A miserable failure in everything he has ever done, Bush is proving once again that everything he touches turns to crap.

Mired in the lowest approval ratings of his stolen presidency, George W. Bush is looking more and more like a ‘dead duck,’ rather than just a “lame duck.”

Reminds one of the old Chubby Checker, Limbo Rock lyric; “how low can you go?” Come on George, stand firm; “don’t move that limbo bar, you’ll be a limbo star, how low can you go?”

If Bush were a Fortune 500 CEO - rather than a Fortune 500 bought and paid for prostitute – now would be the time to jettison him from the penthouse office suite with an exorbitant “golden parachute.”   more »

Left-leaning websites are getting hysterical about the Bush Regime's impending war against Iran. Is it possible that they are becoming mouthpieces for Bush's 'rhetorical' war on Iran?

Why do these websites get so over-excited, almost orgiastic, in predicting a middle-east apocalypse? It's more likely that Bush is rattling his sabre in an attempt to scare Tehran. The Left are playing into his hands.

Is the rhetoric threat or bluff? It's really not about the worry that Iran will enrich a little bit of uranium. This is about the Bush Regime wanting regime change.

It is also about the neocons' last stand, an final attempt to ensure that Israel [armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons] remains the dominant state in the Middle East. Attacking Iran is a neocon wet dream.   more »

Pre-Marxian writers like Adam Smith and Ricardo had also seen capitalism as a system driven by objective laws independent of human will and consciousness.

But they had envisaged this as the end of history (another example of how the modern perception of Fukuyama [end of ideology/history] and others is a throwback to a pre-Marxian idea).

They characterised capitalism as a self-actuating order that was on the whole benign and historically durable notwithstanding a tendency for falling rates of profit (which could be kept in check).

But Marx saw this universally alienating system as producing increasing wealth at one pole and increasing misery at another in a manner that made its supercession historically necessary and possible.   more »

Suppose you could contact George Washington, and suppose you posed a question to him that never mentioned Iraq yet described the dilemma facing the United States. It might go like this:

"Can a powerful army sustain control over a widely dispersed foreign population that contains a militant minority prepared to resist subjugation at any cost?"

Washington would recognize the strategic problem immediately because it is a description of the predicament facing the British army in the colonies' War for Independence.

And, more than anyone else, Washington's experience during the war as the leader of an American insurgency allowed him to appreciate the inherently intractable problems that faced an army of occupation in any protracted conflict.   more »

Can politics learn from history? Or is it subject to a fatal compulsion to repeat the same mistakes, despite the disastrous lessons of the past? Bush's new strategy for Iraq has posed anew this age-old philosophical and historical question.

Ostensibly, Bush has embarked on a new political and military strategy for the war-torn Iraq. Bush's new course can be summarised under three headings: more American troops, more Iraqi responsibility, and more US training for more Iraqi troops.

If you apply this new plan to Iraq alone, two things immediately catch the eye: almost all the proposals of the Baker-Hamilton report have been ignored, and the plan itself - in the face of the chaos in Iraq - is quite simplistic.

In light of the failure of all previous "new strategies" for stabilising Iraq, there is little to suggest that the newest "new strategy" will succeed any better, despite the additional 21,000 US soldiers.

What is interesting and really new in the US administration's recently announced policy is the way it reaches beyond Iraq, to deal with Iran, Syria, and the Gulf states.   more »