Summary: A recipe for revelation...

First:
Yesterday afternoon, I watch as Cenk Uygur lays out his theory about how, for John McCain, the invasion of Afghanistan practically never happened.

Next:
Yesterday evening, I watch as Keith Olbermann tries to wrap his mind around John McCain's claim that George Bush basically lied about the Surge and began it before asking for it to even be considered by Congress and the American people.

Finally:
Yesterday night, I make the mistake of thinking about politics while I'm trying to go to sleep, which is one of the few subjects that makes my mind more, not less, hyperactive at night.

The combination of these factors has produced a theory about not only John McCain, but the Bush Administration and some of its higher profile supporters...

...a theory I call, "Bullshistory."

Late July, 1991:

It was one of those hellishly hot days here in Albuquerque, where you either stayed inside with the air conditioner running, or found a swimming pool someplace, or just sat in front of a fan and tried to stay cool. I was working as a student intern out on Kirtland Air Force Base, in a chemistry lab, where I did radiochemistry work with americium-241 and plutonium-238. That was one of the days when my mom picked me up.

We were driving along a long, winding road leading out of the base. Suddenly the stream of cars slowed down, and stopped. Straight ahead, we saw several military vehicles blocking the road.  Standing in the vehicles were "military guys with very big guns" (as my my mom described it later).

We'd seen the signs all summer: WARNING: CONVOYS. That day, we found out what the signs meant. Far head, we spotted several huge transport vehicles with missiles on them.  The trucks were flanked by security vehicles, with more heavily armed soldiers making it very obvious that this was serious shit. I suddenly remembered what one of my friends at the labs had told me: "You'll see convoys of missiles. Those are nuclear weapons. They're moving them so they can be dismantled. Don't have to worry about the Russians anymore, you know."

It was utterly surreal. That was when I realized what was behind the huge "doors" in the Manzano Mountains. It had always been something lurking at the back of all of our minds during the Reagan years: nukes.  Soviet nukes pointed our way, ready to launch. Reagan with his finger on the button. As a pre-teen in the early 1980s, I'd tell my mom about my nuclear attack nightmares;  she'd tell me about "duck and cover" when she lived at White Sands Missile Range in the late 1950s.

Strange, then, that my undergraduate studies in chemistry lead me to work with transuranics... stranger, still, that I eventually wound up working at the Hanford Nuclear Site, on yet another student internship. My project involved analysis of the waste that had resulted from nuclear bomb production during the Cold War.

The Hanford Nuclear Site. (Click to enlarge.)

Hanford's B Reactor (more). (Click to enlarge.)

The Hanford Site is in southeastern Washington State (see the map at the right).  It played a critical role in the Manhattan Project, for that was where plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was produced.

As we all know, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a catastrophic and deadly announcement to the world of the birth of a new weapon - a "Sword of Armageddon" that heralded one of the most frightening periods in history: the Cold War.

Hanford became a very busy place. A "war" was on.  The US had a nuclear arms race to run... and run we did. At the peak of nuclear weapons production, approximately 70 bombs were coming off the assembly line a day. In 1967, we had a staggering 70,000 nuclear warheads poised for use. The number declined over the years; by the time the Cold War had ended, our stockpile had been reduced to about 21,500 warheads.

(From the diaries -- kos)

By now, most have read of the possibility that Obama would give an address before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on July 24th.  Arguably, alongside Normandy Beach, no other location in the world still holds the same symbolism for America's historical commitment to freedom and democracy.  

An address there would be a historic opportunity not only to announce a new direction in foreign policy, but to demonstrate Obama's unique ability to restore America's reputation abroad.

(Obama currently leads McCain in German opinion polls by a staggering 72% to 11% --- leading with an even more staggering 86% among adults with at least a high school diploma.)

Instead, the event risks being trivialized by a domestic German political squabble, as the German government responds to political pressure from the Bush administration.

What happened?

Robert Scheer, author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, was recently seen at Huffington Post, SFGate, SFChronicle, Digg, and other sites arguing that "Taiwan had Declared Peace on China". Scheer's misunderstanding of the situation is profound and his portrayal is factually inept. What it really shows is how progressives continue to fail Taiwan and its democracy by viewing the island through Cold War lenses.  

I was relieved to learn that I won’t have to cancel today’s dental appointment. According to the New York Times, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced late last week that we have nothing to fear when they switch on their Large Hadron Collider.

Until that reassuring statement those of us who worry about the unintended consequences of Big Science were worried that the LHC would generate so much energy that it would create a Black Hole in which the earth or perhaps even the entire universe would be swallowed.

Not that we or they for that matter have any idea how the universe is configured or its ultimate fate. At least about that we don’t have to have too much anxiety for at least another few billion years. So Dr. Hirsch, I’ll see you later this afternoon.

"Reagan's role in the Cold War is way, way overrated. I refer to that obliquely in Admirals. We'd really already beaten the Soviets, maybe as far back as the Cuban missile crisis. When Reagan came along, they were like the boiling frog that's still conscious but already three quarters cooked."
-- Jeff Huber

I think it was back in a '98 Proceedings [the US Naval Institute magazine] piece when I joked that we'd evolved to a point where our politicians play general and our generals play politics. A decade later it's no joke any more.
-- Jeff Huber

We engage Military.com columnist Jeff Huber in a wide-ranging discussion that begins with his new novel, Bathtub Admirals.

Pitch Bathtub Admirals to prospective readers as if you were trying to interest an agent in representing you.

In the background we see the bizarro world version of historic events: the Cold War, the Tailhook scandal and so on. In some of the promo material I describe the book as a "satire of America's rise to global dominance," and at one level it illustrates how the military-centric U.S. policies led to the mess we're in now, although I cut the book off on the week before 9/11.

(Part 1) here

Written in the same trenchant tone as his column at Military.com, military analyst Jeff Huber's first novel, Bathtub Admirals, has just been published by Kunati. Publishers Weekly calls it a "profane parody."

When we meet protagonist Jack Hogan, he's been appointed assistant navigator to a aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation. He already made his reputation -- as a world-class tactician in "The Great Big Backfire Raid." The American carrier group in the Pacific with which he was serving caught wind that the head admiral of the Soviet navy ordered its Backfire bombers out on a practice run against the group.

John McCain continues to oversimplify the threats to U.S. security emerging from the Middle East. In his speech on nuclear security delivered iin Arlington, VA, May 27, he said:

President Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and represents a threat to every country in the region - one we cannot ignore or minimize.

Yesterday's Washington Post contained an important op-ed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Odom entitled "A sensible policy on Iran" that I think sheds important light upon the difference between realism as a description for a simplistic singleminded pursuit of percieved self interest and true realism or as perhaps it should be termed given the corruption of the original term realism "scholastic realism."  What I mean by this is that a truly realist foreign policy would start with a realitic and complete assesment of one's adversary or percieved adversary in order to determine what outcomes are achievable and what policies are most wise.  Here is a link to the piece I refer to.  
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Perhaps Karl Rove is running for Vice President. He's using his freehold on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to test attack lines on Barack Obama that are, well, Rovian. Here's how he characterized comments by Obama attempting to place the threats posed by Iran and other 'rogue states' in context:

On Sunday at a stop in Oregon, Sen. Obama was dismissive of the threats posed by Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. That's the same Iran whose Quds Force is arming and training insurgents and illegal militias in Iraq to kill American soldiers; that is supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in violent attacks on Lebanon and Israel; and that is racing to develop a nuclear weapon while threatening the "annihilation" of Israel.

A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 2:

Neoconservatives and the "appeasement" meme

                                                   
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In the diary A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 1, I addressed the long history of the Munich analogy in American political rhetoric and decision-making during the Cold War years up the time of Reagan. Part 2 continues the history of "Muniching" from 1980 to the fall of the Soviet Empire.

Its years of Cold War service as a master narrative and a political bludgeon have embedded the Munich analogy in American culture. The idea of Munich has become a tenet, or dogma, of the American civil religion, or at least a tenet of the Wilsonian interventionist denomination which has been shared at various times by both American liberals and conservatives.  As a moral syllogism applied to "parallel" foreign policy crises, it postulates a predetermined outcome, and dictates an imperative course of action.

A Short History of the Munich Analogy in American Political Rhetoric and Decisionmaking

Part 1: The Munich Analogy and the Cold War

  In October 1938, representatives of France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy met at Munich in Bavaria to address German demands. Hitler had signaled his expansionist intent by re-arming Germany, by occupying the demilitarized Rhineland, and by engineering the Anschluss of Germany and Austria in March. Gripped by fear of military confrontation and politically inhibited by their pacifist populaces, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s premier Daladier accepted Hitler's assurances that the Sudetenland was Germany's "last territorial demand in Europe," and signed away Czechoslovakia’s western defenses.

Lately it's become apparent to some of us here in the Orange Forest that if one desires to see one's diary reach the rec list, one's chances are greatly improved if the title includes a hint of conversion to Obamaism, a pillorying of Hillary, or the old stand-by, BREAKING!!!  Now, by nature, historioranters don't get to shout "breaking" all that often, but since you all seem to have abandoned Mike Gravel, and have said everything that could possibly be said about Barrackemiah and/or Billary, I'm left with little choice but to pander like Senator Clinton at a Great Silent Majority rally.

So join me, if you will, just outside the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll be scanning the skies, on the lookout for a school-bus-sized piece of space junk that NASA tells us (well, told us – the subject of this story broke literally and figuratively between 1973 and 1979) could crash/land almost anywhere on Earth.  Perhaps in our observations, we'll even get a glimpse of that rarest of celestial phenomena: A presidential candidate with a viable, workable, ambitious space policy.

The Nation has an interesting article by Stephen F. Cohen:

The Missing Debate

Here's a piece of a dismaying article from McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — John McCain dropped a little-noticed bombshell into his March foreign-policy address: Boot Russia from the G-8, the elite club of leading industrial democracies whose leaders try to coordinate economic policies.

One major problem: He can't do it because the other G-8 nations won't let him.

But the fact that he's proposing to try, risking a return to Cold War tensions with the world's second-largest nuclear power after 20 years of prickly partnership, raises questions about McCain's judgment. It also underscores that many of his top foreign-policy advisers are of the same neo-conservative school that promoted the war in Iraq, argue for a tougher stance toward Iran and are skeptical of negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear program.

I'm writing this because I do not feel the Democratic Party is doing enough to explain the real problem with a 100 year occupation of Iraq. John McCain said we could basically be there forever as long as troops aren't being killed.  However troops signup at a great risk, so that’s really not the primary issue here.

The primary issue is that we are spending an insane amount of money to try to START propping up a country with major cultural indifferences. Once and IF we actually prop up this country it may take even more money to get it running and to continue running.  Let’s face it a big part of the oil profits are going to be filtered to the companies who are sucking out the oil.

McCain wants to cut taxes here so our roads can go to hell however he doesn’t seem to mind investing insane amounts of tax dollars to rebuild the Iraq infrastructure (which may not even get a quality product for them). His dated cold war mindset to building bases all over the world will bleed us dry. There is no doubt that having such a large footprint is going to spread us so thin that it keeps us from being able to protect our own streets and borders. And that is an issue even Republicans can get behind. SO LETS GET THE MESSAGE STRAIGHT!!