“Winning isn’t the most important thing,” Vince Lombardi once said, “it’s the only thing.” It is a quintessentially American sentiment coming as it did in the wake of the victories of World War II. But it is also a self defeating approach to life, which inevitably also serves losses up to all of us. Dealing with loss, and growing out of a sense of entitlement, is a major part of maturing in people, and in nations.

We Americans see ourselves as winners, and not only for ourselves but we like to believe for the greater good of all man and womankind. When we look into our national mirror we still see the heroes of World War II who fought bravely and vanquished the dark forces of unspeakable foulness. We see ourselves as the good guys on the side of God, who have taken up the fight over the last century for ours, and His, values of democracy and human rights. Our villainous foes in this simplistic narrative were the sordid and murderous likes of the Nazi’s, the Communists and now the Islamic Extremists against whom we must once again call upon our brave sons and daughters to dispatch. But there’s a serious problem. It just ain’t like that.

Like all people who achieve power, the line between what’s good for us and what’s good for the rest of the world has blurred over the last fifty years. We have excused the accumulation of assets and wealth for ourselves as offerings into the collection tray for the Lord’s work that is our national mission. This posture historically invariably leads the powerful to hubris and arrogance and the disastrous overreach which has historically brought all empires crashing down. It’s the Napoleon in Russia moment that no empire can seem to resist. Power, it seems, is a never ending High School Biology yeast experiment that cannot stop itself until it’s too late.


No one personifies this inflated sense of hubris more perfectly than General David Petraeus, and it’s a sadly telling sign of our own inability to adapt to the changing world that we should have a military man front and center in our current political dialogue. The reality is that our military is now among our least useful assets, and indeed the days of it being useful to our nation are long over. The military has one function, to kill and destroy, and that is not what is called for to advantage us as a nation anywhere in the world. Nor has it really been since the Japanese surrendered over sixty years ago. Since that day, American influence moved from the front lines of battle to the shadowy alleys of covert operations. It was the CIA, not the military, that took center stage through the decades of tension with “the communists.” The times we did engage the military, in Korea and Vietnam, and Iraq and Afghanistan have been useless and wasteful and nothing short of debacles (very few Americans indeed can recall anything about the Korean War).

The great problem we now face is that General Petraeus has developed a plan to use the military as a psuedo-CIA via what he calls the COIN Strategy. His plan is essentially to use the military as functionaries against “counter insurgents” which is a nice way of saying fighting people in their own countries. It’s what Custer would have called Native Americans. But while motivations may differ, no one accuses us of trying to exterminate the Afghans in order to take over their land, imagine the 19th century US Calvary trying to infiltrate Native American villages in order to pit one tribe against another. Imagine men in mutton chops and blue uniforms sitting around the fire, smoking the peace pipe and trying to convince tribal elders that they were really just there to help. That ridiculous vision is probably not far off of what the Afghans see when they look at us and it is why Petraeus’ whole idea is such a bad one. Nation building simply can’t be done in this day and age, and even if it could be, the military is the last tool in the box that could be of any use.

Winning is not the only thing in international relationships. While we are busy pouring our blood and billions of our dollars into the sand of the Middle East the Chinese are spending their billions buying land and mineral rights in Africa. They are having, and will continue to have, many cultural and political problems in that venture because like the British in America 250 years ago, they appear incapable of facilitating “win-win” scenarios with African nations. The Chinese seriously lack political and cultural savvy and seem destined to foster resentment but you don’t see them pouring troops and tanks into the region to try to nation build to get what they want. That would be, well, stupid.

On this anniversary of our country’s founding we should all stop and take a long serious look at where we are going and how we are choosing to try to get there. The reality is that there is simply nowhere useful that dinosaurs in military uniforms like David Petreaus can take us anymore and the sadder truth is that they can only make every situation they enter into worse. Muslims around the world do not hate our freedoms, at least not enough to strap on bombs and fly airplanes into buildings. What they hate is our military in their yards and the longer we keep in there the deeper and more hateful our relations with the Islamic world will become. And nothing good will come of any of this, only more senseless death and destruction while the next generation of shoe bombers and worse who lost innocent family members in the senseless violence lace up and head for the airline ticket counter.

In the ever expanding collection of career-ending utterances caught on video, few have been as deadly as Helen Thomas’ observation that the Israelis should “get the Hell out of Palestine.” Unlike most of these episodes, where we are all treated to the delightful sight of perpetrators twisting and squirming and humiliating themselves as they try to dislodge themselves (can there be any more glorious example than former congressman Eric “The Tickler” Massa on Glenn Beck’s show?), not so with Thomas. Within literally hours of the video appearing everyone who had ever known her scampered like swimmers who spot a turd in the swimming pool to jump in front of a camera and disavow ever having had so much as a coffee with her. The media has been playing polo with her severed head– at the expense of the much more important story of the Gaza flotilla and the shooting death of nine people by Israeli commandos– ever since, making sure to drive the point home.

Most Americans are now numb to images of the Hellish inferno that has engulfed the Middle East and western and southern Asia since the British bailed out of the region leaving careless, ill-thought out partitions behind. We have seen so many images of exploding people and buildings and sobbing mothers in movies and on television that they now wash over us like ads for cars and light beer. Most Americans just shrug their shoulders at the grim reality as though this was just how this part of the world operates and there’s not much we can do about it. But that would be wrong. Very wrong. We are, all of us in this country, very active players in every aspect of the horrific drama that is playing out daily from Egypt to Pakistan.

We have always been involved. In the post-war years, we used the CIA as the primary tool to influence the people in the oil rich terrain of the Middle East and we pumped money and arms into the formation of Israel and we pay handsomely to keep the current dictatorship in Egypt in place ($1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance- $50 billion total since 1975). But since 9/11, we have upped the ante and sent our young men and women in the military overseas to “keep us safe,” though no one has ever articulated just how that works- which is because it doesn’t. It does the opposite. All our military has done since 9/11 is jam a stick over and over into a hornet’s nest beyond their imagining. And there is no more angry hornet’s nest than Gaza.

Make no mistake, Gaza is under siege. The point of the Israeli blockade is not to prevent “arms” from entering Gaza, but as adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Dov Weissglas, suggested it was “to put the Palestinians on a diet.” It’s a punitive, not a preventive, measure. The Israelis are, literally and undeniably, trying to starve out the inhabitants of Gaza by denying them food and medicine while they continue building settlements which they will do until the question of “land for peace” is effectively moot. It is an inhumane strategy born of decades of the most bitter hatred that humans are capable of- the religious kind.

But lest anyone shrug their shoulders as though this were just another sad problem in a distant land, it is OUR problem because, rightly, in the eyes of the world the United States of America is funding, aiding and abetting this indefensible blockade each and every day. The blockade is quite literally ours every bit as much as it is Israels, as is the responsibility for every home that is destroyed and the blood of every person who is killed. We need to understand that in the same way that the rest of the world sees it.

The time is long, long overdue, however, that both we and the Israelis realize that, morality aside, killing our way out of the Palestinian conflict is simply not a viable solution. It worked in America in the 19th century against the native Americans, but that was a long time ago. Nor will there ever be a “two state solution.” Sure we can lop off the head of an elderly journalist who makes off the cuff remarks that criticize Israel, or who points out, however inartfully, the inconvenient truth that much of today’s Israel is indeed populated by post-war immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe who did indeed uproot Palestinian families and take over their homes. Denying that reality gets none of us closer to a solution. But this is not a war and we need to understand that. In the wars of days gone by the superior military force prevailed by inflicting punishment to the other side until a surrender was tendered. Those days are long gone. There will be no surrenders in the Palestinian conflict, or in the Middle East writ large, and no amount of military force or killing or suffering can produce one (and the same is obviously true of the Palestinians who, stupidly surrender their moral standing by shooting rockets). The sooner all involved finally get that through their thick skulls the sooner we all might, just maybe, begin a journey towards a solution that factors human dignity, let alone rights, into the equation because that’s the only way out of this mess. But as long as the religious zealots in Israel continue see building settlements, one by one, until all of greater Israel is realized, there’s going to be a lot more misery, and some of it’s going to wash on on us again unless we do something to stop it.

People in America are pissed off, no doubt about it. And rightly so. The America we thought we knew feels like it’s falling apart- and that means all of us not just those who can’t abide a black president. From the run away deficit to Katrina to the bank meltdown to the oil slick filling up the Gulf of Mexico, corruption seems rampant and nobody seems to be able to do anything right anymore. None of us are happy, save a handful of bankers, and few are optimistic about the future. But forget the politics, let’s just talk about good ol’ downright stupid for a moment- and the problem stupid presents for us all.

Is anyone really surprised to find out that Wall Street firms were engaged in shady deals that reaped billions of dollars? No, of course not, but when the average American feels his own pants getting pulled down, he gets upset and grabs a pitchfork and a torch. The reality is simply that our most sacred political agreement has been breached. The age old American axiom- that we don’t really care if government is a grab bag for cronies and corporate interests who line their pockets as long as we, the average American, can hang on to enough of what we earn to live at a basic level of security and consumer comfort. The great problem with a pissed off public is that, untrained as they are in how things really work, they cannot navigate the complexities of solutions and are lead by those who simply call for hanging and burning. That is where we are today and the great problem is that those voices of leadership are, for lack of a better word, stupid.

In one of her speeches during the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin scoffed at wasteful government spending projects like research into fruit flies. As most anyone who took High School Biology should know, and as anyone in the science field will tell you, fruit flies are one of the most valuable subjects for scientific research available because their life cycle is so fast. They are heavily used in genetics research among other things. It was a really stupid thing to say and what’s more damning than just her saying it is that no one on her staff apparently had any clue either. Even if you excuse Ms. Palin for not knowing this herself, as a potential president, she should at the very least have someone around her who does have a clue. But she is stupid surrounded by uniformed.

But the rightly oft-ridiculed Ms. Palin is not alone. Last week Rush Limbaugh told his radio audiences that the oil pumping out into the ocean was not really that big a deal because, like the ocean itself, oil is part of the natural world and nature would absorb it. As Bill Maher noted, mercury is also part of the natural world but you don’t put it in your Cheerios. Crude oil, of course, is not found in the ocean and nature has gone to great lengths to keep them separated. It was an amazingly stupid thing to say and shows just how lacking in basic education Mr. Limbaugh also is.

Remember Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal? He was the Great Brown Hope for the Republican Party for a few minutes until he sashayed into a video performance like a stylist during Fashion Week. Homophobia aside, while the less than macho aura was problem enough for the Republicans, Mr. Jindal also, in that same speech, railed against $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.” “Instead of monitoring volcanoes,” he opined, “what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington.” This comment was worse than either Palin or Limbaugh’s because, ignorant of basic science as those two are, coming from the very state where poor planning created the most notorious disaster this century, you’d think he’d be among the last to ridicule disaster planning. It was a stupid thing to say.

And then there is the increasingly pathetic specter of John McCain as he ransoms his dignity in the face of a challenge to his senate seat from a Neanderthal who can do nothing but mimic. Never known to be a towering intellect, the 2008 presidential campaign revealed an intemperate, scatterbrained airhead with an appalling sense of judgment. This was a person who, with no understanding of the history and dynamics between Russia and its former state Georgia, nevertheless when a conflict broke out rashly proclaimed that American’s “were all Georgians now.” When it turned out that the Georgians themselves initiated the conflict to try to manipulate NATO countries, McCain looked…well, stupid. But there is a pattern here. He made a great show of “suspending” his campaign to return to Washington as the financial crisis unfolded only to sit slumped in a chair with the dumbfounded look of a student facing a test he had no clue about.According to the book Game Change, rather than getting a briefing on the drive from the airport to a meeting at the White House, he instead talked on the phone for an hour about dinner plans and then turn to his briefer at the last minute as he was getting out of the car and asked “what do I kneed to know?”

What ties all of these dimwits together is not conservative or right wing politics. What they all share is the idea that political success is simple and that it’s tied to nostalgia. They think the way to get people’s votes and to win elections is by promising to take them back to the good ol’ days when life too was simple. That is the really stupid idea, because there is never any going back televisions with four channels and dial telephones. The naked reality is that human existence is far more complicated, for good and not so good and that going forward will be difficult but it will also be complex as all progress invariably is. Following pissed off simpletons and hotheads waving pitchforks and torches who don’t understand science ain’t gonna lead any of us back to the past, mythical or otherwise. New Orleans will never be the same and the millions of Spanish speaking immigrants ain’t going anywhere. Our days of being the big, bully, “exceptional American” pig around the world also need to be over if we are going to survive. We are all going to have to learn to live on, and with, less.

It’s understandable that the realities of today’s world, and our diminishing place in it, will cause grief for many Americans who used to view the world as two camps- fellow Americans and those who wish they were. The world is equalizing whether we like it or not and the sooner we all move on from the anger and denial stage towards the bargaining and accepting stages the better it will be for all of us, and more importantly for our children. Stupid won’t get us there and the longer we listen to stupid the harder it will be for all of us.

If you are like most Americans, the name a-ha is synonymous with their 1985 hit Take On Me which not only sold a stunning million and a half copies world wide in it’s first week of release but also produced a dazzling, live action/roto-scope video that became an instant MTV staple. But as a result of the song’s success, and the lack of a followup hit song to match it, a-ha has since been overlooked and relegated to the expansive “one hit wonders of the 80’s” bin. That song is, however, but a sliver of the band’s impressive output in the 25 years since, a body of work that has largely gone unnoticed in America- and an unrepresentative one at that. As a result, as they embark upon their final tour together, and while they are filling arenas and stadiums elsewhere in the world, they are making a total of five stops in club-sized venues on our shores in the coming weeks, two shows in New York, one in Chicago and two in Los Angeles.

Despite Take on Me, and their impossibly beautiful front man and lead singer Morten Harket, a-ha was never a pop band in the mold of their contemporaries like Culture Club or Duran Duran who existed to produce hit singles. No doubt much to the chagrin of their record label, the group never pursued the 80’s band formula of catchy, disposable pop ditties that ruled the airwaves in those days but explored instead a heavily textured, anthemic style that owed more to progressive rock staples like Yes and Genesis than it did to the post-punk skinny ties and jangly guitars of new wave. In an era that embraced simplicity, both of style and thought, a-ha’s lush cinematic style and thoughtful lyrics, while hugely popular elsewhere in the world, was never sold to American audiences. What most of us has missed, however, was not a one-hit wonder, but a career and a body of work that matured and grew stronger, both musically and visually in both design and video, with each successive release. Throughout their career the band’s video work was uniformly strong and captivating, and much copied.

The bane of 80’s music, of course, is the drum machines and programmed keyboards that flattened and sapped the life and vitality out of so many of the songs and is what makes them sound so hokey today. While a few artists, like Culture Club and The Pet Shop Boys, were able to use the technology to create interesting and lasting work, most followed the Duran Duran model and endlessly decorated rank turds with saccharine strings and fake brass, filling the cultural cesspit with Euro-trash and casting a stench over the entire decade. A-ha, however, was different. Their second album, 1986’s Scoundrel Days was a far more sophisticated work than their debut effort. Gone was the pitter patter of drum machine, replaced by dynamic live drums and meaty rhythms over which Morten Harket’s majestic, Orbison-esque, vocals soared. From the raw and gritty I’ve Been Losing You and Manhattan Skyline to the serene and gorgeous Soft Rains of April this was a band that had outgrown being teeny-bopper heartthrobs. Over the subsequent releases since the mid-eighties, the songwriting team of Magne “Mags” Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy has created a rich body of work that, while not instantly accessible as pop music, holds up impressively over time. They leave now having just created one of their finest works, truly a rarity in the entertainment business.

But the end of a career of twenty five years is also the end of a relationship between an artist and the public. Most of the artists we connect to in our youth end up being disappointments at best and embarrassing reality show disaster areas at worst. Many middle-aged folks have had to try to explain to blank faced kids about why someone was so great “back in the day.” Anyone who dragged their kids over the last few years to go see the bloated Def Leppard’s or Motley Crue’s of the world clearly had some serious explaining to do. But those handful of artists who maintain their integrity, a Bruce Springsteen or a Paul McCartney, represent more than just songs. They are interactive reference points with their audiences who have grown up and older with them. We look back over the years together and share milestones. It’s one thing to bathe in nostalgia and go and see Van Halen play the songs you grew up with but something else to see someone like Springsteen with whom you have a long and ongoing conversation.


A-ha’s most recent, and apparently last, album The Foot of the Mountain is as good as the rest of their work, as are the videos. Harket, astonishingly, remains not only in great voice but still looks almost the same as he did when he burst onto the covers of teen magazines around the world. The band clearly has a lot more gas in the tank, but obviously have their reasons for ending the band’s career. Loss is a part of growing older but it’s a particular shame to see someone go who is still in great form, and to whom you want to keep conversing. And the older you get the more precious those relationships are. Below is the video for the title track, and as they say in the High School music class, “once more with feeling.”

It’s true that we live in a time where wails of disaster and the end of life as we know it, from “death panals” for the elderly to the advent of Hitlerian totalitarianism, echo across cable television and the Internet. It’s also true that virtually none of these events or challenges are real- there is no impending socialist regime or any furnaces being built to wheel granny into. The challenges we all need to worry about are the ones that no one is talking about.

For anyone unfamiliar with the great Enron debacle, for as complex as the legal and financial mess was, the real problem with the Texan energy behemoth was a very simple one. Everyone involved knew full well that their work was not only morally wrong but it was a financially and legally doomed enterprise- a train ride hurtling towards a crash. Even those outside the actual offices of power, and especially on the brokers’ floor, could smell the rot but chose to look the other way, especially if there was a paycheck coming. Many people look the other way at morally questionable corporate behavior when there’s a paycheck involved, but at Enron the amorality gained so much momentum that it made people stupid as well. Lulled by the culture of stupidity that engulfed them, they sat on their hands and watched the brick wall coming towards them.

Intelligence being paralyzed by immorality is certainly not a new thing. Golfer Tiger Woods did the exact same thing- acted immorally and then dumber and dumber until he was caught. We all have a litany of astonishing voicemails and text messages that anyone who can out think a head of lettuce should have known better than to leave. We surely hardly even need to mention the names Bill Clinton or John Edwards in this regard. Courage, especially of the moral variety, is a rare, rare thing.

Sadly for us all, the halls of Congress today are no different from the halls of Enron a decade ago. “What are ya gunna do?” groupthink and hopelessness has anesthetized and paralyzed most of Washington D.C. Where the traders at Enron all laughed and joked about old ladies sitting in the dark when they cut California’s power, today’s yucks are about the lobbyists who now freely run the government and not only helped themselves to our treasury but have now run up the national credit cards to the breaking point. What Congress is doing is exactly what the good folks at Enron did- go further and further into debt on the promise of reimbursement down the nebulous way- with Enron via stock and with Congress via treasury securities (currently we offer banks free money from the Fed with which they turn around and by treasury bonds that yield 3 or 4 percent- so we’re paying banks interest to borrow money from us…not exactly how it’s supposed to work).

When Enron’s Sherron Watkins saw the books she immediately went to the chairman, Kenneth Lay, and told him there are two kinds of companies with financial irregularities- those who open their books and ask for help in fixing the situation, and stand a chance of staying in business, and those who continue to hide and swindle until the bitter end. We know how Enron turned out and it’s hard to imagine anyone in Congress behaving any differently than Lay did. Tiger Woods famously texted one of his courtisans that he “couldn’t wait to spank that ass that I own.” Sadly for us, the ass that’s owned, and that’s going to get spanked, is ours.

At least Benjamin Netanyahu is not joining the long line of Israeli leaders who have bullshitted us all about a “two state solution.” That was never a serious idea, was never going to happen and never made the slightest sense at all. Did anyone really ever think the Israelis were going to dismantle their settlements and allow the Palestinians an actual state- to have their own economy, security force and sea or airport? America also promised a two state solution to deal with its troublesome indigenous people, we called them reservations, but despite all the signed treaties, American intentions then were never any different than Israel’s are today. Multiple states were never going to happen here or there.

Like the vast majority of his predecessors and supporters, Netanyahu has little if any regard for the Palestinians, which is why the current state of apartheid exists. He believes that the Zionist promised land includes all of the currently “occupied territories” and that the rest of the world just needs to get over the idea of Palestinian claims to the area, let alone, laughably, a sovereign state. All of the two state blather, meetings and negotiations and over publicized handshaking photo-ops have always been nothing but an Israeli cover for continued, and endless, settlement building towards a Palestinian version of the Trail of Tears. His great gamble is that with settlements going full steam ahead, and with rock solid support from AIPAC and other political powerhouses in America, he simply no longer needs to pay lip service to two state fiction. Perhaps by seriously trying to start talks the Obama Administration has just called Israel’s bluff, but either way, it’s clearly out there. So now what?

The choice before the Israelis is simple. Do they continue the pantomime of pretending to want some sort of agreement with the Palestinians while they slowly continue to encroach, settlement by settlement, until there are no more occupied territories left? Or do they just put an end to the problem by sending in the troops and just annexing the territories the old fashioned way and then hunker down and weather the storm. Sure there would be a great gnashing of teeth and load moans from the international community but for how long? More importantly, would anyone actually do anything about it?

The choice before the Obama Administration is equally simple. Does it want to sit passively and let the Israelis follow which ever option they choose- either way with the same end game in mind- and for America to take on its share of the scorn and the generation of burning Jihad that will result? Or does it want to take a step back from the abyss and not only act itself but engage the global community if necessary in taming the Netanyahu/uber-Zionist beast before it really does drag us into a clash of civilizations? The infamous “neo-cons,” the vast majority of whom have direct ties Netanyahu, will tell us that it’s too late and that the die is cast and that Israel and America must now stand together against the Muslim world. But it’s simply not true. Were America to insert itself as an impartial and serious broker into the conflict and force compromises from both sides- and above all halt the settlement building- we would be seen around the world in a new light of fairness and respectability, and rightly so. And as we work on our own negotiations with various Taliban and other factions both in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region such credibility would be invaluable.

The real question for all of us as Americans is this: Do we really want to take on the Muslim world for a generation just so that Israeli hardliners can realize their fundamentalist dream of subjugating all of “the promised land?” If so, considering what a handful of angry men with box cutters were able to achieve, the price tag will be very, very high indeed.

One can only imagine how angry Vice President Joe Biden is today after being so humiliatingly bitch slapped by the Israelis, who are now drifting farther and farther towards the gun wingnut zone. By announcing yet another 1,600 strong settlement to be built, shocking no one familiar with Israel’s long term “reality on the ground” strategy, while Biden was standing in Jerusalemthey sent a strong and unmistakable message to both Biden and the Obama Administration. “Fuck you!” Fuck you about settlements and, more importantly, fuck you about Iran.

Politics, as the old axiom goes, makes for strange bedfellows. Sometimes the otherwise unpalatable enemy of your enemy is your friend, but sometimes you must stand by the enemy of your friend for the friend’s own sake. This is the situation we now face with the rapidly escalating tension between Israel and Iran which has the potential to become a full scale crisis with almost unthinkable ramifications.

The Israelis are clearly set to launch an air strike against Iran in a stunningly misguided attempt to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons capability. This is something over which neither they nor anyone else, given that meaningful Russian and Chinese sanctions are unobtainable, have any control whatsoever. To launch such a strike- a naked, aggressive act of war- would require at the least the tacit approval of the the White House, something the Obama Administration has wisely not thus far been willing to grant. An air strike on Iran would not only be a disaster for everyone involved, it would have the exact opposite effect that the Israelis, and we, desire. Not only would it be almost certainly ineffective, it would nevertheless unite the currently divided Iranian nation against America and Israel and thoroughly convince anyone in Iran who needed convincing that a nuclear capability was now essential to the nation’s survival. It would most certainly solidify and empower the Iranian military and would be the death of the burgeoning “green revolution” movement.

But such an air strike would have a much deeper and more detrimental effect on American standing in the world. After eight years of the blundering cowboy diplomacy that wreaked so much havoc in the world, the majority of which has yet to be visited upon us, for all of it’s shortcomings in domestic politics, the Obama Administration has made great gains on the international stage. Gone is the knee jerk, dimwitted, babbling about us “all being Georgians” in the wake of the dispute between Russia and its neighbor or the suspicions that America’s crusade to spread democracy was simply a cover for muscling in on other people natural resources. Barack Obama is clearly, and rightly, seen around the world as someone who is trying to resolve conflicts, and clean up messes, not start new ones. To be seen standing next to an unprovoked, preemptive Israeli attack on Iran would be seen around the world as yet another front on a war against the Muslim world. It would destroy our credibility as a world power and galvanize both Sunni and Shiite Islam against us for a generation.

The Israelis are ragingly drunk on a cocktail of fear and testosterone. And despite this lashing of Joe Biden, the best thing a friend can do for them, and for the entire world, is to take their glass and car keys away and hope they will see reason in the morning.

It’s perfectly understandable that students and faculty of California’s universities and colleges are upset at the financial situation they are facing. It’s also understandable that they feel compelled to action. What is sad is how stunningly clueless they and their leaders are and how their actions today have harmed rather than helped their cause.

Consider the image above. It perfectly illustrates exactly how NOT to make any headway with the rest of the state’s population. To start, notice the guy holding up a UAW sign. The United Auto Workers? Really? Is there any less credible outfit in the eyes of the American people imaginable other than perhaps Wall Street bankers? (and bankers, you can be sure, have good enough sense not hold up signs in a protest identifying themselves as such). Sure, most people don’t know that UC grad students have aligned themselves with the union but nevertheless it should be obvious that the visible participation of the union who helped run the American auto industry into the toilet is not helpful to put it mildly.

Next, the banner “students of color on strike.” What does that mean exactly and why put it out there? What is the point of making a skin color distinction? Does this mean that “uncolored students” are not striking? Are the people of California supposed to be more concerned or threatened to know that “students of color” are protesting? Why on Earth would someone make the funding problems in education about “race?” That is exactly what you DON’T do if you have a clue. If you want to protest and make a case to the people of California writ large, what you do is NOT make it about race, or about minorities. You make the case, as it should be made, that cuts in education hurt us all.

Lastly, and most stupidly of all, you don’t protest cuts in education by shutting down schools. It’s like the urban riots over the last four decades where people have gone out into the streets and trashed their own neighborhoods and stores. These are schools with paid faculty not the factories of old whose owners are vulnerable to lost income when workers strike, but so lacking in imagination and understanding are these protesters than they are unable to visualize a model for themselves beyond the union strife of the last generation.

The very last thing you want to do when your economy is sinking is make cuts in education, especially when your manufacturing and low skill job base has vanished. It’s not about people of color or Spanish speakers, it simply relegates the entire next generation to more weakness and grimmer prospects for the future. But you certainly don’t make a case for the society as a whole by drawing attention to your skin tone or your affiliation with notoriously inept and corrupt unions and you don’t shut down the very schools whose value you are trying to emphasize. What you do is organize away from campus, in town squares and city halls, and involve as many diverse people as you can to speak with a united voice. And when, and only when, that sort of protest is effectively deployed will anyone take serious notice.

Oh yeah, and the Anarchists don’t help much either…

Love or her politics, there was a moment, right when Nancy Pelosi ascended to the office of Speaker of the House, that it looked as though, she might actually do some “swamp draining.” Perhaps its a sexist thing, that women seem somehow more fair and decent, but it appeared that she might enforce a higher ethical standard. But, as always, politics is about alliances and it’s hard to toss a long standing ally out onto the street and, all position issues and ideology aside, Pelosi is no different from any of the rest of them.

The case of Charlie “Swampthing” Rangel, however, and despite is “leave of absence,” is absolutely beyond the pale. It’s probably a truism that anyone who stays in congress over ten years will accumulate things that can’t stand the light of day, from trips to golf rounds to plane tickets, etc. But the Swampthing Rangel case is so very far beyond that. He’s been around for forty years and is no less than the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which despite its boring name, is one of the most powerful committees in the whole congress. It oversees, ironically, the tax code, the very thing Rangel has apparently so egregiously trespassed. The New York Post reported that Rangel did not declare the income that he earned from an apartment building in the Caribbean that he and several major campaign contributors are investors in. The income that Rangel received from this investment could be as much as seventy five thousand dollars a year. Seventy five thousand dollars a year? Seriously? And that’s just the tip of the Rangel slimeberg.

The point that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats miss here is that people, and not just the Tea Party crowd, are FED UP with this kind of crap. Sure it happens, and we all know that congress is a slimy, corrupt institution, but when a slimy turd like Rangel floats to the visible surface, it has to be removed as fast as possible. If she wants to retain any…ANY…credibility, Pelosi needs to yank him out of his committee chair and NOW!

For all of the jokes and snickering about Sarah Palin and her lack of knowledge about politics and policy, consider this. Girl is getting paid and in a major, major way. For her 45 minute appearance at tonight’s “Tea Party Convention” she will drop a check for $125,000 into her back account. That’s more than she made in a year as governor of Alaska. With an entry fee of over $500, however, the event will be light on those who are actually supposed to constitute the whole “tea bag” movement, the regular Joes and Janes who drive their flag adorned camper vans filled with “Obama the African Lyin’ King” posters from protest event to protest event. Instead it’s a conference for high rollers who want to associate themselves with the movement people who won’t actually be present, let alone represented. It will be like calling an event a black empowerment conference and hiring Jesse Jackson to address a room full of rich white people who want to look like they care. But girl is getting paid and in a major, major way.

Then consider her book. It was written to sell to all those folks in the camper vans and their ilk who consider her a leader and want to hear what she has to say- or rather want to hear her say what they want to say and are sure she wants to say too. But, given her notorious inexperience with the written word, she had Lynn Vincent, a features writer for the uber-conservative World Magazine, write it for her. We can’t know what Vincent’s deal with Palin was, but we can bet pretty safely that it’s a paltry percentage of Palin’s reported $7 million haul.

Lastly, consider her gig at Fox News for which she’s clearly also getting a very fat paycheck. Fox and company are probably smart enough to know that Palin’s value is in direct correlation to her scarcity. The more she’s on the screen, the less valuable she’ll become and they must know that it’s only a matter of time before she’ll say something mind blowingly stupid that will blow her whole deal. Fox’s answer to Rachel Maddow she is clearly not, but she obviously knows this and has zero interest in wading through policy details or masterbating into a microphone for three hours like her pal Limbaugh.

But perhaps she and her snowmobile husband have figured all this out too? Perhaps, after having been through it once and being a national laughingstock, they have zero interest in running for a public office again. Perhaps they know the smart play is to cash in as much as possible while she’s hot enough to command these big checks and before she is relegated, as she most surely will be, to the Ross Perot/Monica Lewinsky pantheon of “used to be’s.” Until then, girl is going to get paid and in a major, major way.

So who’s the real idiot here?

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