Night of the Long Knives

"It's time for 'no more Mr. Nice Guy'. All those people shouting, 'Down with America!' and dancing in the street when Americans are attacked? We have to kill them."

Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century, encouraging the White House to forget about all this "win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis" crap.

And the White House, as usual, is listening. Apparently, they've secretly tucked away millions of dollars in the Iraqi War appropriation to fund paramilitary units loyal to the Iraqi National Congress to start assassinating people that they BELIEVE are ex-Baathists supporting the insurgency, much like the CIA did in Vietnam in an operation called the Phoenix program.

And we all know what a resounding success that was.....

Painfully Honest Quote of the Day

"Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this......The system isn't about ideals. The country doesn't elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great. "

- Tony Kushner, playwright for, among other things, Angels in America, about why it was foolish for progressives to vote for Nader in 2000, and why it would be even more foolish for them to vote for anyone other than the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is (including Lieberman) in 2004.

Needless to say, I don't completely agree with this point of view, but his statement about the nature of Presidential candidates is definitely spot on.

The Atlantic | December 2003 | The Bubble of American Supremacy | Soros

The Next Bubble
How rich is George Soros? He was just fined $2.2 million by a French court for insider trading. For the average American citizen, who's median net worth was ~$71,000 in 1998, the equivalent fine would be about $22.

So, for a dude who came to the US as an immigrant, he clearly knows a thing or two.

In his latest book, The Bubble of American Supremacy (excerpted here in The Atlantic Monthly, he compares the current push for global American hegemony (otherwise known as The Bush Doctrine), as a geopolitical equivalent of the dot.com boom of the late '90's. In other words, it seems like a good thing on the surface, but it's totally unsustainable, with equally disastrous results.