Those bastards are trying to kill me.

Billmon took on the Blair/ Bush dinner fiasco yesterday where the two leaders were caught on a microphone discussing events in the Middle East from a unbelievably naive perspective-

This is fascinating as well as terrifying. It suggests that Bush and his faithful water carrier both really believe their own bullshit -- not just in terms of viewing Hezbollah and Hamas as the mindless tools of Syria and Iran, but also in their rosy-lensed assessments of how things are going in the Middle East these days.

The biggest thing I take from the exchange, and response of the United States as a whole to the growing conflict, is that this is just yet another example of the cold war mindset that the clowns running our foreign policy are stuck in. They simply cannot bring themselves to see any world event outside the influence of state actors. All the recent talk of "WW III" from Gingrich and other neocons just highlight this mindset.

It demonstrates once again why George W Bush and Tony Blair are exactly the wrong men for our time. They lack the imagination or the mindset to truly keep the us secure by dealing effectively with our true enemies: loosely organized, shadowy terrorist organizations. Their continued efforts to pound the square peg into the round hole only seeks to make things worse.

Add to that their "rosy-lensed assesment of how things are going in the Middle East," as Billmon put it, and there isn't much hope for a responsible change in course anytime soon.

Yeeeeehaaawwwww!!!!

Everybody seems to linking to Billmon's excellent deconstruction of the possibility of a U.S. nuclear attack on Iran and the results with regards to foreign policy, the economy and international relations, so I might as well do the same: http://billmon.org/archives/002375.html

Mutually Assured Dementia

Maybe it's just me, but I've been at least a little bit surprised by the relatively muted reaction to the news that the Cheney Administration and its Pentagon underlings are racing to put the finishing touches on plans for attacking Iran – plans which may include the first wartime use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki.

I mean, what exactly does it take to get a rise out of the media industrial complex these days? A nuclear first strike against a major Middle Eastern oil producer doesn't ring the bell? Must every story have a missing white woman in it before the cable news guys will start taking it seriously?

The fact that the corporate media has failed to go bonkers over something as signifigant as nuclear war is an interesting question. But I'm not sure that coverage would change anything. At this point- with five years of living under this administration in the tank- I'd say there's very little that could or would keep them from using nuclear weapons as Syd Hersh reported.

Consider the counter arguments to nuking Iran:

International Treaties- Practically the first act taken by this administration when they slithered into office was to announce that they were pulling out of the Kyoto global warming treaties.