The Baucus Caucus called the Senate Finance Committee knocked out the front teeth of the sacred and celebrated "public option" scenario that has embodied the unusually herky-jerky Obama healthcare desires these last eight weeks. The vote was not close enough to spin as close, 15-8. Most significantly, the United States of Olympia Snowe voted "No" in a fashion that was indistinct form the "Nos" of her nine grumpy colleague Republicans. The hard news for POTUS and Mrs. Pelosi is that the unenthusiastic Democrats Baucus of Montana, Conrad of North Dakota, Lincoln of Arkansas, Nelson of Florida and Carper of Delaware also voted "No." The White House's Agent of Influence Rahm Emanuel is smoking the peace pipe with Mrs. Pelosi's Liberal Immortals, and there is the usual creative speculation on how to make sausage in the Senate (no option) into a ham sandwich for the House (option) and then a pork banquet in conference (option on option), but the odds just got very long that the healthcare bill will resemble something edible.  Liberal Immortal Anthony Weiner of New York says that it is time for POTUS to step up as "the clean-up hitter." I am out of mixed metaphors. The public option is kaput. The civil war between the Democrats is ready to "move on," as the mischievous and goofy posse "Conservatives for Patients Rights" claims. What is a conservative against patients rights? Mortician?  Ghoul?   

Drift.  

The Obama administration is young enough to read the history of the Vietnam era mistakes by five presidents, Ike, JFK, LBJ, RMN and Gerald Ford, and then determine that it must escape the Afghanistan spiral. However the policy-makers on the Politburo are not mature enough to find an exit that is based upon the history of Afghanistan.  One way that has a probability of working over time is to call on the British experience in-country for help. This is a long slog, and it does not need firepower more than savvy and patience.  Instead, the Politburo schemes in secret with the Saudis and ignores Stanley McChrystal and the facts of the eight-year struggle.  Fogh Rasmussen of NATO speaks up to POTUS that there are 35,000 non-US troops in Afghanistan that are at risk not only to the Taliban and entropy but also to the mystery of Obama administration policy in Afghanistan.  More, what will the Politburo do with the Karzai brothers, now that the Obama administration has surrendered to the rot of the election and accepted the usurper Hamid Karzai as sovereign? Diem scenario?  There is no recognizable Politburo policy.  Gordon Goldstein, author "Lessons in Disaster," told me Saturday 26 that McGeorge Bundy regretted over the last thirty years of his life the mistake of the Kennedy administration decision to remove the Diem brothers in November 1963 and to back a strong-armed Army general (Big Minh) -- a decision that proved a trapdoor to ruin.  POTUS cannot choose, and may not even believe he has a choice to make.  POTUS wants out of the whole region by mid-terms 2010.  What happens in a vacuum of doubt is the worst possible.   All is drift on the wind.   Anything is possible.  Disaster shadows.

Lefty Lula and POTUS.   

Spoke to Mary Anastasia O'Grady Sunday 27 re the Mouse that Roared, the tiny and modest Honduras and its stand-off with rich and potent Brazil over the manipulations of the rascal Hugo Chavez-stooge Manuel Zelaya. Mary says that Zelaya sneaked back into Tegulicgapa in cahoots with the Brazilians, who offered him sanctuary in their small embassy. What does Brazil get out of it? Mary says that President Lula is an operatic Lefty, who needs to remain middle-of-the-road in Brazil's bursting economy, and who can only show off his Castro-kissing in facile foreign policy. Brazil vs Honduras. Does Brazil have a Navy? And what does the Obama administration have to do with this passionate mouse fight?  POTUS and his UN Ambassador Susan Rice side with Zelaya and Lula and the stooge-master, Hugo Chavez.  Why?  No one yet has found a good explanation for what POTUS gets out of his stubborn attachment to Zelaya except more farce.  

Moscow talks the talk of sanctions, because Moscow knows that there is nothing effective that will come of the sanctions regime which would alter the aim of the Tehran Twelvers to provoke with nukes and ballistic missiles. Moscow is the patient, confident grown-up in this scenario. The intelligence we have on Iran is good, because it is Moscow's intelligence.  Some of it is Israel's. We see what we see with our very good signals.  Moscow knows what it knows with its very good sources.  The new site is a very well known site.  Moscow knows we cannot see everything, because Moscow trained Iran how to hide what it has.  Nukes are a grown-up business.  POTUS and his Politburo make an unusual mistake of presuming that Moscow will act in the White House's best interest.  George Friedman's observation of the Obama-Medvedev palaver at the UN with regard Iran's nukes is droll and dead-on: "Nothing has changed."

Usurper Ahmadinejad demonstrates the Tehran Twelver smirk in Farsi when asked about the long-time fact of Iran's secret nuclear enrichment program. Hard to tell from the video if Richard Stengel and Joe Klein of Time are hamboning their foreign correspondence performance on CNN or have so long ago lost their embarassment about the obvious that they can ask stupid questions of stupid men as if epiphanies were at hand. "Why did you not reveal the existence of this nuclear facility before?" "And two, will you allow the media..." The usurper enjoys his New York close-up.

Attended remarks by PM Bibi Netanyahu at the 92nd Street Y in NYC and heard a certainty and confidence in the face of the widespread abuse by the UN General Assembly. The UN Goldstone Report on Gaza that smeared Israel, the General Assembly Gadahfi harangue that insulted the US and the families of the Lockerbie mass-murder, the General Assembly Ahmadinejad blither that repeated the slanders and the Holocaust denials, the smug approval of the thugs and potentates of the General Assembly, all this produced a measure of the wasteland of the UN. The Obama administration treats the UN as a credible, functional enterprise. Is it a rookie mistake or the willful delusion of a man who is not prepared to be commander-in-chief of the "Citty on the hill?" Still too early to answer. Netanyahu is a stern, ambitious, well-educated, seasoned head-of-state.   He can teach President Obama how to backdown the Devils.

David Petraeus is a self-conscious presidential contender for the a future cycle.  He speaks carefully, intellectually, with the temperament of a commander-in-chief, not a schmoozer or the other thing, a rock star.  Petraeus's instinctual tone is to speak softly.  We do understand about the big stick of West Point, Class of 1974.  No man ever went wrong campaigning for the reawakening of American military security.  Horatio Nelson understood 200 years ago what makes common sense about common defense: "No Captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy." Sixteen months from now is the 2012 primary organizing banquet in Manchester, New Hampshire.  Twenty-seven months from now is the primary in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Will Petraeus pass?  Ike shrewdly passed on the inquiries to him from the Democrats and Republicans for 1948.  How long will we wait to ask, "Who lost Afghanistan?"  

Colleague Aaron Klein enjoys shooting lay-ups against two predictably robotic voices from the Saudi-goosed stooge camp of institutes, universities and think-tanks. David Mack of the sluggish Middle East Institute and a Hamas stooge, Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a professor of Political Science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, assert positions and make demands that are out of date and insincere. Aaron Klein waits on them politely and then measures their derivative propaganda efforts: "...talk as if Israel hasn't gone through this 'land for peace' formula so many times... Gaza now not only threatens Israel, it also threatens Egypt... "  Aaron Klein's remarks are especially rich following the unusually undiplomatic display by POTUS in New York, who is said to be "impatient" that PM Netanyahu does not agree with the Obama administration that "land for peace" (West Bank settlements for Abbas deceptions and delusions) is credible.  Can POTUS's approval go even lower than single digits in Israel?  

The mystery is why did POTUS aim to sharp elbow David Paterson out of the governor's chair at Albany just days before arriving to make a speech and greet Paterson and his rival Andrew Cuomo? If Paterson fades, POTUS is a bully. If Paterson rises, POTUS is a knucklehead. Andrew Cuomo will primary. Unless POTUS wants HRC to abandon State and try for Albany? Nah. HRC not going anywhere.  HRC wants Joe Biden's seat at the Executive Office Building. And Andrew Cumo wants POTUS's seat at the Oval office, soon enough. Cuomo in '16. Let him take Albany first, without breaking arms and irritating his ex-in-laws the Kennedys. It is a one-party nation just now. No rules.  The remarks by POTUS are all conflict-averse misdirection.  Talk talk.  Do they fear Rudy?  Nah.  Can they bribe Paterson?  Team Obama is not shy about roughing up governors of large states.  Recall Blago?

To my knowledge, POTUS did not speak to the fact of the terror-related arrests of what are said to be Afghans in Colorado and an imam in New York this last news cycle. The FBI conveys that the trio were involved in a conspiracy to plant a bomb against US targets, few details provided.  The chief suspect, Najibullah Zazi, has been in the US since 1999 and has admitted to learning how to make a bomb while in Pakistan in 2007-8.  Zazi is a shuttle driver at an airport.  All the usual profile buttons pushed.  A question about Zazi did not come up in five TV interviews. Why not? Because POTUS is not a terror president?   After one attack, POTUS will be tested. For now, POTUS skates along making concessions to terror states such as Iran and North Korea. Why? I am told that POTUS and the Politburo regard foreign affairs as a distraction. Everything except their domestic policy is a distraction. A bomb at Denver's airport would be a distraction.

At this time, the Senate is not expected to approve funds needed to close GITMO in January 2010 at POTUS's direction. The challenge appears twofold. No one has established where to put the approximately 200 prisoners still held. And no one has established how the cases of the detainees are to be resolved -- special tribunals (similar to those suspended by POTUS order) or in the Federal court system? In sum, the mess of GITMO gets worse, and the facile rhetoric of last fall's Candidate Obama electioneering has turned into equivocation and delay. Also, the terror detainee situation at the lesser known Bagram AFB outside Kabul is equally unsolved. Eric Holder, who has treated the previous administration's policies with illegal combatants as irregular if not extra-legal, is now administering the exact same program.  The blame-shifting continues.

Usurper Ahmadinejad sings his old tune of Holocaust-denying to demonstrate authority and resolution, however the magic has left the room.  Since the coup in June installed the IRGC and its midget militia, the Basiji, as a tool of the Supreme Leader's whim, Iran has been adrift in sloppy lies.  The demonstrators in Tehran have been arrested, tortured, killed, and still they keep protesting the usurper.  The regime has so much blood to explain that it can only survive by being threatening.  The Obama administration looks to appease a weakling -- but a perilous weakling, a non-rational, unpredictable weakling.  My source tells me that as long as the Obama administration feeds the Twelver demon, it will gloat and rant and preen and fatten.

The 21st Century version of a grand kleptocrat means that you must proclaim your innocence with remarks that are unambiguous, naive and cunning.  A suppressed smile is a gift. Melodic British English is always welcome with video scrutiny. On a scale of 5 to 10 for chutzpah, Hamid Karzai in this performance is a 9. In distant memory, Nasser, Diem, Amin, Ghadafi, Saddam were all straight 10s, but not in English. "...I believe firmly firmly in the integrity of the election... there were government officials who on both sides who were partial... fraud if it was committed it has to be investigated. .. and rather shocked to hear such a such a grand scheme of things they spoke about... they were observers... now it's up to the Afghan constitutional bodies..."  Back to you, Viceroy Holbrooke.

Colleague Simon Constable makes his debut as co-anchor of the Wall Street Journal's Online "NewsHub," a high energy and very brief webcast of the buzz from the plush new offices of the WSJ/DJ at 1210 Avenue of the Americas, in the News Corp building. Mazel tov to Simon, the newest, freshest co-host in New York along with Kelsey Hubbard. Smashing.

With an apologetic face consistent with mourning, Ben Bernanke says of the Great Recession that it is, "Very likely over at this point...."  Then the Fed Chair speaks as if he is recalling the hub-bub in a room full of commiserating prophets that he has just left with reluctance to be with us here today: "...the general view of most forecasters is that the pace of growth in 2010 will be moderate..."  The verdict is in.  Resurrection is possible.  No certainty.  Bernanke is warning the Obama administration that its immediate future is grim and cloudy.  Very high joblessness through the holidays.   The consumer remaining on sabbatical. Rather than pardon that Thanksgiving turkey, POTUS may send along the gobbler to an over-subscribed food bank.

Rod Blagojevich provides a confirmation of a long reported detail that David Axelrod telephoned him the day after the election of 2004 to ask if Blago would think about running for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton for 2008.  Striking is that Axelrod made this appeal despite the fact that he had successfully managed rookie Barack Obama's victory of the day before to be the new Illinois senator.  The Blago-Ax-Obama connection is a still unresolved story.  What happened the 25 months between November 6, 2004 and the Obama decision to run for president in December 2006?  Tony Rezko and Pat Kelly were indicted for corruption in the governor's office in late 2006.  But Rezko splashed trouble on Obama, too.  And the Rezko trial, and now the Kelly suicide, have not yet resulted in indictment trouble for Blago.  So why did Ax drop re-elected Blago (in November 2006) and choose the rookie?  Says Blago, "He was obviously trolling about for potential candidates..."  Axelrod is an op.  He works for pols.  Who told Axelrod to troll?   What else does Blago know about Ax and Obama?

David Axelrod dismisses the Tea Party marchers in Washington on Saturday 12: "I don't think it's indicative of the nation's mood." It appears the Obama Politburo has made the calculation that the town hall demonstrations and now the Tea Party gatherings can be treated as a distraction. Is it wise to speak of great visual stories that play well on cable TV as irrelevant to a national debate? POTUS on "Sixty Minutes" constructs an unusual criticism of the fact that the town hall passion about healthcare was compelling and the policy wonkery by Democratic committee chairs about healthcare is not compelling when he asks, with suggestive sacrasm, "How can we make sure that civility is interesting?" The grin afterward is a rookie stand-up mistake. Let the audience find the punchline, avoid flagging it with a contrived smile.

Steve Cohen reported Saturday 12 that V. Putin's decision to announce he is thinking about running for president of Russia again in 2012 freezes fresh, developing political alliances with the boy-wonder Dmitry Medvedev. Putin is the same old boss of a posse that has successfully managed Russia's transformation from a decrepit and inert superpower into frail and impotent failed state and then into a cocky and ambitious energy superpower. The new Moscow-Berlin alliance creates the conditions for European domination of Asia in this century. Washington needs Putin's help in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unilateral world of the lone superpower just turned back into a multi-polar world of Russian virility and American hesitancy. The recession in Russia does not touch the state within a state, Gazprom, which is controlled by Putin's cronies, which is supranational and nearly impregnable.  And Washington?  From Moscow's POV, not consulted, not trusted, not much of a problem.  The new boss of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, has just declared that oil will soon return to $100 a barrel. 

New arrives that the Politburo at the White House (Axelrod, Emanuel, Rice and so forth runners) have decided to orchestrate a negotiation with the Tehran Twelvers.  It is flimsy diplomacy, based upon a contrived fiction that Six-Party Talks West (US, UK, Fr, Ru, Ch, De) will produce results other than Tehran's aggrandizement.  Once upon a time, the US jaw-jawed with predatory Imperial Japan while London and Washington maintained sanctions on Tokyo and threatened more.  The Philippine Army paid for the arrogance and delusion of FDR's and Cordell Hull's futile diplomacy.  What is to be gained by negotiating with usurpers, pirates, homicides and tyrants?  The Bataan of the Golan Heights?  

The Manhattan FBI office's agent Roland Ubaldo presents the driest, least ironic pitch in the history of New York real estate as it previews the sale of Bernie Madoff's four thousand square foot penthouse. My favorite room is Bernie's over-furnished and drab study, thick with stale cherrywood panelling.  The study features the Desk of Sins where Bernie was seated when he cracked-up in December 2008. The apartment will pass into the lives of other routinely wealthy human beings, but that desk is for the ages, eventually for the Smithsonian's Hall of Fools. Also, there is creepiness in the fact that you can still hear Bernie as he rambled the rooms the last months, whining to himself, "Is that all there is?"

Joblessness is officially at 9.7% and unofficially well over 15%, gold is over $1000 per ounce, and the dollar is getting stomped on by all manner of foreign boots -- which make the commodities jump around like frogs in July. At the same time, we mark one gloomy, loopy year since the day the music died when Lehman Brothers was thrown into the ashbin along with market confidence and most of our 401ks. And we are supposed to concern ourselves with the gabby sideshow of Max Baucus solving the healthcare fiasco by threatening every family with punishment if it does not join a Post Office-housed medical insurance cooperative maintained with the virtuous rigor of a stamp machine out of change? Next!

Hysteria.    

Spoke to Leslie Hook, Asia Wall Street Journal, and Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, re the continued turmoil and astonishing uprisings in Urumqi, the capital of conquered and abuzed Eastern Time Turkistan -- which the Beijing tyrants name as Xinjiang. The accusation without evidence that Uyghurs were attacking Hans with syringes led to massive Han demonstrations in the street that were blocked by massed police and military -- for the second time in two months. The Party sacked the police chief and local Party boss. But the Han demonstrators also want the long time Party boss of Xinjiang, Wang, fired. This is a direct assault on the leadership of Hu in Beijing. The Party is drained of power by the dissent. Conspiring elements in the Party and in the PLA will move to fill the vacuum created by Hu's failure to lead. Instability in the empire is a fact.  This traditionally means, there will be blood.  And what do we hear from the Obama administration on the libelous abuse of the Uyghurs and the mass hysteria of the Han in Urumqi?  The wind.

Google Weapon.  

Van Jones resigned not because of something new or shocking but rather because many deliberately dramatic facts about his career as a Green activist were published over the last two months on the internet, almost entirely by colleague Aaron Klein.   Aaron Klein's work on Jones is available on the Herculean archival site, RBO -- which, in addition, aggregates many other rich tales of the industrious Van Jones.   All of the details are the product of the Google search engine weapon in the hands of skillful sleuths.  No secrets are involved. The White House, the DNC, the RNC, the WaPo, the BBC, any clever bunch could have knitted together the tale.  Jones is a first-rate Green provocateur, pontificating with trite tropes from the Luddite subset.  Why now? Why him? The cynical response is, Why not?  More cynical?   Van Jones is better at being Barack Obama than Barack Obama was at being Barack Obama back in Cook County: POTUS just fired himself.  Dostoyevsky's "The Double," or Doppelganger, takes the fall.  In fiction, the phenomenon can mean transformation, can mean exhaustion, can mean termination. 

Is this Vietnam?  

Spoke Saturday 5 with the famous Rufus Phillips, author, "Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lesson," who has just returned from a month in Kabul observing the elections. Rufus Phillips spoke with his onetime student and protege Richard Holbrooke while he was in country. Holbrooke is confident, determined and overwhelmed not only by the Afghanistan entanglement but also by the Pakistan confusion. Rufus Phillips opinion just now is that the solution for Afghanistan will require years of economic development and security. Rufus Phillips is unclear tonight if the American people have the understanding or the endurance to outlast the fragmented Taliban and its cronies in Pakistan.   Is this Vietnam?  No, but then... 

Speaking Saturday 5 with the famous Rufus Phillips, 80, who joined the CIA out of Yale and, after a series of romantic almosts in Germany and Korea, arrived in Saigon for the first time in 1954, after Dien Bien Phu gave the North to Ho Chi Minh, where he was attached to the famous "Ugly American" Colonel Ed Lansdale. The adventures continued when he returned to Vietnam as an AID op in 1962 to work in the Strategic Hamlet Program. He was known as the tyro who briefed JFK during a Cabinet showdown on the Diem brothers the summer of 1963.  Two of Rufus Phillips's early assistants were Tony Lake and Richard Holbrooke. Rufus Phillips has just returned form a month In Saigon, observing the election fiasco. Rufus Phillips's thoughts on the comparison of Vietnam '69 to Afghanistan '09 are unique. His book, "Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned," is rich, sharp.  He regrets Saigon was abandoned by the Nixon administration in 1972.  I will ask what he believes are the chances of the Obama administration abandoning Kabul to the enemy in 2010.

"We still do not," said SecDef Robert Gates at the deliriously insincere "Bob and Mike Show" on Afghanistan, "have all of the forces the President has authorized -- in Afghanistan yet... we think that we now have the resources and the right approach... turning around the situation that many have indicated that has been deteriorating... I absolutely do not think that it is time to get out of Afghanistan..."  Not a word of this is useful.  Gates is carrying water for a POTUS who will not fight.  General Stanley McChrystal has not asked for additional troops yet, but when and if he does, he will be turned down.  Holbrooke's mission is to cook a Dayton Accord for the Taliban, call it the Kandahar Accord, and then to get out.  Admiral Mike Mullen's declaration at the close has the weight of irony:  "There is no way to defeat Al Qaeda, which is the mission, with just that approach. You can't do it remotely, and you can't do it from off-shore."  POTUS has remotely ordered the US off-shore.

While watching Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper and Harold Ford spin the facts of the Obama administration's troubles with healthcare reform, what I could also hear, off-camera, off-mic, were the spontaneous sighing, unhappy laughter and imminent cynicism of a press corps that knows at last that the thrill is gone with the new president.  There will be a melodramatic joint session speech on healthcare next week; there will be determined statements of commitment to Afghanistan in three weeks; there will be bold words about confronting Iran's nuclear weapons program in a month.  But there will be no more unironic White House correspondent celebrations of POTUS.  TV now settles in for the long slog with a young, fragile, undermanned, demoralized, outgunned, defensive, slow-witted administration.

The earnest Michael Steele is not a sturdy baritone sales guru, rather an agreeable tenor who seems out of place in the pitchman role. This healthcare Blll-of-Rights ad (above) is derivative, trivial and familiar.  Aimed at seniors, I puzzle who is senior enough to believe that bureuacrats can be stopped when the bureaus are linked servers.  The perfomance does achieve the unusual for the Republicans in that it is a polite display. Manners have been a major challenge for the GOP ever since the star-crossed Newt Gingrich lumbered onto the scene and started eating chocolate chip cookies while talking compulsively about himself alongside his compadre, the Orson Welles imitator on radio. Gingrich and Limbaugh are cloying, unself-aware and rude. Manners win elections.  Credit to Mr. Steele for being dull, adequate and polite.

Spoke Sunday 30 with Parris Chang at Teipei, Tawan, re the visit of the Dalai Lama to the island in order to give comfort to the families mourning their losses after the recent devastating typhoon. The worst hit section of the island was the south, especially among the Aborigine peoples, who were hit by mudslides that buried more than 500. The Beijing tyrants protested the Dalai Lama's charity and made certain that His Holiness was deprived TV media attention (which would have comforted the larger community). President Ma of Taiwan is in disgrace for his abuse of the Dalai Lama's visit, for his incompetence in helping the victims of the disaster. Ma is regarded a toadie of Beijing. With 33 months to go in his term, he is in disgrace, with few options other than apologizing and hiding.  Do not look to the Obama administration for an opinion.  POTUS hides from the fact that Beijing luridly abuses the Dali Lama and the people of Taiwan.  The Dalai Lama persists in his humility and thereby inadvertently defeats an empire of patronizers.