Hold on to your hastas and batten down the la vistas, it's coming (at least, if she wins): the era of the RetaliaClinTerminator.

"I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel," she responded to a question from one of the ABC shills throwing last night's debate. "Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States,"

It came deep in the Pennsylvania shindig, after a long, frivolous political panty raid (gee, thanks, ABC!), but now we see Hillary for the Yankee Athena she yearns to be.

"Massive retaliation". On the Olbermann show, Pat Buchanan picked up the phrase and shook it like a chimp with a baby rattle. He was the first of the evening to see the implications of her throwaway sabre-rattling: Four more years of imperial presidency if she moves back in to the big marble  digs on Pennsylvania Avenue.

And, following the Israeli Lobby/Bush Doctrine to the last line of fine print, she slung Iran against the wall. As we can just about repeat by rote now, she sees them as the hulking, sinister Dark Force in the Middle East, forever plotting evil and a sanction away from cooking up black-market nukes.

Except, they're not. At least, not down here in the real world, where we buy iPods, burn oxygen and make poo-poo. Iran hasn't invaded another country, or even started a war, in more than three centuries. Yeah... they were pissed at us 30 years ago; that little matter of us overthrowing their elected government in 1953 kept eating at them.

But WE'RE the big devastator in the Middle East. The U.S. is the country that invaded two states and threaten more, unless everyone plays marbles to our favor. For these misadventures, we've thrown away the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, along with a king's ransom - in the trillions of dollars, by some estimates.

And as its 2006 Lebanon incursion reminded us, Israel can stir up some chaos of its own. In fact, the one boon from Hillary's immodest proposal is that the door is now open to discuss our special relationship with our close - very close - Mideast ally.

The big question: Why does this alliance exist in the first place?

Even sources most critical of the Mideast status quo tend to cast the U.S./Israeli "strategic relationship" in a "hired-gun" rendering that has Israel assuming a collateral position, doing regional dirty work at the behest of a demanding, belligerent U.S. San Francisco State professor Stephen Zunes, for one, has profferred this interpretation, calling Israel "a surrogate for American interests in this vital strategic region."

But the facts just don't add up to that interpretation.

Israel gets $3 billion annually in foreign aid - i.e., American taxpayers' money; the split usually comes down to $1.2 billion in economical aid, and $1.8 billion in military aid. Contingency spending, such as the relocation of the Suez settlers a few years ago, can boost the sum by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and direct military aid - both on and off the books - adds much, much more.

Additionally, federal loan guarantees to Israel amount to another $2 billion annually. Again, this can vary: For instance in the early 1990s, the U.S. agreed to loan guarantees of $10 billion for the resettlement of Russian immigrants in Israel.

All of this amounts to the largest portion of foreign aid given to a country, and constitutes over 30% of the total amount of the entire - ENTIRE - U.S. foreign aid budget. Imagine how chagrined Sumatra must be.

As Yossi Beilen, deputy foreign minister of Israel and a Knesset member, asked one gathering, "If our economic situation is better than in many of your countries, how can we go on asking for your charity?"

Well... how indeed?

We may assume, that for all this money and favor, Israel is obliged to do American bidding as it polices its "bad neighborhood." But when, exactly, has that ever happened? When has Israel deferred its own national and security concerns to act as "a surrogate for American interests"?

Well... never. The dog wags the walker in this arrangement, and Israel's powerful lobbies in the U.S. make sure it gets what it wants - without backtalk.

The short list here would tote up what the U.S. gets out of its joined-at-the-hip partnership. And it's a short tally: nothing. We earn the enmity of the Arab world, and that's it. You can argue our big deathware dealers make a bundle from Israel's weapons business (and, now, co-development). But that only means riches for the most seamy sectors of our economic elite.

It's time for a reappraisal of our relationship with Israel. And it's time to bring our Mideast policies into a more realistic framework.

Anyone out there besides me getting a little uneasy about the raid on the FLDS compound in Texas? Now the authorities say they’ve separated the children from their mothers… and no one will go on record to even speculate about eventual custody of these young, undoubtedly terrified children.

And all of this prompted by an anonymous phone call from someone – someone – not even present at the compound; this “someone” also took the time to implicate at least one person at the FLDS home base in the rugged inter-mountain region of Arizona and Utah, evidently trying to whip up a raid there.

One of the most alarming – and, dammit, fascinating – components of the entire affair is the trial-by-newsprint/bandwagon approach of the national media. Not one national news outlet, neither print nor broadcast, has varied from an apparently ironclad posture that this offshoot sect is guilty, guilty, guilty of nothing less than pedophilia and sexual slavery. Admittedly bizarre, the Colorado City-based faithful have been convicted of heinous crimes on little more than the jabber of this country’s forever-frenzied talking heads. We can watch nightly as Bill O’Reilly counts his fingers down to his pinkie the hideous infamies racked up by what has been portrayed as some kind of ugly, wasteland Sugardaddy Cult. He is supported by lights no less brilliant throughout the cable band and in newspapers across the country, and none of them refer to the crimes as “alleged”. The crimes simply “are”.

In as shredded condition as it is, the Constitution still grants us freedom of religion, and as strange as this sect appears, its members still deserve due process – even in Texas. We learned, through difficult trial and error, that carbonating people at stakes wholesale is never a good idea. The media needs to turn down the volume, and try a more cautious approach to what appears a complicated case.

The credibility of the fifth estate has been eroded in recent years by its faltering relationship with the truth, with the biggest stumble by far its tireless Iraq War boosting, helping lead us to a monumental strategic disaster in that faraway netherworld. Hysterics and sensationalism won’t help it reclaim its status. That will take facts, not kangaroo courtroom melodrama.

What jacked up the eyebrow of blue-collar America was not Obama's crack about guns and religion as much as the second part of his quote, in which he said small-income townies turn to "anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." The tone of his assertion indicated he felt much the same as all upper-income American liberals: That such frustrations are absurd.

Actually, they're not absurd - not to people living from paycheck to paycheck, one banana peel away from financial disaster. These Americans have watched an undeclared open-borders policy fill this country with labor willing to toil long hours at microscopic wages, under conditions approaching the bedlam of 19th-century sweatshops. At the same time, they've seen this rollback of trade policy and workplace preferment defended as "progressive," and their own growing alienation dismissed as backward... and even racist. There is a common concurrence in American politics and media that anyone favoring measured, limited immigration be tarred as "anti-immigrant." In this context, there's apparently no allowance for any condition "illegal."

The Democratic Party's shift to the left decades ago veered it away from the mundane world of workaday folk. After all, the party was to be the boilerroom of change and progress, the engine that would take us to a more equitable, just tomorrow. The working class turned elsewhere, and many ended up in the camp of the GOP. It's not that this country has become more conservative over the last 40 years as much as there is no viable alternative to the right; the Democratic Party simply doesn't represent its traditional base anymore, and its platform favors whatever squeaky wheels catch its ear. American workers are worse off under pro-business Republican regimes - whose deep, abiding love of cheap labor further depresses domestic wages and marginalizes domestic wage earners - but this undercutting is accomplished without brutally insulting, phony charges of "racism."

The American working class, particularly the white working class, feel like both tax-resource cookie jars and social-experiment lab rats. It wasn't all that upsetting that Obama gave them a backhand - they're accustomed to such treatment. It's just that, for awhile, the parts of this embattled sector that supported him thought he was different - that he listened and that he was more than just another tapas bar revolutionary...