It was only a matter of time before Long Bill Kristol and his scurvy dogs of war used piracy as an excuse to goad young Mr. Bush into invading one last country before the door hits him.  In the latest gurgitation of the Weekly Standard, Bill suggests that the best thing young Mr. Bush can do in his final days as commander in chief is send the Marines into Somalia to deep six those pesky buccaneers.  Now: if we can't identify and capture pirates while they're plundering ships on the bounding main, I'd like to know how the yo-ho-ho Bill thinks the Marines can tell the pirates from the rest of the poor starving Somalis once they go ashore.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen appears to be the most powerful man in the world.  Americans elected a president who pledged to get U.S. troops out of Iraq in 16 months.  Iraq's parliament, by a substantial majority, has ratified a security agreement that requires all American troops to be out of the country by the end of 2011, a deadline specifically "not governed by circumstances on the ground."  

One might think the book is closed on the matter of U.S. occupation of Iraq, but no.  Admiral Mullen says it's "theoretically possible" to change the agreement.  "Three years is a long time," he says, and we will "continue to have discussions with them [the Iraqis] over time as conditions continue to evolve." In July, Mullen said that a deadline for a U.S. withdrawal would be "dangerous."  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been asked to hang around for a year or so into the Obama regime, objected to the 16 month plan during the presidential campaign, and incoming National Security Adviser James L. Jones, a retired Marine four-star, said in 2007 that a deadline for our withdrawal from Iraq would be "against our national interest."

What do they call it again, when a country is run by its military?  

This year I'm thankful Dick Cheney and the Bush administration haven't destroyed the whole world.  Yet.  I suspect young Mr. Bush has lost his enthusiasm for the project, but I'm concerned that the Dark Lord's little helpers will keep the fuse burning right up to the closing bell.  We dodged an October surprise, but plenty can still happen between now and January 20.  NORAD and the FAA better keep close tabs on Santa's sleigh come Christmas Eve, that's all I can say.  We don't need no stinking 12/24.  

I'm thankful John McCain didn't win the presidential election.  You hear some of the TV satire guys crying about what great material they'll miss out on without Gramps and Bering Strait Barbie in the White House, but I'm not complaining on that score.  Joe Biden as vice president?  Come on, he'll be better than having Chico Marx running around the West Wing (Getta you tootsie frootsie money quotes).

And Hillary as Secretary of State?

THANK YOU, JESUS!  THANK YOU, SANTA!  THANK YOU BARACK OBAMA!

Last spring my dog Shady and I were walking across the bridge over Pleasure House Creek when I heard a disturbance in the water.  I looked down and saw a Great Blue Heron breaking the water's surface.  The heron flicked the water from its wings, flapped them, and went flying down the creek about two feet above the surface.  

Impressive, I thought.  Boy, wouldn't the weapons procurement nimrods at the Pentagon like to get their mitts on technology that could do that?

Thus it was that I reacted with both amusement and horror to an email notice I received in October from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offering federal grant money for "a feasibility study and experiments to prove out the possibility of making an aircraft that can maneuver underwater."

In other words, DARPA wants to pay someone to come up with a phony baloney argument that says it's possible to make a flying submarine.  

This Polish missile defense system walks into a bar one afternoon and orders six shots of vodka and a beer.  The bartender says, "How can you afford to get drunk in the middle of a business day?" and the Polish missile defense system says, "I don't work."

And lo it has come to pass that as the End of Bush Days draws near, Dick Cheney and the neocons are taking their last shot at instigating Cold War II by deploying a ballistic missile defense system that doesn't work to defend against ballistic missiles that don't work either.  

President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem sure whether he approves or not.

"Obama from the Bullpen" discussed how the president-elect's edict that the U.S. will not keep permanent bases in Iraq helped avert Cold War II, but he has far to go to fix all of the foreign relations fiascos he's about to inherit.  "Puckered Persians" addresses how Obama needs to handle the Iran piece of the puzzle.

The neocons may have lost the election but they still own the narrative.  For nearly a decade they've repeated their message of messianic fear and loathing through Rupert Murdoch's Big Brother Broadcast and the compliant mainstream media over and over and over and over until that's what everybody says so it must be true.  

One has to wonder, then, how much of the neocon line on Iran Barack Obama had swallowed when he said at his first post election press conference that, "Iran's development of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable. We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening."

Our intelligence services say that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in fall of 2003.  I'm not convinced they ever had one at all, exactly.  The Russians didn't start building Iran's first nuclear reactor until fall of 2002.  It's hard to say how much of a nuclear weapons program they could have developed in a year starting from scratch, but it couldn't have amounted to the program my dogs have going on in the back yard.

Navy skippers immemorial wrote "He hit the deck running" on their new junior officers' fitness reports until the phrase became, well, ship-worn.  You mean that the officer just checked aboard, seems eager, if a bit much so, has done a nice thing or two, but it's not time to recommend him either for your job or for immediate transfer to civilian command.  In other words, it's an expression that sounds impressive but doesn't really mean anything, something common to at least 95 percent of Navy writing.    

But the expression appears to mean something in the case of Barack Obama, whose orders just showed up on the message board, as we say in the NAV, and who doesn't even check aboard for two more months.  In the past week he's made three significant interrelated foreign policy moves that involve Iraq, Iran and Russia that have potential to look good, go bad or turn ugly, depending on how he follows up on them.

Part I outlined the neocons' "resurgence" strategy.  Part II discusses how Barack Obama may be steering us toward a neo-neoconservativism.

The Bush administration celebrated Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election by blowing away another Afghan wedding party.  The airstrike, which came within hours of the election, killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others in Kandahar Province.  

Afghan President Hamid Karzai held a press conference on Wednesday to congratulate Obama on his victory, and said that his first request of the new American president would be "to end the civilian casualties."  We've been bombing weddings in Afghanistan for over six years now, and the tactic clearly isn't working.  

I'm rather hoping that Obama's foreign policy platform has room for an alternative to bombing weddings and other mainstays of the neocon tactics manual, but I'm not yet convinced that it does.  

If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

-- Sun Tzu

It ain't over just because they've been voted out of power.  Until January, young Mr. Bush is still commander in chief and Dick Cheney is still in charge.  Surge architect Fred Kagan is putting the finishing touches on the "resurgence" strategy, and the neocons have two months left to do that voodoo that they do so well.  

A former professor of military history at West Point, Fred knows the components of a classic advance-to-the-rear maneuver: the main body backs down toward safe haven where it can regroup for the counter-offensive, leaving skirmishers in its wake to mine, booby trap, burn bridges and otherwise harass the advancing enemy.  

The war party continues to retreat; its skirmishers trail behind the main body to burn bridges, set booby traps, and otherwise harass the advancing Obama phalanx.  The Syrian shenanigan is the latest tactical move in the neoconservative right's fight-another-day strategy, both in the fact of it and in the way it has been covered in our polluted mainstream media.  

The story broke on October 26.  The UK Telegraph reported that "Media reports gave conflicting accounts" of an air strike apparently conducted by U.S. military helicopters on Syrian civilians.  The Times article first cited Syrian state television as saying an attack took place "near the Syrian border town of Abu Kamal."  

Then it quoted a private Syrian TV channel saying nine people had been killed and 14 wounded when an unknown number of American helicopters attacked the village of Al-Sukkiraya.

Then it referenced and AP story that said seven people were killed and five others wounded when two American helicopters carrying U.S. soldiers raided the village of Hwijeh.  

Then it cited a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Sergeant Brooke Murphy, as saying that commanders were investigating the reports.

The narrative got confusing after that.  

Parts I, II and III of "Johnny and the Warmongers" described John McCain's intimate relationships with the neoconservatives and the military/industrial complex.  The fourth and final essay in the series discusses how, even with a Barack Obama presidency, militarism will continue to be the single greatest threat to America's security.

John McCain's policy positions reflect the same formula for disaster that America has followed throughout the past eight years.  

According to his campaign web site, "John McCain believes we must enlarge the size of our armed forces to meet new challenges to our security."  What are these new challenges?  "The global war on terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, threats from rogue states like Iran and North Korea, and the rise of potential strategic competitors like China and Russia."  That sounds like the same old set of boogeymen the neoconservative Bush administration has been making scare noise about, and the "threat" they pose doesn't sound any more credible coming from the mouth of John McCain.  

Parts I and II described John McCain's position in the neoconservative daisy chain.  Part III discusses McCain's tireless fundraising efforts on behalf of the Military Industrial Complex of America.

Among John McCain's more preposterous campaign promises is that he'll reduce federal spending by cutting back on non-discretionary outlays except for defense and veterans benefits.  That's about as pound-foolish as an American politician can get.  

Part I describes how John McCain became indebted to the neoconservative cabal when he gained their support by endorsing the Iraq surge stratagem.  Part II examines McCain's taste in bedfellows.

The thing I dread most about a John McCain presidency is that he gets that phone call at three in the morning and actually wakes up to answer it.  McCain best illustrated the sound judgment he claims to have when he voted to invade Iraq, followed by his echoing Dick Cheney's line that "the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators."  Then there's his choice of running mates.  

I've heard the excuse that, well, Sarah Palin wasn't McCain's pick of prospective veeps, that his advisors pushed her on him.  If that's true, it only goes to show how bad McCain's judgment in choosing advisers is and his utter inability to judge when he's getting bad advice.  In the foreign policy realm, McCain has shown the same misplaced trust in the same woebegone wonks that young Mr. Bush listened to.

This is the first installment of a pre-election series of essays on John McCain and American militarism.

Having based his presidential candidacy on his prowess in national security affairs, John McCain needed a running mate who wouldn't show him up by understanding more about the subject than he did.  This left his vice presidential search committee with a Herculean task, and one that they performed dutifully, but make no mistake.  The top bimbo on the GOP ticket is not Sarah Palin.  In the area where McCain claims to possess the most competence, he couldn't find his proverbial rear end if Joe Lieberman held the map for him and Lindsey Graham worked the compass.  

To paraphrase Voltaire, witticisms can be the best way to make a point but they never prove anything.  So while a couple of satisfying one-liners may illustrate the chasm between McCain's perception of his national security credentials and the stark reality of his fecklessness, it is vital that we examine the specific ways in which, as commander in chief of the United States military, McCain would be the most dangerous man in world history.  

It's vital that we take this journey, even if it turns out that Colin Powell left McCain and his number two without a pot to go number one in.  Every president for the foreseeable future will have to deal with the threat to U.S. security interests that McCain personifies: parasitic, malignant militarism.