Bud Selig ended the era of the independent commissioner that began when Judge Landis was made the first Commissioner of Baseball in the wake of the Black Sox scandal of 1919. This was in a failed attempt to break the players' union, a movement led by Selig, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and others.

The Selig-Reinsdorf coup over baseball took place in 1992 when Commissioner Fay Vincent was ousted and Selig named by the owners as acting commissioner. The owners left Selig in power in this "acting" capacity until 1998, never seriously entertaining any to return the office of the commissioner to an independent person who would make decisions for the overall good of baseball, not the overall good of the owners. What Selig, Reinsdorf and the others had against Vincent is that Vincent enforced rules against collusion on them when they attempted the rig the free agent market to force players to accept lower salaries.

Never mind the DH, artificial turf or even the Black Sox scandal itself, the coup of the owners against the commissioner's office was the worst thing that ever happened to baseball. Selig canceled the 1994 World Series rather than settle the players' strike, which by that time had become an owners' lockout. Fortunately, a court ruling brought the owners' anti-labor scheme to an end. He lifted the life time ban of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, who was suspended by Vincent for associating with gamblers and, ironically, is largely responsible for the out-of-control salary structure that Selig and Reinsdorf found so disturbing. Meanwhile, Pete Rose, suspended for gambling by Vincent's predecessor, Bart Giamatti, complained of getting no such consideration from Selig. Worst of all, Selig presided over the era of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, doing nothing to stop it since juiced up players hitting home runs was so good for the owners' bottom lines.

If any one wonders what America will look like once corporate bosses start treating politicians like their personal employees to an even greater extent than they do now, one can look at the sordid history of baseball in the Selig era. If Selig deserves a statue to honor his contribution to baseball, then the image of George W. Bush should adorn Mount Rushmore.

Marshall McLuhan said we go into the future looking through a rear view mirror. We go into the unknown making references to what is known that don't quite fit the new situation. Thus, for many of us, Bush, the presidential usurper with authoritarian tendencies, was equal to Hitler, a real totalitarian monster. That doesn't really work. Bush was not a mass murderer but a thief. He came to power by one and possibly two stolen presidential elections and then lied to the entire world in order to commit American resources to an unprovoked invasion and an imperialist occupation of Iraq. The idea was simply to put Iraq's natural resources, mainly its oil, in the hands of western corporations, not to murder every Iraqi on whom he could lay his hands. Hitler, for his part, did not usurp power. He was named Chancellor by German President von Hindenburg in the normal constitutional process for the Wiemar Republic. I also liked to point out, in a dig not only to Bush's rise to power but all facets of his entire life, that Hitler, unlike Bush, was a self-made man.

Now that President Obama has made the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, we see comparisons on DU to the Bush and Cheney regime, who saw no problem to which they did not think the solution was to drop bombs, launch missiles and send in the Marines. Such a comparison is, to use a technical term, a load of crap.

First of all, no one should expect President Obama to start asserting power he doesn't have, as Bush and Cheney did. Bush and Cheney interpreted the Commander-in-chief clause of the Constitution as giving the President carte blanche to commit the United States to war as he sees fit, unbridled by either congressional action, or, in the case of the usurping Bush-Cheney regime, facts or common sense. Also, President Obama is going to keep Congress informed, unlike Bush and Cheney, who treated the legislative branch in general and its opposition members in particular as most of us would treat an inflamed appendix. President Obama knows he'll have to withdraw from Afghanistan if Congress votes to cut funding for the effort. In the case of Bush and Cheney, Speaker Pelosi would have had to put impeachment back on the table first.

OK, I'm disappointed at the President's decision. I hope I'm wrong, but I think Afghanistan is already a lost cause and was long before January when President Obama was inaugurated. There is no way Karzai can keep his government weak enough to protect his brother's drug cartel and at the same time be strong enough to fight the Taliban. Karzai may be an American tool, but he's still a tool that doesn't work for the purpose intended.

Still, I do not believe that the President is using the war on terror to promote ulterior motives. For Bush and Cheney, that's all it was, which is why his statements about the importance of catching Osama varied with the phases of the moon. Osama and his lieutenants can be captured and it's hard to see why the President would need 35,000 more troops and three years to accomplish that. Even the incompetents Bush and Cheney nearly accomplished that in a matter of weeks.

There is the matter of Pakistan and nuclear proliferation. That was another matter that didn't seem to concern the Frat Boy or the Big Dick very much, but should have concerned them and thankfully does concern President Obama. The idea of a right wing Islamist regime in control of Pakistan supplying right wing Islamist terrorists with the ability to make a small scale nuclear device for the purpose of carrying out hits on soft targets wherever they choose is not a future to which we should acquiesce so easily. That may be worth committing blood and treasure to prevent, but if that's the idea then Obama is not sending the troops on a clear mission by sending them to Afghanistan to keep the Pakistani government propped up in order to withstand threats from right wing Islamists seeking to take control of the government and that government's nuclear arsenal by force. Nor do I see a possibility of the Pakistani government gaining any popular support by sending an SOS to Washington requesting that US troops in Afghanistan be redeployed to Pakistan to fight these right wing rebels.

Perhaps I don't understand is that if we created the Taliban by sending them weapons to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan why we can't defeat them by arming their enemies now. That comes back to Karzai being the wrong tool. Some time in the next three years I see a coup d'etat in Afghanistan, just as there was one in South Vietnam in 1963 to replace the crooked and tyrannical Ngo brothers just months prior to the major escalation of the war by the United States.

The US had relative success in South Korea at the cost of supporting authoritarian leaders, the best of which, Park Chung Hee, was not the kind of man any American who doesn't call himself a tea bagger would want as president. Otherwise, the Ngo were followed in South Vietnam by a series of embarrassingly clownish and short-lived military governments mostly led by General Nguyen Khan, then a fairly stable but unpopular regime led by Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky and finally a president who won a rigged election, Nguyen Van Thieu. That was a disaster. In Iraq, Bush and Cheney made no pretense that the invasion was any thing other than colonial piracy by appointing an American, Paul Bremer, as "administrator" of Iraq. Apart from the fact that Bremer's presence showed that Bush and Cheney were spreading democracy to Iraq like the British spread it India, Bremer made the very kind of stupid moves, such as dismantling the Iraqi army, for which Bush and Cheney were famous by going into Iraq in the first place, blowing the cover of a key CIA operative in a political vendetta against her husband, the firing of US Attorneys for refusing to bring trumped up charges against Democratic voters and office holders and generally being asleep at the wheel during disasters whether it was natural like Hurricane Katrina or man-made like the Wall Street meltdown.

War has not worked well as a policy tool for my country. Count me opposed to the President's Afghan policy and disappointed that he has gone this route. But please, please, please, don't compare him to Bush. It may be a bad decision, but it's it was still arrived at by better means and for better reasons than Bush or Cheney could imagine. President Obama is not Bush and Cheney. To say he is try to go into the future while looking though the rear-view mirror.

EDITED for typing.

Professor John Yoo, one of the architects of the Bush regime's policy toward detainees in the war on terror, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal today condemning President Obama's decision to close the detainee facility at Guantánamo Naval Base and to end the policy of torture, called "enhanced interrogation techniques" by Yoo and other members of the regime and by their cheerleaders in the right wing punditocracy.

Mr. Yoo argues:

• The civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks;
• The government will be unable to get more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists.

Mr. Yoo, who is himself a potential defendant in any future war crimes trials, lacks the credibility to make such assertions. Moreover, his case for keeping Guantánamo open is every bit as fact free as was the Bush regime's case to go to war against Iraq.

First of all, I don't view those lawyers, including Professor Yoo, who advised Mr. Bush on what is legal concerning detainees, so much as bona fide legal advisors as co-conspirators with Bush and Cheney to trash the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture. Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and others should be prosecuted for war crimes along with Bush and Cheney. The legal reason is too spurious to take seriously. Their mission was to give the former regime legal cover by redefining torture in a way that waterboarding would not be torture, when no reasonable person would say otherwise.

Yoo's pleas that Guantánamo remain open that torture continue are based on the dubious propositions that civilian courts are insufficient to keep us safe from terrorism and that torture works. To the first proposition I offer the trial and conviction of José Padilla as a refutation. Try as they might, Bush and his legal henchmen could not keep American citizen Padilla from being tried in federal court for terrorist-related charges. Padilla had his day in court and was convicted. It would appear to me that an ordinary federal court was quite sufficient to keep the American public safe from Mr. Padilla. Mr. Yoo also compares the Guantánamo detainees to pirates, "illegal combatants who do not fight on behalf of a nation and refuse to obey the laws of war." However, this is a false analogy. A pirate, when captured on the high seas, is charged with a crime and brought to court to face trial. Here, he enjoys the rights of due process. On the other hand, Guantánamo detainees are denied due process, including the right to be charged with a crime. Most detainees were never charged with any crime. Indeed, the purpose of Guantánamo was to violate the human rights of the detainees to a fair trial and any protection against torture or other harsh or humiliating interrogation techniques.

As for torture itself, which Mr. Yoo defends along with such erudite spokesmen of the lunatic fringe as Sean Hannity, not only is it universally condemned as cruel, but it doesn't work. A subject being tortured will likely say anything to get his interrogators to stop. Consequently, nothing a torture victim says should be taken at face value. That includes Khalid Sheik Mohammad, who confessed to being the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks but to a number of other schemes, some never carried out. It also includes Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, who under interrogation by waterbording in 2002 told investigators that the Iraqi government trained al Qaida members to use biochemical weapons. We know now that this is not true, yet by falling back on this kind of "information", the Bush regime cited as a fact the working relationship between Saddam's regime and Osama's terror network. The only thing torture worked for in this instance was telling neoconservatives what they wanted to hear, which were talking points and not necessarily facts. Bush and the neocons didn't care about the facts. They were lying and they knew they were lying when they told us they had reliable information about Saddam's weapons and his ties to al Qaida. Like the legal memoranda approving torture itself, the intelligence gained by torture was suspect at best and worthless at worst.

Speaking about sources we should not take at face value, we have only the word of former Bush regime spokesmen such as Professor Yoo and Mr. Cheney and sycophants like Sean Hannity that valuable information was gained by harsh interrogation techniques. Against this is an article by journalist David Rose that appeared in December's Vanity Fair that states counterterrorist officials on both sides of the Atlantic conclude unanomously that "coercive methods" failed to provide "significant levels of actionable intelligence." Moreover, in the specific case of Khalid Sheik Mohammad, Rose quotes a senior Pentagon analyst as saying, "K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were."

Mr. Yoo shouldn't tell the public the kind of nonsense that appears today under his by-line in The Wall Street Journal. He should save it for the judge.

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From the Soviet film by Grigory Kozintsev (1971):

The final scene of King Lear reveals the destruction of Britain and of Lear and Cordelia, Lear's beloved youngest daughter, at the hands of Edmund, the evil son of the Earl of Gloucester, and Lear's two selfish daughters, Goneril and Regan. The trio have together brought war and ruin to the kingdom.

At the beginning of the clip, Edmund is defeated and slain in a trail by combat with his virtuous brother, Edgar. The Duke of Albany, who is the husband of Goneril, reveals that he knows of the treachery of Edmund, Goneril and Regan. Goneril, who has already poisoned Regan and had planned for Albany to be killed and then to marry Edmund, runs offstage and commit suicide. Edmund reavals that Lear and Cordelia have been sentence to death by hanging.

At the very end of the scene Albany offers the crown to Edgar and the Earl of Kent, who remained loyal to Lear throughout while disguised as a serving man named Caius. Kent declines, stating he is too old, while Edgar accepts.

For comparison, here is the same scene with Lord Laurence Olivier as Lear from a BBC production.

George W. Bush's final days in office are spent in a whirlwind of his reminiscences on his tenure in office. He would like us to see him as a great president who, like Truman, was unappreciated in his own time but soon came to be seen as one willing to make tough choices that turned out to be right.

There was nothing right about the response to Hurricane Katrina. There was nothing right about firing US Attorneys for not being crooked enough to file bogus charges. There was nothing right about torturing individuals detained in the war on terror. And even if invading Iraq turns out to be a better idea than it appears to be now, there was no excuse for lying about the threat Iraq posed not just to the United States but to Iraq's weakest neighbor.

It's too much of a stretch to see Bush as well-meaning.

At other times we are being asked to feel pity for well-meaning a man for whom nothing worked right. We're not taking about Bush, are we? There is nothing to pity about Bush. {i]Pity is a cathartic emotion elicited by literature and specifically in classical tragedy. The tragic hero was a noble person, a great man of enormous talents and virtues who is laid low by a fault in his own character. Shakespeare's tragic hero is a man who is wise and virtuous in many respects, but has a blind spot that makes him gullible to certain people who do not have the hero's best interests in mind (such as Othello with Iago or King Lear to Edmund, Goneril and Regan), to underestimate the prowess of the villain (such as Hamlet with Claudius), or to be propelled by a character flaw to commit an infamous act which proves to be his undoing (such as the ambitious Macbeth).

Bush is not Hamlet, Othello, Lear or Macbeth. There is no nobility in his character. Bush is no tragic hero. He does not inspire pity.

I could feel pity for Bush if he had a prior record of some distinction, or if had made a principled stand even if I personally disagreed with it, and then had his disastrous presidency befall us and him. I could feel sorry for him if I thought he really believed all that crap he was using to justify going to war against Iraq or if he really believed it was a war to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny rather than their mineral rights.

Bush is a man with no record of distinction in public service or in private business, who "won" two disputed presidential elections (he most definitely lost in 2000), who had to know of the bona fide doubts about the intelligence he used to lead us to war, who promoted those who toed the party line in falsely justifying that war and punished those who were less than enthusiastic about it, who fought the Iraqi government to allow greedy western oil corporations back to Iraq.

I feel pity for Herbert Hoover. Hoover was humanitarian (see his work for famine relief during and after World War I) and an able administrator (it wasn't for nothing that he was asked to head a commission for government reform by presidents from each party). He would likely have made an excellent president at any time in American except at the onset of the Great Depression, something that by ideological bent he was reluctant to fight in the way it needed to be fought. A man such as Hoover would never have botched the response to Hurricane Katrina as Bush did. Hoover would never have lied us into war as Bush did. Hoover would never have fired US Attorneys for failing to file prosecutions they knew to be bogus, and he would never have asked them to do it as Bush did.

Hoover was a tragic figure who spent his later years too proud to ask for pity. There is nothing about Bush that evokes pity. As president, or the usurper who acted as president, he was what he had always been: a failure. That he would fail as president was predictable. That a man who kept the council of Karl Rove would a dishonest leader who would try to shroud himself in a thin layer of false courage, false wisdom and even omniscience was predictable.

There may be a dramatic transformation of Bush from the beginning to the end of his tenure in office. He came in as a clown and leaves as a grotesque villain. There is nothing to pity.

For now, he will slither back to Texas.

When a right wing talk-show personality says this is just to say "thank you," it's time to grab your wallet and get out the hip boots.

No one but Sarah Palin "Dan Quaylized" Sarah Palin. She didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was when asked by Charlie Gibson. Other than Roe v. Wade, she could name a Supreme Court decision. Her idea of foreign policy experience is the ability to see one God-forsaken island in the Bering Straight from another about four miles away that happen to have an imaginary line running between them. She had a vague idea what duties the Vice President is given by the Constitution.

Come to think of it, we would never "Dan Quaylize" Sarah Palin. That's an insult to Dan Quayle.

I'm sorry, Mr. Williams, but I expect the Republican nominee for Vice President to be able to ace a high school civics exam, and I am convinced that Sarah Palin could not.

I don't know what your agenda is Mr. Williams and I don't care. If you want to spend millions of dollars thanking a loser without any qualifications for the office she sought, don't let me stop you. It's your money, after all.

In case you didn't notice, Mr. Williams, yours and Mrs. Palin's meme of the "real America" versus the "fake America" took a beating on election day. There appear to be about eight million more of us fake Americans than there are of you "real" ones. Yes, I am an American who voted to elect Barack Obama president; Barack Obama didn't buy my vote, he earned it.

Also, I don't recall any election where you ran for some office that gave you the right to set in stone what a "real American" is, let alone won that office. To paraphrase President Obama: There are no real Americans; there are no fake Americans; there are only Americans.


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In a piece in today's Wall Street Journal, Jeffery Scott Shapiro admonishes Americans for being so irreverent and disrespectful toward the current occupant of the Oval Office, the former Governor of Texas, George W. Bush.

Mr. Shapiro's piece, The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace: What Must Our Enemies Be Thinking? appeals to the same faux patriotism that conservative and right wing pundits have appealed since Richard Nixon kept trying to prosecute the Vietnam War before finally agreeing to a peace settlement he could have gotten soon after taking office.

Mr. Shapiro cites the case of President Truman, the patron saint of presidential come backs, not for his surprise upset of Governor Dewey in the election of 1948, but rather for his unpopularity as he left the White House in contrast to his shining historical reputation now. Just because it happened to Truman doesn't mean it is going to happen to Bush. Truman's unpopularity was based on his ability to take a middle course, such as the policy of containment, that the right found too soft (they wanted to nuke the Commies then and there) and the left too dangerous (they were uncomfortable with any contemplation of nuclear weapons). Bush did not look for wise middle courses. He looked for way to go further to right to enhance his base and encourage them to turn out to outvote moderates, liberals and the left, and then let crooked elections officials do the rest.

As usual, I take issue with prefixing Bush's name with "President." He never won a clean presidential election. In fact, I'm certain he lost in 2000 in spite of Katerine Harris' best efforts at voter suppression and then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell did such a royal job of fucking up Ohio's voting in 2004 that any objective determination of who actually carried the state is probably impossible.

Says Shapiro:

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

To start with the subtitle for Mr. Shapiro's piece, I don't give a two-bit damn what our enemies think, but I'll happily offer up what I think. My first inclination is of offer Mr. Shapiro a counter-question: Exactly how did Mr. Bush stand by us? He wrecked the federal budget after inheriting a surplus and now we have red ink as far as the eye can see. Am I supposed to be thankful that my children as yet unconceived grandchildren will have to pay it off instead of me? Did he stand by us sending our children to die in a war for oil and corporate profits justified with a pack of lies? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he was standing by Senator McCain waiting for some birhtday cake, not be the people of New Orleans. Did he stand by us as our jobs were lost and homes foreclosed the way he stood by Wall Street bankers as they sank? Did he stand by us when he seemed to sleep through a briefing about Osama's plans to used hijacked planes as missiles in a torrorist attack on American soil?

Mr. Bush has never stood by us. He has done nothing for us. He has done much to us.

For Mr. Shapiro's benefit, I shall enumerate:

Mr. Bush issued a policy, cited as the Bush Doctrine, asserting the right of the United States to prevent by use of military force any threat he merely suspects to be planned but not yet materialized in contravention of the Charter of the United Nations, to which the United States is a party.

Mr. Bush used the September 11 attacks as cover to start an unnecessary, illegal and imperialist war of aggression against a nation that had nothing to do with the attacks. Osama bin Laden, the actual perpetrator of the attacks, remains at large to this day.

Mr. Bush used manipulated intelligence and even outright lies to justify invading Iraq. As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he was not a threat and the US had far more important security priorities in the spring of 2003, like finding and capturing or killing the aforementioned Osama bin Laden.

After using the manipulated intelligence and the outright lies, Mr. Bush allowed persons under his authority to publicly identify a ranking agent of Central Intelligence as part of a political vendetta against the agent's husband, who published an article in The New York Times calling into question the authenticity of intelligence of which he had first hand knowledge.

Mr. Bush, in violation of common Article 3 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture, approved and implemented a policy of torturing persons detained in the so-called war on terror. Furthermore, in violation of the Convention against Torture, Mr. Bush allowed agents of the United States to secretly detain persons suspected of terrorism and rendition them to foreign countries for the purpose of interrogation by torture.

Mr. Bush approved and implemented a system of justice bereft of due process and rights for the accused to try those suspected of terrorism against the United States.

Mr. Bush, in direct violation of his oath to uphold the laws of the United States and its Constitution, asserted the authority to detain indefinitely any person he suspected of terrorism, actual or planned, against the United States.

Mr. Bush, in direct violation of his oath to uphold the laws of the United States and its Constitution, asserted the authority to and directed the National Security Agency to secretly collect data from the private communications of American citizens.

Mr. Bush suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus without sufficient cause.

Mr. Bush used tax policy to transfer wealth upward with disastrous results for the rich, the middle class and the poor alike.

Mr. Bush promoted tax policies which encouraged American businesses to outsource jobs to foreign countries to the great detriment of American workers and the American economy.

Mr. Bush attempted to destroy social security, which, had he had his way, would have been sucked dry in September's Wall Street debacle.

Mr. Bush ignored the humanitarian disaster in the wake for Hurricane Katrina for several days in callous disregard for the welfare and lives of American citizens.

Mr. Bush allowed those under the authority of his re-election campaign to deliberately distort the military record of his opponent, Senator John Kerry, by suborning false testimony calling into question Senator Kerry's valor while serving in Vietnam.

Mr. Bush ignored the threat to the planet of climate change caused by use of fossil fuels, at first by falsely asserting there was no problem and later, after admitting that such a problem did exist, simply doing nothing.

Mr. Bush allowed those under his authority to fire up to nine US Attorneys for political reasons, to wit, their refusal to prosecute meritless cases of voter fraud.

Mr. Bush allowed the Justice Department to prosecute innocent persons for political purposes, most infamously the case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who was wrongly convicted of accepting a bribe.

Mr. Bush, in an attempt to cover up several of the misdeeds enumerated here, issued false claims of executive privilege in order to prevent the testimony of aids and former aids before congressional investigators.

Mr. Bush, in direct violation of his oath to uphold the laws of the United States and its Constitution, asserted the authority to modify or simply ignore acts of Congress with signing statements affixed to the act when he signed it into law.

How dare Mr. Shapiro accuse American citizens of "not standing by the one person who stood by us"? The fact that this war criminal and constitutional scofflaw was never impeached and removed from office, that he is still free to come and go as he pleases rather than confined in a federal penitentiary, is ample evidence that too many American citizens stood by him too long.

With right wing talking heads and their celebrity guests calling the President-in-waiting a socialist or a communist because he believes in a progressive income tax, I am reminded of the days when members of the John Birch Society or other far right organization of the Cold War era thought there was a communist under every bed.

Birch Society founder Robert Welch earned a reputation as a whack job, which persists almost a quarter century after his death, for stating that President Eisenhower was a "conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy."

Dr. Martin Luther King was a frequent recipient of the communist epithet, almost always from segregationists and white supremacists. Equality, as right wing pundit Dennis Prager pointed out in just the last week, is the value that defines the political left. While Prager was simply conflating egalitarians with American Europophiles, the attempt in those days was to conflate any advocacy of equality, including racial equality, with communism.

This conflation of civil rights and communism lasted long after the issue was settled for most Americans, well into the 1980s when Senator Jesse Helms objected to declaring Dr. King's birthday a national holiday on the grounds that Dr. King was a communist. About the same time, your humble servant responded to a letter to the editor of the local newspaper which cited various laudatory remarks about Dr. King by obscure communists as proof that Dr. King was a communist. I pointed out that Lincoln was admired by no less a contemporary leftist than Karl Marx himself, and asked if that made the Great Emancipator a communist. On the other hand, even nowadays some on the far right point out what a reckless disregard for property rights the abolition of slavery was.

Barack Obama a communist? a socialist? Of course not. Nevertheless, by being accused of being one by the lunatic right, he joins good company.

For years, I've been of the view that Ayn Rand's philosophy is based on a poor reading of Aristotle.

A is A is Aristotle's law of identity. It is one of three axioms of Aristotelian logic. The other two are the law of contradiction (the poposition A is not A) is always false) and the law of the excluded middle (the proposition A or not A is always true).

A is A and man is man, Ms. Rand would say. But what is man? Depending on how that question is answered, one could prove just about anything.

Ms. Rand answer was that man is an acquisitive animal. The freedom to acquire things and territory is therefore the meaning of freedom itself, and any artifice that prevents an individual human from acquiring is immoral. Therefore, laissez faire capitalism is the only truly moral economic system. Selfishness is a virtue.

It's a pretty handy way of refuting Marxism in ten seconds or less. If that sounds too simple, it's because it is. Objectivism is an intellectual reaction to Marxism, and in rejecting oversimplified Marxist premises by simply asserting some form of their opposites, objectivism ends up being at least as flawed as orthodox Marxism. Objectivism and Marxism have a great deal in common in that both are materialist philosophies to the point of dogmatically rejecting a belief in God.

The definition of man presented in this example is a half-truth; recognizing it as such brings down the objectivist house of cards. That man is an acquisitive animal is true as far as it goes, but that man is also a social animal is an inconvenient truth for an objectivist. For the orthodox Marxist, that man is a acquisitive animal is the inconvenient truth that calls into question the practicality of a goal of a post-socialist utopia.

Man is both acquisitive and social, as well as intelligent. It is the survival strategy of our species, which is a slow runner and awkward tree climber. The dual nature of acquisitiveness and the need to be social often brings about contradictions in individuals causing spiritual conflict when the individual's intelligent nature makes him self-aware of the contradiction. Selfishness may be a positive character trait in a being who needs to acquire things and territory, but it can be disruptive to the cohesion of a social group.

 
These people are willing to believe anything, no matter what the source or how ridiculous, that furthers an agenda or supports a particular world view.

Of course, there are people around here like that, too. They tend to think that September 11 was in "inside job" and Osama had nothing to do with it. But I digress.

What Cenk left out of his summary of Andy Martin's "theory" is how Bill Ayers somehow fits into this. According to Martin, Ayers and other radical sixties leftists recruited Obama, who, we must keep in mind, is a secret Muslim with terrorist connections in this alternate universe. So those who sought to destroy the United States forty years ago have joined forces with those who seek to destroy her today, in spite of the fact they really have nothing in common other than violent tendencies and a hatred for or distrust of America. This sounds more like the plot to a bad science fiction novel.

Martin is a devotee of classical right wing ideology. That is to say he is a racist. All racism is inherently right wing. What defines the right wing is a rejection of democracy, where all humans are equal, and an embrace of a social hierarchy where some people have an inherent right to rule all others, or even kill them. This emblem of superiority may be race (Hitler), heroism (according to Mussolini), religion (according to the dominionists) or wealth (neoconservatism).

The political left embraces human equality as its fundamental principle an rejects slavery, imperialism and other forms and institutions of social or political hierarchy. However, misguided usage of right wing ideology is not unknown to the left. A recent example is leftist usage of anti-Semitism as a tool against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. The Israeli-Palestinian issue, in fact, has given birth to a bizarre conflation of left and right; we see racists embrace an anti-imperialist message, pretending to in solidarity with the Palestinian cause against Israeli ("Jewish") occupation and injustice while anti-imperialists, impatient with the occupation, lash out against not just the Israeli right but on all Jews (who "control everything").

Of course, that makes it very difficult to tell who's really left and who's really right.

Returning to Mr. Martin, any one can make sense out of his droppings probably belongs in the state hospital.

This is not as tragic a moment in western civilization as the sacking of Constantinople in 1453 or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but it suffices as one of those sad moments we will regret over time.

First of all, he gives western civilization primacy over those barbarian Muslim Ottomans, who simply swept aside what was left of the Byzantine Empire. I wouldn't consider this event a harbinger of good things, but that's because no empire deserves any legitimacy, reverence or allegiance, whether it is western or not. This is racism on Professor Anderson's part.

Second, all the Bolsheviks did was something similar to what the Turks did. What the Russian people needed was to energize solutions to their own problems in 1917, which would not have been possible had the war continued. Lenin thus swept aside the Kerensky government, whose war policies doomed it to failure. Kerensky and other liberals and leftists had already done part of what needed to be done by ousting the Tsar from power. Removing a corrupt and brutal power by itself, however, only leaves a vacuum if it is not accompanied by a positive and energetic program for change. That Kenensky did not have and Lenin did. The Bolshevik program was imperfect and, years later under Stalin, would become a grotesque imitation of Tsarist rule. Nevertheless, it was the best choice for the Russian people in 1917. Professor Anderson appears to be little more than a rank ideologue cursing the darkness rather than lighting a candle.

Professor Anderson finally gets around to admitting that "some" the Bush administration's economic policies were "bad, if not a disastrous." OK, I love understatement, too, Professor. He accuses Professor Krugman of being an anti-Bush partisan in his attacks.

Perhaps Professor Krugman is a partisan hack, but it's difficult to prove it based on critiques of the Bush administration. The administration's policies have been disastrous. Not just some of them, but all of them taken together. It will be hard to imagine any Wall Street big shot being held accountable for the collapse of a large investment firm or any other piece of rubble in this debacle; the laws were abolished Senator Gramm and Senator McCain, then signed into law by Mr. Bush the Frat Boy (and President Reagan and President Bush the Preppy and, lest we be accused of being partisan, President Clinton). By this time, there were no laws to break, so they broke none.

A deregulated market with only a few players, all of which suffer from corporate elephantiasis, does not self-regulate; it descends into a murky hell of greed and self-aggrandizement. A rising tide lifts all boats? Not any more, it doesn't. A rising stock market did not benefit common Americans, who saw their wages stagnate, if they were still drawing any after many jobs were outsourced to China and India. However, while a souring Dow meant nothing to stiffs like you and me, we will share in the hard times to come as stock prices drop like a rock in the sea.

As a result of this, I, who eight years ago owned no stock, now have a portfolio that includes Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns. AIG and will soon have several large banks as well. I never dreamed I would be so rich. Why am I worried?

Professor Anderson accuses the Bush administration of being socialist because of its recent takeovers of failing private firms and turns around to accuse Professor Krugman of believing the administration is not socialist enough. The fact is that the administration's actions are, like President Hoover's before he left office in 1933, too little and too late. Krugman's argument is that they may also be misdirected, since the real danger is the freezing of the credit markets.

Perhaps the solution will be found in a new New Deal. However, the New Deal was not, as Professor Anderson would have us believe, a socialist lite program that was set in place as soon as FDR was inaugurated. President Roosevelt was no profound intellectual; in fact, he compares only slightly favorably to President Reagan in that department. The tip I give FDR over Reagan is that he was in no way, shape or form the ideologue that Reagan was. Roosevelt had his brain trust, and he let them propose ideas. He would try anything and everything until he found something that worked.

That is the approach I want President Obama to take after he assumes power. I doesn't have to be socialism, it most certainly won't be unregulated capitalism, but it just has to work.

The McCain campaign has been lowering the expectations bar to give Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a fighting chance against Senator Joseph Biden in the debate scheduled to begin in a few minutes.

It is a fallacy to to award a contest to someone who does "better than expected," especially when the expectations gap is as wide as this. It is apalling that the MSM has been assisting the McCain campaign in establishing such a devious standard.

If I were to play a game of chess against Garry Kasparov and resign after 30 moves facing either checkmate or a ruinous loss of material making defending against checkmate impossible, I might be said to have done better than expected, but the fact is I still lost the game. The standard of winning in chess remains checkmating one's opponent. It is the only standard.

There is only standard in tonight's for even a satisfactory performance is whether the candidate presents himself as a credible potential president of the United States. In her televised interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, Mrs. Palin has failed to meet that standard by demonstrating an alarming ignorance current affairs (she did not know what the Bush Doctrine is) and US history (she could not name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade to which she could take exception). These were not trick questions. One could easily expect such questions on a high school civics exam.

Furthermore, she supports a position on crossing into Pakistan in a hypothetical pursuit of al Qaida that is supported by Senator Obama and opposed by Senator McCain; if there was any trick here, one could blame it on Senator McCain, whose stand on the issue is counter-intuitive to one that he would be expected to take. In a gaffe related to the present financial crisis, she suggested that Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac had always been government owned and operated. Most infamously, she has given as her idea of foreign policy experience to be living in a state from which Russia can be seen across a maritime border.

Mrs. Palin begins tonight's debate not only as an underdog, but in a deep hole she has dug herself. For this, the only person she has to blame other than herself is Senator McCain, who rolled the dice and gambled on an unknown quantity, unknown even to him, on the chance that she would emerge as a diamond in the rough rather than a poor student who doesn't do her homework.

Mrs. Palin's public performance thus far shows that her only qualifications to be president or vice president are those specified in the US Constitution: she is a natural-born American citizen over 35 years of age. There is no reason to expect more of her tonight, even if she manages to string talking points together coherently enough to make Tina Fey work Saturday to come up satire. Coherent nonsense is still nonsense.

Mrs. Palin's task tonight is not simply to do better than expected, but to show that she has the knowledge expected of the president. She doen't even necessarily have to look better than Senator Biden, she just needs to look credible.

My bet is she doesn't.

Television and radio news programs should take all the "campaign spokesmen" off the air. It doesn't matter whose spokesmen, just get them off the air. Stop booking them for interviews on Meet the Nation or Face the Press, appearances on Hardball or Countdown or CSPAN, or casual chats with Larry King.

The job of a campaign spokeman is to obfuscate, hide the truth, sell refrigerators to Eskimos and snake oil to the rest of us, and just make up "facts" out of thin air. A campaign spokesman isn't just uninformative, he's counter-informative. It isn't that he is performing no useful service to the voting public, he's more often than not doing a disservice.

Right now, like most people, I'm much more peeved at the McCain campaign than the Obama campaign for the sudden decline of intelligent discourse. It is, after all, Rick Davis who says (as if any one appointed him to make this decision) that this should be an election about personalities and not issues and it is Steve Schmidt who is playing Svengali to Sarah Palin's Trilby O'Ferrall least she put her foot in her mouth in the next few days and show what else besides that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are private corporations that she doesn't know. Speaking of Governor Palin, the PR wizards in the McCain campaign also concocted talking points about her foreign policy expertise ("she the governor of the state that's right next to Russia") and her military experience ("she's the commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard"). Since such credentials as presented are parodies of themselves, one might think they should show up in an Obama ad soon. And now we find from these same slick salesmen that Obama was obviously insulting Governor Palin when he wasn't even talking about her.

Altough they've not said anything nearly as outrageous, don't think for a minute that Senator Obama doesn't have people like that working for him. He, too, has his David Axelrod. But there's no reason to listen to his spin, either. Just because a campaign consultant works for your guy doesn't make him something other than an occupational liar. What was that about lipstick on a pig, again?

Four years ago, NBC did a disservice to the voting public by handing over the microphone to Karen Hughes and Mike McCurry for analysis. Either of them could have mailed in their remarks a week ahead of time. If McCurry sounded the less ridiculous of the two, it's because Kerry actually won all three debates; don't think for a minute that really had any influence on anything he said. Ms. Hughes was forced, as a loyal and professional campaign spokesperson, to call black white and white black.

Let's have no more of that. Enough!

]i]The New York Times ran its editorial on the acquittal of Salim Hamdan this evening. It is mistitled Guilty as Ordered. Apparently the Times, like me, was expecting Hamdan to found guilty as Bush and Cheney had ordered.

If Salim Hamdan had been guilty as ordered, he would have been convicted on all counts, regardless of the evidence. That is what the Bushies wanted, according to Colonel Morris Davis, whom The New York Times quotes in this editorial.

The military commissions process created by a joint effort of the Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress is indeed a rigged system, or was designed to be. However, Americans apart from Messrs. Bush and Cheney and their flunkies in the Pentagon and Justice Department (I'm talking to you, Professor Yoo; are you paying attention, Mr. Gonzales? don't go to sleep on me, Mr. Addington) believe in due process and fair trials, especially trained jurists.

I was certain that Salim Hamdan would be found guilty on all charges. The Pentagon even got to hand pick the jury. We in the public would have done none the wiser, for in this misbegotten kangaroo court the evidence could be classified and the proceedings closed. The kangaroos refused to jump on the command of the neoconservatives. I think I owe an apology to Captain Keith Allred, the chief judge, and the jury for displaying a degree of professionalism and acquitting Hamdan on all charges except the one not in dispute: that he was Osama bin Laden's driver. Insofar as that in any kind of crime, it isn't a war crime. Making up reasons out of thin air to invade a sovereign nation is; torture is; and denying combat detainees due process is; but those are bridges to be crossed another day, by a band of rogues who wear western business suits rather than keffiyehs.

The verdict was not what was ordered. It is now Bush, Cheney and the other rogues who once again stand at the bar of world opinion awaiting a harsher verdict than one that could have been handed down against Osama's chauffeur. They are charged with constituting a kangaroo court so lacking in justice that the kangaroos would have none of it.

This would be a good time to revisit the military commission process, and shut it down.