Tethered Swimming

“8:58, first time I’ve ever been early for work, except for all those Daylight Savings days…lousy farmers.” - Homer Simpson

Daylight Saving Time comes to an end this weekend.  Millions of working stiffs will get an extra hour of weekend in exchange for it being dark before they get home.  It’s not a bad trade, I suppose.  The whole clock switching thing seems kind of silly though, doesn’t it?  After all, if we appreciate that extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, why stop in the winter, when light is scarce?  The biannual switch does provide a little bit of human comedy though.

(There were reports on-line last week that switching the mechanical clocks screws up the biological ones to some degree.  I’m always leery when science articles cross into lay media, the point often gets lost in the transition, but this one at least seems to make sense, even if the real world effects seem pretty minor.)

I’m willing to wager that the overwhelming majority of people do not pay a lick of attention to the difference between times posted as -DT and -ST (e.g. EST & EDT, PST & PDT).  Since every place (except those freak states like Arizona, and formerly Indiana) changes at the same time there really isn’t much motivation for people to care which time they’re currently using.  Except for right after the spring switch most people just reflexively say “standard” time, even when it’s daylight time.  Because really, who cares?

You see the little graphic with the analog clock arms in the corner of the paper, or the news anchor reminds you to set your clocks or, in its most modern expression, your computer/cell phone/gadget with a clock tells you that it automatically switched itself.  And that’s all there really is to it, the clock changes and you go about your day, though probably with a few forehead smacking, “Oh yeah…” kind of moments every once and awhile and a newfound appreciation for just how many timepieces you have in your life.

The Standard/Daylight switch is another one of those little ways in which our modern, technology based society rubs up against the differently ordered nature in which we live.  Try asking somebody why we have leap year some time, see what you get.  Or, worse yet, ask about the seasons, either why we have them (tilt of the Earth’s axis) or how we decide when they start and stop (solstices and equinoxes).  You’ll get a smorgasbord of answers.

Most people don’t know the answers to those relatively simple questions and even the ones who do know the answers probably haven’t thought about them in awhile and won’t be sure.  If I were feeling waggish, I could poke fun at dismal science education, the disconnect we feel from the natural world, or any number of other modern absurdities, but what would be the point?  It’s just another one of the ways in which we are all exposed as being frail, forgetful and silly and I like those sorts of things.

What I can’t resist pointing out though is the comedy in the terms.  We are about to switch to Standard time, which runs for 18 weeks out of a 52 week year.  There’s nothing standard about it.

“Go away!  There ain’t no monorail and there never was!” - Monorail Café Employee

On Wednesday I got a new London Review of Books and the very first article was a speculation on just what we’re going to be doing with all those bases we’ve quietly constructed in Iraq.  (The LRB is nice enough to have the entire article on-line - it’s not long, I promise.)  The author, Jim Holt, points out that the current chaos and de facto division of the country might…could…maybe…just be exactly what an American government would want in order to secure the massive, and I mean really massive, oil reserves in Iraq.  Divided cities, a weak central government, and American troops stationed in impenetrable (and comfortable) desert fortresses make the entire country an oil gusher with Washington’s hand on the spigot.

After putting this all down in a fresh and imaginative way, he points out at the very end that for this to be true you have to believe that, “a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.”  I’ll agree with that immediately, but the article got me to thinking about those bases and just what the plan was and is.  Setting aside the fact that this theory ascribes a competence to the Bush Administration that is uniformly unearned, I have always been extremely skeptical about the permanency of those bases, or “enduring camps”, or whatever the en vogue bullshit term may be.

Without putting too fine a point on it, Iraq is neither Cuba nor Kuwait.  This isn’t like Guantanamo, where we have a semi-legal claim, port access and close proximity.  Nor is it like our bases in Kuwait, we literally saved that country (and it’s very wealthy citizens) from death and dispossession; they owe us, know it, and seem happy with the arrangement.  Iraq is a country that is on the other side of the planet, almost entirely landlocked, and full of people who want us to leave.  On those simple facts alone our long term presence seems dubious as hell.

The idea that we could maintain bases in the face of all that smacks of the ignorant arrogance that got us into this mess in the first place.  It assumes that whatever government is nominally in charge will want us around.  Nevermind that they have a theoretically democratic government that is supposed to be answerable to a populace that wants us gone.  Nevermind that the flimsy institutions we have created may not be sustainable.  Nevermind that it’s in the interest of any number of powerful parties to see us go, including the Shiite and Sunni factions within Iraq, the Iranians, the Syrians, and any country with an oil company that might not be content with scraps from an American table.

We ignore all that because the conventional assumption is that whatever government exists in Iraq will always be beholden to us.  What, exactly, is the reasoning behind that?  That they’re grateful?  If you believe that I’ve got some “Welcome American Liberators” banners for sale (still in the original packaging).  That we can bribe or co-opt enough elites to turn the country into a petrol republic?  We tried that once already, it was called Saudi Arabia and even though we made a much better first impression there you’ll note that we no longer have any troops in the Kingdom.  That they need our troops to fight and keep the government secure?  If American casualties continue the US public will eventually force a withdrawal.

That last point is potentially bigger than any of the others.  Decreases in casualties are nice, but only the elimination of casualties can snuff out the Iraq War as an American political issue.  I know I’m not the only one who remembers that we spent most of the nineties and the beginning of this decade, right through the Afghan War, waging a low level air war against Iraq.  The strikes rarely made the news and never stayed very long because there were no American casualties, there was no Capt. Scott O’Grady.  That may be the template our government has in mind.  If so, then it becomes even more important that someone who promises to end the war takes office a year from January.

There are a lot of problems with barricading ourselves in bases and bombing things from the air.  The first and foremost of those problems should probably be the fact that it kills and maims a lot of otherwise healthy, innocent human beings.  That particular problem isn’t first and foremost because no one in any position of real authority actually gives a shit about dead Iraqis.  Dead Americans, on the other hand, matter.  And if we’re going to remain relevant to Iraqi politics, American troops are going to continue dying in a land not their own.  Sure, we can bomb away from safe distances and altitudes, but doing so doesn’t usually make a damn bit of difference outside of the immediate blast radius.

Iraq is in a state of civil war, and looks like it will be for a while. That means that politics and violence are very closely linked.  The kind of violence that matters in this situation isn’t the ability to kill every living thing in a certain area or collapse a building from miles away.  Just because we’re good at something doesn’t make it useful.  The kind of violence that carries weight at the moment is a close in kind: urban infantry combat and intelligence gathering.  That cannot be done without casualties and if we recuse ourselves from it we become useless or worse, malingerers.

We have been militarily exposed and strategically neutered by these people and we continue to expect their unconditional respect for our hyperpower might.  It boggles the mind.  Stupidity of this magnitude rarely lacks for precedent, and this is no exception.  During our last fiasco war we went on blithely constructing a super base at Cam Ranh Bay.  It was to be one of the great outposts of American military might in Southeast Asia for decades.  Instead the Vietnamese turned it over the Soviets and it was one of their great outposts right up until they went out of business.  I wonder who will eventually use these newer versions.

“I am even dustier!  Dustier than thou!” - Sideshow Mel

Ah, Salon.com and Slate.com, the Time and Newsweek of our time.  This week each of them had an article about meat eating and the environment.  Both articles boil down, more or less, to the fact that eating meat is bad for the environment but not as bad as serious vegans would have you believe (links: Salon - Earth to PETA, Slate - Vegans vs Vegetarians).  The gist of both is that producing beef and pork creates more greenhouse gasses than not doing so, but we don’t all have to go vegan to feel good about ourselves, etcetera etcetera.  There is nothing really wrong with either piece, but they share a common assumption that strikes me as silly and self absorbed.  What’s more, you can see it in a lot of other popular discourse about acting green, caring about the environment, and doing something about global warming.

That assumption is that through personal choices you (Yes, you!) can have an impact on the environment.  I have bad news; this is patently false.  Your small acts of environmental heroism and self sacrifice are almost completely meaningless.  Sorry.  People want to feel like they’re doing something, or at least feel that they can do something, but it ain’t necessarily so.

I once saw a license plate on a Prius that read 4UEARTH.  The conceit and self delusion behind that is staggering.  Obviously a Prius emits a lot less carbon dioxide than a Hummer, but they are both still using an internal combustion engine.  If, starting with the 2009 model year, all cars used some type of hybrid engine we’d see enormous savings in oil consumption and emissions, but driving one voluntarily is not a mark of environmental sainthood.  You’re still burning fossil fuels to pick up the kids, go to the movies and buy groceries; it’s just a matter of degree and in the grand scheme of things it’s utterly meaningless.

Now let’s take a look at food in general and meat specifically.  Our food system wasn’t constructed with efficiency in mind, of water, energy or anything else.  Not surprisingly it isn’t very efficient.  Since transportation and packaging account for so much of the inefficiency the immediate and logical reactions are things like the Eat Local Challenge.  The problem with solutions like that is that they aren’t convenient and they aren’t practical.  There isn’t much food production in and around metropolitan Phoenix, for example.  Even if you live someplace where buying mostly local food is an option, you still have to go out of your way to do it.

As for beef and pork and chicken and eggs, my sneaking suspicion is that there are probably ways to raise cows, pigs and chickens that are more or less sustainable.  We aren’t doing them right now because there’s no incentive to raise feed animals in that manner.  Going vegan is all well and good, but it doesn’t address the underlying issue, which is that in terms of environmental sustainability the way we produce meat is irrational and dumb.

That’s the real problem with hybrid cars, eating locally, going vegan, or whatever other environmentally conscious behavior people proselytize these days.  Some Americans, but by no means even close to a majority, have the time, the money, and the inclination to try and lower their personal environmental impact.  It’s basically a hobby that makes you feel better about yourself.  Dick Cheney was right, it is personal virtue; and as long as it costs more, in time and money, to be green than it does not to be green it will remain that way.

“A gay President in 2084?” - Lisa Simpson

“We’re realistic.” - Gay Republican

It is almost time to start paying real attention to the presidential candidates.  The New Hampshire primary might happen in December and Christmas is a scant nine weeks away.  We’re getting close; soon the race will become more than masturbatory fodder for cable news and on-line political addicts.  Before it does though, I’d like to make a small point, or perhaps just ask a question.

This year, for the first time ever, we have a chick and a black dude in actual contention for residence at 1600.  That is historic and has been commented on exhaustively in a we’re-not-racist-or-sexist-but-let’s-talk-about-it-anyway-to-prove-how-not-racist-and-not-sexist-we-are kind of way.  What there hasn’t been, or at least what I haven’t seen, is comments on the, for lack of a better term, non-traditional roads they’ve taken.

Clinton has been a national figure for fifteen years now, for good and ill.  Her first serious national exposure was on “60 Minutes” (after the Super Bowl) tacitly admitting that Bill had screwed around on her and that she was okay with it seeing as how he was in the running for Big Dick in Chief.  That is a humble and humiliating beginning and she has done extremely well for herself since.

Obama, meanwhile, didn’t become nationally famous until aught four when, as a not yet elected Senator, he was widely proclaimed as the future of the Democratic Party.  The similarities with Slick Willie were apparent - big speech at the convention for a doomed candidate, setting himself up for a run at the title, young, good looking, blah blah blah blah blah.  It was a better opening that Hillary’s and he hasn’t set a foot seriously wrong since.

Now they are the #1 and #2 contenders for the best looking Democratic nomination since 1976.  The accepted wisdom is that this is a shoe-in election and whoever takes the Blue nomination need only avoid being caught with live boys or dead girls.  (Terrifyingly, I agree with this.)  I find it just the tiniest bit funny that had you told someone forty years ago that in 2008 the two top contenders would not be white guys, these two would not be what you would’ve expected.  I don’t mean that in that let’s-talk-about-how-not-racist-and-sexist-we-are kind of way, but rather in their paths to fame and contention.

Hillary got where she is by sharing a bed with one of the most charismatic politicians of the last century.  Worse yet, she got there by standing by her man through the most famous extra marital blowjob in history.  Obama got there by growing up largely outside the, ahem, traditional minority experience and being the most non-threatening black pitch man since Michael Jordan.  If you didn’t know his name and had never seen a picture of him, Obama would look like just another vicious Illinois Democrat with killer instincts and saleable bullshit (and that is a storied tradition).

That’s how we got here: a women who married into big time politics and a black guy who is only half black and has no ancestral links to the keystone experience of black people in America (psst, that means slavery).  We don’t have an independent womyn or the great-grandson of a slave, the only way we could get farther from the fevered dorm room dreams of trod upon liberals is if we had an adopted Kenyan girl raised by the Bush clan.

Still, she doesn’t have a penis and he isn’t white and if either one of them gets sworn in as number forty-four it will be a first, no matter the path taken.  I guess I have no point except to say that, as usual, nobody saw it coming.

“You see, killbots have a preset kill limit.  Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.” - Zap Brannigan

In grim commemoration of the Congressional vote to authorize the Iraq War yesterday (which was now half a decade ago) the Washington Post published an op-ed article written by twelve (12!) former US Army captains.  Their conclusion, arrived at after a succinct and grim evaluation of the situation, is that “our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.”  That is about as unambiguous a statement as you can ask for and it doesn’t leave any room for misinterpretation.

To attempt to forestall or at least blunt the inevitable attacks on the authors’ credentials and credibility the Post lists the time and place of service in Iraq right next to each name.  The dates range from 2003-2006 and the places read like a AAA Triptych of cities and provinces that plenty of Americans we wish we’d never heard of.  The authors are neither grunts too close to the action to have any perspective nor higher ups with political axes to grind or promotions to consider.  They are the junior officers who were charged with carrying out ground level command while still considering the overall picture.  Their conclusion couldn’t be clearer.

This latest cry for sanity from the ranks will likely fade from the discourse as quickly as the one written by the enlisted solders for the New York Times back in August.  In fact this one will likely fade even faster as none of the authors are still on active duty and therefore can’t get killed in the war effort.  Nevertheless, articles like this nourish my hope that the Iraq War can be in some way steered toward conclusion before January of aught nine.

There is still that pesky matter of the $190 billion the Administration says it needs for the war to continue.  For Congressional opponents of the war, and those (still) on the fence, surely having something like this op-ed piece as rhetorical ammunition not only aids the argument but strengthens the spine.  Military, or in this case veteran, support for not just ending the war but immediately ending the war cannot be ignored completely.

I’m not naïve enough to think that this one thing matters, but the fact that it was published and that it has, at least so far, not received much in the way of angry reaction is encouraging.  That the rank and file, the people for whom this war is as real as Vietnam or WWII, has had enough is becoming less controversial.  The “Hoorah” crowd was once the exclusive province of war supporters, now the opposite is becoming true.

That kind of shift in conventional wisdom is tremendously helpful.  The farther the public image of war opponents gets from leftover sixties stereotypes of peacenik Democrats the better.  The last leg that war supporters have to stand on is the movie house myth of America and America’s military.  As long as American soldiers are fighting and dying the knee jerk support-the-troops-America-always-wins-except-for-pussy-liberal-backstabbing argument will be employed.  Hearing from actual Iraq veterans isn’t enough to break that illusion in one blow (witness the “Phony Soldiers” incident), but every little bit helps.

“Clean…clean…pistol…Uzi…two kids posing as an adult…” - Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Security Guard

News came this week that security at the Phoenix airport will soon be using a new type of scanner. It looks like something Bill & Ted’s kids might use to travel through time and employs invisible beams of energy to peer through clothing and detect foreign objects a would be terrorist might’ve taped to his body. McPaper has a quick and dirty write up of the whole thing.

I’ve written before about what a pitiable charade airport security has become and this new machine is exactly the kind of thing I loathe. It’s a new technology that is expensive and invasive but doesn’t seem to address any specific or pressing need. It’s added complexity for the sake of complexity.

The ACLU and other privacy advocates are raising objections on the grounds that airport security is going to see all kinds of embarrassing details on our flabby, broken bodies. USA Today and the other articles on-line have been too prim to spell out just what this means, but I feel no such constraints. The poor TSA people are going to see, in strange ghosted outline, nipples of various lengths surrounded by areolas of various diameters, penises (large and small, cut and uncut), and all manner of labia. And let’s remember that this is a country with an obesity problem so most of the people that pass through this apparatus are not going to be the kind you’d want to see naked. The term being used is “virtual strip-search” and that seems entirely accurate to me.

Those icky details and the privacy implications that come with the use of a functional x-ray specs machine have raised objections, which in turn have been addressed in a theater-of-the-absurd kind of way. You see, it’s all going to be okay because the security people watching the display are put in a separate location so they cannot identify specific passengers and snicker at them for having small dicks and sagging tits. The scanner cannot store images and, you’ll be glad to know, cell phones will be banned from the control room to prevent other images being taken. I feel better already, don’t you?

Even with those goofy precautions it’s still inevitable that some embarrassing stories will eventually shake loose. Sooner or later erections are going to enter the machine, either old guys are going to have taken their Cialis a little too recently or fifteen year old boys’ thoughts will stray. Wherever erections go, off color jokes follow. Or suppose some bored male screener, knowing his buddy is working the booth, diverts the attractive women to the machine as a prank. Some kind of humiliating story will come out in the press and the reputation of airport screening, and by extension the federal efforts against terrorism in general, will sink a little further.

More importantly, I haven’t yet seen any real justification for these machines other than that they basically seem neat and futuristic. Are people with concealed items in their clothes really a problem we’re not already addressing? Can this thing see items hidden in rectal or vaginal cavities? If so, what items? What are we defending against here? The TSA has so far bought eight of these things for a cool $1.7 million. That’s more than two-hundred grand per machine and doesn’t cover whatever ongoing maintenance will be required. Think of all the FBI and CIA agents that could learn Arabic or Pashto for $1.7 million.

New and better scanners at the airports are not going to secure the planes. (I suspect that the manufacturers of the scanners have eyes on markets beyond airports, e.g. schools, prisons, etc, but that’s for another time.) There will always be a way to either defeat the scanner or simply go around it. A friend of mine works maintenance at a major American airport and he’s related to me how slipshod the security is for employees. Sometimes he gets the full grilling just to return from lunch and other times he and his whole truck get waved right past the gate without a second glance. It is physically impossible, legally impossible, technologically impossible and socially impossible to secure an operation as complex as an airport. It couldn’t be done even if we implanted tracking devices in everyone and shredded the Constitution even worse than we already have.

Machines like the one going in at the Phoenix airport do not make flying any more secure, they merely look cool and make the feds seem like they know what they’re doing. At the same time they also make air travel that much less appealing and more intimidating. Nobody wins except whoever is invoicing the feds.

“As a final humiliation, you must walk home naked, dragging behind you the stone of shame.” - Number One

I don’t follow Congress closely enough to accurately gauge the chances of the kiddie health care bill gaining enough votes in the House to override last week’s veto.  I do hope it happens though.  I don’t know if it will do any kids any good.  If it does, that’s nice; if it doesn’t, well what’s one more government program?  For entertainment purposes though, a veto override would be pure saccharine.

Bush the Younger and his cadre of fanatics do not handle adversity well.  Their argumentative tactics, indeed their entire would view, is based on the conviction that they can do no wrong.  When something does go wrong, as so many things have, they are forced into amusing verbal gymnastics and mind bending leaps of logic.  It’s high comedy.

One of the few bad things that hasn’t yet happened to this Administration is a Congressional override of a veto.  It’s virgin territory for the rightist press flaks, the professionally angry pundits, and the man himself.  Having Congress pass a bill over a veto is a rare instance of undeniable humiliation for a President.  It’s not something that can be ignored or swept under the rug.

If Congress trumps him, it dims the aura of power that Bush has so assiduously cultivated.  This is, after all, a man accustomed to having his orders obeyed.  For six years he and his ilk have treated Congress like a foolish younger sibling, too naïve and raw to be trusted, an inconvenient and occasionally embarrassing tagalong.  Now these upstarts might pull rank on him.

Bush and his defenders will never admit that they’re wrong about something, even if they lose a veto vote.  Instead they’ll have to express frustration that the President is being ignored, certainty that he will be vindicated in time, and absolute denial that anything that goes wrong is his fault.  It’s a tall order, even for experienced bullshit craftsmen.  What lunatic statements might they conjure to exonerate and justify themselves?  I really hope we get to find out.

“I’m putting you where the action is.” - C.M. Burns

“Springtime fresh, winter white, what could be better?” - Mr. Smithers

Homophobia has always been one of our more complex prejudices.  Think about it for a second: gay people can look just like regular people!  I mean, you can hate just about anyone you want to (Jews, blacks, women, the Chinese, albinos, whatever), but at least you and your bigoted friends can be confidant that you aren’t one of those undesirables.  (Assuming your forebearers didn’t pull a George Allen on you.)  Ah, but then we have the Ted Haggards and Larry Craigs of the world.  Those damn gays have camouflaged themselves - in the bodies of white Republicans, no less.  The audacity!

Homosexual suspicion, that’s what a lot of homophobia is about.  After all, there’s no such thing as black suspicion or Jew suspicion.  No one in real life is going to experience a moment like Richard Pryor does in See No Evil, Hear No Evil where he discovers that he isn’t white at the tender age of forty-seven.  (The only YouTube clip I could find of it is dubbed in Spanish, which almost makes it funnier.)  But you can find out late in life that you’re gay, at least your friends and family can.  My hunch is that you probably knew all along, eh Senator?

The upside of that omnipresent homo-danger is that it leads a lot of people to believe that being gay can be treated.  After all, if it’s something that just hits you at some point in your life, especially late in life as is the case here, you should be able to get rid of it, right?  Once you believe that sexuality is a choice you’re more than halfway to the conclusion that it can be therapeutically treated.  That idea is laughably insane and contradicted by an avalanche of scientific and anecdotal evidence but the stigma of homosexuality is great enough that people will put the blinders on and crash ahead anyway.

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and assume that most of the people who believe that nonsense vote Republican.  That, sports fans, is the reason that Larry Craig is still a senator and Ted Haggard is still a preacher.  Confronted with incontrovertible evidence Haggard had to recant and make penance, but he’s all better now, “completely heterosexual”.  Sure he is.  Craig, meanwhile, went with the straight stonewall.[1]  He said, “I am not gay.  I never have been gay.”  Well, that’s just super.

Let’s quickly parse that statement, shall we?  “I am not gay.”  Pretty straightforward, no room for wiggling or toe tapping there.  Now for the kicker, “I never have been gay.”  He sees it, I think, as a way to strengthen his denial.  “I’ve never been gay!  I’m certainly not like that Ted Haggard weirdo!”  The implication is that people, which is to say human beings other than Senator Larry Craig, can be gay and then change back.  Craig is, in effect, saying, “I didn’t even do that!  That’s how not gay I am!”

It’s a brilliant statement; it shows that he understands homosexuality the same way as the “gays can be cured” crowd while simultaneously denying the whole thing.  In fact, his handling of the entire affair should be taught and studied in public relations classes.  It is a masterpiece of damage control.

Right after he was arrested he immediately pleads guilty (to try and make it go away).  He didn’t have much choice, but it was still the right move.  Pleading guilty keeps the details from ever being hashed out in court.  A United States Senator, there are only 100 of them in the entire world, was arrested (in 2007, in an airport!) and nobody knew about it for two months!  Two months of distance from the actual event was more than worth the guilty plea.

When the story finally did break he almost instantly promised to resign.  Note the key word, “promised”.  He didn’t actually resign, but that’s what the headlines said.  One needed to get into the story a little bit before finding out that it wasn’t immediate.  He bought two months with the guilty plea and another month and a half with the phony resignation.  That’s a lot of news cycles.

Then he said he would try and appeal his guilty plea.  He knew it wouldn’t work and, sure enough, it didn’t.  I don’t think Craig wanted his appeal to succeed; if it had his actions would become central to the story once more.  Instead, the Ballad of Larry Craig took another turn and now there’s lawyers involved, that’s always a downer as far as the general public is concerned.  With each little twist in the story the audience shrinks just a little bit more, news about Craig becomes just a little bit older.

As things now stand he has said that he’ll finish his term and won’t run for reelection next fall.  I have my doubts.  I’m not saying that he’s running for sure, but I know he’s at least thinking about it.  If he wanted it to be over he could’ve just quit and vanished.  Instead he’s signed up to be a public figure until at least January of 2009.  I don’t think he’s doing that for fun.  He doesn’t want to retire a disgraced Senator and the only way he gets back on top is to win another election.  He’s only turning 63 next year so he’s certainly young enough to run again and politicians view winning elections as a cure all, rightly so.

Cooler Republican heads, in Idaho or D.C., may yet prevail upon him to slink quietly away.  They’re at enough of a disadvantage already without the Senator from Gay Bathroom Sex.  But Larry Craig has been in Congress for a very long time and I’d be willing to bet that the Idaho Republican Party is littered with friends and people who owe him.  Don’t count Larry Craig out yet, the man was caught soliciting sex from another man in a public bathroom and four months later he’s still a U.S. Senator.  Imagine what he’ll be capable of four months from now.

“We got a little rule back home, if it’s brown drink it down, if it’s black send it back.” - Homer Simpson

Amongst people who worry about things like water usage and all the problems and shortages we’re likely to experience with it in the very near future, the term “blackwater” refers to a very specific kind of waste water - that which comes from toilets.  By way of contrast, “graywater” is water from sinks, showers, dishwashers, washing machines, etc that can be used for other purposes like watering lawns or irrigation.  Graywater can be useful as it is, whereas blackwater cannot be used for anything until it is chemically purified.  It has been fouled beyond usefulness.

I cannot be one-hundred percent sure of this, but I think the first time I read about the poorly named mercenary outfit Blackwater USA was in 2003 when they were guarding Paul Bremer as he traipsed around the newly agovernmental Iraq.  The first time I read about private contractors taking over military functions was probably back in the nineties.  Those were mostly non-combat jobs and looking back I can remember multiple articles using the “soldiers don’t peel potatoes anymore” metaphor.  Now, of course, Blackwater USA and its founder, one Erik Prince, have become famous.

The specific misdeeds that have made them so quickly infamous probably piss them off.  Killing Iraqis is clearly not something they take all that seriously, to be held accountable for it has to be galling.  (To be fair it’s not like the military shows a whole lot of restraint in that category either.)  Recent Congressional and media histrionics aside, there is nothing shocking or surprising about any of this.  The Blackwater book came out way back in February and even then very little of the information contained within was in any way shape or form surprising to anyone who follows the war with a skeptical eye.

Which brings up an excellent question: What outrageous facet of the war, already well known to those of us with an internet connection and a sense of curiosity, will be the next big media story on Iraq?  Here are some possibilities.

The naked vulnerability of the Green Zone - The sacred island of safety at the bend in the river has thick walls and its own utilities.  Nevertheless it isn’t exactly safe.  Last I checked, mortar rounds are still falling daily and even with all the walls and guards everyone is on edge because there is no real security.  It’s only a matter of time before a headline making security breach takes place.  This one comes up from time to time in articles that contain sentences like, “all personnel have now been ordered to wear flak jackets at all times outdoors”, but it hasn’t really sunk in yet.

The nonfunctional state of the Iraqi Parliament - This one definitely hasn’t sunk in and the proof was in all the protest this summer when Parliament went on recess as the, ahem, surge was continuing.  Plenty of intelligent looking people were asking questions along the lines of, “Why are we trying to establish security if their Parliament is going to be out of town for two months?”  Asking that question implies that when they are in session something meaningful can get done.  Nevermind that even when technically in session they have a hard time reaching a quorum and that al-Maliki currently does not have a voting majority behind him.

The cozy relations of the Iraqi government with Iran - This is a particular favorite of mine.  We bang the war drums and demonize the Iranians, but they are the closest natural allies of all those anti-Saddam Shiites we put into power.  The Iranians hated Saddam Hussein and by removing him we did their dirty work for them.  Now they have warm relations with the Iraqi government and we act concerned.  In all the anti-Ahmadinejad hoopla last week I sure didn’t see a lot of pictures of him and our guy al-Maliki embracing.

The degenerating situation between Kurdistan and Turkey - This is potentially the most serious one on this list as it could involved starting even more armed combat than is already taking place.  The Turks have been some of our staunchest allies for decades; the Kurds are our best friends in Iraq.  They really don’t like each other and it’s been getting worse lately as de-facto Kurdish independence has stirred up trouble in southeastern Turkey.  The Turks have all but openly said that they would consider an independent Kurdistan casus belli, meanwhile Kurdistan inches towards independence as the chaos continues to their south.

The British are going, going, gone - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made small headlines yesterday by announcing further troops reductions before the end of the year.  In reality British involvement in Iraq has been reduced to little more than guarding the airport they will someday use to fly home.  Brown needs to be elected in his own right if he wants to be an effective leader and the Iraq War is even less popular in Britain than it is here.  His actions may serve as a preview for what our own withdrawal will look like under the next Administration.  Whoever is President next will want as little to do with the Iraq fiasco he will inherit from Bush the Younger as Brown wants with the one he inherited from Tony Blair.

Iraqis in custody - No one really knows how many Iraqis are being held in American and Iraqi prisons at the moment.  Usually the number is placed in the tens of thousands but if the real number were six digits that wouldn’t surprise me.  All those guys we grab in raids have to go somewhere, right?  Well, most of them are still there.  Like any mass roundup of people, this one probably mostly grabbed guys who are otherwise quite harmless and sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with them.  Neither our military nor the Iraqi government can hold them indefinitely.

The de-facto ethnic cleansing in Baghdad and elsewhere - Calls for partitioning Iraq have been around since the dawn of the war, but what only gets brief mention is that the country has been partitioning itself through all of this violence.  Mixed Shiite/Sunni neighborhoods have sorted themselves out one way or the other with assistance from armed men of various loyalties.  Sectarian violence and sectarian killings have gotten a little press attention as a result of being incorporated into the, ahem, benchmarks we set for ourselves, but there has been very little public comment of the results of this kind of prolonged violence.

This is by no means an exhaustive list; I present it merely as a primer.  The number of stories that get ignored in any war is huge and it can be helpful to remember that no matter how bad the media coverage, the reality is probably worse.  “Blackwater USA,” it certainly sounds cool, but if you look a little closer you’ll see that it’s just another word for shit.