Back in a day not too long ago, Bob Schieffer was one of two remaining television journalists with a hint of spine (the other being Keith Olberman).  Every other TV news head in America was afraid of making Condoleezza Rice cry on camera and was just plain afraid of Donald Rumsfeld, but not Schieffer.  Schieffer once snapped "let me just ask you to answer the question" at Condi and growled at Rummy, "Well, you really have not directly answered that question, if I may say so, Mr. Secretary."

I don't know what ever happened to that Bob Schieffer, but he was nowhere to be found on last Sunday's Face the Nation McCain campaign ad featuring Joe Lieberman.  Last Sunday's Bob Schieffer was Tim Russert reincarnate.  

In apparent response to Defense Secretary Robert Gates's complaint that the Air Force isn't providing Central Command with enough unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the Navy is working on a developmental version of the discontinued Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) that it's calling the Naval Unmanned Combat Air System (N-UCAS).  What makes N-UCAS different and far more special than J-UCAS is that N-UCAS can operate from aircraft carriers, which the Navy has and the Air Force doesn't.

There's no special reason that any version of the UCAS needs to operate from an aircraft carrier, but that's no never mind.  The money's in the pipeline to develop N-UCAS; so damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!

There may be such a thing as absolute truth, but evil is, without question, a relative commodity, especially when it comes to elections.  I rejected Hillary Clinton as a suitable presidential candidate because of her penchant for kissing up to the neocons.  She was going hook, line and sinker for their Iran narrative the same way she took the bait on Iraq.  As president of the United States, John McCain would be the most dangerous human being in the history of civilization, so he made for an even worse candidate than Hillary.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different."

-- attributed to Benjamin Franklin

One problem with using the rational actor model to forecast what the George W. Bush administration may do next is that the model wasn’t designed to analyze people referred to as "the crazies in the basement."  There is near universal agreement, for example, that for the U.S. to attack Iran would be the ultimate act of insanity.  Unfortunately for us, the more insane any given course of action is, the more likely it is that the Cheney-centric Bush administration will pursue it.  

"Vlad" Gingrich is molesting the Constitution in the name of national security again.  This time he's on a tirade about the recent Supreme Court decision that grants prisoners held at young Mr. Bush's pleasure in Guantanamo the right to a habeas corpus hearing.  

"This court decision is a disaster and it could cost us a city," Newt said on Face the Nation.  Land o' Goshen.  The only way this court decision could cost us a city is if it makes Newt's head explode.  Driving Newt's noodle to critical mass would be the kind of disaster we need, but it would force us to make some difficult decisions.  Losing New York City or Washington D.C. might be too high a price to pay to be permanently rid of Newt, but if we're talking, say, Minot, North Dakota, well...

I take that back.  Minot's a lovely city and we have a strategically significant military base there.  We'll blow Newt's noggin to smithereens in that chancre sore on the Potomac.  Let's just make sure all the politicians are in town when we push the plunger.

As the End of Bush Days draws near, the desperation and insanity of the administration and its neoconservative policies become more and more apparent.  One of the most recent examples is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's address to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on June 3, where she once and for all crossed over to the dark side and swore fealty to Lord Cheney's quest to start a shooting war with Iran.  

With Horse's Caboose Condi hitched onto the Cheney train, can Armageddon be far behind?

Keystone Kondi Rice is back in the news.  This time she's helping her boss make boo noise about what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) calls Iran's "relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons."  

On January 8, speaking at an AIPAC conference, Condi said that the Iranians, "continue to inch closer to a nuclear weapon."  This despite the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate finding that stated, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Condi and AIPAC and the rest of the neoconservative universe have treated the November NIE the way it treats all inconvenient facts; they've ignored it.  And once again, the mainstream media, most notably the New York Times, have been their willing partner in crime.  

A June 7 New York Times editorial commended Defense Secretary Robert Gates for giving the ax to his Air Force secretary and chief of staff.  According to the Times editors, Michael W. Wynn and General T. Michael Moseley were dismissed for "systemic problems in securing nuclear weapons and components, a primary Air Force responsibility."  The Times called the move "absolutely necessary" and applauded Mr. Gates for "raising the bar at the Pentagon."

Gates had good reasons to fire his air service's top guns, but they went beyond the issues the Times discussed, and he may have raised the bar, but he hasn't raised it high enough yet.  

His Air Force is an unmitigated cluster bomb.  

From the sound of things, when John McCain went to address the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on June 2, he took along his buddies Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham and a pair of kneepads.  Senator McCain might as well have come right out and said that President McCain would make protecting Israel America's number one foreign policy objective come hell or Hezbollah.  After all, isn't that our top foreign policy priority now?  Why change losing strategies in midstream?

Alas, irony.  White House Press Secretary Dana Perino calling former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan "sad" is like McClellan calling Perino a "Bush administration whore."  They’re both right, but look who’s talking.  

No, Scott didn’t really call Dana a Bush administration whore—not in public, anyway.  Dana really did call Scott sad though, and she really is a Bush administration whore.  

Dana should have taken it easy on Scott.  He’s just the latest in a long line of former Bush liegemen who wrote books so they can make enough money to buy their way out of hell.  Dana’s time will come.  After her press secretary gig is over and people start calling her out for fibbing about the surge, she’ll get to dwelling on the fate of her immortal soul and boy, will her tune ever change.  

So this guy with an odd name writes an article in the Asia Times that says Bush plans to run an air strike on Iran by August.  Do we ignore it or do we start squirreling away canned pears in the family fallout shelter?

Self described "former broadcast news producer" Muhammad Cohen writes in a May 28 article that "The George W. Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months."  This is according to something "an informed source tells Asia Times Online."  We can be reasonably certain that "Asia Times Online" is Mr. Cohen.  The identity of the "informed source" is somewhat less scrutable.  

A regular visitor at Pen and Sword posited last week that a naval blockade of Iran wouldn’t be an act of war if the UN sanctioned it.  I replied that no, acts of war aren’t defined by whether or not the UN or any other international organization sanction them.  Dropping a nuke on Tehran would be an act of war even if the UN, the Catholic Church and Oprah Winfrey combined sanctioned it.

That led me to thinking that Memorial Day 2008 would be a good time for a short study of war in the age of American hegemony.  War can be a dry subject, but I’ll do my best to keep the discourse lively.  I would promise you that the next several hundred words will be more entertaining by far than any lecture you’d ever hear from any professor at any war college in the country, but that promise is so easy to keep it’s not worth the trouble of making.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on May 21 that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proposed to speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi that "a naval blockade be imposed on Iran as one of several ways to pressure Iran into stopping its uranium enrichment program."

Hmm.  By whom did Olmert propose this naval blockade be imposed, I wonder?  Israel’s navy could no sooner get to the Persian Gulf than Iran’s navy could charge up the Red Sea to assault the Israeli naval base at Haifa.  Both maritime forces would sink of natural causes before they got anywhere close to each other.  

Tom Friedman of the New York Times thinks we’re in a cold war with Iran.  He’s correct that we’re in a cold war, but he’s two Friedman units and change late coming to that conclusion, and he’s got the enemy country wrong.  We’re no more in a cold war with Iran than we were in a cold war for 50 years with Belarus.  

There are, nonetheless, a few similarities between that cold war and this one.  

The story that most likely would have knocked the bottom out of the Bush administration’s case for war with Iran occurred more than a week ago, and the mainstream media still haven't reported it.  

Donald Rumsfeld’s short lived Office of Strategic Influence spawned a termites’ nest of truth ministries; the Office of Special Plans, the Information Operations Task Force and the Iran Directorate are just a few of the ones we know about.  

The Pentagon’s latest information warfare effort involves a network of foreign language web sites that promote U.S. interests.  I doubt whether anyone at the Pentagon seriously thinks foreign language web sites are going to win over any foreign hearts and minds, but foreign language web sites could be neat placea to plant covert propaganda that can migrate into the domestic press without anyone knowing it originated at the Pentagon, huh?

At least one high profile war critic sounds alarmed by a recent revelation that Mr. Bush signed a “secret finding” against “the Iranian regime” six weeks ago.  I’m frankly less than agog about it.

In a May 2 CounterPunch article, Andrew Cockburn wrote that Bush has launched a “covert offensive” on Iran that is "unprecedented in its scope."  The “directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan.”  The directive, according to Cockburn, also permits an expanded range of actions, “up to and including the assassination of targeted officials.”

Wow, I thought as I read it.  That’s some scary sounding stuff.  Then, out of habit, I rescanned the piece to note who Cockburn’s sources on the secret finding were, and here’s what I found: “those familiar with its contents.”

Great.  Caesar’s.  Ghost.  Credibility wise, that kind of thing puts Cockburn and CounterPunch on an even footing with Michael R. Gordon and the New York Times.

It looks like we’re still using U.S. Navy warships to assassinate suspected terrorists in Somalia.  The New York Times said, "at least four Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a Navy ship or submarine off the Somali coast had slammed into a small compound of single-story buildings in Dusa Marreb."

The NYT’s source for that information was an "American military official in Washington, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation."  Notice how operations these days are "sensitive" as opposed to "classified" or "secret."  One has to wonder how they arrived at a world like "sensitive" to describe things like cruise missile attacks that kill people.  Then again, so many of these missile strikes kill people other than the people they were intended to kill that yeah, I guess American military officials in Washington might get sensitive about that aspect.  The NYT reported that 10 to 30 people other than the intended target were killed this time, and we can be pretty sure that part of the story is mostly true because the NYT didn’t get it from an anonymous American military official.