It Starts To Make Sense

When lots of people said, "We invaded Iraq because of the oil", I was willing to consider it as one possible reason, but it also had the hollow ring of empty rhetoric for me, especially as we failed to produce a decent flow of crude.
(3.5M bbl/day pre-war, 1.5M bbl/day now)

It seems I was pretty wrong on that one.  Almost crazy stupid wrong.  For one thing, while invading Iraq was indeed about securing the supply, more importantly it was about controlling the flow (but that's just a little bonus info - read on).

A book review by Matt Stoller via Naked Capitalism:

The use of coal and oil in the context of industrialization has always been about who has the power to profit from the surplus these energy forms produce, but until now, no one has pulled the various historical details together into a historical narrative laying bare the fascinating power dynamics behind the rise of Western political systems and their relationship with energy. Carbon Democracy is an examination of our civilization’s 400 hundred year use of carbon-based energy fueling sources, and the political systems that grew up intertwined with them. Rather than presenting energy and democracy as separate things, like a battery and a device, Mitchell discusses the political architecture of the Western world and the developing world as inherently tied to fueling sources. The thesis is that elites have always sought to maximize not the amount of energy they could extract and use, but the profit stream from those energy sources. They struggled to ensure they would be able to burn carbon and profit, without having to rely on the people who extract and burned it for them. Carbon-based fuels thus cannot be understood except in the context of labor, imperialism and democracy.

--and--

And oil companies operated not to maximize production, but to sabotage it. Mitchell wrote, “The companies had learned from Standard Oil that it was easier to control the means of transportation. Building railways and pipelines required negotiating rights from the government, which typically granted the further right to prevent the establishing of competing lines. After obtaining the rights, the aim was usually to delay construction, but without losing the right. Iraq became the key place to sabotage the production of oil. It would retain that role through much of the twentieth century, and reacquire it in a different way in the twenty-first century.”

So it turns out that all the Geopolitics and whatever nuevo-jargon maneuverings you care to mention over the last 50 years or so is just the same old imperial game of grab the cash and make a stash?

Same shit, new day.  And Jesus wept.

Sounds Familiar

An editorial cartoon published some time in the early 1930s:

What Does Leadership Look Like?

Go ahead - tell me there's no difference.  Tell me it doesn't matter who you vote for.  Tell me you're gonna sit on your ass and just let the shit happen.

Wait - What?

From Salon:

Yesterday, Ryan announced that he is launching a $2 million ad buy, something unprecedented for a congressman who has barely spent over $2 million totalin previous election cycles. The Zerban campaign saw it as a sign that Ryan, who has never faced a very credible Democratic challenger, is Nervous about his prospect in the district this year.

The poll comes just a day after Ryan released his own internal poll that was meant to show his election is inevitable. Ryan’s survey showed him up 25 points, beating Zerban 58 to 33 percent. That’s a drop from a June internal poll, which found the race at 63 to 29 percent. Considering the expectations behind Ryan and the resources in his favor, anything showing the race to be less than a blowout is surprising and likely not welcome at Ryan HQ.

Just a fuckin' minute.  Under the law, Paul Ryan gets to run for as many different offices as he can afford to run for?  And if he wins both of these races, he just chooses which one he likes better?

So we have a huge problem with Dark Money and the risk that we could end up with at least 2 branches of the federal gov't owned by 15 or 20 billionaires, but now we get to add the little problem that arises when Ryan (eg) wins both races, chooses "to serve" as VP and basically (in effect) gets to pick his own successor for his House Seat?  Well ain't that just won-fuckin'-derful?

Yes, I know Wisconsin requires a special election, but the name recognition and a personal endorsement from the VP-Elect is prob'ly gonna help quite a bit.

I also know that Biden did the same thing in 2008.  Guess what?  It wasn't kosher then and it's not kosher now.  Commit to one or the other and stop trying to hedge your fuckin' bets allatime.  Yeesh.

And These Are His Friends

WIllard's takin' some big hits.

Daniel Larison:

Romney has made many foreign policy blunders before now, but this is the only one that has provoked such swift, harsh, and near-unanimous criticism. The most incredible part is that all of this has been self-inflicted. Romney and his campaign volunteered for this by inserting themselves into the story. If it were simply the other campaign or Democratic partisans that were hammering Romney on this, it wouldn’t be any different from previous mistakes, but the backlash hasn’t been limited to his partisan foes. The dishonesty of the original Romney statement and the gall of his press conference this morning have combined to create serious doubts about his judgment and to confirm the impression that there are no limits to his opportunism.

--and--

At the same time, Romney’s blunder could have been made by almost any leading national Republican today, because the blunder was rooted in an understanding of Obama’s foreign policy that relies heavily on things that have been grossly distorted or simply made up. Similarly, Republican hawks have developed an allergy to substantive policy arguments, preferring to fall back on talking points that were designed to win news cycles rather than reasoned arguments. Once one accepts the reality of the non-existent “apology tour,” providing supporting evidence for other charges would seem redundant and pointless. One of the things that has distinguished Romney’s foreign policy arguments is their relentless hostility to inconvenient empirical evidence. Contrary evidence is simply waved away, and facts are twisted or invented to fit a predetermined conclusion. This has usually involved making untrue claims about policies few people pay close attention to, but this week the gap between Romney’s foreign policy vision and reality was held up for intense scrutiny for all to see.

Paging Mr Escher

Pic O' The Day

Standing Up To Friends

Pat Buchannan is mostly a bombastic dope, but since even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while, I gotta give him props when he has one of his increasingly rare moments of cogency.

Bibi’s dilemma: Despite his threats of Israeli strikes on Iran, Tehran is taunting him. His Cabinet is divided. The Shas Party in his coalition opposes a war, as do respected retired generals, former Mossad leaders and President Shimon Peres.

And the Americans have sent emissaries, including Secretary Leon Panetta, to tell Bibi we oppose an Israeli attack. The Pentagon does not want war. Three former U.S. Central Command heads oppose a war. And last week, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey said he does not wish to be “complicit” in any Israeli attack.

Implied in the word “complicit” is that Dempsey believes an Israeli first strike on Iran could be an act of aggression.

The Israelis were furious, but suddenly the war talk subsided.

A Story Untold

Matt Taibbi would be the most dangerous man in America if anybody paid real attention to what he reports.  Unfortunately, the stories reveal the fact that guys like Willard are doing these hugely horrible things in hugely public ways - they're pulling off their capers in broad daylight - and we want so desperately to believe they wouldn't be doing this right in front of us if it wasn't OK, that we just sit there and watch, not even wondering why the "cops" are sitting there watching with us.

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

Like A Nightmare

By way of The Atlantic, linking to NYT (log-in required):

...an inescapable conclusion: the administration's reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed."

NYT got badly used and abused by Cheney in 2002-2003 as a conduit for the bogus rationale for invading Iraq, so there could be some axe-grinding going on here, but if there's any truth in this, we need to hammer it home to expose the fact that Romney's Foreign Policy team is chock full of the same NeoCons who've been fuckin' us over for  a good 12 or 15 years.

The saddest part is that I can see how somebody on the Bush team might've actually bought into the bullshit about FDR knowing about Pearl Harbor ahead of time, and letting the thing go forward in order to get us amped up for WW2 - which could've been used as pretext for distracting Bush from the 9/11 warnings.

And yes - politics can be just that shitty.