I was wondering how Gary Tradeau would pay tribute to Hunter S Thompson.

You remember that copyright infringement where the “Swift Boat Veterans Against Social Security” used that Portland Tribune photograph of a gay married couple — without permission? Hm.

Oddly enough, I just used the covers to the American Spectator (the Jon Stewart and Chuck Hagel covers), one of the offenders to that swipe. (It’s where USNext advertised.) But I’ll count it as being under Fair Use.

We heard this talk before. Back in the 1970s — Ford — Carter years, the question was “Is American power declining?” Are we losing “it”? Some schaudenfreude* abounded. Soon enough, it would become clear that whatever was ailing America, (a few fresh coats of paint during the Reagan and Clinton administrations masked the problem) it didn’t matter too much — the Soviet Union was much further into the thralls of collapse.

Today, the Bush Backers will tell you that we just reshaped the entire Middle East. Or that we’re reshaping it quickly. Jon Stewart says that his entire worldview is in collapse. The Berlin Wall is falling! The Berlin Wall is falling!

But, you know… the entire scene is incredibly brittle.

No sooner had the President arrived in Europe than an economic trapdoor seemed briefly to open beneath his feet when the South Korean Central Bank stated that it intended to move some of its holdings from the dollar to other currencies, causing a 174-point drop in the Dow Jones average. The next day, the bank disavowed its report and the dollar recovered, but not before the fragility of America’s economic position in the world had been revealed.

You return back to the late 1980s / early 1990s, before the tech-boom of the Clinton era and before the Asian Financial Crisis showed that they weren’t entirely on the up and up, when everyone thought that Japan was pretty much crushing us. The Yen was all set to bury the dollar.

Our psyches are perpetually paranoid. But with good enough reason. (You notice that the changes in Bankruptcy is about to pass the Congress and get signed into law… Perhaps the International System is about to draw up the same sort of law for the governing body that ties us down.)

In his meeting with Putin, Bush seemed almost obsequious, repeatedly referring chummily to an unresponding, scowling Putin (it’s an expression that settles naturally on his face) as “my friend Vladimir.” As for democracy in Russia, the man who would “end tyranny” everywhere in the world could only muster, “I was able to share my concerns about Russia’s commitment in fulfilling these universal principles.”

I imagine Putin explaining to Bush (whose administration has been expressing their concerns about his power grabs and crushing of democracy) by explaining it in terms of a “War on Terror”. And Bush nodding his head, and offering to pass in a Patriot Act for his consideration.

This European Visit, incidentally, was glorified in rose colors of “Triumph!” on Fox News.

Its military has been stretched to the breaking point by the occupation of a single weak country, Iraq.

I found a solution to this, said beneath the words spoken by a Pentagon spokesperson, on the trouble of Recruitment.

That’s a factor, that we’re a nation at war,” Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Thursday. “If it’s a young kid who’s in high school and contemplating his future, what are his parents advising him?”

Mr. Di Rita added, “I mean, without question, when there’s the kind of coverage that there has been about casualties – and we certainly mourn all the casualties, but they are covered, there’s prominent media coverage of casualties in Iraq – parents factor those kinds of things in to what they want their children doing.”

What we need, therefore, is to replace the Media with The Pengagon Channel, and then re-educate the parents of America on the need for a more Spartan Society.

* My god. I spelled that word correctly on first blush!

There was this depressing moment when Israeli Prime Minister Barack unilaterally removed Israel’s troops from Lebanon. He did so in large part because Israel simply had no desire to do anything with Lebanon. It was unilateral because Syria didn’t agree to remove its troops.

Had Syria withdrawn, the unsettling message — some terrorists supporting the Palestinian Cause waving signs saying “Palestine Next!” as a sort of “Israel out!” — wouldn’t be so. Thus, we have a glimpse at the tragedy of the Israeli politik.

At the moment, a handful of the liberal intelligentsia (such as they can exist in the form of bloggers and Bill Maherians) are entertaining the notion that “Maybe Bush was right.” It’s the yang to the yen of the Liberal Hawks’ quasi or full (depending on the individual) Apology for supporting the War in Iraq, circa Summer of 2004. Go to the American Spectator website and you’ll find a full page of Triumphantalism: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Egypt, the DNC — where is the Bush Doctrine not winning?.

Full realization that good be borne (partially, though not completely in the case of Syria now being pressured to withdraw from Lebanon) can come out of bad is the mark of a well heeled non-ideological thoughtful person. (At the same time, analyze these photos and appreciate the manipulation.)

A message to everyone, though: Occupations end, whether a host nation likes it not. More later. Perhaps.

I imagine such things as these covers, which The American Spectator seems to throw at us once a week, as Negative Political Advertising. You can picture the faces turning to the photo-negative Blue, with the voice-over“How Can You Trust This Man?

The Jon Stewart article should be read, not least of which to marvel at the spectacle of giving Jon Stewart a cover for a two-page article. Unfortunately, the article does not appear to be online, except for an excerpt, where we see the author marvel at these jokes:

Here are some of Stewart’s incomparable laugh-quakes from “America”:

“The name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., became synonymous with an era, not unlike his colleague Representative Pleistocene, D-Minn.” — page 61.

My favourite joke on Reagan from the book, incidentally, is (from memory, so it’s not exact), on presidential nicknames: “Well noted as an effective communicator and Conservative Ideolouge, Reagan received his nickname ‘The Gipper’ for his tendency to gip a lot.”

Some people get it. Others don’t. To each their own.

Robert Byrd’s speech before the Senate has received a smattering of controversy from his friends on the other side of the aisle, and a fair amount of right-wing punditry brushing us up on Byrd’s KKK past. (Which they managed to drudge up when he oppossed the confirmation of Condelleza Rice.)

His speech? It’s pretty good.

The problem with turning up examples of what is wrong with breaches of parlimentary procedure, and the exasperated power grabs that are at the heart of said breaches, is that the roads they historically lead to, is that invariably it takes us to a very bad spot.

For example, spots where the indefensible is defended, or brushed aside.:

Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you’ve used words like ‘sickening,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘reprehensible.’ Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam’s rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?

McClellan: I’m glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often.

Or… some such nuttiness from elected officials.

“Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on `em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.” — Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX).

(There are two things wrong with that quotation. Maybe three.)

Anyway… We all have our own guages on where the slippery slope runs from, or how Nazi Ideology pervades our nation’s political policy.

Grover Norquist: Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you’ve got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you’re right, there’s an exemption for — I don’t know — maybe a million dollars now, and it’s scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, ‘Yes, well, that’s only 2 percent,’ or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax.

Grover Norquist: No, the morality that says it’s OK to do something to do a group because they’re a small percentage of the population is the morality that says that the Holocaust is OK because they didn’t target everybody, just a small percentage. What are you worried about? It’s not you. It’s not you. It’s them. And arguing that it’s OK to loot some group because it’s them, or kill some group because it’s them and because it’s a small number, that has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally. The government’s going to do something to or for us, it should treat us all equally. “