[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.]

A little-remarked virtue of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is its graphic rendering of The Parable of the Frog. What? You don’t know about it and aren’t haunted by it day and night? Well, if you’re a journalist in Washington or New York, it’s no wonder. You and some colleagues are probably the hapless frog himself....

As I noted here before the 2004 election, the nation’s Founders were worried about republican prospects because they were reading Edward Gibbon's then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, frog-like and degree by self-deluding degree, into imperial tyranny.

They knew that bad leaders throughout history had bedazzled citizens out of liberty by titillating and intimidating them into a mob mentality that, as Gibbon put it, "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army … ."

Surely Founder Richard Henry Lee was anticipating a Frogometer when he wrote that "nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces." Surely Tom Paine had a frog in mind when he warned, in Common Sense, “Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, Come, come, we shall be friends again for all this.” But if you can survey what is being done to you and “can still shake hands with the murderers, then... whatever may be your rank and title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of sycophant.”

Surely a nation like ours, fighting a supposed war of self-defense against terror, shouldn’t rely on a “volunteer" army of kids driven toward supreme sacrifice by economic and civic emptiness at home. That nation would be lapsing “by gradual paces” into trusting “a mercenary army.” But I’ll leave the encroaching militarism, surveillance, cultural decay, and corporate fleecing to experts who’ve kept their independence, like retired generals who’ve spoken out.

I’ll mention just one bowl of warming water I do know fairly well – the one that holds “mainstream” (a.k.a. “liberal”) news media in New York and Washington. This is the water whose temperature George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and their faux-journalist retainers are raising, most recently in Bush’s disgraceful charge that The New York Times’s reportage on encroaching surveillance is “disgraceful” and has “harmed the United States of America” more than he has.

A word about the media bowl itself: Since the corporations that own most mainstream journalism are bound by law and their own charters to maximize profit and market share, they don’t really contribute to civic-republican deliberation by citizens who sometimes temper their market interests to advance a common good. Corporations don't deliberate that way; their civic gestures are write-offs, sales-lubricating "good will."

The effect on journalists? As Gore reminds us in his film, anyone whose salary depends on his not understanding something is not going to understand it. In his important blog, David Warsh wonders this week if that’s why Slate, absorbed by the Washington Post media conglomerate, hasn’t managed to find a serious economics columnist to replace Paul Krugman, who left there in 1999.

It happens all the time. I'm becoming a connoisseur of the ways undergraduates like those I’ve taught at Yale go into journalism with civic-republican, liberal-humanist standards like Paine's but adapt to their employers’ and editors’ characteristic ways of falling silent about -- or finessing, in a civic-republican idiom -- the yawning gap between civic-republican candor and the courtesanal behavior that deftly advances corporate priorities and practices. Soon they are serving up gossip, gotcha, and titillation, some of it with the telltale ironic posturing of people who know that they’re no longer free.

In the media bowl these days, more and more frogs are drifting listlessly in the rising heat. As the republic dissolves, writers who came to journalism with good civic-republican educations write little that Richard Henry Lee would have admired and more that Tom Paine would have considered cowardly or sycophantic.

Other scribblers thrive as warm-water snakes, like journalists of 19th-Century Paris whom Balzac portrayed in Lost Illusions. As that novel’s translator, Herbert J. Hunt, notes in the Penguin edition, “Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under [Napoleon, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy], instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position, and power.”

You may think here of Judith Miller, Stephen Glass, Tony Snow, Matt Drudge, Hugh Hewitt (in his online Weekly Standard column), or the majority of the staff of the New York Post, which Rupert Murdoch transformed from a crusading liberal tabloid edited by my second-cousin James Wechsler into the daily reminder it is now that Australia was founded as a penal colony.

At a subtle remove, think of smooth operators like David Brooks, himself a temperature-raiser on the Iraq War and other threats to freedom who has nevertheless been making nice references lately to publications somewhat to his left (such as this one) where he has been criticized, while blasting the leftist blog Daily Kos as a corrupt political machine. This is all-too characteristic of the false, cloying comity and one-sided hypocrisy of Washington journalism. Brooks should be challenging the far-more powerful conservative blogosphere and excoriating Bush’s latest moves against honest reporting on encroaching surveillance.

And someone should be bringing back John Adams to warn us, as he did in 1786:

When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society....

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.]

As every political junky in the country now knows, just before finding himself not indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove went to a fundraiser in New Hampshire and launched the Republican campaign for the 2006 midterm elections. Its simple goal was to keep a Democratic majority (and so the power to investigate) out of either house of Congress. He promptly attacked Rep. John Murtha and other Democrats for their "cut and run" attitudes on Iraq. ("They may be with you for the first shots, but they're not going... to be with you for the tough battles.") He swore that the administration had been right to take out Saddam Hussein ("We have no excuses to make for it...") and proposed a new version of the administration's most successful post-9/11 ploy -- the constant linking of Saddam Hussein to the al-Qaeda attacks. Now, he would link the wreckage of administration policy in Iraq to future terrorist attacks. If we "cut and run," he pointed out in a fabulous Mobius strip of political logic, "It would provide a launching pad for the terrorists to strike the United States and the West."

His President had only recently announced the turning of "the tide" in Iraq with the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the installation of a new Iraqi government in Baghdad's Green Zone. Vice President Cheney would soon answer a question about whether we were still in the "last throes" of the Iraqi insurgency by insisting that the Democrats wanted to "bail out" just as we were "making very significant progress" in Iraq. The Congressional Republicans, whatever their private hesitations, were brought into line with the Rove plan and launched the sort of offensive that, in the past, has proven so ineffective in Iraq and so effective at home.

Given the disaster that Iraq actually is, some alterations of argument were obviously in order. Put in terms of Colin Powell's infamous "Pottery Barn rule" ("If you break it, you own it"), this particular formulation would go something like: You've barged into Pottery Barn, an invading bull in a China shop and you've been breaking things right and left ever since; management, employees, and other customers are enraged, so what choice do you have but to stay and keep breaking things? Bail out now and all those angry folks will be heading for your house to break your things.

Once upon a time, this administration's top officials and associated neocons dreamed of shock-and-awing the Middle East into the shape they wanted, settling into Iraq for the long haul, dominating the planet in geopolitical and energy terms, ensuring that no nation or bloc of nations would ever again challenge the U.S. and, in the bargain, installing the Republicans as the dominant domestic party for at least a generation. Now, forced to hitch their fates to the President's disastrous war, they simply hope to squeak through the mid-term elections and, two years later, hand ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan off to another president. Joshua Marshall of the Talking Points Memo website recently described the President as "like an owner of a business that's slowly going under… And he won't just liquidate and save what he can, because then he'd have to come to grips with the fact that he's failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground."

In fact, whether it works or not, Rove's political gamble is breathtakingly bold in its simplicity. He's throwing the dice on a single proposition: That, in the end, Americans will prefer the illusion of living in a Green-Zone world all the way and so will swallow the Green-Zone fictions that go with it.

Let's consider, then, a few small pieces of the Green-Zone world our President has created:

George in the Green Zone: On his Potemkin travels, the President has long taken a portable Green Zone with him. On the campaign trail, he almost never met an audience that hadn't been carefully vetted and so seldom found himself face to face with a questioner who wasn't beyond friendly, outright obsequious, or absolutely fawningly admiring. Put another way, with rare exceptions, his world is regularly cleared of reality as he approaches. On his foreign travels, this happens with clocklike regularity. Major metropolises are simply shut down or cleared of humanity, so that, like the USS Abraham Lincoln for his infamous "Mission Accomplished" tailhook landing, they become but movie sets on which he can tell his Green-Zone stories about how the world works without fear of complaint or contradiction.

Last week, George and his entourage landed in Vienna for a brief yearly confab with European Union leaders on a continent that views him with ever increasing alarm and hostility. According to the latest Pew poll, for instance, two-thirds of Austrians now have a negative view of the U.S. (even though Desperate Housewives is the TV hit of the year there). "A Harris Interactive/Financial Times survey released Monday found that 36 percent of Europeans view the United States as the world's greatest threat to 'global stability.' By comparison, 30 percent of those polled named Iran as the biggest threat, while 18 percent named China." When a European reporter actually confronted Bush with this at a press conference, it angered the President greatly and he responded not only with irritation, but with a Green Zone-style description of our American world: "We're a transparent democracy," he insisted. "People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open. We've got a legislative process that's active."

Here, then, is a description of Vienna as he entered it by Charles Bremner, a British reporter who has covered summits all the way back to Jimmy Carter's administration and finds the present security arrangements to have reached "absurd proportions." He writes:


"The centre of Vienna has been locked down since Bush's arrival on Air Force One last night. Streets are closed to traffic and parks and squares are locked shut. Bomb disposal squads are checking suitcases. The unusual quiet makes it feel like a prettier version of Soviet Moscow on the morning of the old November parades. Military helicopters are hovering over the Hofburg, the old Imperial Palace… We are working alongside in the usual vast press centre inside a cordon of about 2,000 police. To enter means penetrating three cordons, with the right credentials. At two of them, they searched all my bags and asked me to show that my computer and mobile phone were real. Dogs then sniffed them, along with the laundry in my overnight bag."

Oh, and while humanity is cleared from the general area, the dogs are usually flown in from the U.S. along with snipers, hordes of security personal, a bevy of escort cars, masses of aides, even cooks.

Two weeks earlier, the President made his secret escape from Washington and flew into Baghdad international airport wearing 25 pounds of body armor, helicoptered into the capital's heavily fortified American-controlled Green Zone, met with the new Iraqi prime minister (on five-minute's notice -- lest word get out and something terrible happen), dramatically looked him "in the eyes," and a few hours later left the U.S. version of "Iraq" for the administration's stage-set version of Washington to offer the American people yet another round of Green-Zone tales of turning tides, progress, and future Iraqi successes.

Incident in the Red Zone: But what about anyone who has to leave Baghdad's Green Zone for even a brief visit to the region the Americans on the spot call the "Red Zone" and most of the rest of us think of as Iraq? Well, the Australian ambassador had an interesting experience along these lines lately. As it happens, not all Iraqi ministries are located inside the Green Zone. The Ministry of Trade is unlucky in this regard, being in one of Baghdad's many embattled neighborhoods, which made the Australian ambassador no less unlucky. Last week, he had to visit Abdul-Falah al-Sudani, the Iraqi trade minister, in hopes of negotiating a multimillion dollar deal for Australian wheat. Naturally, he took along his "security guards." (Who in Baghdad would go anywhere without them?) In the ministry's parking lot they evidently ran into a set of armed Iraqis -- the trade minister's bodyguards, as it turned out -- and evidently fearing themselves in danger, simply opened fire, killing one and wounding several. They then seem to have leapt into their vehicles and hightailed it back to the safety of the Green Zone (apologies to follow later). Amid security guards, bodyguards, militias, insurgents, armed criminals of all sorts, private mercenaries, jihadis, and armed, terrified citizens, shoot on sight is increasingly the operative phrase. Call it the Wild East or maybe the world that George made.

Life between the Zones: While George and Karl and Dick and Don and Condi and Zalmay -- "Zarqawi's death will not by itself end the violence in Iraq. But [it] is an important step in the right direction. It is a good omen for Iraq, for Prime Minister Maliki's new government, and our overall efforts in the Global War on Terror..." -- were spinning a cotton-candy confection out of post-Zarqawi, don't-cut-and-run Iraq, our Green-Zone ambassador, the very same Zalmay Khalilzad, sent a cable marked "sensitive" to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that just happened to end up in the hands of the Washington Post. All the Post would say was that it was "obtained" by the paper -- though assumedly it was leaked by someone, Iraqi or American, who wanted the world to know what life in Iraq was actually like, even for those working in the Green Zone.

The cable focused on the Iraqi staff of nine in the Public Affairs section of our gargantuan embassy and, though it got some media attention, few of us really read such long documents beginning to end, so let me summarize. It dealt with Iraqis who have to leave the Green Zone each night for Red-Zone Iraq and return each work-day morning. In their Red-Zone neighborhoods, the employees often got but an hour of power for every six hours without (one area lacked city power for "over a month"); spent endless hours in gas lines (12 hours on a day off for one employee); were taunted by Iraqi guards, who seem to belong to (assumedly Shiite) militias, at Green-Zone checkpoints; could not tell family members where they actually worked; faced mounting criticisms of the U.S. at home; experienced sectarian strains in homes and neighborhoods; could not protect their own children; did not take home their American cell phones (fearing these might ID them for death); are in some cases "planning for their own possible abduction" by entering code names for friends and colleagues into their Iraqi cell phones; cannot be called by the embassy on holidays or weekends without having their "cover" blown; regularly know of people dying and often attend funerals ("every evening" in one case); if female, are being intimidated and harassed for not "covering up" and for using cell phones (a "suspected channel to licentious relationships with men"); have to regularly modify behavior, language, and dress as they pass into different neighborhoods controlled by different militias; and find that in their neighborhoods "the central government… is not relevant."

The memo concludes, "Although our staff retain[s] a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see that their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials." In other words, even inside the heavily guarded American embassy, signs of incipient civil war can be observed.

But perhaps all you need to know is this: According to Khalilzad's cable, "More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames." In other words -- as with the President's five-minute notification time for the Iraqi prime minister -- the embassy is not reliably secure.

Whoever wrote this cable for the ambassador notes that "in March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate." In Iraqi minds, then, already the shades of Saigon, 1975 are arising.

At the very moment Bush and Co. were painting a picture of progress in Iraq, the ambassador's memo bluntly notes that "even upscale [Baghdad] neighborhoods such as Mansur have visibly deteriorated." The splendid New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise had a piece on this in the Saturday paper, Fear Invades a Once-Comfortable Iraqi Enclave. She writes: "[Once] Baghdad's Upper East Side… but… no longer the address everyone wants… [n]ow Mansour, a religiously mixed area just three miles from the fortified Green Zone, feels more like wartime Beirut than Park Avenue, and its affluent residents worry that the wave of violence that has devoured large swaths of Baghdad has begun encroaching on them." As you read on, it only gets grimmer. For instance, the owner of a well-known, upscale "Sweet Shop" that was satchel-bombed, she writes, "blamed the Americans for the security troubles, an opinion expressed by many in Mansour -- Shiite and Sunni alike."

And none of this includes the mayhem that followed that turning "tide" -- the murder of one of Saddam Hussein's lead lawyers, the small spike in American troop deaths, the steady stream of sectarian killings, or the gun battles that broke out between Sunni insurgents and the Sadrist militia (and came to include American troops) on Haifa street, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, once known as "Death Street," and a notorious hotbed of insurgent activity that was long ago supposedly reclaimed by Iraqi troops.

Green Zones inside Green Zones: In good times and bad, the Bush administration has always had a Green-Zone strategy in Iraq, but never an "exit strategy" because they never planned to depart (and still don't). From the beginning, they expected to hunker down in a series of permanent bases, largely away from major population centers, and these, to the tune of billions of dollars, have since been built. The biggest of them is Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, "a small American town smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq," with 20,000 American troops, most of whom never leave the base, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges, four mess halls, as well as extensive bus routes -- and it's still being upgraded. Bases like Balad were meant to be little islands of well-fortified and well-guarded American irreality at the heart of the planet's "arc of instability" (think: its oil lands).

When the administration was received in Iraq so much more poorly than any of its officials ever dreamed, they simply fortified more heavily and settled into the chaotic ruins of the country for the long haul. Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the new American embassy rising inside the Green Zone, a massive citadel inside what's already our citadel. It is, as Nicholas von Hoffman pointed out recently in the Nation magazine, the most permanent of bases. Known to Iraqis as "George W's Palace" (a sly reference to Saddam's elaborate former palaces), it is to be the biggest, most expensive "embassy" on the planet to the tune of at least $592 million (and probably more) -- a mini-state within a fortified city-state with 8,000 employees, "twenty-one buildings, 619 apartments with very fancy digs for the big shots, restaurants, shops, gym facilities, a swimming pool, a food court, a beauty salon, a movie theater... and, as the Times of London reports, ‘a swish club for evening functions.'" When it comes to electricity and water, it will operate independently of the rest of Baghdad. With its own missile defense system, it will be the global bunker of bunkers.

(Not surprisingly, a not-so-mini-version of this embassy is being built in Afghanistan for our other failing war on terror. In 2003, it was already being constructed under a $100 million contract with Halliburton -- which specializes in bases, prisons, and now fortress embassies for the Bush administration. Much of it is now finished, though little has been written about it, and it too, as someone who has seen it tells me, is an enormous fortress-like compound with very few windows (all probably easily convertible into gun emplacements), guarded by Nepalis -- wouldn't want to let the locals too close -- and well supplied from the U.S. right down to the heads of lettuce.

Of course, as the early post-9/11 adventures of our Vice President indicated, the Bush administration has long been hunkered down with a bunker's-eye view of the world through those gun-emplacement windows. For its top officials, the rest of the planet exists outside Green Zone walls, a place you never venture without your full contingent of security guards who shoot first, ask questions later, and never, never (unlike the Australians) apologize. Beyond those walls, it should never be surprising to find mayhem and horror on some version of the old American frontier (where you take people "dead or alive"), because out there is where you find the savages and barbarians.

The Green Zoning of History: One of the things you need to do when telling Green-Zone stories to the American people is "Green Zone" history. Historical memory (if you're not remembering the glories of World War II -- "'The president understands people's impatience…,' [Tony] Snow said on CNN. 'He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, "Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?" But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.'") is generally to be avoided. For instance, the history of American support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s would, in the pre-invasion period, play no part in all those stories about Saddam's "killing fields" and his acts of horror.

When our enemies (even if once our friends or allies) commit horrors, they are, of course, the brutes, the barbarians. In telling any such story, if the enemy is barbaric that automatically makes you "civilization." Saddam was a barbarian, big time (but skip the years when our satellites were helping him pinpoint Iranian troop concentrations to gas). Only last week, out in the Red Zone, two American soldiers were brutally slain, their bodies mutilated and evidently burned beyond recognition, and one of them was beheaded (probably after death); the bodies were then booby-trapped with IEDS.

As New York Times correspondent John Burns put it, "The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world." National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley offered the following version of the same: "I think it's a reminder that this is a brutal enemy that does not follow any of the rules. It attacks civilians for political gain, it provokes sectarian violence, and it really follows no rules of warfare. It's a very brutal enemy, and it's a reminder to all of us about what we're up against." And those were typical comments in our world.

Mind you, in Red-Zone Iraq, mutilated bodies -- including many with holes from power drills (very twenty-first century), often tortured, it seems, by militias connected to our Shiite "allies" -- have been pouring into the morgues for god knows how long. However, when a largely Green-Zoned American public is suddenly shocked by the horrific deaths of American troops and wonders what century the brutes we're up against are really in, it helps enormously to lack all historical memory. I don't mean memory of eighth century or even "medieval" brutality, but simply of the last decades of the previous century when the CIA ran the largest covert operation in its history, aimed at turning Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam.

To accomplish this, the Agency entered into an alliance with Pakistani intelligence and the Saudis to fund a range of extreme Islamic jihadists, including one by the name of Osama bin Laden. They were to take guerrilla war to the USSR by any means imaginable and make them pay -- and that they did. Back then, hailed as "freedom fighters" by President Ronald Reagan and as a "resistance movement" in our press, our jihadis committed a wide range of terrorist acts (including using car bombs, bike bombs, wheelbarrow bombs, even "camel bombs," as well as roadside IEDs) -- and were hailed for it. Moreover, when they captured Russian soldiers, they made a point of torturing, mutilating, and beheading them. (Soviet atrocities were also legion.)

These were the well-funded predecessors of the jihadis (or in some cases, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, they were the very same jihadis) fighting us today. Now, they are the barbarians.

As a point of comparison, the same week those American bodies were mutilated in a barbaric fashion, reporter Ron Suskind came out with a new book, The One Percent Doctrine in which, according to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, he describes the President's special interest in a captured al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, who turned out not to be a leading terrorist but a complete nonentity and literal madman.


"'I said [Zubaydah] was important,' Bush reportedly told [CIA director George] Tenet at one of their daily meetings. ‘You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?' ‘No sir, Mr. President,' Tenet replied. Bush ‘was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, ‘Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' And so, Suskind writes, ‘the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.'"

Of course, this administration never admits to torturing, but if you're going by "medieval" standards, water-boarding was once upon a time simply known as "the water torture." Such American actions -- and they have been legion in recent years -- have taken place outside the walls of the Bush administration's Green Zone, out there in a world of barbarians where "the gloves must come off" and hands must be preemptively dirtied to make us all safer back here.

Running with the Barbarians: So let's return to those ridiculous Europeans who think that the Bush administration is a greater destabilizing force than Iran or North Korea in our world. Despite the President's outrage, here's the odd thing: If you stop to think about it for a moment, the Bush administration's Iraqi argument and the recent full-scale charge of the Republicans in Congress is now implicitly based on little but the destabilizing qualities of the President's war-on-terror policies; on the thought that, if those policies are not pursued to their unimaginable endpoint, the destabilizing happening elsewhere, the turning of Iraq into a lawless, devolving Red Zone, of Afghanistan into a lawless, rebellious narco-state, the potential unsettling of the whole "arc of instability," will arrive on our shores.

The globally disastrous results of Bush administration policy are now the explanation for continuing that policy. We must stay in Iraq because otherwise the Zarqawis will come to us. Who even remembers when, before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi was a nonentity, a small-time thug and crude jihadist, a would-be whatever -- with little hope of becoming that "whatever." Now, he's in the pantheon of whatevers and he and his successors are being transformed in the White House Rose Garden from the dismal results of what this administration has done into the justification for everything they still plan to do.

In the meantime, we have now passed the Nth tidal shift, the umpteenth turning point -- moments which invariably allow the Bush administration to retell the same inane Green-Zone stories that the media always takes up with a strange kind of hope as if some slate had just been wiped clean until, soon after, they are drowned in new waves of blood and chaos.

How many more Green Zone stories are Americans capable of taking? For how long will Americans mistake safety for hunkering down in the ruins of occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, with the embassy lights on and the water running and that fabulous little club in full swing, and everything else going to hell? As long as we do, matters will only worsen. And sooner or later, whether the jihadis arrive on our shores or not, our empire will come home. It already has. Don't for a second think that you can keep the torturers, their methods, and their mentalities -- those classic "dirty hands" -- off in the shadows, beyond the walls forever. Indeed, the barbarians are already inside the gates. Soon enough, they may be impossible to tell from us.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in suburban Philadelphia. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century,” which will be published in the fall by Harvard University Press.

I live near Philadelphia, and I love our hard-luck, up-and-down baseball team. Until the Phillies take Brett Myers off the field, however, I won't attend any more of their games. And neither should anybody else.

Last Friday morning in Boston, the Phillies' Myers was arrested for assaulting his wife. According to Kim Myers and a witness, Brett Myers struck her in the face during an argument near the team’s hotel. He also dragged her by her hair and pulled her shirt up around her neck, the witness said. He was released shortly thereafter on $200 bond.

And the Phillies did . . . nothing.

That’s right: nothing. The team’s website announced that it would not comment on the episode, “out of respect for the privacy of both Kim and Brett Myers.” And the Phillies put Myers on the mound the very next day, for his scheduled start against the Red Sox.

Nor did Major League Baseball censure Myers and the Phillies in any manner. But Commissioner Bud Selig issued a fine and mandatory “sensitivity training” for Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, who insulted a local journalist with an anti-gay epithet. White Sox officials also called on Guillen to exert more self-control.

So let’s get this straight. If you use a hateful word to malign a reporter, you get fined and re-educated. But if you use your hands to pummel your wife, you get nothing.

Nothing.

You might reply that Myers--unlike Guillen--was charged with a crime.
So the courts—and not the Phillies—should sort out the matter. In the interim, Myers should keep playing.

That’s exactly backwards. Until we know what really happened on that streetcorner in Boston, the Phillies should sit Myers down. Otherwise, they’re sending a potential wife-beater to the mound every fourth or fifth day. And they’re sending the wrong message to the rest of us.

Let’s suppose that Myers had been picked up for buying cocaine or heroin on that same Boston corner. Do you really think he would have pitched the next afternoon? Not a chance.

Aah, you might respond, but drugs are a scourge on the game of baseball. And you’d be right.

But so is domestic violence. Just last month, Detroit Tigers infielder Dmitri Young was charged with choking his ex-girlfriend. Or consider Oakland outfielder Milton Bradley, who received three visits from police last year to investigate charges that he was beating his then-pregnant wife.

Other notables with domestic-violence rap sheets include Yankees pitcher Scott Erickson, Tampa Bay shortstop Julio Lugo, Atlanta manager Bobby Cox, and, yes, San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds. We hear about Bonds’ alleged drug transgressions every day, but nobody talks very much about his arrest for assaulting his first wife.

Here you might argue that this double-standard infects our entire society, not just baseball. And again, you’d be correct. [ital]Two hundred dollars[ital] bail? For hitting your wife in the face? What does [ital]that[ital] tell you about America’s social attitudes and priorities?

There’s only one way to change these attitudes: with our feet, and with our wallets. If the Phillies continue to put Myers on the mound, we shouldn't go anywhere near their stadium. Trust me, the team will listen.

“I love the fans,” Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said on Sunday, defending his decision to play Brett Myers. “Believe me, without the fans, we don’t have a game.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

In recent weeks, the talk among pundits about the inevitability of Democratic triumph has simmered down. For some reason - one that I have not yet ascertained - Bush in the high-30s induces an entirely different storyline than Bush in the mid-30s. While the logic does not make sense, the result is nonetheless a move in the right direction. We seem to have returned to the much more sensible conversation that we were having in March: for the Democrats to win the House, they will actually have to do something.

What do they have to do? This is the $2.3 trillion question, one for which many answers abound. Most of the answers center on a date and a word. The date is 1994 - the most surprising of political years since Dewey defeated Truman. The word is "nationalize." The Democrats need to nationalize the 2006 election, just as the Republicans did in 1994.

Is that really an answer, though? Nationalizing an election is not like declaring shenanigans at a carnival. You do not simply walk up to a microphone in front of a camera, declare that the election is "nationalized," and away you go. Nationalizing an election is a tricky thing to do.

The reason for this is the pro-incumbent bias inherent to congressional elections. It has greatly increased in the last few decades. When people talk about nationalizing an election, what they usually mean is bringing the national mood to bear on local House races. To nationalize an election is to essentially reward or punish members of Congress based upon the President's job approval. This is a difficult task. Incumbents have become increasingly able to retain their seats despite whatever partisan winds that might be blowing. Part of this has to do with redistricting, but most of it has to do with the fact that our Congress has become professionalized. Being in Congress is now a profession - and so, therefore, is being a candidate. It is part of members' jobs to know their districts and to know what it takes to get to half-plus-one. Professional members can also hire consultants, pollsters and strategists who make their living based upon electoral victory.

But this bias existed before World War II, and it roots extend to the very foundation of the American experiment. Our system of government - in particular its doctrine of separated powers - makes it very difficult to identify who is responsible for any given policy or any given result. So many different actors are involved in any given situation that confidently identifying a causal chain is virtually impossible. Hurricane Katrina provides a perfect example. Who should we blame for Katrina: the state government, the city government, the county government, the President, the Congress, all of the above, none of the above? I think it is literally impossible to place blame with any precision. Most answers I have read ultimately hinge upon the partisanship of the writer - liberals are more likely to blame institutions operated by the Republicans; conservatives are more likely to blame institutions operated by the Democrats. The reality is that power is so divided that nobody is clearly to blame. This enables all parties involved to shirk any responsibility they might have.

So it goes with almost all policies and outcomes. Madison and the founders instituted this type of system to thwart tyranny. Their thinking was that a division of power would confound potential oppressors by pitting them against one another. It was successful; but, as a side-effect, it greatly diminishes responsibility. Identifying who is responsible is a difficult task, and it works to the advantage of incumbents twice over: they can believably take credit for the good stuff and believably deny responsibility for the bad. When you combine this structural feature with members who are very skilled at campaigning in districts full of fellow partisans, you can appreciate why the incumbency retention rate has recently hit the 99% mark.

There is another way to nationalize an election - one that is much easier. You do not have to pit yourself against James Madison when you nationalize open seat races. Recently, it is through open seats that most swings in the balance of power have occurred. When members of Congress decide not to run for reelection - and many times such a decision is predicated upon national political conditions - local races take on a much more "national" flavor. For starters, voters are more inclined to vote according to their partisanship. This is key, as the effect of the incumbent's advantage is his ability to get voters who are of the opposite party to support him. You also see a more explicit discussion of national issues. The freshmen class that entered Congress in 1992 was there largely because the election was nationalized, which in turn was due to the large number of retirements stemming from the House bank scandal.

Thus, to an extent, all midterms are "national:" in every year there are at least a few open seats. Unfortunately for the Democrats, in 2006 there are only about 5 open Republican seats from marginal districts - i.e. districts whose partisan composition does not heavily favor one side or another. What the Democrats therefore need is to nationalize the election in a way that Republican incumbents bear the brunt of the force. This is what the Republicans did in 1994. They grossed 56 Democratic seats that year. 22 of them came from open seat victories. A whopping 34 came from defeated Democratic incumbents, most of whom occupied marginal districts.

Just as the Republicans did in 1994, the Democrats have to find a way to counteract the advantages that incumbency confers. The question becomes: how did the Republicans manage this counterintuitive result?

They did this, in essence, by using Bill Clinton's knack for the art of persuasion against him. Clinton was able to persuade Democratic members of Congress to go on the record supporting left-center policies that their districts opposed. He thus made what is usually an opaque picture of responsibility crystal clear. This enabled the Republicans to do what is so rarely done: bring the national mood home to the district.

For how much the conventional wisdom asserts that Clinton only gained his political bearings in 1995, the fact remains that the 103rd Congress had an impressive number of achievements that Clinton spearheaded. Many of them were decidedly left-of-center: notable among these were the tax increase provisions in the Deficit Reduction Act, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and the assault weapons ban provision in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Clinton - in conjunction with the House leadership - was very adept at inducing Democrats from marginal House districts, where these measures were quite unpopular, to vote with the party. In roll call vote after roll call vote, Democrats - particularly from the South and the Mountain West - voted with the party and against their constituents.

These roll call votes were what landed Democrats in so much trouble on Election Day. They explicitly and clearly attached House members to that which had upset voters in these marginal districts. Republican challengers could say more than, "Our Democratic incumbent is part of the problem!" This is what every challenger in every race says every year. It is not effective because it does not offer a coherent or compelling causal argument. Republicans in 1994 offered something more. In race after race, Republican candidates declared, "Our Democratic incumbent is part of the problem; just look at his votes on H.R. 1025, H.R. 3355, H.R. 2264!" In other words, the roll call votes made what is normally a quiet and confused trail of responsibility loud and clear. Voters who were angry about the direction of the country came to believe, thanks to Republican campaigns based upon these votes, that their members were to blame for it. They thus developed bad impressions of their members, and, on Election Day, they voted Republican.

The evidence is pretty clear on this point. As Stanford political scientist David Brady has argued:

"For many...Democrats, especially those representing more conservative districts, the choice (to support or oppose Clinton's legislative agenda) was...difficult: vote for a decidedly liberal legislative agenda, and risk offending constituents, or vote against the party leadership. Those who decided to support the president's legislative agenda risked providing Republican challengers with an obvious line of attack...Where Clinton ran poorly in 1992, Democratic incumbents with pro-Clinton voting records in Congress were much more likely to be defeated than those with lower levels of presidential support."
Examining the roster of defeated Democratic incumbents, one will only see a few who had opposed Clinton on all three of the aforementioned measures. Almost all of the losers supported Clinton at least once, and they paid for it with their seats.
Would an identical strategy work this year? It might, but it might not; 2006 is different in many respects from 1994. As mentioned, the Republicans won 22 open Democratic seats that year. This year, the Democrats can only hope for 5 such seats. Further, there was a tension that year that is absent this year: namely, there were many districts that tended to vote Republican in the presidential election and Democratic in the House election. This gave Republicans many opportunities for pickups that are simply absent this year. More than 90% of Republican members are in districts that voted for Bush. Fortunately for Democrats, the number of seats they need to win is much lower. The Democrats had a 40-member majority going into the 1994 midterms. The Republicans have a 15-member majority today. ...

[Jonathan Zimmerman (jlzimm@aol.com) teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth.]

According to recent news articles, American teenagers are using a high-pitched cell phone tone that many adults cannot hear. The reports have sparked alarm among schoolteachers, who fear that the new tone will let their students take calls in class.

But the captains of American industry aren't afraid of change. Instead, they embrace it! Even as we speak, creative businesses are developing an array of adult-proof products. Here are just a handful of them:

The Invisible Television: Emits rays that only adolescents can detect. Mom and Dad will think you're staring into space. Instead, you're staring at reruns of Malcolm in the Middle.

"Open Access" Software: Have your parents blocked your favorite Web sites? Using obscure computer jargon, this program lets you "unblock"
the sites. In field trials, nobody over 18 was able to follow the directions.

The Hard-Core Car Radio: Plays grunge, techno, hip-hop, and everything else adults hate... but on a frequency they can't hear! Makes those long family drives a lot more pleasant for everyone involved.

Teen-Speak Morse Code: For special occasions when you really don't want your parents to know what you're saying. A voice-activated machine will automatically insert like or cool into every clause and sentence, scrambling your speech beyond adult recognition. But your friends will be, like, cool with it.

Scentless Beer:You drink for the taste, right? Yeah, right. But adults can't taste this beer - and they certainly can't smell it on your breath. Perfect for prom night.

The Adjustable Clock: Do your parents hassle you about being late? It's time we moved to your own clock, my friend. Go to a computer, click the mouse a few times, and this clock will slow down - or even move backward. Mom and Dad will be too stressed out to notice.

The Subliminal Advertiser: Let's suppose there's a special product you want - an MP3 player, a video game, what have you - but your folks say it's too expensive. This video camera lets you splice microcosmic advertisements into their TiVo-ed Sopranos episode. You'll get the prize, and they'll get the bill!

So stop worrying, America. As the very old song goes, by some band I can't remember right now, "The Kids Are Alright." And even if they're not, we'll never know the difference.

The president of the United States is in some ways the nation's leading public historian. More people hear about American history from him than from virtually any other source, with the possible exception of Hollywood.

It has therefore been dispiriting to witness the falsehoods about American history consistently purveyed by the Bush administration. Bush and his officials have repeatedly made allegations that simply are not true, but they sin most grievously against the muse of Clio with their flat-footed and implausible analogies.

On Sunday, the most prominent among Bush's spokesmen from the ranks of Fox Cable News anchors, Tony Snow, did it again. He compared our current situation in Iraq to the Battle of the Bulge. This battle began in mid-December, 1944, a little over 3 years after the US entered the war. Snow also suggested that the American public was ready to throw in the towel at that point in the war!

Is the only way this tawdry administration can make itself feel good to defame the Greatest Generation? My late uncle used to tell us stories of how he fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Is Tony Snow saying he was a coward? That the Americans back at the homefront were?

From CNN on Sunday:

BLITZER:"Let's talk a little bit about troop withdrawal potentials for the U.S. military, about 130,000 U.S. forces in Iraq right now.

In our most recent CNN poll that came out this week, should the U.S. set a timetable to eventually withdraw troops from Iraq, 53 percent said yes; 41 percent said no.

Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today. She's going to be on this show, coming up.

She wrote this:"We have now been in Iraq for more than three years. And we believe that the time has come for that phased redeployment to begin. It is also time for the Bush administration to provide a schedule and timetable for the structured downsizing and redeployment of U.S. forces in Iraq."

"Does that make sense?"

SNOW:"The president understands people's impatience -- not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?

But you cannot conduct a war based on polls. And you can't conduct this kind of activity. What you have to do -- and the president's been clear about this -- is take a look at the conditions on the ground. Let's think for a moment of the alternative.

If the United States pulls out -- and what's been interesting is that most people realize that simply pulling out would be an absolute, unmitigated disaster, not merely for the people of Iraq but the larger war on terror."

On the question of American faintheartedness in the face of the Ardennes assault by the Germans, here is what was on the front page of the New York Times on December 20, 1944:

"nothing but confidence in our ability to deal with . . .""It has long been foreseen that the enemy might make some such counter-stroke . . .""the risks of powerful armies closing in on his flanks seem even greater . . ." Oh, yeah, we were obviously petrified! Why, it is amazing that Gen. Patton didn't just slink away for very shame at our pusillanimity!

Not only were the Americans determined in the face of the Nazi assault, but the NYT reported that the Belgian resisters to the Nazis urgently requested permission to line up to fight the German army, a request that Gen. Erskine declined. Ragtag Belgian irregulars weren't afraid, much less the public and military of the United States of America!

And here is the concluding para. of the NYT editorial on Jan. 13, 1945:

So let me get this straight. The NYT editorial says,"This state of affairs calls not merely for watchfulness on the part of the allies but also for the recovery of the general control of strategy as soon as possible."

So Tony Snow thinks a poll would have shown that the US public was shaking in its booties at the Battle of the Bulge? He thinks the New York liberal press was calling for an abandonment of the war? What a steaming crock!

So his premise is just not true. But neither is his analogy on the mark. We are not at the Battle of the Bulge in Iraq. We are at the beginning of 1983 and we are the Soviets in Afghanistan. Here is what wikipedia says about that era:

"1983

The Muslim insurgency remains locked in military stalemate against Soviet and Afghan troops. The government controls the cities, while the guerrillas control the countryside. There are conflicting reports on the success of the regime in either neutralizing the insurgency movement or crushing it with the aid of some 110,000 Soviet troops. Reports on the war are sketchy and probably biased, since they are based on accounts given either by Pakistan-based rebel groups or by journalists taken on conducted tours by the government. President Karmal is firmly in command of the ruling PDPA. Infighting between the Parcham and Khalq factions of the party is less evident in 1983 than in previous years, and it appears that the Soviets have succeeded in bringing them under control. Afghanistan continues to depend on the Soviet Union for economic aid and food assistance."

Three years later, Soviet documents show, Gorbachev had decided he could not win in Afghanistan, and that he would have to withdraw. Shortly thereafter, the CIA gave Stinger shoulder-held missiles to the Mujahidin (including to our then ally Gulbuddin Hikmatyar), and Gorbachev had to accelerate his plans. In 1988 the Soviets withdrew. A year later the Soviet empire lost its Eastern European satellites, and in 1991 it collapsed.

Would the Soviets have been better off getting out of Afghanistan in 1983? Without any doubt whatsoever. Would the chaos in the country have been worse than what eventually happened, in the 1990s? Highly unlikely.

As for Snow's contention that for the US to get out of Iraq would be a defeat in the war on terror, it is exactly the opposite. The US occupation of Iraq is now reviving the terror movement among Muslim radicals. This is the conclusion of experts such as Fawaz Gerges and Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin. The quicker we end the miltiary occupation, the sooner we will stop inadvertently training the next generation of terrorists who want to hit us.

And, anyway, as the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi demonstrates, there is no real need to worry about terrorism flourishing in western Iraq. The neighbors-- Jordan, Syria and Turkey-- would never put up with it, for fear it would spill over onto them. And as that operation showed, the Jordanians are better at tracking down Arab terrorists than the US military (yes, it soes help to know Arabic fluently).

Moreover, there is some danger of Bush's imperial over-stretch imperiling our republic. Our budget deficits, enormous indebtedness, the sinking dollar, and other effects of imperial overstretch and Republican Party irresponsibility could lead to a crisis of epochal proportions.

Everything Snow said was wrong, and most of it was insulting-- whether to my late uncle, to the greatest generation in general, or just to our intelligence.

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights. He can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com]

In his first visit to the White House on May 23, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told President Bush that Israel will “devote six to nine months to find a Palestinian partner” before it pursues the unilateral “Convergence Plan.” It was an empty promise. Olmert knows that given the reality in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the probability of returning to the negotiation table is close to zero.

Since the ruling Fatah party lost the democratic elections to the Islamist party Hamas, much has changed in the Occupied Territories. Following Hamas’s electoral victory, Olmert asked foreign leaders to boycott the new Palestinian Authority (PA) until it complied with three conditions: 1) disarm Izzeddin al-Qassam and other paramilitary groups; 2) annul Hamas’ charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel; and 3) accept the agreements and obligations that the Palestinian Authority took upon itself when the Fatah party was in control.

Given Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Hania’s recent statement that if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders Hamas will be willing to sign a peace agreement based on an extended hudnah (truce), the first two conditions could easily become part of future negotiations rather than a condition for negotiations. Olmert’s third demand, however, puts Israel in a thorny spot. After all, Israel, not the Palestinians, has been using the separation barrier in the past three years to execute a unilateral plan that contravenes all previous agreements. Thus, according to Olmert’s logic, the international community would also need to boycott Israel in order to remain consistent.

Nonetheless, following U.S. pressure, the three other members of the Quartet­the United Nations, the European Union and Russia­agreed to follow the general thrust of Olmert’s demands, and have cut off most of the foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Even before the foreign aid was cut, 64 percent of the Palestinian inhabitants were living under the international poverty line of $2.20 a day, while the World Bank reported that acute malnutrition affected 9 percent of Palestinian children. Since the aid amounts to almost one-third of the per capita gross national income in the West Bank and Gaza, the cuts could eventually lead to a famine.

Since February, when the foreign aid was cut, the Palestinian Authority has been unable to pay salaries to its 160,000 employees. These workers provide direct livelihood to over one million people (almost a third of the population), and if their salaries are not paid for a few more months the Palestinian economy will totally collapse. Both Israel and the United States are now thinking of ways to alleviate the dire situation­after all, no wants to be blamed for producing a famine. Together they have adopted a scheme that could be called the “Somalia Plan.”

The idea is to transfer salaries directly to the bank accounts of those 90,000 PA workers who are employed by civil institutions like the education and health ministries. The remaining 70,000 Palestinians who work for one of numerous security apparatuses in the Occupied Territories will not receive salaries. This will keep the economy just above the famine level, leaving 70,000 armed men with nothing but frustration and anger.

Under such conditions, a struggle is sure to break out among the different Palestinian warlords over the scant resources in the Occupied Territories. Already, Ha’aretz has reported that dozens of bombs have been laid near houses or cars of senior Hamas officials and officers in the last few weeks, while homes and cars of Fatah senior officials and Preventive Security officers have also been booby-trapped. In some cases the bombs went off, causing injuries and damage.

If the existing skirmishes among the different factions develop into full-blown battle, it may very well be that certain segments of the Palestinian population will go hungry. Yet, it’s the warlords or faction leaders, rather than Israel or the United States, who will be blamed for the human catastrophe. We are, in other words, witnessing Somalia in the making.

Members of the European Union have expressed “serious concern” about the deterioration in the humanitarian, economic and financial situation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. But even though they have pledged to resume payments to the Palestinians, E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana hinted to Ha’aretz that resistance from the U.S. Congress might make it impossible to transfer the funds.

So it is not only that Israel and the United States are uninterested in abating the violent clashes among Palestinians. They do not seem to care that a civil war in the Occupied Territories will both engender immense suffering and destabilize the region for decades. In many ways, their policies are precipitating this­not coincidentally, but as part of the very logic informing the perpetual war on terror.

[Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard University and the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire." His new book, "The War of the World," will be published in September.]

Think of the economy of the United States as a dinosaur — one of those huge herbivores whose bulk shook the ground. A brachiosaur. A brontosaur. A diplodocus. Like them, the U.S. economy is mind-bogglingly enormous — two and a half times as big as the next largest economy in the world and almost as large as that of the six other members of the Group of Seven combined. The catch is that it has to consume almost incessantly to sustain its great heft.

Contrary to what we used to believe, leviathans like the diplodocus were not exactly sloths. It is now thought that they had the strength to stand on their hind legs in order to reach food at the top of trees. They may even have been able to run rather than merely plod. But it seems reasonable to assume that their reaction times were slow; it was a very long way from the diplodocus's tail to its brain. If a predator sank its fangs into that tail, it might have taken the diplodocus a few moments to feel the pain.

The big question about the dinosaurs is, of course, What caused their extinction? Why were so many species unable to evolve in response to environmental changes? The most common explanation is that a very sudden event, like a meteor's impact, gave the dinosaurs too little time to evolve and provided smaller and more dynamic life forms with an opportunity to take over.

An analogous question for economists is whether the United States is capable of evolving out of its present excessive indebtedness. Or could the global economic environment change so drastically as to threaten, if not extinction, then at least decline relative to smaller, more dynamic economies?...

The most important lesson to be drawn from the history of debt is this: It's not the absolute size of your borrowings that matters. It's not even the relative size in relation to your income. The crux is whether the interest payments you have to make are more or less than you can afford to pay. And that, in turn, is a function of whether or not the rate can move, whether or not your income can change and whether or not inflation can help you or hurt you. On this basis, both subprime American mortgage-holders and a distinctly subprime administration may find the months ahead more painful than they anticipated.




The dinosaurs, we conjecture, succumbed to global climate change. The American beast — call it debtlodocus — faces a comparable economic challenge. The global economic climate seems to be changing. We hear no more talk of deflation; we hear a lot about rising rates.

For America's giant, dinosaurlike economy — with its small, wealthy head; its big, fat middle; and its long low-income tail — there is a tried-and-tested response to a change in the weather. Dollar depreciation and inflation have saved the debtlodocus before. The assumption seems to be that they will do the trick again.

Yet this time may be different. For sinking like a velociraptor's fangs into the tail of the debtlodocus are interest-rate hikes that may outpace and check any increase in inflation. And no one knows when and how violently the leviathan may react to this slowly discernible pain.

It is too soon to speak of extinction, of course. But one obvious inference to be drawn from the British experience of an indebted empire and a sliding currency, as well as from the history of the diplodocus, is that eternal life is not on offer.

[Mr. Applebaum, teaches history at Rowan University, NJ.]

It is ironic to find the text of the Florida Law on teaching history published in “online sunshine.”

Analysis of the legislation states that the fiscal impact of the legislation is “indeterminate” – a postmodern term in a document that condemns postmodernism! The impact, from the point of view of “revisionist historians” is not indeterminate. There are contingent possibilities and that is the reason for historians across the country, at every level of the profession, need to take action now.

In the name of “providing limited government” the legislation creates an intrusive state which substitutes propaganda and partisan polemics for historical study. Similar legislation, in Italy after 1929, German after 1933, and Vichy France after 1940 carried similar rhetoric and justifications.

This year, efforts in the Fifth French Republic to control the teaching of colonialism and imperialism were stopped. Our colleagues in France were able to block government from controlling research, shaping scholarship and limiting classroom content. Within the framework of our Federal system, we should adopt a similar goal.

The Florida law calls for completion of ONE CREDIT! No doubt, the simplification of the truth and rote learning envisioned by the legislation matches the amount of time the needed for the political indoctrination fabricated in Tallahassee

The American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Council of Social Studies can and must act with speed. If the Florida curriculum becomes practice, then the logical step is decertification by these non-governmental, professional organizations. In addition, colleges and universities across the country cannot and should not accept the Florida curriculum as fulfillment of undergraduate student admissions requirements.