While Neo-cons acolytes like Jonah Goldberg are busy sanctifying Irving Kristol, I need to introduce a note of reality here. Irving Kristol and Milton Freidman are responsible for the mess we are in. Kristol's two tenants of the neoconservative faith were simple.

In domestic affairs the national government should shrink (by cutting taxes and business regulations)

In foreign affairs the government should grow (by becoming the world's sole military superpower).

The simplicity has a frightening economic and moral inconsistency. Obviously if you cut taxes and grow your military you are going into debt. Obviously if you eliminate business regulations, grifters (which we breed in the millions) are going to take advantage of the system. Too much debt and too many people trying to game a system with few regulators. That about sums up our economy since Kristol's ideas in the form of the Reagan era took hold. Even if Bill Clinton was able to get the debt briefly under control, he never took on the question of what we gained by spending so much money to be Kristol's "world's sole military superpower". Perhaps President Obama will be willing to answer that question. Our economic rivals give all their citizens world class health care and K-College education as a right of citizenship (paid for by taxes). They spend 5% of our defense budget on their own military.

May Neoconservatism rest in peace.

Two events this month suggest a transition from one conversation about the American republic to another. The old conversation -- often little better than a shouting match or a dance of snarky repartees -- is petering out with the passing, at 89, of Irving Kristol, the "godfather" of neo-conservatism. A different conversation is renewing itself in a voice coming from the center of the old republic, thanks to Nicholas Thompson's gripping, stirring new book, The Hawk and the Dove.

Writing about the half-century-long rivalry and friendship of arms-race "hawk" Paul Nitze and Cold War strategic "dove" George Kennan, Thompson shows that even bitter antagonists can remain friends if they care more about the civic-republican spirit that is the secret of this country's true strength than they do about themselves or their grand strategies.

It's not an obvious or easy truth, but Thompson makes it live. Let me say a few words about the old conversation, though, before taking you to the even-older one that Thompson has revived.

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Glenn Kessler has written an excellent front page profile of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton titled "A Team Player Who Stands Apart" in today's Washington Post.

I generally agree with Kessler that Hillary Clinton has shown that she can be an effective team player in Obama's cabinet -- but I'm not sure I am on the same page as Kessler that she is out of the picture on Afghanistan, Iran, and Israel/Palestine.

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The Obama administration issued a statement Friday night criticizing the UN report on war crimes in Gaza for focusing more on Israel's crimes than on those of Hamas. "Although the report addresses all sides of the conflict, its overwhelming focus is on the actions of Israel," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

Hmmm, I wonder why the report's focus was unbalanced. Perhaps it was because 1387 Palestinians were killed in the war (of whom 320 were kids). Seven Israeli soldiers were killed (3 more were killed by friendly fire).

As for the US, it would behoove us to be more concerned about those Palestinian deaths in that we supplied the weaponry, while the Hamas thugs get their primitive weaponry from other sources.

Here is the full test of the administration's statement.

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President Obama's sensible decision to pull the plug on the Bush administration's plan put missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic has - predictably - drawn howls of protest from Republican critics who argue that it will leave the U.S. and its European allies exposed to an Iranian missile attack. While they're at it, they note that the decision somehow involves "abandoning" our Polish and Czech allies, as if the deployment of a missile defense program were the only way to cement relations with two countries that are, after all, already NATO allies covered by the U.S. defense umbrella. The details of the Obama administration's alternative approach matter, but of equal interest is whether the latest attempt by military hawks to play the "fear card" will get political traction.

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As everyone knows, anyone who criticizes Israeli actions is either an "anti-semite" or a "self-hating Jew."

It's easy to figure out who's who. If you thought Israel's onslaught against Gaza was an abomination, and you are not a Jew, you are an anti-semite.

Or if you agree with the United Nations' investigator, Richard Goldstone, that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and you are a Jew, voila, you are a self-hating Jew.

Goldstone, a Jew, is of course a self-hater.

Read this piece by Dan Fleshler. He did the math Goldstone has already been refered to as a SHJ 5,000 times.

I'll fess up. I'm an SHJ. I thought the Gaza war was everything Goldstone said it was and more. It's hard to call it a war actually because the casualty numbers were so unbalanced.

1387 Palestinians killed of whom 320 were children
(773 were not fighting at all)

10 Israeli soldiers killed (3 by friendly fire).

Here is notorious SHJ, Matt Yglesias, on the Goldstone report.

Irving Kristol has died at 89.

Kristol is the primary intellectual godfather of the neoconservative movement -- which his son Bill Kristol helped transform into a major political force.

Kristol and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, were and are respectively profoundly significant intellectuals whose work and public commentary had an enormous impact on Washington's political culture.

But what now will be interesting to watch is the race between those who want to inherit Irving Kristol's mantle as the "real neoconservative" and who will take the movement into a new generation.

This title will not automatically go to his son, Bill Kristol, who committed a great sin in the eyes of many neocons by animating the political pretensions of the anti-intellectual populist former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

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Excellent analysis, as usual, from Reidar Visser on Biden's latest trip to Iraq.

Noting that this is Biden's second visit to Iraq as Vice-President, Visser writes, If anything, what these visits have demonstrated twice is that US leverage is quickly disappearing from Iraq. Biden today informed the press that no further "benchmark legislation" would be passed this side of Iraq's parliamentary elections scheduled for 16 January 2010 (hopefully that statement was offered as a prognosis, since this issue supposedly is for the majority of the Iraqi parliament to decide!), whereas Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki used the opportunity of his joint press conference with Biden to coolly steer clear of any reference to national reconciliation issues...

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I'm not going to comment on Steve Rosen's ridiculous Obama and J Steet bashing piece in Foreign Policy today except to ask why this guy has any kind of platform whatsoever.

I know the espionage case against him was dropped. But that does not make him innocent. And he's not, not in the larger sense.

He spent his entire career at AIPAC trying to sabotage any chance of peace between Israelis and Palestinians and -- he brags about this -- successfully convincing Republican administrations that US and Israeli interests are identical. Prime Minister Rabin tried to get him fired; neither he nor Shimon Peres considered him any kind of friend of Israel. No doubt he thinks of himself as dedicated to Israel's interests. And so did the US Attorney.

I, however, do not impute "dual loyalties" to Rosen. But rather none.

He is not pro-Israel in any sense that I know. He is simply a pro-Likud neocon who was a tireless advocate of war with Iraq and now agitates for war with Iran. Does he push these wars for Israel's sake? I suppose he thinks so. He is, however, only "pro-Israel" in the sense that being virulently anti-Arab and anti-Muslim makes one pro-Israel.

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Maybe it's just that Barack Obama took heat this summer for saying that Sgt. James Crowley had acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but I think that the real reason he's down-playing Jimmy Carter's alarm about the racism in recent right-wing histrionics is that his better, savvier side is at work.

Racism is at work, too, of course, and Carter's reasons for crying "Fire!" in our crowded racial theater are deeply grounded. But so are Obama's for not joining him. Carter's condemnation works only when balanced by Obama's reserve, because far more than racism is at stake.

Free of Carter's penitential moralism on the subject, Obama sees the swifter, deeper currents driving the screamers. He knows they'd be frothing just as furiously were Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or John Kerry in the White House. In Sunday's Washington Post I explain what we risk losing by writing them off as racists. The Post has already put the column online here.

NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams ran an excellent clip last night on the "unfairness" of some Americans being allowed to travel to Cuba while others are blocked. "Relatives" of foreign nationals living in Cuba get a green light to fly from Miami to Cuba -- while most others do not.

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How is it that a decision next week by a single Senator from Maine will almost certainly determine whether America's future healthcare system is still in the hands of private for-profit insurance companies and Big Pharma or enables more Americans to get better health care at lower cost? Bear with me, because you need to know what's likely to happen if she signs on, and if she doesn't. The next few weeks are crucial.

Scenario One: If Olympia Snowe votes in favor of Max Baucus's plan -- which is favored by the medical-industrial complex because it dramatically increases their customer base without a public option that squeezes their profits -- the Baucus plan will be the bill that goes to the Senate floor. Why? Because her vote will give enough political cover to waivering Dems Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Jim Webb, and Evan Bayh to gain their support for the Baucus plan. Which means the White House and the Democratic leadership in the Senate will have a good chance to get the 60 votes they need when the bill goes to the Senate floor in a few weeks.

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Two years ago this week, seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisour Square. This horrifying incident not only did lasting damage to the relationship between the United States and the Iraqi government but also brought to light the extraordinary dependence of the United States on private security contractors (PSCs) and the lack of legal accountability for these actors.

While the Blackwater guards will finally face trial in January 2010 on charges of manslaughter, the problems with America's use of private contractors continues unabated. Over the past few weeks disturbing reports have surfaced of "lewd behavior and sexual misconduct" by PSCs operating in Afghanistan, as well as unresolved problems with the oversight of contractors working for the State Department. These reports are symptomatic of what has been an overall abdication of responsibility by the US government in overseeing the private companies in their charge.

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The AIPAC crowd is going to have a hard time with this. Israel's uber-hawk Defense Minister (and the most highly decorated soldier in its history), Ehud Barak, says that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not pose an existential threat to Israel.

Today's New York Times reports that Barak told Israel's largest paper Yedioth Ahronoth that "Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel."Asked specifically about a nuclear armed Iran, Barak said, "I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel."

Barak concluded: "Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat,"

The threat, of course, is not to Israel's existence but to Israel's status as the region's only nuclear power.

But don't expect this to mean that the "Bomb Iran" crowd here -- which is the lobby and its cutouts -- is going to shut up.

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The New York Times reviews Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid's new book on Global health care alternatives, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. The review ends with this trenchant reminder.

Mr. Reid's underlying message of hope does not preclude an intensely satisfying quotient of moral outrage at the worst casualties of our system as it stands.One is the uninsured working person, too rich for Medicaid, too poor for a standard insurance policy, at first too proud to acknowledge disability, and then too sick for the process that a formal declaration of disability requires. These are the people who die of treatable illness in our country.

And then there is the insured working person who discovers, with surprise, that health insurance is a for-profit industry, that the industry term for payment is "medical loss" and that the process of extracting payment for a dire health condition can turn into a bizarre game of "catch me if you can."

A person's last days can be spent in any number of ways. But on the phone pleading with an insurer, that's only in America.

This seems like an unassailable argument to reform our system. How Republicans can support such a system is a mystery to me. It must be those Insurance company campaign contributions, because there is certainly no rational excuse.

Jimmy Carter has done us a favor by bringing the race issue out in the open.

We all know that racism is behind the anti-Obama furor. That first became clear during those Palin rallies, then at the town meetings, and finally at last Saturday's rally in Washington with the hundreds of racists placards. It is no coincidence that Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs are the leading media voices against Obama; their specialty is the politics of racial resentment. Why shouldn't we just say it?

I don't much like it but Israel has been able to blow off criticism for over sixty years by deeming the critics "anti-semites." It works even though most of the critics are not anti-semites but no one wants to be called one.

In Obama's case, 99% of the criticism is race based so calling the haters out for their racism is legitimate.

I don't think Obama should do it. But the rest of us should. Whey they squeal, we just say, "the truth hurts."

The label "racist" is a weapon just like "anti-semite" is. It's time to use it. Besides, it's the truth.

Keynes wrote: "Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist." An amendment: the crackpots on today's streets are in the thrall of the ideas of dead loons.

Alexander Zaitchik has an edifying piece up on Salon about Glenn Beck's intellectual debt, if we can call it that, to W. Cleon Skousen, a berserker from way back, Salt Lake City police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo," said the conservative mayor) who specialized in grandiose, fantastical, conspiracy-thick tracts like The Naked Communist. This is the master thinker who has today's Republican Party in thrall.

Puts me in mind of the last lines of Camus's The Plague:

"Rieux...knew...that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for many years in the furniture and the linens; that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the misery and the enlightenment of men, the plague would again arouse its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Barack Obama has invited Colin Powell in to see him today -- and knowing General Powell's respect for the Office of the President, whether occupied by Barack Obama or George W. Bush, we aren't going to have a fully informed read of what transpires in this meeting for some time, if ever.

As Laura Rozen notes, Defense Secretary Gates will be meeting with the President two and a half hours after the chat with Powell.

But while not knowing whether Barack Obama is meeting with Powell to get a tutorial on what to do about the growing challenges in Afghanistan, or getting the General's views on an Iran strategy, or perhaps kicking Powell's tires about taking on some kind of national role -- perhaps as a presidential emissary for public service or as yet another super-czar focused on the Middle East or becoming the President's lever in rolling back Don't Ask, Don't Tell -- I think Powell should take the opportunity to convey some Powell-isms to Barack Obama.

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It takes, Jimmy Carter, a white southerner to speak the truth about the people spewing virulent hate against the President: it's racism

Check it out.

Of course, everything Carter says is obvious. It is just that so many hate hearing it. Not only is this country obsessed with race, it always has been. Racism is one big reason why we have rejected Europe's social democratic path and why millions and millions hate the idea of universal health care even if they personally will benefit from it. A sizable minority of Americans will reject any program that African Americans will also benefit from.

Bottom line: if there were no African Americans and no African American President, these white bigots would have insisted on single payer decades ago. It's like the old adage: a Republican can only enjoy a meal if he knows someone else is hungry.

That someone else is black.

The good news is that the bill will pass and the voting coalition Obama assembled is solid. White Christian male bigots -- and their wives -- cannot elect a President. (They couldn't even carry Virginia, North Carolina or Indiana).

This is stage 2 of LBJ's nightmare: the silver lining. Yes, the civil rights law turned the south from deep blue to deep red. That killed us for 40 years. But, over those same 40 years, demographic changes in the American population (considerably assisted by LBJ's liberal immigration policy) ensured that the party of the white male would be unable to put together an electoral majority beyond 2000 or thereabouts.

That is why the racists are losing their minds. They say that they have lost their country. They are right.

But we welcome them to ours. Just leave the hate behind.

Richard Goldstone who headed up the United Nations fact-finding mission in Gaza explains his conclusions in today's New York Times.

"In Gaza, hundreds of civilians died. They died from disproportionate attacks on legitimate military targets and from attacks on hospitals and other civilian structures. They died from precision weapons like missiles from aerial drones as well as from heavy artillery. Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.

I"srael is correct that identifying combatants in a heavily populated area is difficult, and that Hamas fighters at times mixed and mingled with civilians. But that reality did not lift Israel's obligation to take all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians."

I am not sure one needed an international investigation, and a massive report, to document war crimes in Gaza. It was all in the media for those interested in such things. But I suppose this one will serve one purpose. The Israelis now cannot credibly claim that there army did not commit war crimes. (Hamas did too, but to little effect.

More important than the war crimes that took place nine months ago is the fact that millions of Gazans are being tormented by Israeli policies today. Absolutely nothing has improved in Gaza since the IDF leveled the place last year and winter is coming.

The blockade continues. Israel allows no construction material into Gaza so school kids are sitting in classrooms without windows. The sanitation system was destroyed in the Israeli onslaught so that raw sewage is dumped directly into the sea, destroying the fishing industry and sickening kids throughout the enclave. Essentially the entire infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed and we can't do a thing about it (the Israelis and their defensive line in Congress won't allow it).

Read the section about Gaza in this report by Bill Corcoran of ANERA, the American relief organization, who just returned from a visit there.

It is sickening. I need to remember -- and so do you -- that while we focus on preventing an Iran war, we can't forget about Gaza. Yes, I know that it has a rotten Hamas government. So what. We provide relief to people even in the most totalitarian places on earth. The only reason Gaza is treated differently is because we are deferring to the Likud government which is indifferent to thie suffering Israel created. The Obama administration should not be, but so far it has done nothing about Gaza.

It might help if Obama would appoint a USAID administrator. He or she could fight to end this vicious insanity. But right now no one runs USAID. Why not?

While the debate on health reform has dominated headlines, Congress is moving forward with marking up federal financial reform legislation. Currently, proposed federal legislation includes language that safeguards the ability of states to take independent action to protect consumers, but the banking industry, with help from a large block of moderate Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, is seeking amendments that would override state consumer protection laws and eliminate the ability of state and local prosecutors to act on behalf of consumers defrauded by financial institutions.

Progressive States Action is teaming up with Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of nearly 200 national, state and local consumer, labor, retiree, investor, community and civil rights groups to sponsor a conference call today at noon on why folks need to mobilize to protect state consumer protection laws from federal preemption. On the call will be Elizabeth Warren from the TARP oversight board, Congressman Brad Miller from the Banking Committee, along with others to highlight what's at stake. If interested RSVP at www.progressivestates.org/conferencecallrsvp.

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Last year, as the collapse of the housing bubble was threatening to turn Wall Street into a pre-industrial economy, many leading financial commentators were blaming short-sellers for the meltdown. They argued that the fundamentals of the financial industry were essentially sound. The only problem was that evil short-sellers had teamed up to push the price of the stock of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the rest into the toilet. In response this outcry, the Securities and Exchange Commission actually took steps to limit the shorting of financial stocks.

As should be very clear in retrospect, the problem was not the shorts. The problem was that the clowns who ran these institutions somehow failed to see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. As a result, they made huge bets that went bad, and drove their companies into bankruptcy.

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Why did they do it? That's the first question most people ask me about Columbine, so let's plunge right in. Why did two boys walk into their high school one morning and start shooting people in the head?

There's a problem. One big reason we got ten years of bogus answers is a question designed to lead us astray. They. Why did they do it? Even before we shooting was over, we were already repeating that. We fused Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into a single entity. They are indistinguishable to most of the public: two lonely outcasts from the Trench Coat Mafia, of one mind in revenge against the jocks. Almost none of that is true. Dylan was lonely, the rest is nonsense. Eric and Dylan had dramatically different personalities and motives. We can understand Columbine, but only once we look at it from the killers' points of view. That's an unnerving proposition, because it sounds perilously close to sympathizing, justifying or forgiving. Those judgments are up to you. But we're in no position to even consider them, until we explore the murders from inside two radically different heads. Why did Eric do it? Why did Dylan do it?

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This week at Cafe, Dave Cullen joins us for a discussion of his book Columbine, a story ten years in the making that explores the April 1999 school shooting and its aftermath.

From Dave's first post:

...what first got me hooked on covering this: what happens to a community shattered by an event of this magnitude. I was particularly unnerved by the kids in Clement Park the morning after. How would they recover from this? Who would lead them to emotional safety? And what bozos would stand in their way?

Join us for this important discussion.

President Obama has missed yet another chance to pressure Congress to end the self-inflicted damage of a "unilateral embargo" against Cuba and to take American foreign policy writ large in a new, more constructive direction.

Today, the President officially extended the trade embargo against Cuba for another year -- putting the US at odds again with roughly 183 nations that vote against the embargo each year in the United Nations.

The President's global mystique has been based on a perception that he would shift the Bush era gravitational forces in more constructive directions -- that he would support engagement and exchange as tools of American foreign policy in order to try and get better outcomes in international affairs.

But by continuing an embargo that undermines American interests and even US national security, he chooses the continuity of failure over the opportunity for change and over his own principles.

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Or was it the Founding Fathers? I forget.

Get Mary Landrieu's language on ABC's This Week yesterday: "those of us that are against public option [sic] are against it because we think it will undermine the private sector."

And the reason why that's a bad idea is--?

Health care certainly needs doctors, nurses, and people who perform all manner of work in hospitals and clinics. It benefits from prevention, nutrition, technology. And what's the reason why it needs private health insurance companies? I've yet to hear any.

What Landrieu obfuscates, of course, is that the only reason health insurance companies are players in the current debate is that they pay to play. They make piles of money and therefore have political clout.

And remarkably, even if most insured people say they like the particular policy they have, the public as a whole is consistently in favor of single-payer, and likes the public option despite the prospect--or because of the prospect--that it might grow into a national health system.

Wouldn't it be a hallelujah day if an interviewer asked a politician why we need private health insurance companies in the first place?

What is Obama's real plan for Afghanistan? Surely he sees all the signs of quagmire that we do. So why is this happening?

The key to Obama is that he often assumbles what he considers "best practices" into new packages he then tries to promote. The other key is that like any President, he wants to avoid the appearance of losing, even if escalating doesn't assure winning. So here is what he is doing:

[1] Repeating the 2007 Iraq surge strategy of Gen. Petraeus. This was designed for political reasons, to lessen the Iraq violence in order to suppress the Iraq issue as the defining one in the presidential elections. As Petraeus said at the time, he wanted to speed up the Iraq clock to slow down the American one. Anti-war critics were caught off balance. The surge "worked" in ways that were under-reported. First, nearly 100,000 Sunni insurgents were put on the American payroll if they agreed not to shoot American troops. Second, the same McChrystal who now commands Afghanistan was in charge of a massive top-secret extra-judicial killing operation that devastated the remaining insurgents and gave a leading US operative "orgasms" [details in Bob Woodward's last book].

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As he attempted to do with health care reform last week, the President is trying to breathe new life into financial reform. He's using the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers and the near-death experience of the rest of the Street, culminating with a $600 billion taxpayer financed bailout, to summon the political will for change. Yet the prospects seem dubious. As with health care reform, he has stood on the sidelines for months and allowed vested interests to frame the debate. Nor has he come up with a sufficiently bold or coherent set of reforms likely to change the way the Street does business, even if enacted.

Let's be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. “Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” says Goldman Sach's chief financial officer.

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Last week the New York Times Review front-paged TPM contributor Robert Reich's clarion call for universal health care in a magisterial review on the subject.

And this week the Review showcases New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier's equally magisterial -- and, from the Times Book Review, equally unexpected -- put-down of his old friend Norman Podhoretz's unrepentantly neo-conservative tract, Why Are Jews Liberals?

Have the Book Review and Wieseltier changed for the better? Or are the editors just doing neoconservative damage control via feints toward the left, and is Wieseltier just trying to cover his past blunders, this time by turning on a friend?

The record doesn't augur all that well, for there is more (or less) to the editors' and Wieseltier's gestures than meets the eye. Of Wieseltier's review it needs to be said that he is right about Podhoretz, but dishonestly so, while Podhoretz is honest about what he believes, but woefully wrong. Hoping for better from the Book Review and its reviewers, let's take a closer look.

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