small potatoes

This post attempts to organize some thoughts regarding where we are headed. It's fun when there is a clear vision, but perhaps the most important times for reflection are when things are muddier. Basically, if we can identify unsustainable trends, we can identify sources of change. While the catch is anticipating what exactly that change will be, having some semblance of the terrain is useful.

One of the analytical approaches that interests me is where the tendency toward optimism/pessimism intersects awareness of reality vs. fiction. There is a lot of emphasis in our culture on the first dimension, almost as if being optimistic is more important than being right. Visually, it puts the emphasis like this, on the vertical columns.


However, an attempt to rationally understand the world around us needs to compensate for that natural cognitive fallibility by emphasizing the horizontal.


Truth requires an ability to interpret events both optimistically and pessimistically, to have a vision of what could be yet also a sense of what might go wrong.

With a couple decades of general wage stagnation providing the context for several years of very specific economic hardship and dislocation, the strategy of the governing coalition of interests in the US appears both clear and consistent. Outside of the national security nexus (GWOT, drug war, deportation, etc.) neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations are particularly hostile toward or directly targeting 'average' Americans. The 'not Hitler' meme was one of the better ones that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert encouraged at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Metal Chris captured this one:



In other words, it is not so much that individual political leaders act maliciously toward the citizenry so much as they don't care about us. Apathy is the key descriptor; we are simply irrelevant. All of the energy in government is devoted to marshaling whatever resources are necessary to save the Big Fish. What we are left with is the crumbs; small potatoes, so to speak. You can almost see the political class psyching themselves up to sell the latest batch of small potatoes for the masses as something of remotely similar importance to the efforts to save the Masters of the Universe. The transparency that Vice President Biden accidentally showed at the health care press conference, for example, revealed so much.


It's not that Bush's Medicare 'Modernization' or Obama's HCR 'most important reform since FDR nevermind that Medicare thingy in the 60s' are Terrible Legislation that will Destroy America. It's not that Bush was an Idiot or Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Fascist. It's not that abortion and gay rights renders America ungovernable and/or on a path of moral decay and damnation.

Rather, that's not where the action is. Two successive presidents, from two different parties, pushed massively complicated bills that purported to make the healthcare system significantly better. Yet they didn't actually solve the problem of expensive healthcare that causes preventable deaths.

I learned to hone in on that tactic of over-selling and under-delivering as a teenager, and it has proven to be one of the most insightful observations in comparing words and deeds. It's the 'let your yes be yes and no be no' philosophy: either government should do something (such as guarantee quality healthcare for all citizens) or it shouldn't. Both are legitimate beliefs. So is I don't know/let me think about it/it's not important to me. But to pick bits and pieces from both is to give away that neither belief is sincerely held; rather, they are merely justifications for acting upon an unrelated set of beliefs (like the belief that government should protect the economic interests of the wealthy).

Clarity has been particularly revealed with the financial crisis because we now have so much data upon which to draw. It's a simple statement of fact to observe that the Obama Administration supports the use of law enforcement resources to arrest hundreds of thousands of people every year, from illegal drug users to illegal residents to illegal assemblers. Yet one specific group of criminals stand in stark contrast to this massive deployment of police and prisons: politically connected financial crooks. There are literally more baseball players in legal trouble for testimony given before Congress related to steroid usage than there are top corporate executives and board members in legal trouble for all financial crimes combined. The current Secretary of the Treasury was literally head of the New York Federal Reserve when the proverbial bile was impacting the proverbial turbine. The ongoing effort to enter into a mortgage settlement is designed to give the Too Big To Fail financial firms immunity from liability in court - that's the point, that's what a settlement is - a settling of claims of unlawful behavior outside of court.

The preceding paragraph is neither pessimistic nor partisan. It's simply recognizing where we are at. The past and current Presidents of the United States think cocaine users, whistleblowers, protesters, and immigrants should be treated like murderers while financial fraudsters should be treated like people who don't pay a parking meter.

This is beyond specific policy debates or even broad ideological contests. We are now in the realm of questioning, of bringing to light, the core foundations of the American experiment, in all of its grandiose, exciting, and dangerous forms.

Is the Constitution the foundational pillar of secular governance, or do we now look to something else? Is there a rule of law, or a rule by men? Do we want to participate in a peaceful world order, or do we want to instill an American world order? Our basic systems of property and finance and law are quite literally crumbling around us. It's not pessimistic to point this out, to consider the implications. It's responsible.

We know housing prices got out of control. We know higher education costs got out of control. We know healthcare costs got out of control. If actual solutions to these kinds of problems are not going to be forthcoming, that is important to know, to understand what it really means. If you're a Big Fish, you play things very differently, but for areas of American life that depend upon the broad 'middle class', there are only two outcomes. Either public policy ultimately changes and we start encouraging wage growth again (either directly through employment policies or indirectly through additional transfer payments like universal unemployment insurance), or the asset classes dependent upon wages will simply wither away.

This has to happen*.

Either $20,000 - $30,000 a year has to become what it is elsewhere in the world - a comfortable living - or millennials in aggregate looking for jobs have to have a way to earn much more than that in entry level positions. Xers have to have broadly accessible means of earning promotions and switching careers. Baby boomers need to be able to easily replace lost jobs and find part-time income in retirement.

We have utilized credit to bring forward as much consumption as possible. The distant future is finite, too. And the near-future was spent in the past.

Household formation has slowed. New home sales are at record low levels. Record numbers of Americans do not participate in the healthcare system. The percentage of Americans employed has dropped precipitously. Millennials are even ditching things like cable and phones. Student loans - financial commitments undertaken by minors deemed incompetent to buy a Bud Light - can't be discharged in bankruptcy, ever.

Any asset that depends upon middle class wages, any industry that sells to those last marginal dollars of disposable income, will simply shrivel up to a much smaller core.

That's what I don't follow about some of the more intense hyperinflation perspectives. Massive increases in broad pricing measures ultimately requires the government to get money into the pockets of 'normal' people somehow. But that's not the bailout mechanism this time around. The most well connected players are seeing such socialism, but the general citizenry confronts a dearth of capital. I wonder if our 'capitalist' system can handle such misallocation of resources on such a grand scale.

But what I don't wonder is that it is a misallocation. Undermining the rule of law causes many more problems than it solves.

*It is becoming increasingly difficult to get simple, accurate information. The Consumer Price Index, for example, is so watered down and altered that it's not even clear why it's a good measure. A KC strip steak from grass fed open range cattle simply is not substitutable with a breast from a tightly caged, anti-biotically stuffed, corn-fed melange of chickens. Our political process helpfully focuses attention on the relatively small amount of trinkets from places like China and India when the bulk of American household expenses go to much more mundane domestic sources like housing, healthcare, higher education, food, transportation, and so forth. I keep anal financial records, so I thought it interesting to look at a few specific items of my own. By my various calculations, I had a stretch of rental increases that amount to an annualized rate of 4.8%, tuition and fees at Wash U increased by 5%, the cost of an entry level car increased 6%, health insurance increased 12.6%, and food increased 14.7%. The drawback of course is that by being specific, it's unique to me and just anecdotal. But comparing that against the average annual increase in household income over the past decade - 1.6% - it's obvious to see something has to give.

in defense of delta

I've been helping prepare some info at work for a press conference tomorrow on our HVRP program, so I've got veterans on the mind. I checked YahooFinance when I got home, and a story about Delta charging soldiers bag fees naturally caught my attention.

On first glance, it appears pretty outrageous that a big company would tack on fees to members of our armed forces for checked luggage on a flight from DC to Atlanta.

But the thing is, as hard a critic as I am of failures in corporate governance, it's important to observe when the policy under scrutiny isn't actually that terrible. Delta (and the other major airlines) actually have quite friendly policies toward off duty members of our armed forces using domestic, civilian transportation networks. Relevant to this story, Delta doesn't charge any bag fees to checked luggage until the fourth bag, even though they do charge bag fees to other customers on the same routes. Southwest Airlines thinks this is such a huge issue that they've invented an entire television advertising campaign highlighting their policy that 'bags fly free'.

What this demonstrates is one specific example of the economic costs of militarism. There are the direct costs shown on the federal budget, which are astronomical. But then there are the indirect costs on the civilian economy which are even larger. It costs money to fly four bags from DC to Atlanta. It costs money to train soldiers on their return to the US from overseas deployments, on what they should expect right down to the logistical details of how to return home (the military reimburses bag fees). Somebody has to pay for all this.

It's right to be angry.

But in this case, don't be angry at Delta. The problem is DC. When you have Presidents and Congresses that are too deceitful and cowardly to fully account for all of the costs of war, those costs don't simply disappear. They're just externalized onto private actors, from the soldiers themselves to their family members and community to the various actors they encounter in the civilian economy.

And of course, if we weren't deploying troops overseas in Afghanistan, there wouldn't be any troops needing to carry four bags back from Kabul in the first place.

further down the rabbit hole

I've had a wide range of reactions to a Supreme Court ruling this week. The Court overturned a decision by Kentucky's Supreme Court that had determined that police busting down a door without a warrant violated the 4th amendment.

I mean, obviously, that's unconstitutional. You have to create an entire theory of Constitutional Law out of thin air to justify something as ridiculous as that. The text is clear. The intent is clear. The application to modern times is clear.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Because the issue is so straightforward, there's really nothing of substance to add to the background at places like NORML's blog.

But two thoughts I will share for intertube posterity.

First, an issue like this is a good reminder to make sure you know what you believe. Times change, social acceptabilities change, do you know what you believe is right and wrong, or do you float with the wind? If you're an American citizen, is the Constitution your basis of political economy, or do you hold some other idea as being more important?

Second, I think this fits into a broader theme of the shifting sands of power as more and more Americans alive today have grown up without a connection to, or even understanding of, the politics of fear and hate and divisiveness that have characterized so much of our myopic focus on wedge issues at the expense of things that really matter. Like many systems of power that are crumbling, it is doubling down on what worked in the past instead of seeking to maintain leadership in the transition to the future.

It's not just the Fed that has some problems, shall we say, with the concept of exigent circumstances.

comedy news network

CNN claims that, "Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is credited with trimming military spending and using a firm hand on tough decisions."

Ha!

pundit4sale

(P) Something that has fascinated me for several years now is how easily some Democratic pundits seem to shift their principles based upon how the wind blows from party leaders. In the short term, it does provide them significant cover in that it is difficult to discern whether they're bought off or honestly believe what they're blathering. But over time, the only value added Dems bring to the equation is inhabiting the reality-based world, in being interested in doing what works.

It's utter nonsense like this spewed by Matthew Yglesias last week - on a Think Progress blog, no less - that starts warranting comparisons to folks like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin. Yglesias is actively proposing that powerful people should be above the law. That's a direct assault on the Constitution, not to mention a market-based economy.

So here's the question. Is Yglesias bought and paid for, knowing that the rule of law is a good thing but being willing to shill for criminals nonetheless? Or does he honestly believe that poor people should go to prison for petty crimes while the rich and powerful should maintain their liberty no matter how heinous the consequences of their actions?

I'm obviously a little partial to the Heartland, but the one-two transpartisan punch of Bill Black at UMKC and Tom Hoenig at the KCFRB over the past couple years has been much more interesting than most of the 'liberal' commentary from Inside the Beltway about how we need to Protect the Financial Fraudsters for the Good of us All.

I eagerly anticipate wittiness from Yglesias in favor of the rule of law. Oh wait, just look to the Bush years.

Like this commentary on Attorney General Mukasey.
Or this one on Bush lawbreaking more generally.

Black's response is worth reading in full. And here is the underlying New York Times article from Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story that set off Yglesias' defense of our rotten system. By the way, how's that for turnabout? The corporate media runs a big story highlighting a major problem, and the 'liberal' blogger Yglesias defends the status quo!

This is also a good place to tie in some commentary from Barry Ritholtz about another NYT article - yes, that's two positive references from me regarding the Times in the same post! Even as the overall US prison population has exploded, the Bush and Obama Justice Departments radically reduced annual referrals of white collar crimes for prosecution. You know, despite the mid-90s having no systemic domestic financial collapse, while a decade plus later, we confront Armageddon that Requires us to Give Rich People Money.

the disgustingness continues

(P) This week, the ACLU put up another document that the government has belatedly released regarding the criminal (er, heroic, terrorist-stopping, manly, beer-drinking) acts of the senior officials of the Bush Administration.

As the document bureaucratically explains:

Note: This paper provides further background information and details on High Value Detainee (HVD) interrogation techniques to support documents CIA has previously provided the Department of Justice.

This paper focuses strictly on the topic of combined uses of interrogation techniques.

What I think is going to surprise a lot of people as more and more of the details trickle out is how cold and calculated everything is. One of the features of a large organization is that bureaucracy involves lots of decision-makers, and in order to disseminate information among the various groups, there is lots of information sent back and forth. The nature of this process thus can almost hilariously contrast with the particular subject matter at hand. Our nation's leaders discussed war crimes, treaty violations, and felonies as if they were discussing where to build a new highway interchange or quarterly projections for GDP growth.

This process is precisely why transparency, openness, 'sunshine', is a core element of good governance. Decision-makers have to know at the time of their decisions that their deliberations will become public, that there will be social and legal consequences for blatantly improper courses of action.

The PDF for this document from 2004 sent to the Office of Legal Counsel from the Central Intelligence Agency can be downloaded here. It's been clear for awhile that this is no group of 'bad apples' or 'rogue agents' or other nonsense. The dedicated staff at the CIA, NSA, DIA, INR, etc, etc, who are monitoring my blog, your email, your mom's phone conversations, your dad's credit history, your neighbor's political contributions, your kid's internet postings, your grandma's participation in peace groups, etc, etc, are not the people who designed these policies. And to a great extent, it's the bureaucracy itself, the countless professional civil servants, who are able to apply the brakes internally, to slow down inappropriate, counterproductive, illegal programs.

But that only stops so much. When a group of our leaders is committed to ignoring the law, there is only one group of people that can stand up to them, and that is us, We the People. Seven years after we first started this particular bit of horrific, counterproductive, illicit behavior, we have yet to stop it completely, let alone hold the architects accountable for their creation.

But hey, at least we've been able to arrest millions of other Americans over the past seven years for grave allegations like shoplifting, prostitution, and marijuana possession. It's good we've got our 'tough on crime' priorities in order.

unsanitizing torture

(P) I personally tend to be more discrete and diplomatic in my communication, but I wanted to highlight somebody being a little more direct in telling it like it is. The notion that our prison policies have been anything but immoral, illegal, and counterproductive is pretty funny.

Some articles have a way of just lettin' it all hang out, leaving little to the imagination. The graphic alone makes reading this story worth it.

I would normally give a warning that this is mature content, but this is what our government is doing in our name to real human beings. How can conduct be so horrific we should shelter our kids from it, but at the same time, not be worth investigating and prosecuting? That's a rhetorical question, of course. Of the millions of Americans who have been arrested in the last few years, few have committed crimes even remotely as disgusting or an as large a scale as the senior officials of the Bush Administration.

For your reading pleasure, Whores on Terror by Allan Uthman.

A snippet:

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

look, victory

I ran across a rather funny AP article in the Oklahoman. It's called Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost.

It essentially argues that we're winning because insurgents "no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government." Heck, if that's the criteria, why'd we invade again? The central government in place at the time proved pretty resilient to internal dissent.

But the real kicker is farther down. Check this out:

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

In other words, Iraq is so stable now only martial law keeps it stable. And walling off neighborhoods. After the insurgent groups are done with their ethnic cleansing.

Bravo Bush Administration team! You've successfully gotten rid of minority groups in Baghdad! Whoever said ethnic cleansing is a bad thing?

who supports criminals?

Pop quiz time. Who said this about legislation designed to prevent powerful companies from being held accountable for criminal activities and to allow even further spying on Americans by unaccountable government leaders?

"It is not all that I would want," [____] said. "But given the legitimate threats that we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay."

A) President Bush
B) Vice President Cheney
C) Senate Minority Leader McConnell
D) Presumptive Republican nominee McCain
E) Presumptive Democratic nominee Obama

If you guessed Obama, you're right.

Wow, this is just unbelievable. Or at least, unbelievable if you think Obama is as progressive as he lets people believe he is. When push comes to shove, he seems quite willing to support corporations, even when they commit felonies. Some guy who smokes a joint will serve more jail time than these criminals! He seems quite willing to do what the Republican leadership demands, no matter how much the very people whose votes he's pursuing despise the policies of the GOP. He seems quite willing to use the same baseless scare tactics and the same hollow deceptions about 'safeguards' as the GOP leaders themselves.

This legislation doesn't even prevent outright spying on Americans. The Executive merely will have to tell the court that they are trying to 'minimize' the information collection on US citizens.

full power to the shields

Since we haven't developed these kinds of shields yet, and since these shields have been great for war profiteers but can't actually do anything useful, we're left with this. It's low-tech, and it doesn't involve massive taxpayer support.

It's the Iran peace shield. Cool, huh? Don't get me wrong, I love having Boeing and B-2s in my state.

You're just a total nut job if you think using them against Iran is a good thing to do.

traitors or liars

Or both?

(P) Attorney General Mukasey's comments in San Francisco are really interesting:

...we knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that...

Did we know about a safe house in Afghanistan that was making phone calls in 2001? If so, why did the Bush Administration choose not to perform surveillance of those terrorists, as explicitly allowed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? What part of foreign, intelligence, and surveillance does the Bush Administration not understand?

And if we didn't know that, will we now be treated like kindergarteners as Mukasey tells us he didn't say that we knew that? It's definitely a new low when the Administration doesn't even try to tell believable lies anymore.

human energy

The Chevron ads have to be an instant classic. Amidst the general backdrop of oil wars and global warming and former directors in the Executive Branch, there's the particular fun of the hubbub in Burma (er, Myanmar) where the totalitarian state is basically abducting, assaulting, and killing citizens in rather sizeable numbers. Those ever dangerous monks appear to be especially troublesome.

How does the government stay in power? Why, that little oil pipeline Chevron invests in certainly helps a tad.

fall is here

Yay fall. A season almost as good as summer and spring. It occured to me as tonight was the first night I've driven home from work after the sun has set. Woohoo.

(P) As it's been about five years now since the Bush Administration ramped up their Iraq invasion sales pitch, I've been thinking a lot about where we're headed. The initial justifications are so obviously absurd, that it makes one conclude that the Administration must think eventually public opinion will force Congress to do something. Are they hoping the situation stays under control until they're out of office? Are they making a nice little retirement fund out of the cash that's unaccounted for? Are they planning to stay in office longer than January 2009? Do they have the goods via domestic spying on enough Congressmen to prevent real legislation or accountability?

About the only way this can be beneficial long term is if they convince the Iraqis to privatize their oil and sign sweetheart PSA deals with Western firms. But that seems far from certain, and the trends seem to favor the political forces opposing cooperation with the US.

So it begs the question of what if something catastrophic happens? We are so much more powerful than any other nation that it's hard to express the scale of the superiority of our equipment and offensive capability. Yet, it's worthless against an asymmetric foe; we're basically at an impasse. We're going through our stocks of equipment, we're paying huge sums of money to unaccountable private companies, we're destroying decades of international leadership, we're burning out tens of thousands of highly trained troops, and it's all we can do to hang on to a few bases against a fractured resistance. What happens if nationalistic groups manage to work together and overrun a base? What if they take the embassy compound we're building and a couple major airstrips? You can't airlift a quarter of a million people out of a country overnight. What if a real security concern arises unexpectedly, the whole point for having a standing army in the first place?

back on the table

(P) I was a little surprised the Administration, historically stingy with its pardoning powers, commuted the sentence of convicted Vice Presidential aide Libby. They had been handed a Congress with little interest in directly challenging the core criminality of their time in office. One of Speaker of the House Pelosi's most famous phrases was about impeachment being off the table.

But now, amidst a number of interrelated and growing scandals, Bush committed an act clearly linking himself to the heart of the problem, the lack of accountability and transparency, the utter disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law.

He went all in, and I think even members of Congress will become increasingly persuaded by the public to call the President's bluff. One of the great checks of our system is that people consumed by power tend to overreach. While certainly enough impeachable acts have already been committed, keeping Libby out of jail has a beautifully simplistic nature to it. It's very easy to understand and quite difficult to obfuscate. We either have an executive branch bound by the rule of law, or we have a dictator beyond it. Even comfortable DC Democrats won't be able to ignore the increasing pressure that is building on the system.

As we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, maybe it's appropriate that our leaders have given us a gift of such clarity and meaning.

maybe we should be recruiting them

(P) I was doing a little reading this afternoon, and I ran into a very interesting tidbit of information. One of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in the cases that were recently thrown out, Omar Kadhr, is charged with killing a special forces medic on the battlefield.

Omar was 15.

For all the talk about how illegal and immoral the Bush Administration's wars are, maybe there's another problem we need to address.

Let's suspend disbelief for a second and assume Omar is guilty. What does that say about the state of our military when a teenager in an impoverished country can kill a special forces medic on the battlefield?

happy valentine's day

This is really cool.

Apparently a Navy officer sent a list of Guantanamo detainees' names in a Valentine's Day card. As he told a reporter, "My oath as a commissioned officer is to the Constitution of the United States". He was sentenced to six months in jail, but it could have been a lot worse.

AP story
Dallas Morning News

what would you do

(P) I've been thinking about this for a while, but the thoughts tend to be more angry than thoughtful. So lacking what I feel an appropriate post as we mark another year, I am left with a question.

What would you do with four years and a trillion dollars?

I must say too it is fabulous timing that the next DVD on Jodi's Blockbuster queue was a documentary about the Dixie Chicks. Bravo karma.

the great moral tissue of our time

This is great. I would end up quoting every other paragraph, so just read the whole thing.

I know you want to. It even says genitals in the title. No self-respecting person can avoid an article like that. Plus, I needed an excuse to add a new label called scrotum.

"You liberals are such losers...
I bet you think it’s a big deal that al Qaeda and the Taliban – you know, the folks we said did 9/11 – are regrouping in Afghanistan, and that Osama bin Laden remains a free man five years later. So?...
How about all the corruption scandals and gross incompetence of George Bush’s crony government? Get over it...
I’ve heard you guys ranting on and on about the mountain of debt we’re leaving for your children to pay off, plus interest, in order to finance our twin extravaganzas of huge tax cuts for the wealthy and a useless war costing $1-2 trillion. What’s wrong that?...
No, the great moral issues of our time are: Your genitals..."

hanging by a moment

Having reached my 7th year more or less in St. Louis, an event has occurred (a Special Report at CNN) which causes me to reflect upon a rather memorable event from one of my first visits to St. Louis. Now, it is related with Iraq and Saddam Hussein and the Bush family and so forth, but this isn't a post on our current Iraq policy. That can be summed up pretty simply by stating it's an unmitigated disaster whose perpetrators should be impeached and investigated for violating several criminal statutes.

No, the hanging of Saddam Hussein actually brings back a rather fun, almost jovial feeling of a long-lasting discussion that my old debate partner and I started on a trip to St. Louis in high school the first time we qualified to nationals.

You see, Brian made some offhand claim about how Bush won the Gulf War, and me, largely just being smart, said not so fast, he really didn't win anything. We having nothing but a car ride ahead of us (like my school would fly us anywhere we could drive to), and Brian having already read the Cosmo quizzes from Mrs. Hale's magazines, fleshed this out a bit over the next hour or so, and as is the tendency, one starts to grow an affection for the merits of a position sustained for so long.

On the surface obviously, Saddam lost. His military was destroyed, sovereignty overran by years of US fighter jet sorties, and crippling sanctions enacted (well, crippling for poor Iraqis, at least). But scratch that surface, and look what happened. Bush lost the presidency. A generation of operatives ready for complete conservative dominance of governance was swept aside. Meanwhile, Hussein, while having lost offensive military capabilities, gained other forms of respect and power in the Arab world. His became the country that suffered at the hands of US-led sanctions. He became an important wedge between countries that wanted trade, like France and Russia, and those that wanted regime change, like the United States. And, absent massive disenfranchisement of huge numbers of black people, very shady post-election maneuvering in a state controlled by a Bush, and a remarkable, coincidental party-line vote, he would have seen the thwarting of the next generation of Bushies.

With another Bush in the White House, and lots of Reagan/Bush personnel in key positions, Saddam was due for another obvious setback. It's hard to argue that being executed is kind of the ultimate loss. And yet, scratch that surface, and Bush managed to end Hussein in a way that just about elevated his legacy as high as possible considering that he was, in fact, a hated dictator and perpetrator of war crimes. My goodness, Saddam is going to be remembered not for looking hollow and defeated in a legitimate court of law for his most serious crimes against humanity, but rather for valiantly fighting for his country against a hated invasion force. He wasn't kept from a trial because he got old and decrepit and developed serious health problems. He was denied justice under the law in a state able to not only claim injustices against him but even press his case in the very moments before his execution. And of course, it's all caught on camera. The grainy, cell-phone variety that adds that bit of legitimacy you just don't get on the fancy expensive equipment.

Meanwhile, he has ensured that the Bush legacy, at best, will be a remarkable combination of hubris and ignorance, and more likely, one of the worst presidencies in the history of the republic. He quite possibly has prevented Jeb from getting a nomination any time soon, if ever. Even if the opinion doesn't gain widespread adoption, certainly a significant minority of Americans will view the Bush/Cheney Administration as the greatest traitors to the Constitution and war criminals in recent US history, perhaps ever. Conservative governance has been completely discredited, to the point that even massive vote tampering, fraud, and shady tactics couldn't stop a landslide Democratic victory in 2006. In the Arab world, meanwhile (and much of Europe and Asia, for that matter), Saddam Hussein has managed to make himself look like the victim here. He will be martyred and glorified by a not insignificant number of Arabs. How does a man responsible for tremendous human rights abuses and (at least) two strategically challenged military engagements pull that off, particularly when he was so close with the Reagan/Bush "infidels" in the first place?

Just throw in a little Bush. The family helped create an evil dictator (or two or three). And then they replaced him with a hero. Bravo, our fearless replace-the-Kennedys family. Bravo.

And Brian, you still think Bush won the Gulf War?