Hotter'n a $2.00 Pistol....,

rotflmbao.....,

Of Psychopaths and Sycophants

Expounding on Barrett's most interesting notion about the true nature of civilization;

Sycophants revel in their programming. The brainwashing the psychopathic entities have administered to American sycophants since a very young age, has them proudly waving the flag of their nation as "the greatest country on Earth," while vociferously avoiding real world facts: Theirs is a nation built on corruption at all levels.

• Mass-murder is our international policy.

• Enforcement of psychopathic edicts by gun and incarceration are standard procedures at home.

• Endless taxation and regulation are the benevolent side of the U.S. psychopathocracy.

The sycophants kiss up to the images the psychopaths have planted in their minds. With servile devotion, sycophants reach for the handouts from their masters, oblivious to the source of the presumed benefits.

As an example, the sycophants have dutifully filed tax returns to receive their economic stimulus tax rebate. Unbeknownst to them, this is just one of the techniques FED Chairman Bernanke will use to dump created-from-nothing cash from his "helicopter." The end result is that the new cash waters down the value of the already existing "dollars" in circulation and causes a devaluing inflation. The FED will then recover this cash drop with the hidden inflation tax: A closed circuit loop designed by psychopaths for psychopaths to extract servile deference from sycophants who are ignorant of the real nature of a fiat economy.

The modern formula for sycophant management is simple: Build roads, manufacture employment, extend credit, provide shopping opportunities, blast them with entertainment, maintain a welfare net, create the semblance of a justice system, pretend to have an election from time to time, provide grants for science, industry, arts "and other purposes" and the sycophants will grovel before the all-powerful psychopathocracy. If all this abundant benevolence fails to entrance and entrain the sycophants to the will of the psychopaths then fear, terror, wars and rumors of wars are the fallback policies of the ages.

This exceedingly bleak synopsis of the underlying nature of things coincides with much of the data tracked hereabouts.

Twilight of the Psychopaths

A most interesting notion;

Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and “warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.

The prevailing recipe for civilization is simple:

1) Use lies and brainwashing to create an army of controlled, systematic mass murderers;

2) Use that army to enslave large numbers of people (i.e. seize control of their labour power and its fruits);

3) Use that slave labour power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, priests, and PR men). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.

Which coincides with a very great deal of the data tracked hereabouts.

10 Cents on the Dollar....,

Is what Fannie and Freddie stock has fallen to. Lots of investors worldwide must be mighty, mighty displeased.

Fannie Mae’s workers had $116 million in the employee stock ownership plan at the end of 2006. Today, it’s more like $17.5 million. Ouch.

The employees of Fannie Mae, and those of its counterpart Freddie Mac, are reeling from financial blows themselves as the mortgage finance companies lurch toward what could be a government bailout. Both firms ladled out hefty servings of stocks and options to reward and compensate employees — making them popular employers for years.

The top executive of Freddie Mac, Richard F. Syron, for instance, made about $18.3 million last year, two-thirds of that in stock and options that are worth a lot less today. His counterpart at Fannie Mae, Daniel H. Mudd, made $11.6 million, also much of it in stock.

But midlevel employees were paid in stock, too. Stock and options could account for a fifth of their total compensation, according to former employees and financial planners. Their ability to sell and diversify was often limited by restrictions on the grants, the terms of the specific plans and tighter rules on selling by employees while they addressed years-earlier accounting scandals.

For decades, both companies offered lush benefits, with traditional pension plans, 401(k)s, stock plans and other niceties, like child care plans. That means many employees still have a safety net, though their savings have declined, drastically in some cases.

“If it can happen to Fannie or Freddie, it can happen anywhere,” said Marjorie L. Fox, a certified financial planner in Reston, Va. “This is a cautionary tale you better pay attention to.”

America's Uni-Polar Moment Has Passed

Seumas Milne brings it in this morning's Guardian.

If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.

That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.

But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more.

Well fella’s I’m going against the grain. Martin King was correct, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I plain and simply have faith-- the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen – in justice. How? When? Where—I have no idea[...]

I personally don’t care if Bush is as old as Byron de la Beckwith and Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen were when they were convicted, justice must be served. - Bro. Makheru.

Peak Credit

One could say all that is happening is that all financial institutions in the world don’t really trust each other, and won’t lend to each other. And that an astounding $50 to $100 billion of weekly infusions from the Fed and the ECB is not fixing the situation, and that we are witnessing the final parabolic peak of the world credit bubble that has built up for the 63 years after WW2 ended. That, and the end of the USD and Yen driven credit/asset/finance bubble which ensued from the early 1970’s.

So, before we continue, it might be said that the present development of the credit crisis, from August 07 to now, is Credit Crisis I. And the present state of affairs is that the Fed and the ECB have to infuse a weekly $50-100 billion plus into their respective financial regions merely to prevent a world finance implosion.

I also have noticed that the Credit Crisis I has had a one year periodicity of major new developments, ie that if one major sector had a problem on a given month, that the next year the same sector seems to reinvent a new worse manifestation. So, when the central banks stop this massive weekly lending, what happens? Massive forced deleveraging and probably world financial Armageddon. This would be Credit Crisis II, or Phase II. We will look into Credit Crisis II in a moment.

This is the conclusion we came to here at PrudentSquirrel, trying to ascertain where we are in the big picture on the Credit Crisis now. It is that the Central Banks are desperately trying to stave off Credit Crisis II, and they are losing, and probably knowing this, they will at some point confer together and pick a time to let the credit system implode, and try to weather the stock/financial crashes that will occur at that time. Likely, some currencies can collapse as well, and a great deal of FX (foreign exchange) chaos and restrictions will ensue for several years after the fatal date.

If it is true, as we suspect, that we are at the peak of a credit/financial bubble that started right after WW2 ended, and it is at a parabolic peak and cannot be sustained, then the world’s central banks already know this too. They probably are trying to decide when to let go…They all don’t have to agree, it only will take one major Central Bank to let go, then the others will be forced to follow. Credit Crisis II…A World Financial Armageddon?

An Overlooked Solution?

MIT's publicly announced energy initiatives glaringly undervalue the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen and helium, which use the virtually inexhaustible resources of deuterium, lithium, and (lunar) He3. Gram for gram, fusion of plentiful lighter elements releases ten billion times as much energy as combusting gasoline with oxygen, without producing any greenhouse gases. Thermonuclear fusion powers the Sun, and we have already made it work here on Earth, although few people outside the field know about this work. As fossil fuel supplies are obviously limited, we do have a profound need to bring fusion power plants on line ASAP.

Detractors argue that we don't know how to make fusion work on Earth. These folks evidently don't remember that Edward Teller demonstrated deuterium/tritium (D/T) inertial confinement fusion (ICF) via the reaction D + T → He4 + 14.2 MeV neutron here, on Earth, at more than full scale way back in 1952. Many called this ICF demonstration the "hydrogen bomb" because Edward needed a fission device to heat a capsule of D/T to the 200-million-degree ignition temperature. However, laser-initiated ICF research achieved >50x liquid D/T density at temperatures of 200 million degrees more than a decade ago. Although the U.S. is withdrawing (again) from the European Union's magnetic confinement ITER project in France, the single shot/day Nd:glass ICF National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is nearing completion. Design studies funded by the Department of Energy (DoE) for Prometheus ICF with krypton-fluoride (KrF) laser or heavy ion (HI) ignited ICF power plants were completed in 1992 and released in 1994 for international publication.

What Matters: August 2008

Rat Meat in Demand

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday.

With consumer price inflation at 37 percent according to the latest central bank estimate, demand has pushed a kilogram of rat meat up to around 5,000 riel ($1.28) from 1,200 riel last year. Spicy field rat dishes with garlic thrown in have become particularly popular at a time when beef costs 20,000 riel a kg.

Officials said rats were fleeing to higher ground from flooded areas of the lower Mekong Delta, making it easier for villagers to catch them.

"Many children are happy making some money from selling the animals to the markets, but they keep some for their family," Ly Marong, an agriculture official, said by telephone from the Koh Thom district on the border with Vietnam.

"Not only are our poor eating it, but there is also demand from Vietnamese living on the border with us."

He estimated that Cambodia supplied more than a tonne of live rats a day to Vietnam.

Rats are also eaten widely in Thailand, while a state government in eastern India this month encouraged its people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.

($1 = 3,900 riel)

Viruses Rule the Deep Sea

In the Scientist newsblog;

Viruses in the deepest ocean environments are unexpectedly strong regulators of the deep sea biosphere, according to a paper published tomorrow (August 28) in Nature.

By infecting and killing bacteria and other prokaryotes viruses are the main producers of the organic matter that sustains life at 1000 meters deep and below. By generating this biomass, viruses also make major contributions to the carbon cycle and other geochemical processes.

"This shows that a very large amount of the carbon that reaches the sea floor is going through pathways that were commonly thought to be relatively minor," said Jed Fuhrman, an ocean biologist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the study. "The whole idea that viruses have any significance in marine systems is only 15 to 20 years old."

Approximately 65% of the Earth is dominated by deep sea, or benthic, ecosystems. The sea floor is one of the hardest environments for research, Fuhrman explained, because of the distances and logistical challenges involved in conducting experiments.

While I've known for years about the role of viruses in the regulation of the atmosphere (why else you think there's a cold and flu *season*?) It comes as a bit of a surprise to have my mind opened even wider to the fact of deep and profound symbiosis in the ocean depths proceeding even to the extreme ends of biogenesis. Does one even classify virii as living organisms?

Methanogens have existed for billions of years, and according to a living planet climate theory, have modulated climate despite a variety of changing conditions. Biogenesis and nucleotide sorting in cloud parasols is one thing, but to take it from end to end in ocean basins, while not altogether surprising, is nevertheless a surprise.

Flooding and Food Riots

First it's eat rats, now rains and food riots? Bihar can't catch a break!

Food riots erupted on Wednesday in Bihar, where more than 2 million people have been forced from their homes and about 250,000 houses destroyed in what officials say are the worst floods in 50 years. One person was killed in Madhepura district when angry villagers fought among themselves over limited supplies of food and medicines at overcrowded relief centres.

The Kosi river in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, smashed through mud embankments and changed course last week, unleashing huge walls of water that inundated hundreds of villages and towns. The floods have since killed nearly 50 people in Bihar.

Stranded villagers waved at passing helicopters and sent text messages to local authorities from rooftops of flooded buildings.

"Time is running out for me and there is no relief in sight and I have not eaten for days," a message from flood victim Sanjeev Kumar read.

Officials said floods had destroyed more than 227,000 homes and damaged about 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of vegetables, wheat and paddy crops.

Last year, floods in eastern India and Bangladesh killed around 2,000 people. Millions were affected and officials fear climate change will make similar disasters more frequent.

Banking Crisis to Worsen with FDIC Already in Trouble

Ms. Bair’s agency is stretched.

Dozens of staff members who had been through the banking crises of the early 1990s retired in recent years. Despite her efforts to bring some seasoned examiners back, her small army of examiners is largely untested.

Meanwhile, there are growing questions about the adequacy of F.D.I.C.’s insurance fund, which guarantees repayment on deposit accounts of up to $100,000 when banks collapse. The fund dwindled to $45.2 billion during the second quarter, from $53 billion in the first quarter.

To replenish its fund, the agency will probably have to raise the fees it charges banks by at least 14 cents for every $100 of deposits, according to estimates by analysts. Ms. Bair declined to comment on the likely size of any increase but said the agency was proposing to revamp its fees so that institutions engaging in high-risk practices would pay higher rates.

“It only seems fair,” Ms. Bair, 54, said. Such a move is expected to draw criticism from banks.

How Ms. Bair navigates the financial and political landmines ahead will help determine the course of the banking industry and, by extension, the broader economy. It will also determine her legacy.

Here's where it gets interesting and the plot substantially thickens;

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.

The borrowed money would be repaid once the assets of that failed bank are sold.

"I would not rule out the possibility that at some point we may need to tap into (short-term) lines of credit with the Treasury for working capital, not to cover our losses," Chairman Sheila Bair said in an interview with the paper.

Higher fees? Treasury borrowing? Sounds to me like there's some big, big trouble on the way and the cavalry as non-existent for peeple's money as it was for their flooded out neighborhoods in Nawlins.....,

Russia 'Not Afraid' of a New Cold War

Russian President Says His Country Does Not Want a new Cold War, But Is Not Afraid of One Either. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, speaking in the midst of one of the lowest points in the Russia-West relationship since the breakup of the Soviet Union 17 years ago, said Tuesday that his country did not seek a new Cold War but neither was it afraid of one.

"We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War," Medvedev was quoted as saying Tuesday by the ITAR-Tass news agency. "But we don't want it and in this situation everything depends on the position of our partners."

The statement comes hours after Medvedev recognized the independence of two Georgian rebel provinces, defying the West. The recognition which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described as "extremely unfortunate" follows a short but intense war with Western-allied Georgia earlier this month.

"If they want to preserve good relations with Russia in the West, they will understand the reason behind our decision," Medvedev said.

NATO-Russian naval controntation on tap in Black Sea?

Tbilisia/Kiev/Moscow - A NATO-Russia naval confrontation in the Black Sea appeared days away on Tuesday, after American officials announced a US warship would attempt to enter a Georgian port controlled by Russian army and naval forces. US fleet elements will in coming weeks unload humanitarian aid in the Russia-controlled Georgian port Poti, US embassy spokesman Stephen Guice said in remarks widely reported by Georgian media.

The American announcement setting the stage for a direct US-Russia naval confrontation came against a background of continuing high tensions in the region in the wake of the Russia-Georgia conflict and with both Russia and NATO rushing warships into the Black Sea.[...]

The Kremlin has harshly criticised the NATO naval buildup, and has repeatedly made public the names and destinations of NATO warships moving into the region, well before Brussels' official acknowledgement.

NATO currently has a total eight warships operating in the Black Sea, with a ninth frigate en route and expected on Georgia station in the next few days, Russian naval officials citing maritime intelligence said Tuesday.

But Moscow also has responded to the apparent - if officially denied - NATO naval challenge by spiking its own Black Sea warship levels.

The flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet, the guided missle cruiser Moscow, put to sea on Monday after returning to its home base port Sevastopol, Ukraine.

The global consensus on trade is unravelling

Lawrence Summers does a little narrative shuffling. With two wars still continuing and violence in Georgia dominating the foreign policy debate; and with the financial crisis and economic insecurity for families dominating the domestic debate, US international economic policy is receiving less attention in this presidential election year than usual. The limited attention it has received has focused on concerns about specific trade agreements, not broader questions of international strategy. That is unfortunate. The next administration faces the prospect of having to make the most consequential international economic policy choices in a generation at a time when the confidence of governments in free markets is being increasingly questioned.

The current distribution of regional economic power is unlike anything that was predicted even a decade ago. The rise of the developing world, its growing share in global output and far greater share of global growth, is perhaps a quantitative but not a qualitative surprise. The qualitative surprise is this: with almost all the industrial world in or near recession, much of the momentum in the global economy is coming from countries with authoritarian governments that are pursuing economic strategies directed towards wealth accumulation and building up geopolitical strength rather than improving living standards for their populations. China, where household consumption has now fallen below 40 per cent of its gross domestic product – which must be some kind of peacetime record – is the most extreme example. Similar tendencies, however, can be seen in other parts of Asia, Russia and other oil exporting countries.

not that it matters, but...........,

Ron Suskind - The Forged Iraqi Letter;

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

More relevant detail here; National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 254: "The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.

Kucinich.....,

playing nuke-u-ler chicken....,

If the Bush administration proceeds with its plan to deploy its Missile Defense System in Poland, Russian Prime Minister Putin will be forced to remove it militarily. He has no other option. The proposed system integrates the the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border. It's no different than Khrushchev's plan to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s.

Early last year, at a press conference that was censored in the United States, Putin explained his concerns about Bush's plan:

“Once the missile defense system is put in place it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States. It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability....And, for the first time in history---and I want to emphasize this---there will be elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security…..Of course, we have to respond to that.”

Nuclear weapons specialist, Francis A. Boyle, says the Bush administration's plans represent the “longstanding US policy of nuclear first-strike against Russia." In Boyle’s article “US Missiles in Europe: Beyond Deterrence to First Strike Threat” he states:

“By means of a US first strike about 99%+ of Russian nuclear forces would be taken out. Namely, the United States Government believes that with the deployment of a facially successful first strike capability, they can move beyond deterrence and into "compellence."… This has been analyzed ad nauseam in the professional literature. But especially by one of Harvard's premier warmongers in chief, Thomas Schelling --winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics granted by the Bank of Sweden-- who developed the term "compellence" and distinguished it from "deterrence." …The USG is breaking out of a "deterrence" posture and moving into a "compellence" posture. (Global Research 6-6-07)

Bush's real goal is to force Moscow to conform to Washington’s diktats or face the prospect of first-strike nuclear annihilation. Putin must respond.

Mike Whitney on why Putin can't afford to back down.

patience sheeple; death and flag waving are not far off now.....,

Apparently I'm not the only one.

Simon Jenkins fundamentally gets it.

The world is showing alarming parallels with the 1930s. Lights are turning to red as the world again approaches depression. The credit crunch and the collapse of world trade talks are making nations introverted. Meanwhile, the defeated power of the last war, Russia, is flexing its muscles and finding them in good working order[...] Has the West misjudged the fault line of an impending conflict? Its global strategy under George Bush, Tony Blair and a ham-fisted Nato has declared the threat to world peace as coming from nonstate organisations, specifically Al-Qaeda, and the nations that give them either bases or tacit support. Western generals and securocrats have elevated these anarchist fanatics to the status of nuclear powers. Policing crime has become “waging war”, so as to justify soaring budgets and influence over policy, much as did America’s military-industrial complex during the cold war.

Might it be that a raging seven-year obsession with Osama Bin Laden and his tiny Al-Qaeda organisation has blinded strategists to the old verities? Wars are rarely “clashes of civilisation”, but rather clashes of interest. They are usually the result of careless policy, of misread signals and of mission creep closing options for peace.

Terrorists, wherever located and trained, can certainly capture headlines and cause overnight mayhem, but they cannot project power. They cannot conquer countries or peoples, only manipulate democratic regimes into espousing illiberal policies, as in America and Britain. By grossly overstating the significance of terrorism, western leaders have distracted foreign policy from what should be its prime concern: securing world peace by holding a balance of interest - and pride - among the great powers.

spoke too soon.....,

The NYTimes goes to great lengths to deny that race is a pivotal issue. The Race Isn’t About Race and Accentuate the Negative - we'll start with Krugman;

And the McCain campaign, after initially mumbling something about how Mr. Obama eats arugula, quickly resorted to its all-purpose answer: you can’t criticize the candidate because he’s a former P.O.W. Maybe the campaign hopes that the Obama people will fall into a reflexive cringe, the same way they did when Wesley Clark made the entirely reasonable point that having been a P.O.W., while it makes you a hero, doesn’t necessarily qualify you to become president.

Assuming that the Obama campaign isn’t scared off by the P.O.W. thing, can it really win in an exchange of character attacks? Probably not — but it doesn’t have to.

The central fact of this year’s election is that voters are fed up with Republican rule. The only way Mr. McCain can win the presidential race is if it becomes a contest of personalities rather than parties — and if his campaign can instill in voters the perception that Mr. Obama is a suspicious character while Mr. McCain is a fine, upstanding gentleman.

The Obama campaign, on the other hand, doesn’t need to convince voters either that he’s the awesomest candidate ever or that Mr. McCain is a villain. All it has to do is tarnish Mr. McCain’s image enough so that voters see this as a race between a Democrat and a Republican. And that’s a race the Democrat will easily win.

and then go back to Bai, whose claims are a priori somewhat more ridiculous.

The only hitch in this plan is that there’s plenty of reason to think that Mr. Obama’s race is not the insurmountable detriment to his candidacy that a lot of anxious observers believe it is.

The theory that race is holding back Mr. Obama’s candidacy rests on a pretty simple premise. Adherents argue that the Democratic candidate ought to be effortlessly leading by double digits in the polls at this point — and that his failure to do so can only be explained by latent racism among older voters.

After all, this thinking goes, the Republican president suffers from abysmal approval ratings, and even half-witted voters should be able to see that Mr. Obama is a superior candidate to Mr. McCain, were their views not clouded by race.

These are flawed assumptions, however. While it’s entirely possible that Mr. Obama’s race is costing him some support, it’s also true that the electorate that voted in the last two presidential elections was almost symmetrically divided between the two parties. It would defy the laws of politics if, at this early stage of the campaign, moderate Republicans and conservative independents were to reject Mr. McCain (a candidate many of them preferred back in 2000) simply because they don’t like George W. Bush.

Inability to face superficial facts does not bode well for the prospect of facing substantive facts. So many folks caught up in the minutiae of political theater, that they never even consider the cool and calculating hand of the man behind the curtain orchestrating the entire production with an eye to simple governance continuity.