so distracts most of it's idiot readership with tits and ass that it blinds them to just how often its allegedly conservative columnists actually agree with the Left and the scumbag jihadi movement.

There was a time not too very long ago when some shithead liberal would imply that the United States was "asking for" the attacks of September 11, 2001, and conservatives would make themselves feel all patriotic by shithammering them directly into public opinion hell. That always made me smile because, far too often, those same conservatives would go on to not just parrot the line of not just the left - albeit from a different perspective - but of the terrorists themselves.

In yesterday's Sun, Salim Mansur does exactly that, although he isn't honest enough to actually say so. And some of his arguments are specious enough to be actually retarded, even for the journalistic shortbus that is the Sun. Mr. Mansur's column goes a long way in providing a moral and ideological  justification for the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people. He reads like a slightly more tan Ward Churchill, although, unlike Churchill, Mansur actually is an Indian.

On 9/11 the U.S., the leading member of the West, was taken by surprise.

It happened once before in living memory.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, a Sunday, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbour and took America by surprise.

There are many differences between these two events set apart by 60 years.

Yet what is interesting to note — and deserving of study at length — is the varying responses of the American government and people to the deliberately planned acts of war against the U.S.

In any relationship or equation, there is at a minimum two entities.

Over the past several years, I have written in my columns about the broken culture of the Arab-Muslim world which is responsible for the sort of politics that eventually led to 9/11.

It might be said terrorism in the name of Islam is the symptom of a civilization wrestling with its own demise.

In the 60 years between the two acts of aggression, the U.S. and the West changed immensely and not necessarily for the better.

The manner in which Imperial Japan was defeated contrasts with the manner in which for the past decade the U.S. and the West, united or in disagreement, have confronted terrorism and violence emanating from the Arab-Muslim world.

Comparing 9/11 to Pearl Harbor is like comparing apples to ... a dead hobo that you found in the woods and poked with a stick.

The only similarity between the two is that the U.S government had every opportunity to recognize that the attacks were coming and maybe do something to prevent them. In the case of Japan, the intelligence wasn't centralized. In the months leading up to 9/11, the intelligence agencies weren't talking to one another. But in both cases, the intelligence was readily available to the government.

If you're even halfway smart, which most modern conservatives seem to think is a sign of moral degeneracy, the analogy stops there. Imperial Japan was, well, an empire. As such, it had vast real estate holdings that were chock full of military targets to bomb. Fundamentalist Islam, on the other hand, is an ideology and terrorism is a tactic. Ideologies and tactics are famously difficult to bomb since they tend to have no fixed address. As much as I'd like to launch a thermonuclear weapon at, say, supply-side economics, I recognize that there's no way to do so, at least with any precision.

In fact, Pearl Harbor wasn't completely unprovoked. Rather, it was a military response to the American oil embargo imposed on Japan after the conquest of Manchuria. In 1941, the United States produced slightly more than half of the world's oil and Japan imported all of theirs, just as they do now. How do you think the U.S would respond to such an embargo against them in the middle of war? As a matter of fact, one of the cases for the first Gulf War was the near total depedence of Arab oil by Europe and Japan

Pearl Harbor was an act of preventative war. Tojo's war council was convinced that America would eventually pose an existential threat to their ambitions, so Japan attempted to deliver a knockout blow first. Their thinking was not unlike that of the Bush administration toward Iraq in 2003. The only difference is that Tojo was right and Bush wasn't.

Mansur's analysis is purposefully ignorant in other ways, as well. For example, it is increasingly not the "Arab-Muslim world" that is fuelling international terrorism. The main reason that Islamist groups so detest the Arab autocracies is because they repressed them so well. There isn't a single Arab government that has embraced fundamentalist Islam as practiced by al-Qaeda because it directly threatens their very survival. Osama bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and exiled nearly a decade before 9/11, and Ayman al-Zawahiri was imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptians thirty years ago.

The Islamists, on the other hand, were welcomed with open arms in Africa and South and Central Asia. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were Arabs, to be sure, but none of their primary hosts were. Each and every anti-American plot between the first World Trade Center attack and the second was hatched well away from the Arab world. It was only in the wake of 9/11 that some elements of the al-Qaeda movement appeared in Yemen, which is coincidentally being torn apart by a Great Game between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Even if you can get around Mansur's ahistorical nonsense, you still can't help but be struck by the incredibly warped morality of his central argument.

The overriding reason, I believe, is the extent to which the West has lost confidence in its own cultural values and historical achievements. This is a vast and complicated story.

In the future, some historian of much talent and imagination might sit down to write this story, as Edward Gibbon did to tell the story of the fall and decline of the Roman Empire.

But there were periodically intimations of this story, which went unheeded.
The drift of the West is unmistakable, and its denial is a sign of the problem.

Poets have the uncanny, even prophetic, ability to sense ahead of others things or situations gone awry.

Leonard Cohen, in some of his poetry and songs, has demonstrated this ability that great poets possess.

In the song The Future, released in 1992, Cohen described the malady of the West. He wrote, “Things are going to slide, slide in all directions,” recalling for me W. B. Yeats’ opening lines from The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …”

Cohen’s most compelling words in this song tell of what went so terribly wrong in the years between 1941 and 2001. This can hardly be discussed these days because the emotions generated drown any sober thought on the matter.

But Cohen prophetically apprehended the source of moral disorder gripping the West.

He wrote, “Give me Christ/or give me Hiroshima/Destroy another fetus now/We don’t like children anyhow/I’ve seen the future, baby: It is murder.”

Can civilizations “don’t like children” survive? After 9/11, there is no denying Cohen’s chilling insight.

I'm sure that Leonard Cohen is thrilled to be used to support an argument that is morally questionable at best, and outright evil at worst.

Firstly, the Islamists don't "hate us for our freedom," and they've never seriously suggested that they do. They're hardly thrilled with things like abortion, gay marriage and gangsta rap, but they're not looking to establish a Caliphate in South Central Los Angeles or Greenwich Village. They want to reimpose the Caliphate that existed before America was discovered at all.

The Takfiris fear and despise the United States because its foreign policy props up the Arab dictators who stand in their way. Even the most anti-American of Middle Eastern governments, Syria, was more than happy to detain and torture terror suspects on behalf of the Clinton, second Bush, and (probably) Obama administrations.

Unless you're an abject dickhead, you recognize that there is no direct line between the Islamic terrorism of the 1970s and 80s and al-Qaeda. Thirty years ago, terrorists were instruments of specific states and tools in furthering their interests. Al-Qaeda abhors the very idea of the state. They have clearly defined geostrategic objectives, and Mansur's idiotic ramblings aside, they have little or nothing to do with the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

What Salim Mansur, along with certain segments of the American Right, is doing is projecting what they don't like about Western civilization onto the enemy, which is an interesting propaganda tool in that it serves to at least partially justify the enemy's barbaric actions, if not actually endorse them.



In this, Mansur - along with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who said almost exactly the same thing the week of of the 9/11 attacks - are the useful idiots of the fundamentalist Islamic movement. It seems to me that you can't destroy an enemy that you don't understand. To my knowledge, no one in al Qaeda has ever mentioned abortion as a rationale for their actions. Not once. Yet, in imparting their cultural objections onto the terrorists, people like Mansur impede our ability to understand them, which makes effectively combating them almost impossible.

The jihadis probably don't "hate us for our freedom," but it's pretty clear that Salim Mansur does.

I might be the last person in the Western world who doesn't believe that those 3,000 people "shouldn't have worn that dress." They weren't Ward Churchill and Salim Mansur's "Little Eichmanns." They weren't anyone's policy prop. They were just people who had the audacity to go to work or get on a plane on a Tuesday morning in September. But if you believe that our culture invited the attack, it is almost inescapable to reach the conclusion that they were asking for it.

Destroying the Senate to reform it

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

"Hey, What Do You Say We Bomb Libya?"

I've always found it difficult to take Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi seriously. How much fear can you reasonably expect someone who regaled himself in Michael Jackson-style military outfits to inspire? And it only got more laughable in the last decade, when he started dressing like Prince.

Having come to power in a coup d'etat in September of 1969 - six months almost to the day before I was even born - Gaddafi is the fourth longest serving non-royal national leader in human history. In classic Gaddafi fashion, after assuming control, he only had himself promoted from captain to colonel, thereby remaining outranked by the general officers he commands. Oh, and he's surrounded by chick bodyguards.

The guy is a joke and he always has been. The only way he gained any credibility at all was by becoming Ronald Reagan's designated bad guy for a time a quarter of a century ago. The surest way to attain leadership in the Arab world is to provoke the United States, and Gaddafi failed even at that. Even after the April 1986 American bombing of Libya, the Colonel remained the subject of ridicule in the Middle East.

Yes, he engaged in terrorism, but mostly of the nickle and dime variety. His only truly impressive attack, the downing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland, seems to have succeeded almost by accident, and four U.S administrations refused to retaliate against him for it.

Now the "Arab spring" has moved to Libya and there's an uprising against Gaddafi's rule. Rebel forces at one point took the eastern half of the country, but the army has gradually started taking that territory back. Of course, this has all caused a great deal panic-inspiring stupidity among the American commentariat and the blogosphere.

Whenever a foreign policy issue looks as though it might become awkward, the preferred course of action among contemporary Republican commentators generally, and veterans of the second Bush administration in particular, is to stop thinking entirely. This is best exemplified by former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post resident know-nothing, Marc Thiessen.

Thiessen published a column this past Tuesday that is stunning in how spectacularly wrong and hysterically misinformed it is.

With government forces on the offensive, the question now facing U.S. policymakers is: Does it matter if Gaddafi wins?

Those cautioning against U.S. support for the Libyan resistance say "no" - an over-stretched America should not be drawn in to another woolly-headed humanitarian intervention. But putting aside the moral imperative, from a hard-nosed strategic perspective the stakes for the United States in Libya are high - and consequences of allowing Gaddafi to prevail could be disastrous for American national security.

Oh, this should be good ...

If the Libyan dictator survives, he is not likely to resume being the benign Gaddafi of recent years, who handed over his weapons of mass destruction, renounced terrorism and made nice with the West. More likely, he will be the brutal Gaddafi of old - the state sponsor of terror who blew up Pan Am 103 over Scotland, killing 270 people; destroyed a French passenger jet over Niger, killing 171 people; bombed the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, killing two U.S. soldiers and injuring more than 50 American servicemen; established terrorist training camps on Libyan soil; provided terrorists with arms and safe haven; and plotted to kill leaders in Saudi Arabia, Chad, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Zaire. If he succeeds in putting down the rebellion, Gaddafi would probably emerge angry and emboldened - a dangerous combination.

Based on what evidence? Gaddafi's crushing of the rebel movement is isolating enough. Any return to terrorism would bring about total isolation and very probably a multilateral invasion that would destroy his regime once and for all. And why would he be suicidally "angry and
emboldened" by a West that refused to back the rebels in any militarily significant way?

If Gaddafi survives, he would almost certainly put a halt to the destruction of his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, begun during the Bush administration. Since 2003, Libya has handed over the key components of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and allowed the destruction of more than 3,300 aerial bombs designed to disperse chemical weapons. But Gaddafi still has stockpiles of chemical weapons - including mustard gas and chemicals for the manufacture of sarin and other nerve agents - that were slated for internationally supervised destruction. These are deadly toxins that terrorists are desperate to acquire.

Ahh, the old "he'll give WMD to the terrorists" canard that fell out of favor about three months into the Iraq War. I've been waiting for that oldie, but goodie.

Gaddafi indeed had a WMD program, but it may have been the most comical one in the history of nuclear proliferation. Of the nuclear material that Gaddafi received from Pakistan's A.Q Khan, a good percentage of it hadn't even been taken out of its shipping crates. This is because Libya lacked a scientific community that knew what to do with it. That tends to be the result of killing all the smart people in a given country.

Another of the great GOP foreign policy lies is that Gaddafi only gave up his program in the wake of Saddam Hussein's fall in Iraq. As a matter of fact, the Libyans were negotiating the program away with the British and Americans during the latter days of the Clinton administration, several years before the Iraq debacle.

But let's review the logic behind this deeply flawed theory once again. Seeing as how "he'll give WMD to terrorists" was the main predicate for the Iraq invasion, it's probably pretty important that we at least understand it. And there is no logic behind it. It actually defies logic.

For a state to give nuclear, biological or chemical (NBC) weapons to non-state actors for use in a terrorist attack is something that everyone agrees would be an act of national suicide. Doing something like that would almost certainly invite a nuclear response from the United States, Britain, France, Israel or India. Paranoid Republican dogma aside, there actually is a reason that no one has done it yet.

Now, if you've been in power for as long as Saddam was, or Gaddafi has been, chances are that you have a pretty good idea of how to ensure your political survival. State sponsors of terrorism have been careful to facilitate attacks that would draw no more than what is commonly known as a "proportional response", and Lockerbie didn't even invite that. Despite having had the ability to pass NBC (and chemical weapons specifically) to terrorists for use against Israel at least since the 1960s, no Muslim state has ever done so or even seriously explored the possibility. This is because they know that Israel would immediately retaliate with its full nuclear capability.

If, however, you know that you are going to be invaded and deposed from power, there is no longer any reason to be so cautious. If nothing else, you can retaliate against the invader's homeland from beyond the grave. It's important to realize that it takes several months to deploy and mobilize an invasion force large enough to take out even the weakest of Arab leaders. If he actually had WMD, Saddam - or for that matter, Gaddafi - could have used that opportunity to transfer weapons for use in a terrorist retaliatory strike. And I'm not aware of how you would strike back against a regime that no longer exists.

The 2003 Iraq invasion therefore could have caused the terrorist use of NBC that it was supposed to prevent, if only because Saddam had nothing left to lose. He knew that if he was deposed he would be killed, since that the only way that transfers of power occur in the Arab world. It's one of history's happy accidents that Saddam's capability had dissolved years earlier.

It is brutally stupid to suggest, as Mr. Thiessen does, that Colonel Gaddafi would survive the current uprising, only to engage in behaviour that would guarantee the total destruction of his regime and probably his country. While it might be a great way to scare the yokels, it also frequently lands you in endless military quagmires, as any veteran of the junior Bush years should already know.

If Gaddafi survives, his regime will probably not achieve a decisive victory. That means a stalemate in which eastern Libya could become a lawless, ungoverned area. Moderate rebel leaders - who pleaded to the West for help but failed to secure it - could be pushed aside by radical elements. Al-Qaeda could step in to furnish the weapons and training that America refused to provide - and be rewarded with sanctuary in exchange. As the United States continues to put pressure on al-Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan, terrorists could migrate to eastern Libya, where several al-Qaeda leaders have roots, turning the region into a new terrorist haven.

First, how do we know that the rebel leaders are "moderate"? Some of them were in Gaddafi's cabinet as recently as last month. So far as I'm aware, there's no intelligence on any of these people or their intentions. Second, eastern Libya is already a lawless region. A good percentage of the foreign fighters in Iraq came from there. However, the Bush administration still restored full diplomatic relations with Libya at the time and removed it from the list of state sponsors of terror. Third, there's no reason to believe that al-Qaeda wouldn't infiltrate a fully liberated Libya, just as they did the liberated Iraq. The only difference would be the lack of 150, 000 American troops to contain them.

Thiessen then engages in an almost weaponized form of nonsense when he weighs the cost of Gaddafi's survival on U.S foreign policy.

If Gaddafi survives, despite President Obama's demands that he leave Libya, it would send a message of American weakness across the Muslim world - and cement the perception in Arab minds of a United States beaten down by its engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and afraid to act. It was just such a perception of American weakness that emboldened al-Qaeda before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Allowing Gaddafi to prevail would embolden the extremists and invite further acts of terror. It would also embolden dictators from Iran to North Korea, who would see America's lack of resolve against Gaddafi and assume they are free to wreak havoc without fear of a decisive American response.

One does not have to believe in the "freedom agenda" to see that the geopolitical consequences of allowing Gaddafi to survive are serious - and that the United States has a strategic interest in helping the Libyan rebels succeed in removing him from power. James Clapper has said the reason he believes Gaddafi will prevail is that his regime possesses superior firepower. That is a problem that can be fixed without sending American ground forces - by arming and training the Libyan rebels. The United States helped the contras remove the Sandinista regime from Nicaragua and helped Afghans drive out the mighty Soviet Red Army, without sending ground forces. We can help the Libyan rebels drive Gaddafi out without sending the Marines to the shores of Tripoli.

I've already pointed out Thiessen's historical fallacies regarding Nicaragua and Afghanistan here and here, so I won't do so again.

But the Libyan rebellion has to be looked at as a part of the larger Arab uprising and not as an isolated event. American foreign policy has to be at least somewhat consistent if and when this spreads. What happens, for example, if these revolutionary movements gain serious traction in Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia? Does anybody seriously believe that those countries won't respond exactly the same way that Gaddafi has? And does anyone think that the U.S would support no-fly zones in any of those places? As it is, the Obama administration is tacitly supporting the thuggish monarchy in Bahrain's imposition of martial law and the insertion of the Saudi military to quell the popular unrest.

By supporting the rebels in Libya while propping up friendly Arab authoritarians you send the message to the Muslim world that the United States and the world community is overly selective in promoting and upholding democracy, which is largely why American foreign policy already faces the challenges it does in the Middle East.

If the West inserts itself in knocking down the Libyan domino, we can't say with any certainty which one follows it. If the next domino happens to be friendly to us, we'll wind up approving of the further repression of people who neither understand nor particularly care about American vital interests. And even those friendly governments will eventually be overthrown. Having the people despise you when they are probably isn't wise.

Not that any of my points are still relevant. On Thursday, the U.N Security Council established a no-fly zone in Libya in a resolution so vaguely worded that it can't help but be interpreted as taking sides in a civil war. And that's something that rarely ends well.

Since the opposition insurgents are without an air force, the international community has essentially declared war on Muammar al-Gaddafi and his government. If he survives, or even if he doesn't, then it is possible that he will resume sponsorship of anti-western terrorism, if for no other reason than he has no longer has any motive not to. For that reason, we cannot allow him to survive in power. And we have to take him out immediately, since we've basically incentivized his return to terrorism.

Doing that is going to require a lot more than enforcing a no-fly zone, which Saddam Hussein lived with quite comfortably for twelve years. Indeed, Saddam massacred his people within two no-fly zones. NATO, which will almost certainly be tasked with controlling the air, is going to have to actively destroy the Libyan air force and its defences. Then we're going to have to provide air support to the rebels as well as arm them as they march to Tripoli. If the opposition still can't decisively defeat Gaddafi's military, we'll probably have to insert ground forces and do it ourselves. These people, after all, aren't like Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which had decades of prior combat experience.

I wouldn't expect a whole lot of support in that from any Arab League countries, since they know that a liberation operation is something that they may soon have to defend themselves against. We've sent the message to Arabs everywhere that if they want to topple their governments, we will support them. But we won't. At least, not always, or even most of the time. We will support the established regimes in Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia regardless of how savagely they crush any uprising. And we still don't know what we're supporting in Libya.

We opened Pandora's Box on Thursday night. Instead of stepping away from the Middle East and letting events run their course, we've taken sides in a way that we can't and won't apply consistently, and militarily committed ourselves to an outcome that we don't even fully understand the implications of.

There is little in the way of historical precedent that suggests that this is going to end the way we think it will.

The Many Ways He's Wrong: Marc Thiessen and the Reagan Doctrine

The Middle East is a terribly complex and awfully dangerous place. It also hasn't been overly welcoming for the foreign empires that find themselves there. And, as some of you might have noticed, the region has been undergoing transformative change over the last six weeks.

Will that change be good or bad? That's hard to say and the answer depends entirely on the perspective of the person asking the question.

I believe that in the long term, real self-governance is probably the best thing that could happen in the Arab world, in that it creates a mandate for personal and national responsibility for what happens there going forward. In most of the Arab world, this will be the first time that this has happened. Most of the people of the region have never had much of a say in their national destinies, having them decided for them by first the European empires and then the puppet regimes of the Cold War superpowers.

I also believe that real national self-determination will be years, if not decades, in coming. This is going to be messy for awhile. And no, what happens will almost certainly not be in the interest of the United States and Israel. But that's exactly the point: that foreign interests have created the political cesspool that's being drained today. Because the criminal toadies that have been propped up for centuries by outsiders murdered any democratic opposition years ago, the only organized opposition is necessarily the kind that we're not going to like very much. And, like it or not, the last 12 American presidents have supported the people doing the murdering.

More importantly, the more foreign powers resist the changes coming - the more we take sides in their internal affairs - the more it's going to empower the more radical elements of the opposition, and the broader support they'll gain from a justifiably xenophobic Muslim world. You know how most Americans flip out when the Pope speaks out against capital punishment? Well, imagine Vatican City imposing the AFL-CIO as the government of Mississippi because it's in Rome's interest. Whoever the West and Russia backs in these movements are going to be feared and hated by the locals, if only because history teaches them that they should be.

The best thing the United States can do at this point is to stay the fuck out of it. Will doing so negatively impact Israel? Probably, but I believe that the main reason the Israelis didn't reach some sort of a deal with their neighbours decades ago is because Jerusalem knew that the U.S would ultimately back them, regardless of what it did.

Even during the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which Ronald Reagan described as a "Holocaust" to Menachem Begin, the Americans still supported the Israeli-backed Druze, which ultimately cost 241 Marines their lives. Was the outcome of the Lebanese civil war ever a vital national interest of the United States? No, it wouldn't have even mattered all that much in the context of the Cold War. But it did directly lead to the hostage taking of American citizens in Beirut which set the stage for the Iran-Contra affair.

Since the Six Day War, no American administration seems to have known where America's interests end and Israel's begin and that has caused intense and justifiable Muslim outrage. That's not an anti-Israeli position. It's a statement of fact. As soon as the United States determines what it's own attainable vital interests in the region are, the better off everyone - especially Israel, because of the growing demographic shift there - will be. Absent a settlement, the Palestinians and Arab Israelis will eventually be of sufficient numbers to say "let's vote", at which point Israel ceases to exist entirely. But there will be no settlement so long as the United States continues to enable Israel in demanding the perfect at the expense of the good. And the longer that continues, the more profound Muslim enmity toward America is going to be.

All things being equal, the Obama administration has handled recent events about as well as I could have expected them to. They seem to recognize that inserting itself now would change the dynamic from a referendum on the tyrannies that oppress them to a referendum on America, which historically has supported, armed, trained and financed those tyrannies.

Of course, the Republican peanut gallery in the media and the blogosphere isn't helping. Of the GOP commentariat, only Pat Buchanan and George Will seem to understand the implications of what's happening. Others, like The Washington Post's weapons-grade moron and former Bush 43 speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, want places like Libya to become America's new covert wars. Sadly, he has no idea what he's talking about, as we'll learn in his Tuesday article "Apply the Regan Doctrine in Libya."

The administration is positioning military assets in the Mediterranean but seems unwilling to use them. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has expressed deep reluctance about establishing a no-fly zone over Libya, and he recently gave an address at West Point in which he warned that "any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined."

From his days as deputy CIA director during the Reagan administration, Gates knows there are options for removing a dictator short of sending in "a big American land army." In the 1980s, U.S. policymakers figured out a way to roll back Soviet expansionism without committing American ground forces to every flashpoint around the world. There were motivated people willing to fight their own wars of liberation. They did not want American soldiers to fight for them. They wanted America to provide weapons, training, intelligence and other support so they could fight and win those wars themselves. By providing such assistance, America helped resistance fighters in places such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan liberate their countries. It was called the "Reagan Doctrine," and the time has come to apply it in Libya.

Holy Christ, that's dumb.

First, that part of the "Reagan Doctrine" actually grew from the Nixon Doctrine during the abyss of the Vietnam War. And mindsets like Thiessen's are exactly what put the United States in Vietnam in the first fucking place. If you've studied your history, you'll know that the Eisenhower administration was applying "The Reagan Doctrine" with the South Vietnamese government. The only problem was that it wasn't working, so the Kennedy administration put in 13,000 military "advisers." Ultimately, Lyndon Johnson had 550, 000 combat troops there. It didn't end well, as you may have heard.

The Reagan Doctrine differed from Nixon's in that Nixon was supporting internationally recognized government whereas Reagan propagating wars of national liberation, just like the Soviets were. And like the Soviets, Reagan's clients were unsavoury characters to a man. The Contras and the Afghan mujaheddin were, at best, war criminals and at worst, terrorists and drug dealers. None of them were, as President Reagan described them, "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers."

Second, the "successes" Thiessen cites is a stronger case for his own brain damage than proof of his argument. Let's for a moment look at what happened "in places such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan" in the wake of the "Reagan Doctrine".

The current government of Nicaragua is the Sandinista Party, which the Contra rebels Reagan supported were supposed to crush forever. Worse still, the Sandinistas are still headed by President Daniel Ortega, who was also famously in charge in the 1980s. Ortega is closely allied with America's current regional bogeyman, Hugo Chavez.

Then there's Afghanistan. Yes, the Reagan administration continued Jimmy Carter's policy of supporting the mujaheddin fighters there, but it never controlled that support - Pakistan did, and Islamabad had very different strategic interests than did the United States. First, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence funded, trained and armed only those groups loyal to it and who would be willing to also support the jihad in Indian-occupied Kashmir, which exploded as soon as the Soviet war in Afghanistan began winding down.

Second, of the hundreds of millions of dollars in American, Saudi and Chinese aid sent through Islamabad, as much as half of it was diverted to the Pakistani nuclear program. Not only bring South Asia to the edge of nuclear war three times in the last fifteen years, Pakistan also proliferated that technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

As the Russians bugged out of Kabul, American aid ended and a power vacuum was created, which was filled by the religious fanatics and terrorists that ultimately attacked New York City and Washington on September 11, 2001. The Soviet jihad dissolved into an unpredictable civil war, and the Reagan Doctrine never considered that.

Thiessen is advocating following the same policies in Libya without considering their rather well-known consequences, making him either desperately dishonest or dangerously dumb.

Anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya need the same things the resistance forces in Nicaragua and Afghanistan needed:

l Intelligence. America can provide Libyan rebels with satellite imagery of government troop movements and intelligence on the government's military strength, capabilities and intent - as well as tactical advice on how to capitalize on this intelligence.

l Weapons. America can provide the Libyan resistance with everything from guns and ammunition to more sophisticated weaponry, such as advanced artillery, night-vision equipment, and communications gear.

l Training. The United States can put its experience building up the Afghan and Iraqi military forces to use in Libya, providing advisers to train anti-Gaddafi forces in weapons, tactics and military strategy.

l Diplomatic support. The United States can play the role of diplomatic surrogate for the Libyan resistance, further tightening sanctions on Gaddafi, while rallying NATO and allies in the Middle East to assist in his overthrow.

Never mind that, as was true in Afghanistan, that no one really knows anything about the "anti-Gaddafi forces" except that they're anti-Gaddafi, and we don't even know that as a certainty. In fact, their leader, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, was in Gaddafi's cabinet a mere three weeks ago.

We have no idea what the national aspirations of the rebel movement are, yet Thiessen and others are more than willing that the United States send them heavy arms capable of fighting a national military. That's precisely what happened in Afghanistan, and we're paying for that in our blood thirty years later.

To his credit, Thiessen acknowledges that the anti-Gaddafi forces could be jihadis dressed as Jeffersonian democrats. He just doesn't care very much.

But let's assume for a moment that the rebels are what they say they are, which is a dubious proposition at best. Would overt American support alienate them from the Libyan people. We know that the population generally hates Gaddafi, but how it would respond to American sponsorship of the insurgents is unknown. Would they see the United States as interfering in the borders, as the Italians did so brutally? We don't know if the average Libyan's hatred for Gaddafi is greater than it is for foreign intervention, and given the broad support for the Iraqi insurgency in 2004-06, that's something people like Thiessen should think about.

The fact is that there is no American vital national interest in Libya. But once the United States takes sides in a civil war, it assumes the moral responsibility for what happens in it and what their side ultimately becomes. With that comes unintended consequences, such as those we've seen in Latin America, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

More immediately, the American people should be made aware of the risks involved. If Gaddafi's forces capture Americans delivering arms to the rebels, the United States is going to have to go in and rescue them, putting themselves right in the middle of another civil war. While getting into a civil war is one of the easiest military operations imaginable, getting out of one is something else entirely.

Thiessen closes with the typically Republican tactic of unrealistic fear-mongering.

The risks of helping the resistance in Libya are real, but inaction carries risks as well. President Obama has declared that Gaddafi must go. Dictators from Iran to North Korea are watching and assessing the resolve of this president. It would do damage to America's credibility if Gaddafi survived while Obama stood helplessly on the sidelines.

You would think at some point people would start recognizing that line of logic for the horseshit that it is. There are few things that the Iranians and North Koreans have enjoyed as much as watching the United States trapping itself in sinkholes like Afghanistan and Iraq because of terrorists who aren't there and weapons of mass destruction that don't exist.

The more places that America is bogged down, the less likely it is to take action against Tehran and Pyongyang. Iran and North Korea have acted with impunity since 9/11 precisely because the United States has been stretched too thin to do anything about it. Russia was able to attack and occupy a potential NATO member for the same reason.

That anyone could have lived through the last decade and not recognized that never ceases to amaze me. By being everywhere, the United States is increasingly nowhere, and people like Marc Thiessen want to perpetuate that until American diplomatic, military and economic capability finally reaches the breaking point.

What Marc Thiessen and others like him are advocating is essentially a foreign policy of wishful thinking, which is something that the United States has suffered no shortage of since the end of the Second World War. You can't possibly defend your vital national interests when literally everything is your vital national interest.

Well, I guess that you can for a time, but you ultimately wind up bankrupt and impotent.

Doug Schoen's Fairy Tale Economics

Great. Another post about the American debt crisis. You folks have no idea how tired I'm getting of writing these. It's exhausting and it ultimately isn't going to make a difference.

One of the things that I've constantly reiterated over the last year or so is that even the most stalwart Tea Party members aren't really serious about even reducing the deficit in a serious way, let alone eliminating it and addressing America's truly awesome debt. I know this by looking over their (albeit limited) policy proposals and listening to their rhetoric.

If you ever want to have fun, suggest cutting just the rate of growth of Social Security or Medicare to your average Tea Party supporter, who tends to be fairly old. You'll see heads explode rather quickly, more so if you throw cuts to the Pentagon and tax increases into the mix. No, those folks really believe that you can maintain or expand those programs while further cutting taxes and still shrink the deficit. They actually think that banning about $50 billion in earmark spending is going to somehow shrink a $1.5 trillion deceit.

In fairness, the Teapublicans aren't alone. Last week, a Wall Street Journal - NBC News poll found that 70% of Americans don't want entitlements cut, even though that's where the unfunded liabilities that will bleed America dry actually are. You could eliminate the Department of Defense completely and you still won't save enough to pay for the unchecked growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Having said that, defense - entirely dependent as it is on U.S foreign policy - is the very definition of discretionary spending and a good place to start looking for cuts. But you ultimately have no other choice but to reduce and reform the outlays that come with entitlement programs. More importantly, you have to do it in a way that doesn't create a moral hazard bailout trap, like President Bush's "private" Social Security account proposal would have.

The odds of that happening before the international bond market forces Congress to do it are somewhere between slim and none. It's just as likely that Sarah Palin would not only become president, but actually be a great president. It's so statistically unlikely that I can't believe that I'm wasting my time even mentioning it.

Instead of being serious about their national future, most American political types are busying themselves selling the fantasy that they can grow their way out of debt to a public that has no interest whatsoever in the truth. This is mostly a Republican delusion, but it is gaining some currency among the more cowardly elements of the Democratic Party.

Although it seems like it was just yesterday that I pointed out that Democratic pollster Doug Schoen was born wrong, it was actually last Wednesday. On the Daily Beast this morning, Schoen full-throatedly endorsed the "grow your way out of debt" plan. More importantly, he didn't appear to be drunk or kidding.

The theory works like this: If you have a Social Security payroll tax holiday, extend the Bush tax cuts for a few years, and expand a bunch of small business oriented tax credits, you grow the economy to a point where the deficit disappears.

The only problem with that theory is that it's wrong. Mr. Schoen doesn't propose spending cuts, or even a freeze at the current astronomical levels. He just expands tax cuts and credits that further deprive the government of revenue, which is ultimately the cause of deficits in the first place. Just like private individuals, the government goes into debt when it spends more money than it takes in. That debt can only be addressed in one of two ways; by cutting spending or increasing revenue.

Schoen doesn't propose either, at least not in the short or medium term. He seems to believe that the tax cuts and credits with spur the economy enough to increase revenue through a larger tax base. When John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried that, it was called supply-side economics and it just created bigger deficits. As Alan Greenspan recently admitted, tax cuts never pay for themselves, let alone grow the economy enough to raise the revenue necessary to address existing deficits.

For Schoen's plan to even come close to being realistic, the American economy would have to grow at an annual rate that it hasn't seen since the mid-80s. And things have changed greatly since the Reagan administration. For example, the United States had a manufacturing base and trade surpluses then. It doesn't now. Since the Clinton administration, America has been a consumption economy. Unfortunately, the American consumer is even more underwater than his government is.

If history is any indication, American households are going to be conservative in ways that they haven't been since the Great Depression. Just as was the case seventy years ago, their main priority is likely to be discharging personal debt rather than buying new stuff. Given the collapse of the housing a credit markets over the last three years, they can't borrow more even if they wanted to. If the American people weren't mightily spooked by the Great Recession, they haven't been paying attention and there's probably no saving them.

It stands to reason that you're not going to have economic growth if consumers aren't consuming. You can have all of the business tax cuts you can imagine, but they'll be worse than worthless if those businesses don't have a customer base. That's why I'm beginning to think that this might be a structural recession, where unemployment doesn't come down significantly for several years, irrespective of what the federal government does.

Mr. Schoen, like virtually everyone else in America, thinks that the United States exists in a bubble. Every other country with a debt issue is engaging in austerity economics, regardless of their unemployment rates. Taxes are going up and spending is going down. They are doing this because they recognize the unavoidable laws of mathematics apply them.

That's not happening in the United States. From the right of the political spectrum to the left, they think that reality can be ignored and wishful thinking will fix what are now structural problems in the American economy.

And that's not going to end well.

When Hacks Attack

You pretty much know that a political operative has outlived his or her usefulness when he or she starts appearing on television regularly. Just look at Karl Rove. He's on Fox News all the time, and virtually no one in the Republican party will talk to him anymore. Granted, Rove was largely responsible for the Marxist reign of George W. Bush, but that wasn't stopping anyone from being his buddy when he was winning elections. The only problem is that Rove stopped winning in 2006.

The sagas of Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell are even sadder. They're not even washed out strategists, they're tired pollsters.

Schoen worked with the two worst people in professional politics, Mark Penn and Dick Morris; managed to talk Bill Clinton into being more of a Republican than he already was, and incomprehensibly talked Hillary Clinton into continuing to be Hillary Clinton. Caddell somehow managed to work for both George McGovern and Jimmy Carter without getting kicked out of politics.

Both have a long history of going on Fox News and shit-talking Democrats that they don't personally work for. That being the case, I'm shocked that anyone has any interest in anything either has to say, but I'm constantly amazed by the craven ignorance of people generally and journalists in particular. I guess that it doesn't come that far out left field for the Washington Post to publish the "thoughts" of these two old hacks.

I am, however, shocked at just how much wrong they managed to stuff into a mere 1,287 words. Schoen and Caddell pile flawed premise atop flawed premise and somehow think that this makes a case for anything other than how friggin' dumb they are.

This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.

If, as Schoen and Caddell suggest, President Obama has "lost the consent of the governed" and that this month's elections were "certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party", wouldn't the proper course for him be to resign instead of simply declaring that he's not running for reelection?

These idiots seem to think that this would end the gridlock that is almost certain to envelop Washington over the next two years, but they cite no evidence to support it. As a matter of fact, their entire article is just a long series of assertions without evidence, which is pretty much the nicest thing that I can say about it.

Far be it from me to defend Obama, but the entire premise of Schoen and Caddell's op-ed is wall-to-wall silly. Throughout their article, they ignore both political calender and good, old-fashioned common sense.

The GOP just won the House (and would have won the Senate, but for a slew of retarded Tea Party candidates who didn't even belong on the fucking school board) by trying to obstruct everything the White House and the Democrats proposed. It's been said that nothing succeeds quite like success, so why would the Republicans abandon that strategy once Obama announces his premature retirement?

I'm not sure how many of you know this, but the race for the Republican presidential nomination started two weeks ago. What do you think makes for a better primary strategy; cooperation with the departing administration, or running even harder against its "failed agenda"?

More importantly, if Obama withdraws from the 2012 campaign now, all he does is start the jockeying for position for the Democratic nomination as well. Do you think that potential Democratic nominees are going to run toward Obama or away from him? By taking itself out of the game, the Obama White House would make itself irrelevant and Congress would abandon government entirely in favor of a two-year long presidential campaign. And you'd wind up with exactly the same problem you have now, except maybe worse.

I also don't remember any political professionals going on the record to suggest retirement to either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, both of whom had lower approval ratings at this point in their terms than Obama does now. Both Reagan and Clinton won substantial reelection victories.
What Schoen and Caddell propose isn't even all that original. When Harry Truman lost both houses of Congress in 1946, several prominent Democrats suggested that he nominate Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to the vice presidency and then resign, giving the GOP the White House. Truman, as the more historically-minded of you know, not only won reelection in '48, he took back Congress, too.

If Obama has any brains at all - which, I'll admit, is an open question - he'll sit back, let the GOP overplay its hand, and run against that. Essentially, that was the Clinton '96 - Truman '48 playbook and it worked like a charm. You never saw Bob Dole in Clinton's reelection ads. He was always paired with the unpopular Newt Gingrich. Truman almost never mentioned Thomas Dewey by name. He ran against the "do-nothing 80th Congress", instead. Let's just say that you'll be seeing a lot of John Boehner in the summer and fall of 2012.

The Republicans didn't win because of the Tea Party, they won in spite of it. They won because independents swung so heavily to them. But if the GOP just plays to the Tea Party base, they'll alienate independents just as surely as Obama, Pelosi and Reid did, and independents will swing back. What's going to happen over the next two years is the most predictable thing on earth.

Defeating an incumbent president is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in Big Time Politics, which is why it's done so rarely. In the last hundred years, only four (not counting Ford, who wasn't elected president or vice president) presidents - Taft, Hoover, Carter and Bush 41 - were defeated at the polls. Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were all at low points after their first mid-terms, and all five won reelection by commanding margins.

Presidents historically have been at their least effective after their second set of mid-terms because of the "lame duck syndrome" that was created by the Twenty-Second Amendment. It is at that point that a president can no longer do anything of consequence for or to a given member of Congress, and he loses all of his influence. Instead of addressing the fact that Obama would become a lame duck the second that he announces that he isn't running for reelection, they simply try to dream it away.

They present absolutely no evidence that the atmosphere of partisan intransigence would melt away once Obama does, and they offer no plausible reason that it would because there isn't one.

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell don't like Barack Obama, which is fine. Neither do I. The difference is that I'm not prognosticating from the pages of one of America's proudest newspapers with my head up my ass.

Scott Stinson is Terribly Wrong & The Neverending Story of Ines Sainz

I really hoped that the Ines Sainz saga would be a one-day story, what with the world ending and all, but I had momentarily forgotten how the media works.

If you've ever seen the O'Reilly Factor, you're familiar will Bill's tendency to decry something on television that's so overtly sexual and shocking that he has no choice but to show it 23 times in four minutes, all the while noting that material like this should never be broadcast when children are watching. And in case you forgot, the O'Reilly Factor is on at 8 PM. Then O'Reilly will discuss the material with the nearest scantily-clad Fox News fembot as he shows it another thirteen or fourteen times.

That's why I always giggle when Fox News personalities (because they sure as hell aren't journalists) moan about the "mainstream media." Fox News actually put on lab coats and invented this kind of reporting. Why is it, for example, that O'Reilly's "Culture Warriors" are always big-titted blondes? Did they used to look more like Pat Buchanan?

Not that I'm at all put off by it. I like a freakshow as much as the next guy and I like watching bikini chicks working a phallus-shaped Popsicle twice as much as the next guy. Because I'm so much more manly.

Here's the Sainz story in a nutshell. Some Mexican sexbomb from a TV station that no one has ever heard of dressed like a tart and was hit on by football players. Hardly a shocking revelation unless you've suffered severe head trauma recently. Maybe the most newsworthy thing about this story is how badly I want to make Ines Sainz my own Charlie McCarthy.

It should surprise no one that the Sainz story has been a media sensation all week. Every American media outlet that possibly could has whored her out, always making sure that she was appropriately dressed for the occasion. God bless them. They know where their bread is buttered and they're not shy about letting you know what the butter is or how it's churned.

The story hasn't escaped notice here in Canada, either. In today's National Post, somebody named Scott Stimson devotes an entire column to it. The column is noteworthy for just how chock full of wrong it is.

I admit that I am unfamiliar with the quality of Ines Sainz’s work as a sports journalist. She works for a Mexican television station, and my Spanish is limited to ordering beer while on vacation and, thanks to Dora the Explorer, counting fruit (Cinco limones!).

But even if she is the Edward R. Murrow of Mexican sports television, there’s a case to be made that her provocative dress and willingness to pose for bikini photos diminishes her credibility as a reporter. So I understand how she is an awkward standard bearer for women’s rights in the workplace — a role she has been thrust into this week after it was alleged that some coaches and players on the New York Jets had flirted and whistled and basically treated her like the proverbial sexy woman passing by a construction site.

But what is remarkable about the Sainz story is how it so quickly moved beyond her and into a discussion in the media about whether women should even be allowed into men’s locker rooms, and whether female reporters are just as responsible for the behaviour they might elicit from an athlete as the athlete himself. This seems like a debate that was settled decades ago: We expect the athletes to treat them professionally, regardless of what they wear. Don’t we?

Those three paragraphs are shocking for just how naive they are. It's almost as if Mr. Stimson hasn't been a male for very long, and he definitely hasn't been paying attention to life all that closely.

Professional athletes are hardly the standard by which men should be judged. These fellows make tens of millions of dollars for playing games that children play for free. That their maturity might be somewhat stunted by this should shock no one. If you put a woman - particularly one that's determined to show off the fact that she has the nicest ass in all of Christendom - in a room with a few dozen naked and steroid-baked men, shenanigans are something that should be expected. It's really too bad that they don't teach common sense in journalism school.

Moreover, I don't think Ines's slutty, slutty garb or bikini pictures diminish her credibility at all. More than anything, they're an honest representation of what journalism has become. Nobody ever wondered what Edward R. Murrow looked like in a thong, but they did pay attention to what he had to say. Since 97% of modern journalists have nothing interesting to say, they may as well look like Contessa Brerwer or Megyn Kelly.

Stimson went on to dissect the comments of Clinton Portis of the Washington Redskins and Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports and managed to draw exactly the wrong inference from them.

Mr. Whitlock later wrote that stuff is bound to happen when you put women in the company of men in locker rooms, so deal with it. (Those women and their silly desire to not be objectified.) It’s a blunt argument, but one that was repeated elsewhere, though more subtly.

Jemele Hill, a columnist for ESPN, argued that female reporters who dress in tight pants and cleavage-bearing tops are part of the problem.

“It isn’t fair, but female sports journalists have to adhere to unspoken rules that our male counterparts never have to consider,” she wrote. “Otherwise, the door is left open for comments such as the ones … Portis made.”

Linda Cohn, an ESPN anchor, wrote on Twitter that “If female reporters act professionally in lockerooms, most athletes will too. It’s that simple.”

Those arguments are veiled ways of saying, “You and your jeans that look like they were applied with a paint sprayer were asking for it.” Is that really the right message? Women are welcome to be sports journalists, but they must hold themselves to a different standard than men? Ms. Cohn wrote that women should wear “business attire” in locker rooms, and yet no athlete or coach would blink an eye when approached by a male reporter in baggy shorts and flip-flops.

I also doubt that Stimson's hypothetical male reporter would show up in a locker room with three pairs of socks stuffed down his shorts to ensure that the team is suitably impressed. This guy's chronic inability to get the point is nothing less than awesome.

I'm pretty sure that Ines Sainz knows that she isn't a Mexican Howard Cosell and never will be. But she does know that she has a tight little body and an uncanny ability to use it to make a man's balls boil. Her outfit would only be considered "professional" if she was the Grand Marshal in a blowjob parade which, by the way, she really should be.

Then Scott Stinson slips into incomprehensible gibberish;

People over the years have held black athletes to different standards than non-blacks, too; it’s that kind of logic that forced quarterbacks like Warren Moon to toil in the Canadian Football League for years before they were accepted in the NFL as capable of playing such a demanding position.

It’s the same thing with female reporters. They are reporters, full stop. When a credentialed reporter is working among athletes, the onus should be on the athletes to treat them professionally, period. To suggest otherwise is to invite an entirely subjective yardstick that allows athletes to determine who gets treated respectfully. And who gets leered at.

Huh? What exactly do black quarterbacks have to do with hot pieces of tail playing Jimmy Olsen?
If Ines was interviewing, say, Mitch McConnell, I'd agree with Stimson that the onus would be on the Senate minority leader to treat her professional. But athletes are overgrown children that can't be reasonably expected to know much of anything. They're overwhelmingly wealthy retards and often times felonious ones.

Stimson's hyper-liberal narrative would also be far more effective if it was actually Ms. Sainz who filed the complaint with the NFL. The problem with the media narrative is that she wasn't. It was other chick reporters, and probably ugly ones.



More importantly, Mr. Stimson and the Post fail to understand that this story has made Ines Sainz America's biggest star of this week. She's more than a little aware of the power of her el mejor culo and the fact that the entire world wants to give her history's most loving rimjob, which she has used to her professional advantage. Because she has a cute little accent and a fantastic body, she'll almost certainly end up with Neil Cavuto's job by the end of the month.

If people like Scott Stimson have any problem with this story - other than the fact that it's yet another example of trivial medial navel-gazing - that should be it.

Aye, carumba! I'd like to give her the rimjob of her life! It would be epic and, indeed, almost poetic.