Midhusband
Now Playing: "Cirkus" by King Crimson
I'm thinking of a line of poetry I once wrote. Not particularly well-worded, but the idea it expressed astonished even me with its complete lack of human feeling. You know the one? The feeling, I mean.

Nuts!
Now Playing: "Swan Swan H" by R.E.M.
One of my Daddy's favorite movies about the Second World War was The Battle of the Bulge (1965) with Henry Fonda and Telly Savalas and a whole bunch of other big names. Daddy knew a man from work who had been in the actual Battle of the Bulge and he always found that very impressive, as did I.

Today, let us remember the 60th anniversary of this massive battle ---one of the true turning points in the history of the Twentieth Century--- and read Paul Greenberg's excellent column marking the day.

According to the German battle plan, Bastogne was to be overrun on the second day of the operation; it never was. General Anthony McAuliffe's one-word response to the German commander's surrender terms would become a classic summation of American defiance: "Nuts!"

Forced to split up and go around isolated pockets of American resistance, the German advance slowed. Unlike 1940, there was no breakout. Methodically, the Allied command drew up new defensive lines, then held. And to the South, Patton was turning the whole Third Army on a dime and hurtling to the rescue . . . .

Before it was over, the Battle of the Bulge would involve three German armies, the equivalent of 29 divisions; three American armies, or 31 divisions; and three British divisions augmented by Belgian, Canadian and French troops.

More than a million men would be drawn into the battle. The Germans would lose an estimated 100,000 irreplaceable troops, counting their killed, wounded and captured; the Americans would suffer some 80,000 casualties, including 19,000 killed - that's a rate of 500 a day - and 23,554 captured.

Reading such figures should bring to mind the absolute importance of remembering just how massive our military's sacrifices have always been.

Sixty-three divisions going at it in one of the harshest European winters in living memory. Jesus Christ!

Cringe
I, too, cringed when I heard Donald Rumsfeld's remarks last week in Kuwait when he said to the troops "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." I'm still not too sure whether he was referring to the Army as people or as an organization comprised of materiel, but it was still an incredibly unfortunate remark, especially coming from a man who could moonlight as a grammarian.

Anyway, the crowd calling for his removal is growing, most notably among Republicans. Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard has joined the fray, dismissing Rumsfeld as a glib and arrogant buck-passer. I understand that view as a personal perception, but I still have a fondness and a respect for Rumsfeld. Maybe it's because I am too ignorant of the extent of his influence or of just how much he can do with such an enormous institution as the Department of Defense, but surely he has been the most consequential SECDEF since Robert McNamara ---and greatly burdened with putting together a machine to wage such a widescale war against a new kind of global enemy.

I don't suppose Rumsfeld will last too much longer in his current role, but I, for one, think he has been an asset to our country.

The Savage Fortnight
Courtesy of The Belmont Club, here is an excellent piece from Austin Bay on the revolution in the Middle East.

Toppling Saddam also toppled the myth of the "Arab strongman," a point unfortunately missed by critics of the Iraq war. The Arab strongman was a romantic, Superman story of militant rescue and revenge, but it was also a justification for dictatorial rule. The armed strongman would drive the Israelis into the sea. The strongman would restore Arab prestige, at the point of a sword or the blast of a nuclear weapon. But these bloody miracles, permanently scheduled for the near future, required submission to tyranny. To advocate liberty, to promote free trade, to critique the corrupt, to demand a voice in governance -- these acts of weakness undermined the strongman and thus undermined "the Arab cause."

I'll say it again, comrades: you can take a dump on George W. Bush all day long for certain of his domestic policies and I wouldn't care less. But for what he's doing to move the Middle East into the modern age? Your great-grandchildren will know this President as one of the most important leaders of the Twenty-First Century.

Unimaginable, isn't it?

The Manufacture of Dissent
Over at the Captain's Quarters, you can read about he ongoing attempts of the Democrats and craphounds like Jesse Jackson to overturn the election in Ohio.

Jackson wants the court to throw out the election results because of an exit poll -- later shown to be preliminary -- predicted that John Kerry would get 52% of the vote. In other words, Jackson wants to give more legal weight to the few hundred people approached on their way out of polling booths than the actual votes cast in the election. While the ruling today leaves open the possibility of the complaint being refiled, it deserves more to be buried in a landfill.

I read a comment recently by another of the Kerrion claiming that they're only pursuing this recount nonsense for the sake of accuracy. Right. And here I was thinking that they're only doing it to perpetuate their martyr complexes as the disenfranchised victims of the Bu$hitler War Machine, Inc. (a subsidiary of Halliburton).

Sabine Ehrenfeld
Turns out that the incredibly hot babe from the Overstock.com ads is 41 year-old model Sabine Ehrenfeld.

She is simply too much for words.

All Too High School
I have it in mind right now to suggest something that is, in the context of a friendship I share with a certain person, either with or without very great consequence to the one involved. That is to say, it just occurred to me that this old friend of mine is very probably so pissed at me for the direction of my politics and over the outcome of this recent election ---I mean mandate--- that he will not willingly speak to me. As in only one other regard ever between us, he may very well have taken it all to heart ---and all too hard. The other possibility is that he just doesn't like me anymore and would rather not communicate because of the Indifference That Eventually Overshadows All.

Now, the experiment I have in mind just now is to leave this burning sack of emotional dog shit on the stoop of my own hovel ---here--- and sit back and see whether he comes out and stamps on it. I don't even have to ring the doorbell; he either ruins his stylish footwear or not.

I suppose I could have the stones to ask him directly which of the two possibilities discussed here is the right one, but this way is much more entertaining.

Especially to one who traffics in the Grand Ideas of the Times ---and does so without any regret, see, because these are the things that command my attention most, regardless of whether such fascination is of any commercial value.

Sure, it's a poisonous route to take because it might upset or annoy a friendship that only persists through the careful cultivation of the obvious, but what else is there to do?

I don't know. Maybe it's something I said.

If there was ever anything of value that we saw in each other, I will be the one most surprised to learn that it has been lost. I'm not talking about the sentimental things; I'm talking about what it was that made either of us important to the other.

No matter. It is cold and there is television to be watched.

The Old Red, White, and Green

"We must accept that it is a cornerstone of Mexican foreign policy to export illegally each year a million of its own to the United States to avoid needed reform at home and to influence American domestic policy." ---Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 27 June 2003

With that wonderfully succinct observation in mind, this story in the Arizona Republic seems to me quite interesting:

MEXICO CITY - For the first time, Mexicans would be able to vote in the United States for the president of Mexico under a bill nearing approval in that country's House of Representatives.

If the measure becomes law, it will likely set off a fierce battle for millions of potential voters in Arizona and other states and will allow Mexican presidential candidates to campaign in the United States.

Mexicans would be able to register to vote in the United States and cast their ballots at polling stations, probably set up in consulates around the country.

It's all really coming together, isn't it?

Currently, there is no absentee voting for Mexicans who leave the country, and any Mexicans who wish to vote must return to Mexico to cast a ballot.

I don't know what significance all of this bears for us here in America, but when one considers that Mexico's largest source of foreign exchange revenue is remittances from its citizens living abroad (estimated by the Banco de Mexico to be $17 billion this year), it may be that the influence of our Mexican friends here among us may be about to grow exponentially. Which means that Mexico's own government and its domestic policies will now face the approval (or not) of a very large group of better paid and relatively better educated compatriots who have seen the other side of the fence.

Of course, if the millions of Mexicans who live here in America had wanted to participate in the affairs of their own country, I suppose they would have stayed home and done so. Still, it's an interesting development.

Moonbat Guano
Here's a brief story from KXAN.com about the protesters who showed up at the Capitol yesterday (emphasis mine):

Although for most people it's considered a done deal, some aren't ready to let go of this year's presidential election.

About 100 people rallied on the steps of the capitol yesterday to protest the election. They called on state and federal lawmakers to investigate so-called rampant voter fraud. They also want a nationwide, citizen-supervised manual recount of the vote.

"Besides suppression of the vote and intimidating voters, they had all sorts of wrong things happening with the electronic voting system with the OPSCAN technology in Florida," David Raybuck, election protestor, said, "there were a lot of places where the voter turnout, the exit polls didn't really match with the final turnout."

You'd be surprised at how many of these moonbats put more store by the exit polls than by the actual vote tallies. What the fuck is that all about?

Well, in the late morning hours on Election Day, Big Media was reporting that the exit polling data was looking good for Kerry. I remember that very well because it was depressing the hell out of me. But that's also what these idiots are remembering ---and their feeble little minds are stuck in that gear. "But...but...CNN said that Kerry was doing good! Waaahhhhh!!!"

Remember, ladies: governments hold elections, not media-funded polling companies. You may not understand how certain elections can end up in a near-tie, but you can at least concede that the vote totals in an open society like ours are somewhat more likely to reflect the choice of the electorate than informal, non-binding questionnaires put to people leaving a voting station.

Can't you?

A Hell of a Story
Mood:  celebratory
Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard accompanied Vice President Cheney to Hamid Karzai's inauguration last week and tells the story. Hayes also notes:

The Washington Post played Karzai's inauguration on page A-13, a placement that suggested it was relatively less important than Eliot Spitzer's decision to run for governor of New York or the decision of the U.S. government to import flu vaccine from Germany.

This is an embarrassment. The foreign policy of George W. Bush will likely be remembered for two highly controversial decisions: (1) to eliminate not only terrorist networks but also the regimes that sponsor them, and (2) to cultivate democracy in the region of the world long thought least hospitable to it.

So why isn't there more of a sense of our accomplishments in Afghanistan? After all, as Hayes reports Karzai's words:

"Whatever we have achieved in Afghanistan--the peace, the election, the reconstruction, the life that the Afghans are living today in peace, the children going to school, the businesses, the fact that Afghanistan is again a respected member of the international community--is from the help that the United States of America gave us. Without that help Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists--destroyed, poverty-stricken, and without its children going to school or getting an education. We are very, very grateful, to put it in the simple words that we know, to the people of the United States of America for bringing us this day."

It may be that George W. Bush will have to wait another fifty years before he can claim the credit for such achievements. But for now? It's all about Abu Ghraib and Halliburton.

Alexandria Rediviva
Mood:  happy
This is some excellent news:

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer - has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced today while also adding its own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands of pages a day at each library.

This reminds me somewhat of a plan announced by the BBC last year to make its entire archives available for free over the Internet, although I haven't heard much about it lately.

Getting It Straight
On Thanksgiving 2003, President Bush made his famous unannounced visit to the troops in Iraq. While there, he was photographed presenting a turkey in the serving line. I don't know how it happened, but the myth that this bird was fake got started ---and has never abated. Probably because there's some irresistable metaphorical value in such a tale for the President's detractors. Or, maybe it's just because Democrats are goddamned liars who never let the facts contaminate their beliefs.

In any event, our man Patterico managed to get the Los Angeles Times to acknowledge that their columnist Joel Stein was wrong in referring to the "fake" turkey in a recent story.

Yeah. Not a huge victory in the annals of factual accuracy, but whether such small truths are acknowledged is a useful measure of a person's intellectual honesty.

"There are some who call me...Tim?"
Mood:  a-ok
If you're a Monty Python fan, be sure to read this great new article in The New Yorker about our favorite ensemble of British comedians and what they're up to these days. Eric Idle, for one, is doing up a major Broadway musical called Spamalot ---a new interpretation of the group's 1975 masterpiece Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I doubt I'd even walk across the street to see it now, but I'm glad the old guys are still having so much fun.

Long live genius.

Beautiful
If you go to SnapToSell.com, they are selling prints of some newly-discovered negatives of Marilyn Monroe from the 1950s, taken by a local photographer (now retired and in ill health) named Joseph H. Coudert. Saw the story about it on Fox7 News yesterday.

They have some lo-res images at the site above and they are really beautiful.

More on Kuhn
I can't believe I'm actually on Duncan Black's side in this, but the article by CBS News' political analyst David Paul Kuhn keeps on getting blasted, as it deserves.

Who cares whether a blogger is a paid consultant to a campaign? It isn't like it's a surprise that political blogs are partisan. It's in their nature! Why does that have to be explained?

But what about if CBS News is in the tank for one side against another? That, as the Power Line points out, does matter. Why? Because CBS News holds itself out to be an impartial imparter of the day's events, whereas bloggers are explicitly what they are.

One of the most useful things I ever learned from reading Nietzsche is that History (or even the news) is not reported by disinterested parties ---and it is a lie to say it is. There is an ideological component in most everything we do as political beings. I'll take the musings of an ideological foe all day long so long as he has the intellectual honesty to cop to his biases. If he doesn't, then what he has to sell is irredeemably tainted and not worth consuming, anyway.

What Kind of Bullshit Is This?
Courtesy of Little Green Footballs, here's a completely offensive piece about the blogosphere by David Paul Kuhn at CBS News.

Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining influence.

An "unregulated medium," eh? This sounds like a touch of envy, but what can an FCC-regulated organization like CBS do about it? Kuhn goes on:

Like all media, blogs hold the potential for abuse. Experts point out that blogs' unregulated status makes them particularly attractive outlets for political attack.

"The question is: What are the appropriate regulations on the Internet?" asked Kathleen Jamieson, an expert on political communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communications. "It's evolved into an area that we need to do more thinking about it.

"If you put out flyers, you have to disclaim it, you have to represent who you are," Jamieson said. "If you put out an ad you have to put a disclaimer on it. But we don't have those sorts of regulations for political content, that is campaign-financed on the Internet."

The message here is clear ---and entirely predictable coming from the Left: we need more government control of the means of communication. We need to have the FCC and the FEC on top of the blogosphere.

Of course, at CBS News, government regulations didn't prevent Dan Rather and Mary Mapes from knowingly pushing a lie built around forged documents ---all with the intent of sabotaging a Presidential election. But tools like Kuhn are certainly happy to promote the idea that an upstart medium like the blogosphere now bow down before state controls. What fucking bullshit!

Case precedent on political speech as it pertains to blogs does not exist. But where journalists' careers may be broken on ethics violations, bloggers are writing in the Wild West of cyberspace. There remains no code of ethics, or even an employer, to enforce any standard.

Here's where Big Media's understanding of the blogosphere fails most abjectly. Although there are many tens of thousands of active politically-oriented blogs out there, all but a relative few are obscure. Any of them, of course, are subject to libel laws, but the major players (e.g., InstaPundit, Eschaton, Power Line, et al.) already have a code of ethics, whether they wish to or not. It's called fact-checking in a real-time ombudsmen culture. These major blogs wouldn't have the readership and influence they now enjoy if they didn't immediately and conspicuously respond to the challenges made to the veracity of their claims. In this sense, the blogosphere is vastly more responsive to the demands of a meritocratic information medium than even conventional newspapers (which, when caught in an error, rarely do more than acknowledge it in some small place, buried inside the paper a few days later).

As Kuhn reports, the FEC is going to have its claws buried a little more deeply into the blogosphere by the time the next election cycle begins. But I find it particularly offensive that CBS News would be the one to promote any sort of government regulation of free speech when its own people, already ostensibly under such controls, are heedless of them. I guess it's just their way of fighting back against those who put the klieglight on Courageous Dan. And what a noble legacy for the network of Edward R. Murrow to bequeath to the American people: advocating an unwarranted intrusion into their freedom of speech. Great.

Dude
I like this:

A linguist from the University of Pittsburgh has published a scholarly paper deconstructing and deciphering the word "dude," contending it is much more than a catchall for lazy, inarticulate surfers, skaters, slackers and teenagers.

An admitted dude-user during his college years, Scott Kiesling said the four-letter word has many uses: in greetings ("What's up, dude?"); as an exclamation ("Whoa, Dude!"); commiseration ("Dude, I'm so sorry."); to one-up someone ("That's so lame, dude."); as well as agreement, surprise and disgust ("Dude.").

Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power from something he calls cool solidarity -- an effortless kinship that's not too intimate.

Nice.

Junk Mail
Mood:  cheeky
As so often during the campaign season (thanks, I'm sure, to a few of my Democratic friends who put me on a list somewhere), I've once again heard from the Chairman of the DNC, the obnoxious craphound, Terry McAuliffe. What a sweetheart!

Dear Toby,

Your response to Washington Governor candidate Christine Gregoire's plea for help has been overwhelming. Thanks to your generosity, the recount in Washington will now go forward. With only 42 votes separating Gregoire and her Republican opponent, today we can ensure that every ballot is accurately counted. This could not have happened without you.

Then the age of miracles is not yet over.

Your incredible grassroots support is vital to our continued fight to ensure a full and legitimate count of every single vote in this election and future elections. In addition to our strong commitment to the recount in Washington State, the Democratic Party has empowered the Ohio Democratic Party to represent us as our official observer during the recount. We will make sure that every vote in Ohio is counted.

But didn't Mr. Blackwell just certify the vote yesterday? I think y'all are falling down on the job.

But we aren't stopping there.

No foolin'?

After consulting with our Voting Rights Institute staff, Voting Protection Coordinators, Ohio legal team, Party activists, supporters, elected officials, and others, and after reviewing available information, the Democratic National Committee has decided to conduct a thorough investigation of key election issues arising from the conduct of the 2004 general election in Ohio.

Translation: the Democratic Party wishes to further burnish its image as a group of whiney-assed losers who want to poison the public's confidence in our duly elected representatives.

This investigative study will address the legitimate questions and concerns that have been raised in Ohio and will develop factual information that will be critically important in crafting further key election reforms. This project seeks to answer such questions as:

Why did so many people have to wait in line in certain Ohio precincts and not others?

Because the Ohio state legislature is too stupid to institute early voting.

Why weren't there enough machines in some counties and not others?

Because the Ohio state legislature and the counties of that state are too stupid to have provided more money for the purchase of enough machines.

Why were so many Ohioans forced to cast provisional ballots?

Because too many voters in Ohio are too stupid to know where they are supposed to cast their ballots. That, or they were trying to game the system by introducing a lot of confusion into the process, thereby creating a sense of widespread fraud. These sorts of problems are easily solved by the use of literacy.

We will find answers to help implement and advocate reforms in the future.

But, Terry, I just told you the answers.

Let me be clear. We do not expect either the recount in Ohio or our investigation to overturn the results of this election. But both are vital to protecting every American's voting rights in future elections. And the Democratic Party will never waver when it comes to upholding this sacred trust.

Federal elections deserve Federal involvement (i.e., funding and regulations) to ensure greater uniformity in the process. There needs to be national standards for these elections. If your party wants to work to that end, I'll support you. But this necrophiliac desire to gaze once again into the eyes of your dead hopes is unhealthy.

Thank you again for your incredible support.

The pleasure has been all mine.

Sincerely,

Terry McAuliffe

The New Google Usenet Interface Is Complete Fucking Crap
Mood:  irritated
Have you had a look at the way Google is doing up the Usenet groups portal? It's fucking stupid. You need a protractor, some rabbit ears, and a small hand mirror to figure it out.

Was there a reason for them to change it? Terrible.

Fisking Bob Jensen
The notorious anti-war activist and [progressive] Robert Jensen, who moonlights as a journalism professor at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a column in last Friday's local dog-trainer in which he applauds what he believes is our defeat in Iraq. Below is his column (in italics), interspersed with my fisking. Enjoy.

The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.

A well-baited hook, certainly.

I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated.

Because he supports the troops, see.

The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.

Translation: I am better than you because I feel their pain.

The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis - they have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this so-called "new American century."

I was under the impression that the Twentieth Century was America's Century. This century probably belongs to the Chinese. Then again, who knows (except clairvoyants like Jensen)?

The problem with declaring a war lost while it is still being waged or denouncing as a failure a policy that is still being implemented is that it is presumptuous. And where it isn't presumptuous, it is defeatist. And if not defeatist, it is willfully ignorant. Jensen can't know whether our military's actions in Iraq have or have not spared us other 9/11s here at home; he simply says they haven't. But who is he to say? Jihadists from all over the Muslim world have come to Iraq these past 18 months and tried their hand against our best, thus resulting in many thousands of their own deaths. Our policy of proactive strikes against Islamic terrorists has been a major success. But Jensen won't tell you that because he's got to stay on message.

So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat, for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States - its people or their ideals - but of that empire. And it's essential the American empire be defeated and dismantled.

The question here (as there is none of Jensen's disloyalty) is what constitutes an empire. In its most conventional sense, an empire is a conquering power that permanently adds to its own possession the territory of those it vanquishes. Such lands and people become colonial possessions ---and the laws of the occupying power become their own. Colonies become subjects in every way.

But that isn't what America does. Not anymore, anyway. The way we impose ourselves upon the world is through the commerce of trade and ideas. And it is right that we do so because there is no contradicting the rightness of our example. We represent the triumph of virtually all of the most basic human and civil rights. We embody the power of self-determination, representative government, freedom of speech and religion ---all of it. Not only that, we are a remarkably generous and open society where the ideas of the free market have a liberating effect on human capital.

What other "empire" does such good?

The fact the Bush administration says we are fighting for freedom and democracy (having long ago abandoned fictions about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties) does not make it so.

Jensen is a liar. The connections between the Saddamites and global Islamist terror groups are extensive and unquestionable. How is it that he can persist with such a lie? It must be that he has no conscience. As for weapons of mass destruction, if this Administration can't prove that there were large stockpiles of such agents in Iraq prior to our invasion, it must also be that Jensen can't prove they weren't there. Right? Of course, denying Saddam's possession of WMD also makes it harder to explain the nicknames of some of his close associates, such as "Chemical Ali" and "Dr. Germ," but we won't quibble with that just now.

We must look at the reality, no matter how painful. The people of Iraq are better off without Saddam Hussein's despised regime,

They all concede that, don't they? Even when they don't mean it. Because the politically unpalatable alternative for anti-war tools like Jensen is to defend the legitimacy of Saddam's regime. Uh, so why don't they do that? Why doesn't Jensen just come out and say that Saddam was a legitimate ruler? It may be because he and his fellow travelers know how burdensome it would be to defend a regime like that, even if they privately support it.

but that does not prove our benevolent intentions nor guarantee the United States will work to bring meaningful democracy to Iraq.

This guy's a rectal probe. Is there any doubt of that? Jensen wouldn't dare say that our men and women aren't working to build a new Iraq to their faces.

Throughout history, our support for democracies has depended on their support for U.S. policy.

Shocking! In a related development, I hear that the President has callously decided to fill his cabinet with people who agree with him.

When democratic governments follow an independent course, they typically end up as targets of U.S. power, military or economic. Ask Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Heh, heh. Beautiful examples. Of course, our well-known economic warfare against Canada and Mexico, a couple of neighboring democracies, hasn't turned them back to the dark side of Bushitler's imperial designs, but there's time yet.

In Iraq, the Bush administration invaded not to liberate but to extend and deepen U.S. domination.

If extending and deepening our domination means that we can play some role in facilitating free and functional societies that now only produce terrorists and tyrannies, then extend away, baby!

When Bush says, "We have no territorial ambitions; we don't seek an empire," he tells a half-truth. The United States doesn't want to absorb Iraq nor take direct possession of its oil. That's not the way of empire today - it's about control over the flow of oil and oil profits, not ownership.

Jensen is, at bottom, a Marxist. In such minds, as they are, there is nothing that can't be explained entirely by the pursuit of wealth. Every other aspect of human society ---especially the bad ones--- is adjunct to that conceit.

In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policymakers want leverage over the economies of its competitors - Western Europe, Japan and China - which are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

Keep in mind that this is an eminently justifiable position for our country to take. Would Jensen have us cede our influence to others without regard for the future growth of our own economy? What a stupid complaint! And if our only concern in the Middle East were access to oil, why didn't we just buy off Saddam and negotiate some cozy deals for all the oil we wanted? We could have lifted sanctions years ago and owned his ass outright. But we didn't do that because, as I say, there are other reasons to work towards a democratic Middle East besides just oil.

Hence the longstanding U.S. policy of support for reactionary regimes (Saudi Arabia), dictatorships (Iran under the Shah) and regional military surrogates (Israel), aimed at maintaining control.

But what is the War for Iraq also accomplishing, Bob? It is contributing to the security of Israel (an underappreciated phenomenon these days), it is engaging the Saudis in ways they never dreamed of before (sooner or later, they, too, will have to face the reality of a democratized neighborhood and the birth pangs that accompany it), and it is opening up all sorts of possibilities next door in Iran. The Iranians now have a new dynamic: the world's greatest power is just to the west of them ---and working with their old enemies to create a new society. It is just such change that this President means to effect, regardless of your Leftist whining.

The Bush administration has invested money and lives in making Iraq a platform from which the United States can project power - from permanent U.S. bases, officials hope.

Yeah? So? Did that keep the Japanese or Germans from succeeding?

That requires not the liberation of Iraq, but its subordination.

Which you were so concerned about that you spent the past two years screaming against their liberation. Can you understand that they have spent generations being subordinate?

But most Iraqis don't want to be subordinated, which is why the United States in some sense lost the war the day it invaded.

How terribly deep.

One lesson of contemporary history is that occupying armies generate resistance that, inevitably, prevails over imperial power.

Really? Have you ever heard of the Second World War? Or is that not sufficiently "contemporary"?

Most Iraqis are glad Saddam is gone, and most want the United States gone. When we admit defeat and pull out - not if, but when - the fate of Iraqis depends in part on whether the United States (1) makes good on legal and moral obligations to pay reparations, and (2) allows international institutions to aid in creating a truly sovereign Iraq.

Jensen is not to be respected. The moral obligation we have to "reparations" for Iraq depends on our commitment to seeing the job through, not in withdrawing and paying them off. And when we achieve our goal of a free and stable Iraq, it will not be because we have worked to turn over sovereignty to some goddamned joke like the United Nations. It is outrageous to see that neo-communists like Jensen, who very obviously distrust the power of America to do good (just like the loser Jean le Kerrie), still believe in the superior moral authority of world bodies such as the UN to arbitrate and legitimize nascent democracies. Where do such delusions come from? How can an educated man believe that the UN can accomplish anything without the support of the United States and our allies?

We shouldn't expect politicians to do either without pressure. An anti-empire movement - the joining of antiwar forces with the movement to reject corporate globalization - must create that pressure.

Shit, son, you couldn't even get your base out to win the last election. How do you think you're going to bring down the tide of democratization in the Middle East? How do you think you're going to stand in the way of a global economy and the rise of the middle class in countries all around the world?

Failure will add to the suffering in Iraq and more clearly mark the United States as a rogue state and an impediment to a just and peaceful world.

If we're such a bunch of Nazis, Bob, then why are you still drawing pay at a public university? Why aren't your books being burned on the South Mall? Have the Feds come into your house in the middle of the night and dragged you off in some Kafkaesque nightmare of unreason? Do fuck off.

So, I'm glad for the U.S. military defeat in Iraq, but with no joy in my heart.

Yeah, we already got the money shot in the first graf, comrade.

We should all carry a profound sense of sadness at where decisions made by U.S. policy-makers - not just the gang in power today, but a string of Republican and Democratic administrations - have left us and the Iraqis. But that sadness should not keep us from pursuing the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: Pledging to dismantle the American empire.

Need it be said that such tools as Jensen are only allowed to speak and live freely because of this "empire's" commitment to liberty? As a taxpayer in this state and an almunus of the university at which Jensen works, I'm concerned that my money and my school's reputation are being wasted on account of this hypocrite.

Bob, if you're so offended at the corporate power structure, why don't you quit your job with the University of Texas and take up with MoveOn.org or Media Matters or some other Leftist klavern?

This planet's resources do not belong to the United States. The century is not America's. We own neither the world nor time. And if we don't give up the quest - if we don't find our place in the world instead of on top of the world - there is little hope for a safe, sane and sustainable future.

Jensen would rather have the world live under the thumb of tyrants and terrorists. That much is plain. If he cannot recognize American exceptionalism and appreciate what we do as a liberating force for good in the world, then it's time to call him and his what they are: the enemy.