Welcome to 201k.com - A Commonwealth Perspective.

The indispensable Media Whores Online cites an AP story today on the disturbing waning of European support for the US. One line in particular stood out:

"In concert with Bush's fading stature, 81 percent of Germans - up from 55 percent in 2002 - now say the European Union is more important to their vital interests than America..."

That's a 26 point swing in less than a year.

In other words, a year after 9/11, slightly less than half of Germans saw the US as more important to them than the European Union. That's staggering. The US does a huge amount of business with Germany; that nearly half of Germans see us as more important than the burgeoning European Union is a tremendous opportunity.

There's no way to sugar-coat this: a president with real vision could have--should have--acted to move German popular opinion the measly five percentage points in our favor. Solidifying the German people behind America rather than the European Union would have been a brilliant stroke of leadership. It would have paid dividends for American business, and aided in the war on terrorism--and it would have been easy in the wake of 9/11.

When faced with similar opportunities previous presidents have recognized and seized them. JFK did it with a simple (mispronounced) sentence, and a generation later Ronald Reagan did it by going there and making the speech of his life.

Instead, the Bush administration called Germany one of "the chocolate-making countries". They called them "old Europe". They accused them of being indifferent to terrorism.

And the result was that they actually managed to swing the German people twenty-six points against us in one year.

If Bush gets a second term they'll probably go Communist.

Why? Why was Bush determined to wage war unilaterally? What did the American people gain from that? Why purpose was served by insulting our allies and going it alone?

It can't be because he was looking forward to a humiliating return trip to the UN with his hat in hand a year later. Because President Bush knew damn well the UN wasn't going to give him the money he was asking for. And what's more he knew he wouldn't need it.

Because we're going to pay for it.

The time has come for hard cynicism. The time has come to "follow the money". The time has come for Americans to ask who will profit from our unilateral invasion of Iraq.

Because we know who's going to be paying for it: we are.

Everyone else probably already understood this, but it wasn't until we saw Medea Benjamin, founding director of Global Exchange, mopping the floor with the smarmy and uncomically dishonest Richard Perle on the Newshour last night that we realized just how screwed the Iraqis are.

Can you imagine what kind of government the likes of Perle, Cheney, Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and oh yeah, George W. Bush, must be in the process of setting up there? In the absence of any troublesome Constitution to protect the Iraqis? Can you imagine?

We're imagining a bunch of suits jetting around, protected by body guards, devising plans for privatizing every natural resource in Iraq. With no legal restraints on them whatsoever.

Consider what this crowd has done in our own country, despite our Constitution--not to mention OSHA, the SEC, the FEC, the FCC, etc.

Can you imagine what the US would be like if Dick Cheney and Richard Perle got to build it all over again from scratch?

Advocating a five-day work week would be considered an act of terrorism. Pulling your money out of the market because of broker fraud would be considered a threat to national security.

Iraq is their opportunity to build the world's largest company town.

When they're done, Iraqis will be lucky to own their own genitalia.

Well, our withering verbal attack of last Tuesday must have shamed the Bush administration into admitting that there was no evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorists of 9/11. That'll teach them.

They're changing their story now and hoping people will believe they were always saying there was no connection -- and they might get away with it, given the media's craven reluctance to contradict them with anything like the truth, despite the voluminous video tape evidence that exists. As Fox News said this week in response to Christine Amanapour, hey, better to be a foot soldier for the Bush administration than to tell the truth. Or something like that.

In the off chance the media suddenly sprouts integrity, the administration will fall back on the second-to-last last refuge of scoundrels: grammatical parsing of their words. We've seen plenty of that already.

Which is why we loved one particular "slogan" that's buzzing around the net in an email titled something like, "Bush 2004 slogans":

"Bush/Cheney '04 -- Because in your heart you know that technically they're not lying".

Hilarious.

What are the odds that twice in one week Monty Python skits would come to mind when listening to the arguments of the Bush administration and its defenders? We suppose not that high, given the farcical nature of this government.

A letter to the editor in today's New York Times from Ann-Marie Murphy of Ann Arbor is typical:

To the Editor:

Re "The Terrorism Link That Wasn't" (editorial, Sept. 19):

President Bush did not link Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

You quote the president as saying, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on." This recalls the president's speech to Congress after 9/11 in which he said, "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Saddam Hussein's tyranny is not in debate. Neither is his support of terrorist groups.

Furthermore, comparing the war and peace efforts in Iraq to Vietnam engenders combative attitudes at a time when we need to come together.

What would you have us do? Pull out of Iraq when the interim government is not yet stable and allow Saddam Hussein and his followers to resume their oppression?

If you disagree, you can't just do a critique; you must propose an alternative.

Ms. Murphy has clearly been absorbing the right's talking points, and is on board with their shameless attempts to change the subject from the fact the president and his mouthpieces repeatedly misrepresented the nature of the threat of Iraq, thereby putting thousands of American soldiers in harms way under false pretenses and very likely increasing the threat of terrorism world-wide, to some sort of after-the-fact argument that disagreeing now or making (increasingly appropriate) comparisons to Vietnam is actually worse than what Bush did because it "engenders combative attitudes".

Yes, we all know how the right in America deplores "combative attitudes". They're so meek.

Though...we do recall quite a few Republican Senators and members of Congress repeatedly insisting on a specific timetable for Bill Clinton to remove American troops from Kosovo. They wanted to know the exact date he'd bring the boys home. They certainly were a feisty and demanding group back then. Now, apparently, they've decided that combativeness never solved anything, and that we all need to "come together".

The one relevant factual claim in Ms. Murphy's letter -- that Hussein's support of terrorist groups is "not in debate" -- is of course wrong. Certainly the administration continues to make that claim. We don't know any more than Ms. Murphy if it's true or not, but given their history of credibility in these areas it's amazing she's willing to take their word for it. How does she know they won't come out in two week's time and claim they never said there was a connection between Iraq and terrorism?

Her faith is commendable, but the horse she's betting on has a pretty spotty track record.

She also employs the right's favorite tool, the straw man argument: "What would you have us do? Pull out of Iraq...?" Which of course isn't the point at all. The point is "how did we get here, and who is responsible?" It's a question we suspect she'd have no trouble asking of a President Clinton or a President Gore. President Bush, for some reason, gets off the hook.

The answer, for the rest of us, is that George W. Bush and his associates got us here by misrepresentation, and doesn't Ms. Murphy agree that something needs to be done about that? Or does she think it's ok for a president to get away with a gross manipulation of fact just because it isn't technically "a lie"?

We suppose it all depends on what your definition of "a connection" is.

As for her assertion that critics "must propose an alternative", we somehow doubt she'd find any "alternative" proposed by Bush's critics acceptable. Just a guess.

We're not picking on Ann Marie Murphy; she's echoing the current arguments heard up and down the radio dial and throughout the Murdoch media machine, all of which boil down to "forget about the distortions and misrepresentations, forget that they put our troops in a shooting gallery, forget that we mocked UN weapons inspectors as incompetent for not finding weapons that turned out not to be there (remember them?) and definitely forget that we in the media helped. Let's just move on from here and not engender any combative attitudes."

All of which reminds us hilariously of the scene in "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" in which Michael Palin plays a comically greedy Scottish lord whose son's wedding is violently and murderously disrupted by John Cleese as the sword-wielding and not-too-bright Sir Lancelot. Quickly weighing the carnage and destruction all around him against the possible financial benefits of Lancelot's acquaintance, Palin turns to the bloodied guests and wedding party and says, "Now, now, a wedding is a happy occasion -- let's not quibble about who killed who..."

Last week's anniversary of the 9/11 bombings brought much pondering in the press on the "meaning" of the day. The amount of self-questioning suggested that there'd been a lot of naval gazing by the media regarding its own coverage. Of course, that's their favorite subject.

The gist was a feeling that somehow there was something missing in the remembrance celebrations. And not a few pointed out that while we all agreed "the world had changed" since that awful day, no one was confident that anything had been done to make it better.

Allow us to make a suggestion.

Let's make September 11 "Community Service Day" all across the country. A day when all able citizens go out and do things for the community: bring toys to orphanages and clothes to veterans shelters, visit nursing homes, work at soup kitchens -- all the things we intend to do but don't get around to.

What better way is there to memorialize the victims of 9/11, who were killed simply because they were Americans, than to show our national and community spirit, resolve, and dedication? How better to show our enemies that we can't be conquered by fear, and that attacks will only makes us stronger and more unified?

It comes down to this: let's make America better because of 9/11. And all we have to do is do it.

Americans were attacked on 9/11 because of who we are. Let's turn that hatred towards us around and respond by helping Americans simply because they are Americans.

We'll be helping those who in need, memorializing those we lost with deeds and not just tears, and best of all, we'll be saying to our enemies, "if you attack us we will only stand together stronger."

Let's make September 11 "National Community Service Day."

In an excellent article in the Boston Globe, Anne E. Kornblut and Bryan Bender do what Tim Russert didn't do in his interview with vice-president Dick Cheney on Sunday: point out that most or all of the things Cheney said were demonstrably false.

The end may be nearing (we hope) for the media's obsequious tolerance of Cheney's cold-blooded chutzpah, but our eye was caught by one word in this sentence.

"But there is no evidence proving the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush officials said."

This is a quote from "Bush officials", and not Ms. Kornblut or Mr. Bender. We know this because a) it says "Bush officials said", and b) we emailed Ms. Kornblut and asked her. (Cheney doesn't have the market cornered on chutzpah, hard as that is to believe.)

The word that caught our eye is "proving". "There is no evidence proving the Iraq regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks..."

"Proving"? There's no evidence of any kind connecting Iraq to 9/11 -- at least none that hasn't been completely discredited. By any standard of accuracy the word should be "that", so that the sentence reads:

"But there is no evidence that the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush officials said."

By substituting the word "proving", the unnamed Bush official rhetorically suggests that there is indeed evidence -- just not enough to prove it.

It's kind of like saying, "there's no evidence proving the moon is made of cheese."

Try it yourself. Read both these sentences and compare the impressions they leave:

1. "There is no evidence proving the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks."

2. "There is no evidence that the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks."

They're both technically true, but only the second one tells the whole truth as the facts currently are known. The first one intentionally leaves space for what one might call "interpretation".

The second sentence by no means cuts off the possibility of evidence surfacing -- it simple states the truth as is now known. So there's no reason to leave the space for interpretation the first one does. Unless you're doing it on purpose.

(We're reminded of the Monty Python skit in which Graham Chapman plays a Royal Navy admiral who insists that "there is absolutely no cannibalism in the Royal Navy, none, and when I say none, I mean of course that there is a certain amount. However...")

The Bush administration may be the greatest manipulators of language since Groucho and Chico -- not that this is news to anyone. But the million little ways they do it illustrates just how professionally crafted their whole act is. It's as if their every word were scripted by the people who advertise herbal health supplements. You know, you show a paunchy guy taking a pill, then you show him and he's rippled with muscles, smiling and holding the bottle of pills, while down the bottom, in 2 point white letters on a beige background it says "these pills don't build muscles".

Remember the president's State of the Union speech claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Nigeria? So do we. But as we all know now, he didn't actually say that; he said British intelligence had learned it (which they hadn't, but that's another story), so he technically hadn't lied. It was true that the British claimed they'd learned it, though. So there.

It's like having a mortgage attorney running the country. Well, except for Cheney -- he's more like Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life". But the rest of them make Philadelphia lawyers look like Gary Cooper.

Coincidentally on this very point, in a letter to the editor in this week's The Nation, a reader named Mitchell J. Freedman from Newbury Park, California quotes the late I.F. Stone in an eerily prescient observation:

"Now, government lies, but it doesn't like to lie literally. Because a literal, flat and obvious lie tends to be caught up. So, what they do is, they become the masters of the disingenuous statement, of phrasing something in such a way that the honest, normal and unwary reader gets one impression--that he is supposed to get. And then, three months later, when he discovers it's not true and he goes back to complain, they say, 'That isn't what we said. Look at it carefully.' You look at it carefully, and sure enough, it was really double-talk, it didn't say exactly what you thought."

The Democratic candidate will get elected who promises to sign–immediately upon taking the oath of office–executive orders that:

1. Release all government documents relating to 9/11, including the ones relating to the Justice Department's decision to switch Attorney General John Ashcroft from commercial to private jets two months before 9/11.

2. Release all government documents relating to vice-president Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force.

3. Reverse the Bush executive order which gave the vice-president the authority to classify documents on his own.

4. Reverse the Bush executive order which changed the laws governing the release of presidential papers, and effectively undermined the FOIA and put his own father's papers out of public reach.

Make this promise now–loudly and repeatedly–and you will not only take the race away from the other Democratic candidates, you'll put the Bush administration on the defensive on yet another front. Because they can't release those documents, and they can't defend not releasing them.

With American troops facing daily guerilla attacks in Iraq, a question has begun popping up on cable news, radio talk shows, and other forums for political non-discourse: why didn't this happen during the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II?

The talking heads disingenuously posing this question have their own agendas, of course, which their non-answers reflect.

As of yet we haven't heard anyone provide the obvious answer--which is strange, given that it couldn't be any simpler:

In defeating the governments of Germany and Japan, the United States had defeated the enemy it was fighting--end of story. In Iraq we defeated the government, but the enemy we were supposedly after--the one that attacked us--is still out there, waiting to attack us again whenever it can.

The governments of the Axis powers controlled the military of their countries, and defeating them ended the conflict. American forces disbanded their governments and sent their surviving soldiers home to be citizens again. Those soldiers dropped their weapons and went back to their plows, no matter how they felt about losing the war.

That isn't the case in the "War on Terror". This war is being fought against an amorphous entity that exists within and apart from the governments of any country. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 aren't a government, they aren't financed through government taxes, and they don't have factories, roads, and buildings to bomb.

Defeating the government of Iraq (or Iran, or Pakistan, or even Afghanistan, if you can call the Taliban a government) won't stop the terrorists. It ends those governments, no question, but it doesn't defeat the terrorists. In fact in many ways it aids them.

The terrorists are groups of individuals. They're financed by individuals. Destroying the governments of the countries in which they operate will no more stop their functioning than it would stop a religion.

It's like expecting to eliminate Fulan Gong by eliminating the Chinese government. Or eliminating the Tim McVeighs by overthrowing the US government.

There were no extra-governmental entities fighting us in Germany or Japan. But in the war on terror the extra-government entity is the enemy. That's who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.

How to fight a war against millions of individuals is the essential question the Bush administration has failed to grasp. Declaring "war" on an abstract noun -- in this case "terror" -- may make for great soundbites, but bombing it turns out to be problematic. Ultimately you end up bombing places you think it may be hiding near, but that tends to create more problems than it solves -- especially for the innocent people who happen to live in the vicinity.

What you end up with is a global game of "whack-a-mole", the carnival game in which no matter how hard you swing at the mole, it disappears while another one pops up somewhere else. You can turn around and shoot the carnival owner, of course, but then you have to contend with his family. Do you shoot them, too? Then what?

Welcome to "whack-a-mole".

The hard answer, of course, and one that makes for very poor soundbites, is that it's impossible to stop individual acts of terror, especially through conventional warfare. You can no more bomb away "terror" than you can bomb away "sin" or "ugliness" or "murder".

In fact, it's maddeningly hard to stop individual acts of any kind, really. That's why we have prisons full of people, each of whom committed an individual act. You can catch them and punish them, but you can only do so much to stop them in advance--and even that presumes they'll act somewhat rationally while sinning.

Let your mind wander over the myriad possibilities for small-scale terrorist attacks against ordinary Americans going about their daily business. What would stop violent acts by individuals whose aim is to terrorize, and who don't care if they get caught, or even survive?

Nothing. What stops normal people from doing those things is the thinly defined but widely recognized rules of behavior all sane people follow. Occasionally an insane person breaks the rules, and when that happens we're all shocked.

But the terrorists are doing it. They flew planes full of people into buildings full of people. They're sane people (depending on how you define it) doing insane things. Individual acts of madness from individuals who don't care about the consequences to themselves.

You can't declare war on that. And you can't bomb it away, no matter how many bombs you drop. In fact, the more bombs you drop, the worse things get.

As the foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration beget their inevitable (and much-predicted) debacle, the malodorous bile that any criticism of that policy amounts to "aiding and abetting the terrorists" is frothing up out of the usual suspects.

Their aim, of course, is to bully offstage any criticism of their boy, and the shamelessness of their efforts is a direct result of his faltering poll standings. In short, the hard truth is catching up with the hard right, and they have far too much to protect to go quietly.

As the world has repeatedly learned, nothing is beneath them. This is, after all, the group that sent GOP congressional aids to masquerade as protestors to stop the vote recounts in Florida in 2000. They're certainly not going to let a little squeemishness from tossing around the word "traitors" stop them (assuming they still get squeemish from such things).

The president himself gave the green light for this unworthy argument in his national television address last Sunday. In it he said a "strategic goal" of the terrorists was to "shake the will of the civilized world" and that the terrorists themselves "have cited examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans, we will run from a challenge."

You don't have to be Sean Hannity (though it helps) to get the message: any change in policy is "running", and any criticism of the policy is helping terrorists achieve a "strategic goal". And just like that, you're "aiding and abetting the enemy" by noticing that our Iraq adventure has been somewhat other than advertised.

This insulting nonsense must be met head-on. The easy, most rational argument--that this is a free society where people are free to speak their minds--doesn't deter or convince the right. They much prefer a vision of the world where they reserve for themselves the right to decide who can say what, and when.

Here's a few arguments that they cannot so easily dismiss:

An enormous number of prestigious military men have voiced their doubts about the policy in Iraq. Among them:

• Retired Marine General Anthony C. Zilli, the former chief of the U.S. Central Command, and a man who endorsed Bush in 2000. Zilli questioned why we originally "blew past" the UN, and said of our Iraq policy "there is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together." "We're in danger of failing", he said. He also wondered aloud if "the garbage and the lies" of Vietnam were "happening again".

Do the shills of the right think Zilli is "aiding the enemy"?

• Former Navy Secretary James Webb also saw visions of Vietnam, saying, "I am very troubled by the fact that we went into Iraq and very troubled about how we're going to get out of Iraq."

• Col. Pat Lang, the Pentagon former chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 called the administration's war plan "a massive illusion".

• Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki told the Senate in February, 2003, that we would need hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark", and Shinseki announced his "retirement" shortly thereafter.

Are all these men "anti-troops"? Are they aiding the terrorists?

Or are they perhaps honorable and patriotic soldiers who knew that the administration's plans for Iraq were short-sighted, arrogant, and unrealistic at best? With US soldiers now dying every day in a guerilla war, isn't it time to consider that these men had the best interests of US troops in mind -- and were right?

An even simpler argument is the basic observation that the terrorists don't give a damn what we think. They don't care about our internal politics -- they want western nations out of Muslim states, period.

They want fundamentalist Islamic governments, and they don't care if George Bush or Al Gore is president. Really, they don't. They didn't care on September 11, 2001 -- back before the US invaded Iraq -- and they don't care now. They didn't care when they bombed the USS Cole, or the Embassy in Saudi Arabia, or the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

The terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 see themselves as locked in a titanic religious struggle with the west. They hated us long before we invaded Iraq, and they'd hate us if we picked up and left.

They certainly don't care if we're there unilaterally or as part of a UN multilateral force -- they'd shoot at French and German soldiers, too.

The only thing that would "aid and abet" them would be to hear that we were pulling not just our troops but all our businesses and influence out of every Muslim country on earth. And no one but them -- not liberals, progressives, not moderate Muslims in these countries -- is suggesting that. Only they are.

What people are suggesting -- with good reason -- is that it is by no means clear that the path the Bush administration chose to follow after 9/11 improved things either at home or abroad. And that the evidence is mounting that it's made things worse.

The smartest policy in Iraq would be whichever one puts responsible Iraqis in charge as soon as possible, and which provides them with the help they need (preferably not all American) to combat radicalism at home, and get their economy going again.

Because when radicalism is the enemy the best weapon is economic stability. Prosperity is radicalism's natural enemy. Violence and suppression are its fuel. We learned this lesson already -- or at least some of us did.

But perhaps the best argument in response to charges that criticism of the president amounts to aiding terrorists is simply to look the accusers right in the eye and call them on the fact that they don't give a damn about the troops.

They're just protecting their boy from the increasingly unavoidable realization that he's bungled the war on terror, harmed both our relationships with our allies and our standing in the world, and set the cause of peace in the Middle East back twenty years -- and everyone knows it.

And if they cared about the troops they be saying it, too.

Not long after George Bush spoke to the nation this Sunday, the New York Times--that bastion of liberal elitism--ran on its front page an article by David M. Halbfinger which purported to take "the pulse" of the American public's reaction to the speech.

And just where did The Times and Mr. Halbfinger decide was the best place to ask around? Why Georgia, of course--the nation's melting pot of diverse political opinion.

The responses--from self-described liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, etc., ran the gamut from unqualified enthusiastic support for the president all the way to enthusiastic support qualified by a small level of discomfort with the mounting casualties in Iraq. Well, to be fair, Mr. Halbfinger did find one political extremist--a 27-year old waitress named Candi (or Ditzy--we forget), who said that soldiers dying was "like, icky and stuff".

We suppose in a way it's comforting to know that in order to continue propping up the dissembling frontman in the White House, The Times had to go all the way to Georgia to solicit opinions on his speech. Georgia is, after all, the state that found Saxby Chambliss more patriotic than Max Cleland.

Sure, The Times could have asked around in, say, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Madison, Montpellier, or even--here's a stretch--New York. But why poll blue-state elitists when you can talk to "Democrats" in Marietta?

Democrats like Dan Conaway, who described himself as "somewhere between Bismarck and Winston Churchill" on foreign policy. Yes, we think we remember Mr. Conaway from a Bella Abzug rally. The Times referred to his support of Bush as "thinking across party lines", by which, presumably, they mean the line between the Bismarckian and the Churchillian wings of the Democratic party.

For those picky readers interested in opinions from non-Georgian parts of the country, we offer the results of our own informal poll. Up here, where the American Revolution started, opinion of the president's speech also covered a wide swath; all the way from "does he really think we're that stupid?" to "is he drinking again?".

And, as in Marietta, opinion here crossed party lines. Ultraconservative Republicans shared the shock and dismay of Progressive Democrats upon hearing Mr. Bush grammatically juxtapose "The War in Iraq" with the terrorist attacks of 9/11--repeatedly--without actually making a claim of any connection between them.

"Why does he keep doing that?" asked Roger Moore, a Republican. "If he can prove a connection between Iraq and 9/11 why doesn't he just come out and say so?"

Heddy Lamarr, a Green party functionary, agreed. "It's clearly just a sneaky rhetorical device meant to mislead people. Frankly I found it grossly insulting."

"Insulting" was also the word used by self-described "hard-right conservative" Horatio Hornblower in recalling his reaction to the president's claim that any change of policy in Iraq would "encourage the terrorists". Mr. Hornblower, who owns a chain of holistic candle shops in Cambridge and who says he is "to the right of Ivan the Terrible", thought the president was "way out of line".

"I voted for Bush several times in the last election. But now he's basically saying that anyone who disagrees with his policies in Iraq is supporting the terrorists. That's an outrageous statement. I mean, he knows that plenty of Americans disagree--is he calling them all traitors? Heck, half the Democratic candidates running against him--many of whom served this country in uniform when he ducked it---have come out against those policies."

"I agree completely," said Democrat Bruce Springsteen, a steelworker from Lincoln, MA. "He gets on national television supposedly to inform us of the progress of the war on terror, and he finds time to take a cheap-shot at his political rivals? I thought he was 'a uniter', not 'a divider'?"

Support across party lines also plummeted in reaction to Bush's declaration of his intent to ask the UN to become more involved in Iraq.

"What the hell is up with that?" asked Amber Lynn, a member of the Know-Nothing party. "A few months ago we were calling our allies 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' and now he expects them to send their kids to Iraq to bail us out? Wouldn't it have been smarter to involve them from the beginning, and skip all the name-calling?"

Springsteen agreed. "Look, this administration decided that rather than give the UN its props and go into Iraq as an international force, they'd go it alone. And worse, they and their supporters played to their base by calling the UN 'irrelevant' and insulting and misleading some of our oldest allies. They even changed the name of french toast--which is a completely American food invented in Albany, for God's sake--to 'freedom toast'. Talk about childish."

"Now he's saying maybe they'll forget all that and help us out--but by the way if they don't it'll cost at least $87 billion, and if we don't cough up the dough we're not 'supporting the troops'. Hello? Can you say 'blindingly incompetent'?"

Hornblower summed it all up: "I may be a radical right-winger, but I simply cannot wait to vote this clown out of office. Heck, I'd vote for George McGovern before I'd vote for George Bush again."

Its been nearly a year since the last blog entry here. I've been writing under various names for other sites, maintaining a large daily mailing list called Poor Reader, and living my life. This blog sort of fell to the wayside.

Anyway, today, September 11, 2003 marks a new beginning. Seemed like the right date.

No longer strictly about the financial shenanigans that cost so many innocent Americans huge sums of money, 201k will be the new forum for all manner of political and social rambling from myself, Poor Readers, and anyone else I choose. I'll try to do it daily, but of course life frequently intervenes.

The blog will keep the name 201k.com because a) I like it, and b) I'm too lazy to change it.