Thursday’s Mini-Report

Good: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday shut the door on expanding oil and gas drilling beyond areas that have already been approved for energy exploration, drawing a clear distinction from her counterparts in charge of the Senate.” (from The Hill)

After the FISA “compromise” and pledges to end the Iraq War, do you really believe a single word Pelosi says? I rank her the second biggest liar in D.C., right behind Darth Cheney.

She has to go.
http://www.cindyforcongress.org/
Donate now!

Did Iranian officials tamper with the photograph of their missile test yesterday?

Somebody’s angling for a job on FOX News.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi speaks Italian. Just FYI.

Elitist.

G.W. Bush is biligual ? What an elitist !

Ummm…”vacancy.” That should say “vacancy”—unless we want to just leave them in an abandoned van somewhere. Maybe northwestern Pakistan….

Thank you, Senators Dodd and Feingold, for your efforts to protect the Constitution.

Agreed with Brent. The only thing an Obama presidency would have done on this would have been to keep the telecom immunity out of it. But while important, that piece is hardly the whole enchilada, and once the bill is signed it can’t be undone (I assume). So the chances of Obama doing anything to fix this, unless he’s facing a HUGE progressive majority in Congress, are slim.

Sen. Feingold’s statement is an amazing dose of naiveté from him. Either that, or he’s trying to pull a fast one. Seriously, look at the excuses we keep seeing about this FISA cave-in. Obama has some sort of secret plan to use the powers judiciously, or not to use them at all, or something like that. Or he’s just delaying his effort to repeal the FISA revision until he’s in office, perhaps. Things like that which don’t make a lick of sense.

Why didn’t Obama speak up and move against it **now**? It wouldn’t have cost him the election; quite the contrary, it probably would have won him more votes. And as the de facto nominee, he has a great deal more influence than merely comes from his Senate office, so he would have had an easy time drumming up support from other politicians and from the rank-and-file.

The rationalizations and excuses are all so empty. This isn’t about national security, and Obama promised he would stand firm against this kind of undermining of the Constitution. This really was a terrible move on his part.

“Bush opposes the measure because it requires “builders of veterans housing to pay employees prevailing wage,” and we can’t have that.”

Of course not. Doesn’t Congress realize we need this money to overpay no-bid contractors
in Iraq?

* Why it’s amusing that Mitt Romney speaks French. — CB

That was *then*. When he was a young and naive idealist. Before he learnt about such things as “French letters” or “French disease”…

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday shut the door on expanding oil and gas drilling beyond areas that have already been approved for energy exploration, drawing a clear distinction from her counterparts in charge of the Senate.”

Rep Maurice Hinchey of NY state spoke on this on C-Span today, suggesting that the oil companies are not exploring/drilling on those 68 million acres for business reasons (aka profits). He also made the point, that with 2% of the world’s reserves, we ought to be conserving, not squandering our domestic supply.

And, if we did increase our output by a million barrels a day over the next few years, how would OPEC respond? Probably by reducing production, thereby keeping prices stable (aka market manipulation).

I still want to know why no one will investigate why the oil companies aren’t exploiting the 68 million acres they already have – of course we know the answer, but why can’t somebody set the record straight officially so this drill/drill/drill crowd doesn’t affect the election? This is a bogus issue, but the public isn’t getting the word. Someone also needs to set the record straight on why we don’t increase our refining capacity. The public thinks it’s because of those dastardly tree-huggers. My understanding is that the oil companies just don’t want to, again, for business reasons, keeping supplies tight.

Why can’t we have a little truth in this country? Must every single thing coming from our government be a lie? Can’t the media spread facts instead of controversy 24/7?

How the hell can a democracy survive when there is no such thing as reality anymore?
Winston Smith had the job of altering recorded history to support the policies of Oceania’s brutal, totalitarian regime . It’s worse here. We haven’t got the foggiest notion of whether anything we read or hear is true, false, made up, spun, pandered or just plain bullshit. Politicians wrap everything they do in the flag, motherhood, God or apple pie when everyone knows everything is done for sex, power or money. It’s just such hypocrisy.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just whining.

Additionally, I think the Carter presidency proved that it is impossible to conserve our way out of an energy crisis.

Just in case you read headlines over the next few days like this—French town in nuclear emergency or other news about a uranium spill—don’t get your undies in a bundle. I find it so ironic that the government takes extreme precautions in situations like this because they know there’d be a political firestorm if they didn’t and it was found out later. Yet when they do go public and take these precautions they get the firestorm anyway even if nobody’s been injured. As near as I can tell from reading several articles about this, the uranium was NOT enriched, so even if it contained as much uranium 235 as normal ore (0.7%), the total amount that could possibly have made it into the river would have been about half a pound. That’s about the same amount that a typical coal-fired power plant dumps into the environment every 2 days, every day of the year. And unlike in this case, where the uranium was quickly diluted and washed downstream, the coal ash heaps are mounded all over and leaching steadily into their surroundings. The vast majority of the uranium would have been U238, which would be essentially harmless. They use the stuff in sailboat keels, airplanes, and for shooting at brown people to fight over their oil. This is another classic case of anti-nuke hysteria, the ignorant leading the blind. The German environment minister said that it’s no small matter when “active uranium” is released into the environment. As opposed to passive uranium? Go chase the coal barons if you’re concerned about uranium in the environment. Or better yet, go read up on the Linear Non-Threshold concept.

hark said:
I still want to know why no one will investigate why the oil companies aren’t exploiting the 68 million acres they already have ,,,,

I don’t know hark. I’m sure there’s
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
a reasonable explanation why no one
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
in either Congress or in the corporate-
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
controlled media will look into the issue.
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

yeah, steve @28. and they’ve been using oil as a weapon against us ever since. thanks tricky dick

just bill said:
yeah, steve @28. and they’ve been using oil as a weapon against us ever since. thanks tricky dick

And if one of Saint Ronald first priorities hadn’t been to eliminate Carter’s programs supporting solar power and other renewable energy sources, we might not be in such a desperate situation right now.

Thanks, Republicans.

I couldn’t read all the comments for this thread, but anyway for those who never got to read “Fiasco,” IIRC this guy Odierno is the poster child for our military failure in occupying Iraq in terms of hearts and minds. His soldiers were the ones doing things like surrounding whole villages with barbed wire, taking the relatives of people wanted for questioning and shipping hordes of detainees to Abu Ghraib without even finding out who they were first.

What a nightmare that a disgrace to the US military like that is not only still there, but being promoted to the highest ranks. :-O

Okay, I think I have had it with the number of confusions about the FISA bill, and the group of you who have already decided that Obama is ‘Sam Brownback with a great tan.’ I have a hunch i am going to be doing a lot of writing between now and the end of the weekend — various minor health problems permitting.

Before I get started on the bill, on what the 4th Amendment actually means (some of you have been treating it with the same ‘deceptive clarity’ that i;ve come to expect from the Scalia end of things) and on a series of ‘history lesson’ posts on how Progressive change has actually occurred in this country, I want to ask one minor, inconvenient question.

Whatever you think of the FISA bill that was just passed, there was a much worse ‘assault on the 4th Amendment’ in the ‘Protect America Act of 2007’ that was passed on August 5, 2007 and allowed to ‘sunset’ last february. In fact, I think that some of you are confusing the provisions of the two acts — and remember the controversy over extending it, in which Obama was on the right side.

This is the real horror, the bill that did allow warrantless wiretapping, retroactive permission from the FISA Court, etc. It passed — in the Senate — by a vote of 60-28 with 12 not voting (probably they were ‘paired for and against’ in some cases). Every single Democratic Candidate for President voted against this bill, and rightly so. Even John McCain was not recorded as voting. Some of the ‘pet hates’ here in the Senate, Rockefeller, Byrd, Reid also voted against it. (Sadly, and damnably, Feinstein voted for it.) In fact, only one prominent Democrat other than Feinstein was among those voting for the bill — and in fact, he also was to vote against all the amendments on Telecom immunity before the current FISA bill was passed, but it wouldn’t be fair to criticize his supporters here for not condemning him for those votes — yet.

However, the initial vote should have been enough for the rigid ideologues here to damn him as totally as they are condemning Obama. In fact, I hadn’t known about the vote when I ruled him out as a VP Candidate — and now that I do would make this my prime reason. But you people who are so fierce at manning the walls surrounding the Fourth Amendment should have, and at least one of you should have started the same chorus against him that you are now aiming at Obama. Not “Brownback with a great tan” but “Cheney with better aim.”

But somehow, I didn’t hear any of this, even though the same line is present in the votes against striking Telecom Immunity as was in the votes that were in favor of the “Protect America Act.” The line that reads:

James Webb (D) Va

I was lucky enough, the night before the vote, to hear it explained by Rep. Adam Smith (D) of Washington — who, as i said to my wife, “I didn’t know from Adam” when i saw him on HARDBALL. I have since learned he’s a six-term Congressman who beat a Religious Conservative named Randy Tate, that he was a leader in the fight against the PAA (see my last post), and that he was one of the earliest Obama supporters in Congress, supporting him in April 2007. He was fascinating on the question of “Telecom Immunity” and — assuming he isn’t a liar on the Buchanan level — apparently most of us who have been fighting it have got it wrong. (In fact, his explanation was the strongest argument I’ve seen against granting the immunity.)

Apparently (as Smith said ‘we may not like this, but it is the law that currently exists”) the telecoms already have immunity, that a previous law was passed granting them and others immunity if they can be shown to have acted at the direction of the President or the Attorney General. The ‘trouble’ is that to have this immunity, the Attorney General or his representative has to get up in court and testify to exactly what assurances he gave the telecoms, and exactly what he asked them to do. And Bush will not let his Attorney General testify in this matter.

So this isn’t about ‘punishing the telecoms’ or ‘forcing them out of business’ or even making sure our phone and Internet rates go up at the level that gas has been rising. The telecoms were never in danger of losing these suits — and according to Mark Kleiman

Note that the Democrats had proposed last year to substitute the Federal government for the telcos as the defendant in any civil suit. So the question at issue is not whether they have to pay; in either case, they won’t. The question is whether the lawsuits, and the discovery process, can go forward. BushCo is terrified of what that discovery process would produce.

http://www.samefacts.com/archives/campaign_2008_/2008/07/telco_immuity_exhale.php

The one thing that ‘granting immunity’ did in this way was to keep the defendants from being able to force a representative of the Bush administration to testify in the discovery process — subject to cross-examination — exactly what was said to and asked of the telcoms. That is what Obama and those opposed to Telcom immunity were fighting about. But, as Mark also notes in the same piece:

But note that if Obama becomes President, he has no reason either to block internal investigation within the Executive Branch or to use the claim of “executive privilege” to shut down Congressional investigation. So the goal of revealing the extent of the Bush/telco lawlessness is not defeated by the civil-immunity provision.

And despite the responses here, the fact is that the actual debate in Congress was never about ‘punishing’ telcos but about the investigation of the Bush Administration. Take a look back and see how the arguments were phrased.

Thank you Jim. Your sound explanation validates my gut feeling: Obama definitely has a bead on the bigger picture.

Hope you’re feeling better soon!

Prup (aka Jim Benton) said:
I was lucky enough, the night before the vote, to hear it explained by Rep. Adam Smith (D) of Washington — who, as i said to my wife, “I didn’t know from Adam” when i saw him on HARDBALL… He was fascinating on the question of “Telecom Immunity” and — assuming he isn’t a liar on the Buchanan level — apparently most of us who have been fighting it have got it wrong.

Yeah, I saw him interviewed too. He did a bit of misdirection. Yes, this is mostly about investigating the Bush Admin. The Bush people definitely don’t want to admit under oath that they started spying in Americans long before 9-11, and they don’t want anyone to look into the details of what they requested from the telecomm companies.

But the idea of slamming the courthouse door in the face of ordinary citizens is troubling. It’s already tough enough to sue a corporation. And the right-wing Republican Supreme Court, with their Exxon ruling this term, has made it even harder. One good thing about the SCOTUS eliminating bans of guns — it looks like the only redress that people will have left is to go and shoot up a corporation’s headquarters.

Addendum to #41

Not to brag, but I predicted earlier this spring when the Democrats made noises about defying Bush on FISA that they would cave. I didn’t expect them to do it so publicly though. I assumed they would insert telecomm immunity into a reconciliation bill in the middle of the night.

So now I hear rumors about President Obama’s Justice Dept. going after members of the Bush Admin. It ain’t gonna happen. He will tell us that “the country needs to let the past go and look to the future,” or some similar bullshit.

Besides, on January 20 all that the Democrats will find in the executive branch offices are computers missing their harddrives and huge piles of ashes and shredded paper. If Democrats were serious about investigating (and prosecuting) the Bushies, then members of Congress would be in court obtaining injunctions against destroying any records.

To SteveT@26:
Then we have nothing to fear from FISA, right? You said you trust the government to keep your secrets (the same government that outed one of their own undercover operatives when it suited their purposes politically), so what’s wrong with FISA?

To Steve @28:
I realize that Nixon started the problem. I assume then, that Carter’s first action as President was to lift the embargo to ease the crisis? Carter’s solution was for the government to tell people to use less and carpool. The entire purpose of the founding of this nation was that no government should tell its people how to live. On FISA, healthcare, oil, you name it, government is always the problem, never the solution. Governments exist to protect the private property and rights of the people, nothing further. Read John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, which was the primary inspiration for our Declaration of Independence.

Before I get to the next part of this, let me respond to what has already been written, including thanks to Miss Muddled — who isn’t, and a response to the well-phrased response of Brent.

My point in regards to webb is that many of the same people who have already decided that Obama is hopelessly compromised were the same people — I believe, haven’t checked this — who were supporting Webb for Vice president, despite a true assault on the Fourth amendment. I want to ask those of you who knew about Webb’s vote why you didn’t make the same points against him that you are now making against Obama. Why didn’t I hear how he was hopeless, that he was ‘stil a republican,’ that he was the sort of compromiser on basic values that had to be not merely rejected as VP but who should have a challenge mounted against him in the next primary?

And now that he has gone even further and voted against the amendments stripping telecom immunity from the bill, I hope no one will again suggest that he would be a good choice for VP, or would have been had he not taken his name out of consideration. How, in fact, can you possibly support him for any Cabinet position with these votes on his record? (Of course I am exaggerating here, deliberately, but merely to show how idiotic are comments by someone such as “Markos” above.)

I should make one thing clear here. I did and do oppose ‘telecom immunity’ — more strongly now that I understand it better. I would have liked to see the Bush Administration caught between having to testify in court or exposing their ‘corporate friends’ to unnecessary multi-billion dollar lawsuits. And I would have been delighted to watch the telecoms ‘spilling the beans’ all over the place and their response to an Administration that put them in this position. There would have been more ‘whistle-blowing’ than in a year’s course in referee school.

I am glad Obama opposed this, as did the others, my point is that it wasn’t, for me, a ‘deal-breaker.’ It is just as possible for the Obama Administration to conduct its own investigation, as Mark said, and just as possible for preogressive senators to hold his feet to the fire if he fails to — or do it themselves since they will have a large enough majority.

If, as both Obama and Rep. Smith have insisted, rather than increasing or granting greater warrantless wire-tapping provisions to the President, this in fact brings more material under the control of the FISA Court, then it is worth accepting the immunity provision. (Yes, I would prefer a less ‘toothless’ FISA, but that takes us out of the 4th Amendment question entirely. The fact that a particular judge may grant warrants to any police officer who can spell his own — the officer’s — name right, and that the appeals court is unwilling to reverse a judge doesn’t mean that this is a violation of the 4th Amendment — but I want to spend a lot more time on that later.)

Anyway, more on other aspects in a bit. I would hope that someone who is condemning Obama will point to anything other than this one — at least arguably explicable — vote, anything in his past life and career that would imply that he would act in the way you predict. (I don’t mean where he has taken a position you disagree with — as i disagree with him strongly on the death penalty and especially on his willing to expand it.)

Where has he shown the sort of disrespect for civil liberties, the sort of attack on and ignorance of the Constitution, the simple ‘selling out’ that results in his deserving being called “another lying monkey that marches to the same drummer as the smirking chimp.” Any ‘legislative history on that? Any examples of personal choices that would back this up. Or are you just repeating the ‘politicians are all alike and none of them can be trusted, and the government is out to get you if it isn’t curbed’ meme that was so long the staple of such brilliant liberal commentators as Rush limbaugh.

libra: You always deserve careful response and you are certainly not one of the hysterical commentators. But I will ask you to read my comments again. My point is not that Webb and Obama were ‘birds of a feather.’ My specific point as far as Webb went was that he voted for a true assault on the 4th Amendment in the PAA, which Obama, Clinton, and all the other candidates opposed, as did most of the non-Centrist Democrats. That he voted against stripping telecom immunity from the recent bill — on all three amendments including Specter’s — when Obama voted to strip it. In other words, if Obama was deserving of some of the contemptuous comments that he received, then why hasn’t Webb been receiving the same sort of comments from his first vote on the PAA.

And we’ve seen Rockefeller and Reid and others who opposed PAA been blasted as well. But Webb was considered as a perfectly good running mate by many of the people here despite that blotch on his record — of course this was before the current sport of throwing Obama under the bus got started. My point is not that i would oppose Webb for reelection, or a Cabinet post — though I’d have to think hard about it — my point was the difference in response to the two men.

And one point, you could spend a little time looking at the history of the Senate, and of Senatorial Independence. Becoming the nominee has never given a Senator any more prestige in the Senate. It wasn’t true for Kerry, for Gore as VP, even for Dole or Goldwater. It wasn’t even true for Kennedy and Johnson once they’d been elected.Senators rarely change their votes, or their opinions to ‘make things easy’ for the Presidential Nominee even if he was, or had been, one of their own. So no, I doubt if Obama had opposed final passage that he would have brought the Nelsons, or Salazar, or Webb, or Landrieu, or Carper, or Evan Bayh along with him. (In fact, taking a strong stand on this when he knew he would lose would have given the Republicans a great weapon. “He wants to be the Commander-in-Chief and he’s too liberal to get his own party to go along with him.” (A lie? Sure, but they’re Republicans, they lie.)

My economic policy has no connection to my economics advisor.

Aaron said:

Umm… Aaron, the oil embargo was imposed on us by OPEC in 1973. Then in 1974 the oil producing countries began to take control of the companies controlling oil production in their countries or to nationalize them outright. Within a few months, the West had to adjust to the idea that the flow of imported oil was not absolutely guaranteed.

Carter’s solution was for the government to tell people to use less and carpool. The entire purpose of the founding of this nation was that no government should tell its people how to live. On FISA, healthcare, oil, you name it, government is always the problem, never the solution. Governments exist to protect the private property and rights of the people, nothing further.

Carter’s solution was a comprehensive, three-tiered plan. In the short term Americans were encouraged, and to a certain extent coerced by government restrictions like the 55 mph speed limit, to use less energy to reduce the immediate energy shortage. In the intermediate term, Carter and Congress raised milage standards for cars and added regulations to make buildings and appliances more energy efficient. In the long term, Carter established tax incentives to encourage increased use of solar and other sources of alternative power with the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need for imported oil.

Government exists to do more than keep Aaron’s stuff secure from commies and dark-skinned people, both foreign and domestic. Government encourages commerce by establishing regulations that smooth economic fluctuations and create confidence and continuity. During crises the government can impose regulations on the consumption of scarce resources, like it did in WW I and WW II, to ensure the “general welfare”.

Remember the preamble to the Constitution, which describes what the framers intended. It doesn’t stop after “establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense”. It continues, “promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity….”

Now you may argue that the “blessings of liberty” include the right of corporations to do anything they want and for individuals to consume as much as they can afford. But I strongly disagree.

Unlike some mythical Ayn Randian paradise, in the real world corporations exist for one purpose — to increase their profits. If a society expects a corporation to do anything else, such as produce products that don’t kill people, in facilities that don’t kill or maim their workers and using methods that don’t poison the surrounding environment, then government has to require them to do so.

The libertarian solution of “social Darwinism” is unacceptable to a large majority of Americans. Few Americans have the expertise to test the food they buy to ensure that it isn’t contaminated or poisonous. The “free market” solution is to leave the food providers alone, and if the product they sell is dangerous, then they will be driven out of business. But of course, by that time hundreds or thousands of people are dead.

Few Americans have the time or the resources to negotiate their own health coverage and it’s not reasonable to expect them to get the training to decipher the fine print in their policy. Without government regulation to protect consumers from buying health coverage that doesn’t actually cover anything, an awful lot of people wouldn’t buy heath coverage at all. Without widespread access to medical care, epidemics are inevitable.

Government becomes the problem when elected officials don’t have to worry about being held accountable for what government does. Either they don’t have to worry about getting re-elected, thanks to the extraordinary power of incumbency, or one branch of government abdicates its responsibility to provide a check on the power of the other branches.

The problem with the FISA revision is that this Congress has (unconstitutionally, in my opinion) given up the responsibility of the legislative branch to provide oversight on the executive branch and taken away the Fourth Amendment guarantee of no searches without a court-approved warrant.

To SteveT@26:
Then we have nothing to fear from FISA, right? You said you trust the government to keep your secrets (the same government that outed one of their own undercover operatives when it suited their purposes politically), so what’s wrong with FISA?

Again, Congress abdicated its responsibility when members of the Bush Administration outed Valarie Plame. The problem wasn’t that government had too much power. The problem was that unethical Republicans and cowardly Democrats refused to enforce existing Constitutional protections. Congress should have impeached Cheney’s lying ass.

I’m pretty sure Dems have the votes to beat this: “President Bush will stand by his longstanding threat to veto Medicare legislation passed by the Senate Wednesday, the White House confirmed. The veto will set up override votes in the House and Senate, where the legislation passed with more than the two-thirds majority needed to overcome the president’s rejection.”

I’m glad you live in cloud-cuckoo land, because if you think those 9 Republcans who voted for it after Ted Kennedy broke the filibuster are going to sticfk around and override The Leader’s veto, then you really are Pollyanna.

Prup (aka Jim Benton) said:
And the political arguments could be very strong were the race to ‘tighten up.’ As I said to Libra above, there was a very strong possibility that he could have put himself on the line for the bill, and still failed to swing the Carpers, the Nelsons, the Salazars, the Feinsteins, or the Bayhs…. And — again, in a close race — the line “See, he’s even too liberal to get his party to follow him” would have been powerful.

Democrats took a completely wrong lesson from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. When exit polls said that voters wanted a candidate with “values” the weren’t talk about Bush’s values. A majority of voters disagreed with many of Bush’s positions.

Voters wanted a candidate who HAD values — ANY values.

John Kerry was too much of a lawyer to state his positions with bumper-sticker clarity the way Bush did. So Republicans were able paint Kerry as a “flip-flopper.” Al Gore’s inept campaign allowed the corporate-controlled media to create the story that Gore was a chameleon — “morally upright Al”, “alpha-male Al”, “earthtone-wearing Al”. The one persona that Gore was consistent about — “environmental Al” — got locked in a closet by his campaign consultants before the primary season started.

Meanwhile, even Bush’s supporters admitted that he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. But Bush was able to argue that his values were unshakable. Unfortunately, a lot of the values he claimed in his campaigns, like being a “compassionate conservative” and being a bipartisan “uniter” were complete B.S.

This strategy even worked over and over for one of the most despicable human beings in recent history — Jesse Helms.

So I want to see a candidate unashamedly proclaim, “This is what I believe. This is what I will do. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for me.”

I think it would be so different that it would be a winning strategy.

Steve T:
It is precisely because I have seen Obama not merely proclaim this but live it, that i am voting for him with such enthusiasm. (I just disagree that, in this case, it demonstrates any lack of values.)

But more tomorrowwwwwzzzzzzzz*snore*

It is with an equally-muddled clarity that Aaron isn’t looking at the condition of the US military immediately following the Viet Nam War. The US resolve to fight was at an incredible low-point; the draft had ended, and the “all-volunteer Army” of today was still in its infancy, while we certainly didn’t have the precision-guided weaponry of today.

Maybe we could have just carpet-bombed the oilfields, Aaron? Smothered them in napalm? I can’t think of a better way to have put the entire ME under “the loving protection” of the U.S.S.R. than a stupid “I-wanna-be-like-Dubya” move such as that—can you?

The ME was already a delicate hot-spot, waiting for a spark to ignite it—and we were more than a bit less capable of fighting a protracted land war then, than we are today. We can’t even get completely on top of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan now—imagine taking how thin we’re spread today in those two places, and speading it over the entire ME, all of North Africa, down through East Africa, the Pacific Rim, back into SE Asia, and then into parts of South and Central America—all at the same time. Carter knew he had a wrecked military on his hands; Congress would have hung him from atop the Capitol dome if he had tried to re-institute the draft.

All the ’73 Embargo really did was stop the supply of cheap oil by using a tit-for-tat manner of inflationary price increases. Imagine if all of OPEC were to have simply shut off the supply altogether. What then, Aaron?

I think

expect when he speaks for John McCain

should read:

except when he speaks for John McCain