"We Harpooned Every Whale in the Sea.."*

* "and even some minnows". Alan Simpson, co-chair of the Catfood Commission

Alan Simpson said he wanted to be in the Government Witness Protection program after he and Erskine Bowles unveiled their recommendations yesterday. Wildly denounced,Bloomberg news writes this morning that the Deficit Commission's recommendations would cut $3.8 trillion from the national debt. But they added that politically their advice will not be taken.

Give them credit, Bowles and Simpson floated some trial balloons before the final recommendations due December 1. They are least were serious about their mission.Even their fellow board members are rebelling and it's doubtful whether they will rustle up 14 votes for their recommendations. What's curious is that we haven't heard any responses from the Republicans.

Do you get the impression that whenever President Obama is out of the country all hell breaks loose? Huffington Post broadcast that the Obama Administration has caved on tax cuts for the wealthy because of remarks yesterday by David Axelrod, who says the Administration has to deal with the political reality after the election. Almost immediately, the administration walked back the report.

Maybe it's just as well that Americans remain so self-centered. Otherwise, we would be seeing wall-to-wall stories that the young Obama's caregiver was a gay male, who now is a member of a leading transvestite group in Indonesia. Fox News floated the notion that Michelle Obama was going to meet with sex workers when she was in India. She did not. Or what about the huge scandal of Obama addressing the University of Indonesia and speaking Indonesian with some fluency. And the students were in rapture, not the heavenly kind.

It's strange that Pew published a poll on international trade while the President was out of the country. To summarize, Americans want more trade with Canada and the European countries but not South Korea or China. In short,more trade with white people.

The new teabagger congresscritters greeted Hispanic members of Congress with catcalls of "Go Back to Mexico!". Class bunch. Col. West's new chief of staff, who is a right-wing radio host, said on the first day of her new job that Nancy Pelosi was "garbage" and that illegals who commit crimes 'should be hung." It's going to be a long session.

The teabaggers are now turning on Rand Paul because he's reneging on his stance against earmarks. Jim Inhofe claims that the Left has brainwashed people about earmarks just as they have about global warming. What is in the water in Oklahoma? The war within the GOP has broken out and is likely to escalate in the next twelve months.

If you want to know how we have gotten to where we are today, rent the DVD "Casino Jack", which is a documentary on the conservative revolutionaries who gamed the system to win millions of dollars in lobbying contracts. Grover Norquist is shown emulating Lenin, who really is one of his political idols. Ralph Reed shows up with his Christian Coalition and then agitates for a gambling ban in Texas at the behest of Jack Abramoff's Indian casinos in Louisiana. Thomas Franks shows up to describe the origins of this so-called 'conservative revolution" and narrates how Tom Delay and Abramoff managed to manipulate Congress in covering up sweatshop conditions in the Marianas Islands as some showcase for free market economics. The film is a powerful indictment of the system in Washington. It ends with the Citizens United case which the filmmakers take as the ultimate triumph of these characters. One fun section is how a life guard from Reheboth was named the head of a think tank, which received millions of laundered money from Abramoff's clients. Abramoff today works in a Pizza Place in Baltimore after he served time in jail.

Gore Vidal said something that still hangs in the air," Barack Obama's problem is that he is too smart for the people he leads." James T. Kloppenberg, an American History professor at Harvard, just published "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition". This book is the antidote to Dinesh DeSouza's book on the anti-colonial Obama. Kloppenberg writes an intellectual history of Barack Obama by examining his writings, his graduate school papers, his teaching and his educational reading. Listening to President Obama's speeches, Kloppenberg examines Obama's willingness to be conciliatory and moderate in tone. Kloppenberg believes Obama is one of the first intellectual Presidents in a long time and he represents a long distinguished American tradition of political thought. Instead of locating Obama in the world of Franz Fanon as DeSouza does, Kloppenberg links Obama to philosophical pragmatism and its strongest proponents--William James and John Dewey. Now I know why I like him. However, Kloppenberg, who is a liberal, warns that Barack Obama's style and thinking may not be effective in a poisoned atmosphere with such polarization in the country.

Kloppenberg does an excellent job of unwinding the process Obama went through in rejecting identity politics. This always struck me when the Right mentions the list of radical characters Obama knew or was acquainted with. What the Right purposely never admits is that Obama rejected almost all these people's advice and went a different way. One of the personalities the Right identifies with Obama is a friend of his grandfather, a black member of the American Communist Party, who had been expelled. This friend told Obama not to work with white people, don't play their games and do not go to college. I guess that advice was ignored.

"Reading Obama" doesn't encourage progressives to think Obama is one of their own. Instead, he is as I've written a radical moderate. This becomes clear with each policy proposal put forth. It's simply the contrast with the very Radical Right agenda of the GOP that he appears leftish. What Koppenberg makes clear is that Obama is not a political pragmatist, a compromiser for the sake of it, but a philosophical pragmatist, who is skeptical of the assertions of any one group as possessing the right answers. In some ways, it would preferable if Obama was more in the progressive camp given our dire circumstances.

But such subtleties don't bother us with George W., who failed to repeat his defense of the Muslim people when asked about all the Islamophobia by Matt Lauer. Dubya did defend the TARP program on Rush and said facing a Great Depression he chose FDR over Herbert Hoover. Unfortunately, the results weren't the same.

"Decision Points" triggered an uncomfortable realization. George W. Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry--same education, same wealth, same class. Why do we think any one of them would not produce what we have today? As Robert Scheer has pointed out in his most recent book, The Clinton people and the Bush people colluded in the economic downfall of the United States. Why would we think the Democratic candidates would have produced anything different? After all, Democrats allowed the Patriot Act to be passed, knew about the torture program and basically got rolled by Bush and Cheney.

So far in my reading of Decision Points I have not come across anything to explain Dubya's studied lack of curiosity about the world at large. Also, he tries to pump up his Midlands upbringing but it doesn't explain years at Andover, Yale and Harvard. There is a lack of forthrightness about this period of his life as if he want to convey the image of the guy you must want to have a beer with. I've only gotten as far as his run for the Presidency but so far I get any new sense of gravitas or depth to Dubya.

When Wings Take Dreams

For Dubya's comeback, I suggest renting Will Ferrell's America:You're Welcome, a comedic but accurate account of the Bush presidency. It seems Dubya is annoying our allies. Gerhard Schroeder lambasted Bush for lying about why he didn't support the American invasion of Iraq and the British called him out on the assertion that waterboarding yielded information that prevented the Heathrow Airport plot. As a library of research has shown, it was the handiwork of the Brits and uncoerced leads from Muslims that stopped the plot.

In one of the televised interviews, W defends his approval of torture by saying that his lawyers said it was legal. Of course, Dick Cheney massaged the legal opinions, which another whole library has established.

If you are confused about Rightness and Wrongness of America's torturing people, I recommend Charles Fried and Gregory Fried's "Because it is Wrong:Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror". The father and son team debated the issues in the book privately and publicly over a year before committing their ideas to print. Charles Fried had been Reagan's Solicitor General and his son Gregory is a philosophy professor. The two handle the approaches to warrantless wiretapping and torture in their book. While both conclude they are wrong, they disagree to what are the remedies. Charles Fried backs the Obama approach of moving forward, while Gregory wants the torturing part of the Bush years to be punished and some semblance of a national reconciliation commission created.

George W's admission that he approved torture actually puts the United States in a difficult spot. Under the Torture Convention, signatory states are required to take the necessary remedis to stop the practice but also to bring the culprits to justice. This also applies to all sugnatories. In effect, George W. Bush should not be allowed to travel to Europe, Canada or any other country that has signed the Torture Convention. In addition, the United Nations rapporteur on torture is also owed considerable explanations by the United States about its practices on torture and renditioning. These requirements do not end with a change in administration. Jonathan Turley at the beginning of the Obama Administration cautioned the DOJ that if they brushed the crimes of torture under the rug than the new Administration would become liable under international law.

For those tempted to buy "Decision Points", don't. I'll report on anything newsworthy or noteworthy in the weeks ahead. I'll be reading in a quest to answer the question about why the Bush Administration was always so passive/aggressive toward every crisis. It seems Bush himself always needed at least two years before he acted on anything. In his interviews, he has lied about when he first learned about the impending financial collapse of the world economic system. He says March 2008 but the hard-copy evidence points to the same time the previous year. In the memoir he admits he let the situation in Iraq deteriorate for two years before he did anything about it.

My bet is still on Rumsfeld to produce a memoir, which actually says something truthful.

From the interviews to date, the tone of the former President gives you some hint of where the current GOP gets its rhetoric from. This tendency to make bold-faced assertions and then double-down on them if they are proven to be factually incorrect. Dubya's revisiting the reasons for war with Iraq takes us back to the good old days where he accused Saddam of harboring terrorists (he did harbor the PFLP), building vast amounts of WMDs (he wasn't and hadn't since the Gulf War), or at least having the capability (recent justification but also proven wrong), and gaming the international system by cheating on the UN food for oil program (true but can you justify war on these grounds?).

I can't wait to read about 9-11. What was it about the August warnings titled "Bin Laden Plans to Attack America" that he didn't believe. In the interviews, he tries to maintain that no one really knew who committed 9-11 until days later when intelligence picked up Al Qaeda's bragging about it. He and Cheney have argued that no one knew anything about Al Qaeda until after 9-11. This is just plain wrong as the Clinton Administration had a full-time office just tracking Bin Laden and documenting the group's plans and ideology. The same can be said about determining the group's personnel. There has been a huge smokescreen created by the Bush people over 9/11 and the rationale for why the huge military/ terrorist/ intelligence complex was created after that day.

Some of this is understandable. You get caught with your pants down on the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor. It's understandable you would want to cover up the obvious tracks leading to this event. But I find the whole rationale for torture in the Bush Administration to hang on this supposed ignorance about Al Qaeda and the wonderous revelations produced by waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed. But those revelations made the U.S. chase around the world on false leads, produced the false info that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda, and did not produce information about the LAX plot or the Healthrow plot or anything else. The United States and its allies knew buckets of information about AlQaeda. They didn't need torture or the wonderful fantasies about the "ticking time-bomb" to motivate people.

Watching Dubya, I still get this sense the guy was not in control. If you go back to the parts of the interview with Matt Lauer about his authorizing torture,listen to it closely. You get the sense his participation was very late in the game and that he was merely asked to bless the torture that had already been approved. Even in this very major decision, he comes across as disengaged, not quite aware of what is going on.

Years ago, people speculated about Nixon's state of mind and whether he was actually engaged in the last years of his presidency. There were rumors about drink, maudlin late night tours of the Capitol, boatrides to Mount Vernon. But then slightly more than a decade ago, a book was published of all the memos he wrote while President. In these memos he was obsessed with the most minute details of policy, personnel, and politics. He even spent time actually describing the ridiculous uniforms for the White House Guards. In fact, Nixon was in total control--just not emotionally in control of himself.

Maybe we will find out the same about Dubya. But today I have my doubts.