'Check Engine' Light

For the first time I see U.S. oil dependence as a real existential threat. The perfect storm is raging while we are agonizing over Charlie Sheen. Oil prices alone will crush our economy. We can now appreciate the efforts of previous administrations designed to keep it all together. ‘Containment’ had become an intricate game that demanded increasingly complex solutions. Clearly, our present administration does not know how to play.

We went to war in Iraq in response to 9/11. It was not something we could avoid. Admittedly, we ran the risk of destabilizing the region. It did not destabilize. We actually were on the right track. The countries of the Middle East were reminded to mind their manners. They did - for a time. When it became clear that America was crumbling from within and that we would not be able to sustain the drive, they began to bolt. The election of Barack Hussein Obama confirmed to the world that we were finished.

Now, voters' remorse. We don’t even have it in us to criticize our president’s handling of the job. We’re just desperately hanging on till the next election cycle, watching as we circle the drain. Our fear that we won’t last that long is already palpable.

Russia and China will survive. It’s not that our past presidents were so much smarter or capable than Putin or Hu Jintao. But at the very least it was a more or less even match. Now, ‘the U.S. is out of the game’. We’ve left the stadium and taken our ball.

There is one attribute that elevates the leaders of China and Russia (and those of most other nations) to the status of players on the global gridiron: patriotism. Most leaders take pride in their countries. They may have different ways of expressing it; different approaches; different ideologies, etc. But, in almost every case, they do what they do to give their nations a chance to survive. Even Kim Yong-Il rattles his bones of a nation to fair advantage. There are only two notable exceptions: Iran and the U.S.

Iran is so locked into an eschatological vision, it pays no heed to possible consequences. This, while current U.S. leadership wildly pursues some utopian ideological throw-back to some unworkable drug-induced version of a coma. Both are so arrogant as to ignore any and all warning signals.

I’ve been driving for years with my ‘check engine’ light on. So far so good. I haven’t had problems. It’d be a bit different if I still had to ferry kids to and from soccer practice. Or, if I were running a country with over 300 million people in it.

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The Definition of 'Crazy'

It’s always easy and entertaining to make fun of history in a Monty Python kind of way; to say what if, as if ‘if’ were some kind of Frankonian monster ripe for resurrecting at the snap of a finger. Much more difficult to see the lunacy of current policy. If Reagan had killed Kaddafi, who is to say that would have been the end of it?

Fact: For several years after we sent a package bomb into Kaddafi’s tent (killing his daughter among others) we never heard from Kaddafi again. Fact: He behaved himself for a time like a kid after a spanking. And then, we seemed to have lost the concept altogether and the likes of Kim Yong-Il, Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez were able to make their mischief unimpeded, turning the whole class into an uproar.

Now, nobody is learning. The teachers have fled the premises. The school is has become wildly dysfunctional and you have some version of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” going on everywhere you look.

Enter the 12th Imam to put a stop to it. I expect he’ll have enough buckets lined up to put out the fires that are raging; to snuff out the fuses that are burning toward setting off a nuclear holocaust. If not, it doesn’t really matter what any of us do.

For a brief while, we thought it was Obama who would fill the bill. We gave him every chance. We even called him ‘savior’. We were convinced that he was the one who would bring us together. He made quite a convincing start of it, giving speeches all around the world and drawing adoring crowds everywhere he went.

Now we know it was all just so much hot air, effectively causing the polar icecaps to melt and the bears to seek shelter inside an ever shrinking population of whales. Curiously the oceans didn’t rise as predicted and the island of Manhattan still stands (although we did our best to bring her down by other means).

As much as we make fun of Kaddafi, we still shy away from looking in the mirror to examine ourselves. The definition of ‘crazy’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. What we are doing in almost every aspect of our public policy is the same thing over and over again. And all it’s done is accelerate our fall from grace.

Spring is just around the corner and all of us here in the northern latitudes can put our snow shovels away and breathe a sigh of relief. Soon time to put some of the old stuff out on the curb for yard sales or for sanitation to pick up. Don’t plan on going anywhere though. Gas will likely be around $5 a gallon.

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Upsetting the Apple Cart

There can be no doubt that Apple is a hugely successful company. Their sales model works. At the moment, there is much confidence that Apple will continue to do well. No one will seriously challenge or question what Apple does as long as the company flourishes. (If it’s not broke…) Most people will agree that Steve Jobs has been instrumental in the company’s success. Consequently, there is now proper concern about Jobs’ medical condition. Successful corporate leaders, unlike American presidents, are not readily interchangeable.

Companies are much like countries. They are either successful or not. We would think twice about electing a president who smokes, for example; or one with an unsavory past. The metrics to measure a nation’s success are somewhat different however. For one thing, countries are ‘too big to fail‘. You can’t just close them down and tell the workers to go home. The failure of a country generally implies that its people are living in miserable or sub-standard conditions.

As the leaders of nations increasingly see themselves as divorced from the general population, there has been an effort underway to erase the standards by which the success or failure of a nation is defined. What remains is two classes of people: the leadership class and the led.

The leadership class is the one that generally hogs the spotlight. They tend to eclipse the led - no matter how great their numbers - in the national narrative. Furthermore, the leadership class tends to stick together. They will echo each other’s excuses and tend to support a continuance of the status quo. The led, on the other hand, are often divided and thus unable to effectively affect the issues - corruption, ineptitude, shortages, oppression, etc. - confronting them.

This is why Madeleine Albright can go over to N. Korea, smile and toast the Dear Leader while his people are starving in labor camps. This is why Robert Mugabe can continue to live in a palace; why Chavez is able to close down radio stations; why Ahmadinejad can fire live ammunition at unarmed protesters; why Hu Jintao can keep political prisoners in jail without public accusation or trial; etc.

Tunisia was a big deal because it broke protocol. The ruling class(es) - especially in the Middle East - received a wake-up call, saying that a people united are perfectly capable of upsetting the apple cart.

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Assassination Prohibition

China has actually been conducting military exercises with Russia (among others) under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as late as September of last year. It was labeled “Peace Mission 2010”.

During the exercise certain Russian deficiencies came to light. No doubt, Russia is in the process of rectifying these shortcomings. Russia and China do not mock each other publicly as both are openly mocking the U.S. Both know that POTUS Obama has withdrawn from the game at his own peril.

The signing of the START treaty was universally seen as a public humiliation of Obama and America. Obama knows this, but does not care. He is above geopolitics. He has his own agenda. So far, we can only guess what this agenda might consist of. We might assign naiveté to Obama; we might even assign incompetence. We might allow him to play out his utopian farce until a new man can take over in orderly fashion. Both Russia and China appear to be in agreement that it won’t hold together that long. Something will happen before Obama leaves office - it will likely be something our present president won’t know how to handle. In fact, they’re counting on it. Both are seeing to it that they are prepared.

Afterwards, it’ll be a new game.
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Ever since President Ford’s Executive Order# 11905 in 1976, the option of political assassination has been pretty much off the table. A subsequent EO in this regard (Carter’s EO# 12333) reiterated the assassination prohibition. President Reagan was the last president to address the topic. At the same time, he seemed to have no problem whatsoever in sending a lethal package right into Col. Kaddafi’s Tripoli tent, killing about 100 including Kaddafi’s fifteen month old daughter, Hana. I don’t imagine he would have lost much sleep had Muammar had been killed as well. Because no subsequent executive order or piece of legislation has repealed the prohibition, it remains in effect today.

It seems to me that all this smacks of a gross double standard: faceless grunt soldiers appear to be fair game, while those who sent them out to kill are off limits. Nowhere was this point brought home to me more forcefully than watching Madeleine Albright toasting the North Korean dictator, Kim Yong-Il, while much of his nation was starving in some bestial work camp. It showed me that there appears to be an understanding among the privileged that guarantees their continuance simply by being a member of some exclusive club.

This raises the issue of just who can be considered a ‘political target‘. What exactly constitutes the threshold of political leadership. Is the unelected Hu Jintao a legitimate leader? Is the fraudulent Karzai? Is Kim Yong-Il? Is Ahmadinejad? Chavez? Mugabe? Rush Limbaugh?

Certainly, North Korea and others have been giving us huge problems. They have threatened us and predicted our immanent downfall. They are at this very moment preparing our graves. Besides the basic unfairness of the two-tier class distinction all this implies, there are also practical aspects to consider. Did Kaddafi continue to give us much trouble after his tent was hit?

We know precisely where each one of these troublemakers lives. We knew exactly where Saddam Hussein spent his nights. Yet, we mobilized an invasion at great expense, killed a lot of people (including our own) and eventually arrived at the same result. Why go through all this?

All we’ve succeeded in doing is to ignite (perhaps) a million fuses, each singularly fixated on our death by a thousand cuts, when a single 'stitch in time' would have more than sufficed.

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