Warlord vs. Warlord

What are they fighting about in Basra?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2008, at 6:40 PM ET

The wars in Iraq (the plural is no typo) are about to expand and possibly explode, so it might be useful to have some notion of what we're in for.

Here is President George W. Bush, speaking this morning in Dayton, Ohio, and revealing once again that he has no notion:

[A]s we speak, Iraqi security forces are waging a tough battle against militia fighters and criminals in Basra—many of whom have received arms and training and funding from Iran. … This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge and demonstrates to the Iraqi people that their government is committed to protecting them. … [T]he enemy will try to fill the TV screens with violence. But the ultimate result will be this: Terrorists and extremists in Iraq will know they have no place in a free and democratic society.

Paul Krugman: Loans and Leadership

When George W. Bush first ran for the White House, political reporters assured us that he came across as a reasonable, moderate guy.

Yet those of us who looked at his policy proposals — big tax cuts for the rich and Social Security privatization — had a very different impression. And we were right.

The moral is that it’s important to take a hard look at what candidates say about policy. It’s true that past promises are no guarantee of future performance. But policy proposals offer a window into candidates’ political souls — a much better window, if you ask me, than a bunch of supposedly revealing anecdotes and out-of-context quotes.

The $3 Trillion War

After wildly lowballing the cost of the Iraq conflict at a mere $50 to $60 billion, the Bush administration has been concealing the full economic toll. The spending on military operations is merely the tip of a vast fiscal iceberg. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors calculate the grim bottom line.

by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
April 2008

On March 19, 2008, the U.S. will have been in Iraq for five years. The Bush administration was wrong about the need for the Iraq war and about the benefits the war would bring to Iraq, to the region, and to America. It has also been wrong about the full cost of the war, and it continues to take steps to conceal that cost.

In the run-up to the war there were few public discussions of the likely price tag. When Lawrence Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser, suggested that it might reach $200 billion all told, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the estimate as “baloney.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz went as far as to suggest that Iraq’s postwar reconstruction would pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Rumsfeld and Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels estimated the total cost of the war in the range of $50 to $60 billion, some of which they believed would be financed by other countries.

US gave $300m arms contract to 22-year-old with criminal record

· Old stock sent to Afghan forces battling Taliban
· 40-year-old ammunition had to be destroyed

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday March 28 2008

This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday March 28 2008 on p18 of the International section. It was last updated at 00:14 on March 28 2008.

The Pentagon entrusted a 22-year-old previously arrested for domestic violence and having a forged driving licence to be the main supplier of ammunition to Afghan forces at the height of the battle against the Taliban, it was reported yesterday.

AEY, essentially a one-man operation based in an unmarked office in Miami Beach, Florida, was awarded a contract worth $300m (£150m) to supply the Afghan army and police in January last year. But as the New York Times reported in a lengthy investigation, AEY's president, Efraim Diversoli, 22, supplied stock that was 40 years old and rotting packing material.

Obama's Sweeping Foreign Policy Critique

By Spencer Ackerman, The American Prospect
Posted on March 28, 2008, Printed on March 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80623/

When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn't incremental at all. "I don't want to just end the war," he said, "but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."

Until this point in the primaries, Clinton and Obama had sounded very similar on this issue. Despite their differences in the past (Obama opposed the war, while Clinton voted for it), both were calling for major troop withdrawals, with some residual force left behind to hedge against catastrophe. But Obama's concise declaration of intent at the debate upended this assumption. Clinton stumbled to find a counterargument, eventually saying her vote in October 2002 "was not authority for a pre-emptive war." Then she questioned Obama's ability to lead, saying that the Democratic nominee must have "the necessary credentials and gravitas for commander in chief."

How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?

By David Michael Green, AlterNet
Posted on March 28, 2008, Printed on March 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80497/

Watching George W. Bush in operation these last couple of weeks is like having an out-of-body experience. On acid. During a nightmare. In a different galaxy.

As he presides over the latest disaster of his administration (No, it's not a terrorist attack -- that was 2001! No, it's not a catastrophic war -- that was 2003! No, it's not a drowning city -- that was 2005! This one is an economic meltdown, ladies and gentlemen!) bringing to it the same blithe disengagement with which he's attended the previous ones, you cannot but stop and gaze in stark comedic awe, realizing that the most powerful polity that ever existed on the planet twice picked this imbecilic buffoon as its leader, from among 300 million other choices. Seeing him clown with the Washington press corps yet once again -- and seeing them fawn over him, laugh in all the right places, and give him a standing ovation, also yet once again -- is the equivalent of having all your logic circuits blown simultaneously. Truly, the universe has a twisted and deeply ironic sense of humor. Monty Python is about as funny -- and as stiff -- as Dick Nixon, by comparison.

Born-Again Americans and That Old-Time (Civil) Religion

By Sara Robinson
March 26th, 2008 - 11:25pm ET

Can we progressives -- who won't be caught dead these days calling ourselves liberals -- can we stop serving as a punching bag for the right?

And speak with depth and conviction about the things that really matter to us? Once and for all, can we break through the false and humiliating charade that they and they alone are the arbiters of family values, morality, patriotism, the flag, the life of the spirit, God-talk? And that they alone have the credibility to speak to these subjects and concerns?

The search for meaning that defines us as humans is the greatest conversation going, and I want IN.

-- "Born-Again American" Norman Lear at the Take Back America conference last week

Ever since the overlong election season first kicked off last summer, I've been feeling deep gratitude for the happy fact that, for the first time since 1988, we're finally having a presidential election that does not involve re-fighting the Vietnam War. To everyone's profound relief, there's nary a draft dodger, National Guardsman, Bronze Star recipient, or Swiftboater in sight. Nobody's service records are under investigation. Not a single public conversation has devolved into an ugly he said/he said over who did what in some swamp somewhere in 1969. I think I speak for an entire grateful nation when I say: It's been nice.

I must confess, however, that I'm just about ready to take it all back. Because this time, instead of military exploits two-thirds of the country is too young to remember, this election is being fought over religion -- which is, apparently, the new battlefield on which candidates must try themselves and not be found wanting. Obama's pastor of 20 years is being trotted out to whip up white voters' latent terror of Angry Scary Black Men (and, as a twofer, also undercut the resonance of his strong moral voice). McCain is proudly advertising his bizarre affiliations with John Hagee, Richard Land, and Rod Parsley -- religious ideologues so extremist and creepy that most straight-thinking Evangelicals won't have anything to do with them. Jeff Sharlet has a new book coming out shortly that will detail Hillary's long association with a shadowy elitist global prayer group that puts her in spiritual cahoots with the worst kind of paleo-cons and dictators. And I'm watching this theological three-ring circus -- and actually find myself longing wistfully for the good old days when we were merely obsessed with re-hashing the details of a 40-year-old war.

Mark Morford: Tax my rich white torturer

Schools? Health care? As if. Your taxes pay for brutality and Wall St. bailouts. Feel better?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Just so we have this straight: You are not paying taxes merely to fund torture and bomb-dropping and the killing of countless innocents in Iraq in a futile and lost war that's not really a war and is far more of a massive fiscal, tactical and moral failure which will end up costing the nation an estimated $3 trillion, burn through any remaining sense of national dignity and leave repercussions that will last for generations.

Ha. You should be so lucky. Because your tax money is right now also funding the Fed's unprecedented and rather shocking multibillion-dollar bailout of rich bankers and fund managers who have, through their greed and excess and with the implied blessing of former Chairman Alan Greenspan (whom many consider the architect of the collapse in the first place), helped bring about what is shaping up to be the worst fiscal crisis since World War II.

What the Government Doesn't Want You To Know About Global Warming

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on March 24, 2008, Printed on March 27, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80508/

JUAN GONZALEZ: Dr. James Hansen is widely regarded as the leading climate change scientist in the country. It was his testimony to a Senate committee in 1988 that first brought the threat of global warming to the world's attention. For the past quarter of a century he has headed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA's premiere climate research center.

Just over a year ago, Dr. Hansen went public with a charge that made headlines around the world, that the Bush administration had been trying to silence his warnings about the urgent need to address climate change.

Economy nearly stalled in 4th quarter

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer
2 hours, 16 minutes ago

The economy nearly sputtered out at the end of the year and probably is faring even worse now amid continuing housing, credit and financial woes.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product, or GDP, increased at a feeble 0.6 percent annual rate from October through December. The reading, unchanged from a previous estimate a month ago, provided stark evidence of just how much the economy has weakened. In the previous three months, the economy had a sizzling 4.9 percent growth rate.

The GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced in the United States and is the best barometer of economic health.

Many economists say they believe growth in the current January-through-March quarter will be even weaker than the 0.6 percent figure from late 2007. A growing number says the economy actually may be shrinking now. Under one rough rule, the economy needs to contract for six straight months to be considered in a recession. The government will release its estimate for first-quarter GDP in late April.

Glenn Greenwald: What can and cannot be spoken on television

I'm going to re-post the segment I posted yesterday, from Charlie Rose's fifth anniversary Iraq show, because I want to encourage as many people as possible to watch it. If I could recommend one article or segment for Americans to read or watch regarding the current Iraq debate, it would be this interview -- the entire interview -- with Sinan Antoon and Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi professor and journalist, respectively, currently living in the U.S.

[...]

The significance of the interview lies as much in what it says about the American occupation of Iraq as it what it illustrates about the American media. In the American media's discussions of Iraq, when are the perspectives expressed here about our ongoing occupation -- views extremely common among Iraqis of all types and grounded in clear, indisputable facts -- ever heard by the average American news consumer? The answer is: "virtually never."

The Society of the Owned: Moral Hazards

By Terrance Heath

March 25th, 2008 - 10:43am ET

---

Part Seven of a Series

Imagine that you've come upon two people who have somehow fallen into a very deep hole, which neither of them can climb out of on their own. (Nor, for some reason, can they help one another climb out.) In the course of figuring out what to do, you learn how they each came to be in that hole.

One of them fell in because he either didn't see the hole or should have seen it but wasn't paying attention. OK, so he could have avoided falling into the hole if he'd been more careful. The other person, you find out, apparently dug the hole for the one who fell in first, and then fell in himself.

Which one do you help out of the hole? The careless one who fell in first? Or the one who dug the hole in the first place? Which one do you leave in the hole? Which one do you help out first?

Tomgram: The Fate of the Bear Market

The Little Administration That Couldn't

Rebuilding the American Economy, Bush-style
By Tom Engelhardt

No one was prepared for the storm when it hit. The levees meant to protect us had long since been breached and key officials had already left town. The well-to-do were assured of rescue, but for everyone else trapped inside the Superdome in a fast-flooding region, there was no evacuation plan in sight. The Bush administration, of course, claimed that it was in control and the President was already assuring his key officials that they were doing a heck of a job.

No, I'm not talking about post-Katrina New Orleans. That was so then. I'm talking about the housing and credit crunches, as well as the Bear Stearns bailout, that have given the term "bear market" new meaning.

Supreme Court allows retiree benefit cuts

Employers may coordinate with Medicare on healthcare provisions for seniors. An AARP legal challenge is turned away.

By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 25, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday gave employers a green light to reduce health benefits for millions of retirees who turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare. The justices turned away a legal challenge from AARP, the nation's leading senior citizens lobby, which had contended these lower benefits for older retirees violated the federal law against age discrimination.

The court's action upholds, in effect, a rule adopted last year by federal regulators that says the "coordination of retiree health benefits with Medicare" is exempt from the anti-age-bias law.

Sadr urges 'civil revolt' as battles erupt in Basra

A ceasefire crucial to recent security improvements in Iraq was today under severe strain after Moqtada al-Sadr called for "civil revolt" following a crackdown on Shia factions in Basra.

Iraqi security forces in the southern Iraqi city encountered heavy resistance as battles broke out with gunmen from Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

Officials in Basra said 22 people were killed in the clashes, with a further 58 wounded.

Following the clashes, Sadr appeared to threaten to end the ceasefire, which was declared last August.

IRD Blows Smoke in Response to Expose Film

By Frederick Clarkson
Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 07:34:53 PM EST

The oxymoronically named Institute on Religion and Democracy for a generation has sought to disrupt and divide the major denominations of mainline Protestantism, as well as the wider ecumenical communions, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. Even more remarkably perhaps, while presenting itself an agency dedicated to reform and "renewal" of the churches, IRD's leadership and staff have been substantially populated by men and women who are not even members of any of the churches they say they seek to "renew."

I mention all this, because IRD Methodist program staffers Mark Tooley and John Lomperis recently issued a sliming of Steven D. Martin's DVD discussion of the agency: Renewal or Ruin: The Institute on Religion & Democracy's Attack on the United Methodist Church. Martin has written

I was able to produce "Renewal or Ruin?" using only personal funds. I wanted to avoid the accusation that it had been made by someone with an agenda. I wanted to be as fair, and as firm, as I could be. You can see the results of the project by visiting www.ird-info.com, and by viewing the trailer for the video.

Architect of War(s)

by MICHAEL T. KLARE

[from the April 7, 2008 issue]

What more fitting way for the Bush Administration to observe the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq than to send its principal architect, Vice President Dick Cheney, to Baghdad to rally dispirited US troops for years more of futile sacrifice? "It's been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor," Cheney opined during a surprise visit on March 17, at the beginning of a ten-day Middle East trip. As he toured Baghdad, bragging of "phenomenal" security improvements, a bomb went off in the heavily guarded Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing fifty and wounding dozens more.

Ostensibly, Cheney's visit is intended to lend muscle to the White House claim that substantial progress is being made in Iraq because of the troop surge--thereby burnishing the Administration's "legacy" and enhancing the election prospects of John McCain (who recently made an Iraq trip of his own with this purpose). Cheney also sought to persuade Iraqi lawmakers to pass a national hydrocarbon law, thus smoothing the way for the exploitation of Iraqi oilfields by US energy firms.

Fighting Words: How to Humiliate -- and Convert -- a Right-Winger

By John Dolan, AlterNet
Posted on March 25, 2008, Printed on March 25, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80507/

I'd like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.

Why, for example, not popularize slogans that mock the Bush loyalists as "suckers"? Something like, "There are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires and suckers." Put that on a few bumper stickers and I guarantee a lot of "South Park Republicans" will quit the GOP. They just smirk when you tsk-tsk at them for being disrespectful. They want to be disrespectful; every normal young male wants to be.

Sedatives and Sex Hormones in Our Water Supply

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on March 25, 2008, Printed on March 25, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80505/

Editor's Note: Read more about this topic on AlterNet from Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch.

AMY GOODMAN: Saturday was World Water Day, and the United Nations estimates close to 1.5 billion people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water. What about here in the United States?

The Associated Press has conducted an extensive investigation into the drinking water in at least twenty-four major American cities across the country, which contain trace amounts of a wide array of pharmaceuticals. The amounts might be small, but scientists are worried about the long-term health and environmental consequences of their presence in the water supplies of some forty-one million Americans.

Consumer confidence plunges in March

By EILEEN ALT POWELL, AP Business Writer
Tue Mar 25, 1:53 PM ET

American consumers are gloomier about the economy that at any point since just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as slumping housing prices and soaring fuel costs depress consumer confidence to its lowest level in five years.

The Conference Board, a business-backed research group, said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index plunged to 64.5 in March from a revised 76.4 in February.

The March reading was far below the 73.0 expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson/IFR and was the worst reading since the gauge registered 61.4 in March 2003, just ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why?

By Michael Massing

1.

In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry for financial companies. Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying jobs—flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better— about $12 an hour—but even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq,^[1] an uproarious account of his life in the military:

I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day out. Eat, shit, work, sleep, repeat.

At the time, I saw no escape from this. I was in my mid-twenties and I still had no fucking idea what the hell I wanted to do with myself....

Black carbon pollution emerges as major player in global warming

Soot from biomass burning, diesel exhaust has 60 percent of the effect of carbon dioxide on warming but mitigation offers immediate benefits

Black carbon, a form of particulate air pollution most often produced from biomass burning, cooking with solid fuels and diesel exhaust, has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates, according to scientists in an upcoming review article in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego atmospheric scientist V. Ramanathan and University of Iowa chemical engineer Greg Carmichael, said that soot and other forms of black carbon could have as much as 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, more than that of any greenhouse gas besides CO2. The researchers also noted, however, that mitigation would have immediate societal benefits in addition to the long term effect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Harold Meyerson: A New New Deal

Reshaping the U.S. economy so that it actually benefits Americans won't be easy. But it must be done.

Harold Meyerson | March 21, 2008 | web only

The American Prospect is co-sponsoring the Roosevelt Institution's Toward a New New Deal Conference on April 9 in Washington, D.C.

Putting together everything we've learned over the past 10 days about high finance in Manhattan, one thing is clear: If Eliot Spitzer had saved all the money he apparently paid "Kristen" and her co-workers at the Emperors Club, he could have bought Bear Stearns.

Manhattan's culture of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous collapse has been on display in recent days as it has not since 1929. Now, as then, an edifice of shaky credit is toppling. Now, as then, what we took to be prosperity turns out to have been a bubble.

The Gentlemen's Bailout

The Federal Reserve's announcement of an open-ended bail-out for Wall Street's endangered financial firms and banks opens an ominous new chapter in what might be called "market socialism with American characteristics." If Washington tries to do something for "losers" who are ordinary citizens, financial titans complain about violating free-market principles. When the titans themselves are going down, they rush to their patrons at the central bank and demand extraordinary relief. Government must save the big money, we are told, for the overall good of the economy. Thus, the financial system's reckless losses--approaching $1 trillion but probably far more--are being "socialized," dumped on the public, the very people victimized by its snares and falsified valuations.

Put aside the obvious hypocrisy and greed. This nation is on the brink of a historic catastrophe. It requires emergency responses from the federal government on a scale not seen since the Great Depression and the New Deal, the subject of this special issue. Yet the rescue party is composed of the same people who co-wrote this disaster. They are, first, the financiers who indulged their own appetites for extreme wealth and enlarged a financial system of esoteric fakery that inflated prices and profits. Second, the close collaborators were the Federal Reserve and other authorities who blessed this dangerous concoction and declined to enforce prudential standards.

Paul Krugman: Taming the Beast

We’re now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn’t.

Now, I don’t expect presidential campaigns to have all the answers to our current crisis — even financial experts are scrambling to keep up with events. But I do think we’re entitled to more answers, and in particular a clearer commitment to financial reform, than we’re getting so far.

In truth, I don’t expect much from John McCain, who has both admitted not knowing much about economics and denied having ever said that. Anyway, lately he’s been busy demonstrating that he doesn’t know much about the Middle East, either.

Recession Literature

The best books, articles, and Web sites about the economic collapse.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, March 22, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET

This is the first installment of "Reading List," in which Slate writers discuss which books, articles, and Web sites they are reading about the subject that interests them most. The weekly column appears in both Slate and the Washington Post's Outlook section.

For connoisseurs of financial folly, commercial irrationality, and general fiscal inanity, these last several weeks have been an all-you-can-eat buffet. In New York, the implosion of Bear Stearns and the serial failure of billion-dollar hedge funds have induced a combination of schadenfreude (I knew those guys never deserved their big salaries) and foreboding (What will this do to the price of that co-op I just bought?). And across the country, the bursting of the real-estate and housing-credit bubble is destroying personal balance sheets.

So what am I, a business/finance journalist and a self-proclaimed expert on bubbles, reading to keep up?

For less-educated workers, good jobs will be harder to find

WASHINGTON — The steady loss of "good jobs" by less-educated workers has left them more vulnerable to recession than at any time in nearly 30 years, and signs are mounting that a recession is either already here or coming soon.

High-school dropouts and even high-school graduates who lack specialized job training have seen their already limited employment prospects steadily decline during America's decades-long shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service economy.

Scientists warn of soot effect on climate

Soot produced by burning coal, diesel, wood and dung causes significantly more damage to the environment than previously thought, according to research published today. So-called "black carbon" could cause up to 60% of the current warming effect of carbon dioxide, according to the US researchers, making it an important target for efforts to slow global warming.

Around 400,000 people are estimated to die each year due to inhaling soot particles, particularly because of indoor cooking on wood and dung stoves in developing countries. These deaths are mainly among women and children. Professor Greg Carmichael, of the University of Iowa, one of the authors of the study, published in Nature Geoscience, said: "Trying to develop strategies that really go after black carbon is really a very good short-term strategy and a win-win strategy for both climate and air pollution perspectives."

Frank Rich: The Republican Resurrection

THE day before Barack Obama gave The Speech, Hillary Clinton gave a big speech of her own, billed by her campaign as a “major policy address on the war in Iraq.” What, you didn’t hear about it?

Clinton partisans can blame the Obamaphilic press corps for underplaying their candidate’s uncompromising antiwar sentiments. But intentionally or not, the press did Mrs. Clinton a favor. Every time she opens her mouth about Iraq, she reminds voters of how she enabled the catastrophe that has devoured American lives and treasure for five years.

Race has been America’s transcendent issue far longer than that. I share the general view that Mr. Obama’s speech is the most remarkable utterance on the subject by a public figure in modern memory. But what impressed me most was not Mr. Obama’s rhetorical elegance or his nuanced view of both America’s undeniable racial divide and equally undeniable racial progress. The real novelty was to find a politician who didn’t talk down to his audience but instead trusted it to listen to complete, paragraph-long thoughts that couldn’t be reduced to sound bites.

Digby: Wright And Wrong

*Note: this is a tediously long post. If you are inclined to spout off in anger at me about it, could you please do me the favor of reading the whole thing before you do it.


I finally got a chance to hear Senator Obama's speech in full today and I couldn't help but think of a piece Rick Perlstein wrote for the Washington Post a few weeks back. He wrote:

One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man."

No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn't. No one is.