An accumulation of anything valuable is capital, and an appropriate image of primitive capitalism would be a squirrel.

But Vivendi isn't just a big squirrel, and it isn't a given that your favorite conglomerate is more closely related to a shop than an army.

But this article is mostly junk, wendy. The most serious challenge to Presidential authority since the Civil War was Douglas MacArthur's independent negotiations with North Korea, along with an ultimatum he delivered to China on his own authority.

How could Truman possibly resist this great American hero, who occupied the very summit of the military-industrial complex?

Truman fired the son-of-a-bitch, and that was the end of the story.

All other Presidents can exercise exactly the same option, if they have the balls for it, but pitifully weak and silly Presidents like Jimmy Carter and Obama cede as much of their authority as possible as quickly as possible to whoever will pick it up, and there's always a honcho somewhere near the Oval Office who is glad to take it.

Did you even bother to read bkozumplik's reply to my first comment?

We need to have the courage to address the questions and issues, and not just pretend they dont exist. I'd submit thats (sic) your problem...

The chump bkozumplik insulted me without even bothering to click on my moniker, which would have led him to 150 diaries which don't fit his silly misinterpretation of my comment, and then...

Poor old tlees wheezes out of his shoebox full of JFK memorabilia to defend the offensive dimwit bkozumplik!

Bravo! At least you're loyal to your demographic!

I love the liberal blogosphere! For every small sign of intelligence in it, there's always yet another dumb schmuck like "bkozumplik" dispensing half-baked edification in November, 2009, to people who already saw through Obama in November, 2007, when that son-of-a-bitch supported FTA-Peru after every farmer and worker in Peru had gone out on general strike against it.

Congratulations to M.J. Rosenberg and "bkozumplik" for finally waking up and noticing that we elected a blathering con-man.

Now look up "retarded" in your online dictionary, and try not to be quite so late for the next election.

When Rosenberg say "everybody," he makes it clear that he means people like himself and his friends.

I'm not a big fan, but I have to say...

Rosenberg and his friends are well-educated, intelligent liberals who follow the news in detail.

In that sense of "everybody," the answer is probably...

Yes, everybody is disappointed with Obama.

Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems. Most Kandaharis would put basic law and order at the top of their list, then public utilities and infrastructure, education, timely performance of administrative functions (such as delivery of driver’s licenses and title deeds), freedom from arbitrary shakedowns by public officials, and some mechanism to afford them a voice in their collective destiny.

But in more than five years in Afghanistan, the American government, which considers its presence here a part of its broad effort to “bring democracy to the Middle East,” has achieved none of these things.

I spent a couple of years in Washington sleeping on sofas and riding the bus to Capitol Hill day after day with a suitcase full of estimates, bids, and details about the availability of everything you need to provide electricity and clean water in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the main difference between what I proposed for those two shit-holes was that in Iraq I wanted to give it all to the mosques, and in Afghanistan I wanted to give it all to the tribal chieftains.

But Sarah Chayes lives in a different world from ordinary people like me, and I don't mean that sarcastically, because she has made most of that world for herself, with her brilliantly conceived and executed projects in Kandahar.

I was looking for the shortest distance between a shit-hole and a minimally decent place to live. Sarah Chayes is looking for a better world, and actually building a better world around her.

But there aren't many like her, to say the least, and in the short term I still believe that my plan would have lit up a lot of villages before Sarah Chayes can change Afghanistan from the ground up, as much as I hope she succeeds and believe that massive support for her and even a few more like her could achieve what none of the rest of us now imagine.

The question I always ask myself, wendy, when I look at pictures of Afhanistan is...

How the heck does anybody live there?

Look at that landscape behind Chief Zazai. I can't even figure out how a goat could make a living in it, much less a human being.

About the geopolitics of pipelines through Afghanistan, I don't have a clue. As a practical matter, any pipeline across that fractured country will always be vulnerable in a hundred different places.

IMHO we're more or less locked into the current near-monopoly of Russian energy supplies to Europe, a condition of abject dependence about which even well-informed Europeans remain in deep denial.

Here we are!