Remember the old saying that there's no second chance at a first impression - that we're blessed or doomed by our initial public presentation, be it well-groomed messiah or pants-dropping bozo?

For a man who spent most of the primary season hammering home the impression that he's dumb as a post on the economy, this week's news can't be lollipops and rainbows for John McCain.

American employers pruned jobs for the the fifth straight month in May, bringing the unemployment rate to an almost four-year high. And Reuters reports Federal Reserve Governor Randall Kroszner holds out little hope the clogged mortgage market will do anything more than stagnate for the time being.

"Kroszner said he expected housing markets to recover only gradually as housing demand rebounds and excess inventories of unsold homes are worked off. And recovery in housing depends partly on easing strains in mortgage markets -- and vice-versa."

All of the grim news has pushed the dollar lower on international exchanges and boosted the price of oil $6 in a day.

There must be someone in McCain's camp who can scoot him off the homeland security battlewagon and brief him on the issue that's creeping up the vital-concern list for mom and pop America. Waving his six-guns at this week's AIPAC meeting isn't a big sell for uneasy hinterland voters seeing their savings disappear just to cover oil-driven rising prices and mortgage-crunch wolves drooling relentlessly at their doors. McCain's security obsessions - and promise to press on the delusional Mideast forays of his predecessor - attract only surly dismissal among the working class.

For the Americans he needs - the 40-hour national backbone - the real threat is staring at them from the corner, where their bank is located - not from Tehran.

If McCain is going to remake himself as the answer to America's economic prayers, he'd better get started soon. Right now, his patrician assertion to Ohioans that their good jobs were gone and not coming back is a dismissive sore point from earlier this year not soon forgotten.

And there's the matter of sheer destiny. Tuesday night, McCain’s teleprompter-laden speech sputtered and chuffed, and he seemed as lively as a bog mummy. It was a performance so inert and unpromising it lent credence to the whispered theories that he’s a sacrificial lamb, a throwaway candidate offered up in a calamatous year to buy time, so the GOP can mount a comeback down the road. We’ll hear scurrilous rumors throughout the summer that young bucks in the party are cutting him dead, turning down the veep spot for a wait-and-see option. They know their prospects are brighter waiting for the party’s fortunes to turn around – perhaps after a long ordeal – than by wedding themselves to a has-been, an aging boy-wonder from a failed crusade eight years and a million eons ago.

He's facing a candidate who, if nothing else, is impressively unflappable. Obama faced a maelstrom of attacks this year and never lost his cool. He's the material voters want in a President: He’s alone on the ice flow with nothing between him and circling polar bears but a buck knife and some ballsy charm.

And he wins...

On national security... well... Obama has been right. this week, the second phase of the study reviewing the Administration's prewar antics reconfirms, along with Scott McClellans confessional, that the Iraq crusade was launched on a pack of lies. It was, as the Democratic nominee said on the eve of the invasion, a "dumb war."

Unless McCain can turn all these negatives, and his own recalcitrance, into a program that convinces Americans he's the instrument of much-anticipated change, it's oblivion for him and the party come November.

It's funny how - when you're skittish and nervous about your top leadership and its motives - anything can look like a prelude to Iranian regime change.

Today's shakeup at the Air Force, which saw both the brass and civilians chiefs fall, is bound to provoke discussion about a possible "Admiral Fallon scenario": Were these guys cut because they didn't agree with a planned assault on Iran? (Fallon was the Mideast operations commander, and long opponent of a war with Iran, whose resignation several weeks ago sparked fears that he was being replaced to facilitate a military assault on that country.)

The official reason for firing Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley was the recent embarrassing flubs committed by the Air Force - notably ferrying by bomber across the continental U.S. several armed nuclear cruise missiles against standing orders.

Wynne is a interesting functionary. If the name sounds familiar, he's the one who asserted awhile ago that no "death-ray" microwave weapons should be used on the battlefield without first being tested on American guinea pigs - live ones... with opposable thumbs... and verbal skills.

You know: Human beings.

Now, there are two ways of looking at that viewpoint: Either he was saying that a weapon shouldn't be used against an enemy if it's too indecent for use (presumably legal) against a domestic target - or - he was indicating the U.S. shouldn't be armed with weapons that haven't been vetted as lethal by smoking home-front lackeys. One indicates intentions of honorable doubt, even for the combat trades, the other is... well... SATANIC!

His actual quote is:

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation."

...Which indicates the former of my two possibles.

Whew!

The Air Force has been singled out as not carrying its own water - or even having a mission - thus far in our vast Mideast Project. The Associated Press mentions no likely replacements for the men, as yet.

The pattern of Hillary's retirement from the field may indicate whether she returns to the Senate - or is on the ticket as Obama's running mate.

It's so darn difficult to tell. Hillary’s campaign has become the creepy stalker of the election year, sending along love notes to Obama to be quickly followed up with vituperation and chest-beating braggadocio. She seems a mood swing away from raving herself into oblivion.

But if she concedes gracefully this week, she’s veep. The decision is made, the horse-trading has been successful. Obama, I believe, is not adverse to such a development; she is nothing if not a fighter, and her name on the ticket scoops up the recalcitrant electorate he can’t seem to breach – white working class, and angry women who thought this was the Year of the Woman. In the words of Fidel Castro: They would be the unbeatable team.

If she merely suspends, her chance to be tapped as vice president is over. For the Obama camp, she’ll be a troublesome loose end hanging around waiting for a misstep - a “Michelle Tape”, or some other cataclysm. I’m not so tormented by this primary season that I think her reference a few days ago to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination was anything more than underscoring a milestone on that campaign, however clumsy and ill-advised her statement. But you never know. If anyone in this race could make a veiled threat or give us a glimpse into the darkest corners of wishful thinking – can we doubt it would be Hillary?

And besides, there's a limit to how much of this apple-pan-dowdy with which Obama's willing to put up. It will be a tough run to November, he doesn't know what ugly crap the GOP will throw on the table, and he'll need an ally in the troubled times - not a Job's Comforter gleefully notching up the gutshots.

But if she thanks everyone and waves farewell to the race, get ready to say hello to our next vice president. And lay those old grievances aside: For better or worse, she'll be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

There's a key point to remember about this Administration: When one of their rat holes closes, another one opens...

And they pop right through.

That last year's National Intelligence Estimate shot in the ass any credible assertions Iran was close to scoring The Bomb didn't slow down the White House long. Within weeks, the primary issue had shifted from nuclear enrichment to Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents. A key accusation in the Administration's doughty-but-doughy arsenal of opprobrium was alleged Iranian links to explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), the powerful weapons charges that can breach armored vehicles.

Just how lame those connections are, and how they got hammered into the square hole of the Administration's Iran strategy is pored over by Gareth Porter at Antiwar.com:

http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=12933

Porter's investigation reveals a stunning shocker: Vice President Cheney worked hard behind the scenes to get junk "evidence" and cherry-picked data accepted as gospel. Breathtaking, huh? When cooler heads in the Adminstration - notably Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley - balked at blaming Iran for equipping insurgents with the decidedly lethal devices, the veep tapped the ever-cooperative Gen. Petraeus to stage a dog-and-pony show early last year to "prove" for the press the Iran-EFP connection.

You may remember that tawdry episode: Underwriting just how lame the Baghdad press conference really was, the three military officers on hand to vet the dire case refused to identify themselves to reporters. When your sources do everything but throw their coats over their heads and frog-march away, it's never a good sign.

We can't expect this anti-Iran campaign to taper off, even when our absentee Great Helmsman leaves office in January (has ever there been a more anticipated date?). We know speaker after speaker at the now-running annual convocation of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee will follow John McCain's lead Monday and demonize the regime of the Persian mullahs. Even Barack Obama has made of late some hawkish statements about the Iranian regime. And, of course, if you kicked Joe Lieberman in the leg at 3 a.m., he'd roll over and holler: "They're killing our boys! Attack Tehran!"

The mainstream media FINALLY now concedes the Iraq War was the starting shot of an Administration project to remake the entire Middle East to our and Israel's liking, and public support for the war has all but vanished, but that isn't slowing down traffic on the Beltway Warpath. This scheme has a lot of influential fans, like William Kristol and his Weekly Standard, as well as Fred Hiatt's editorial page staff over at the Washington Post; add to them hosts of think tanks and lesser lights in the media and political worlds - and you've got a campaign of Space Race dimensions.

Interestingly, this country isn't alone in relishing the rattle of sabers. A quite alarming story over at Global Research covers a campaign in Germany to reconfigure Iran's mullah's as the vanguard of some new facsist World Order. Some of the spokesmen in this quite-vigorous project declaim Iran with solid, intellectual language like "Satanic ambitions" and "mad mullahs of Tehran”. (That last one sounds a little like a WWE B-circuit team.)

The story is at:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9143

...And it's a wild one. Those crazy Germans. They make Norman Podhoretz look like a panty-waist, a sissy on training wheels. To them, the Iranians are maniacs in Hammer Studio robes - sticking pins in straw dolls and drinking infants' blood from goat skulls.

But it's not all fun and games. There are dark clouds on the international front, as well. New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, outlining the reasons the Down Under nation abandoned the Iraqi crusade, slamed the "abuse" prewar intelligence. According to today's Christian Science Monitor, Rudd said:

"Have further terrorist attacks been prevented? No, they have not been, as the victims of the Madrid train bombing will attest," Rudd told Parliament.

"Has any evidence of a link between weapons of mass destruction and the former Iraqi regime and terrorists been found? No.

"Have the actions of rogue states like Iran been moderated? No ... Iran's nuclear ambitions remain a fundamental challenge.

"After five years, has the humanitarian crisis in Iraq been removed? No, it has not."

Ouch!

Rudd said there had been a "failure to disclose to the Australian people the qualified nature of the intelligence. For example, the prewar warning that an attack on Iraq would increase the terrorist threat, not decrease it."  That all adds up to Mathilda's last waltz in the Fertile Crescent: Australia announced Sunday its 550 troops in Iraq are outta there after five years of pointless sloggin' through.

In response, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino has revived, yet again, the lame excuse that "the whole world believed" Saddam had WMD. So... if you believe you can swallow drain cleaner and live... and you go ahead and chug it... you're blameless because all your friends thought you could swallow it and survive, too.

Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Didn't to most of the world, either. Whether they honestly believed Saddam had the weapons - or just kept mum and cheerily watched us stumblebum to disaster - is immaterial. Even most of our close allies nixed joining the grand crusade; they're sitting at home now, their blood and treasure unwasted by the Mesopotamian abyss.

The long list of those who didn't swallow our drain cleaner includes the French (they now have their fries back, you know), the Russians... and our good friends, the Germans.

Who could guess? Ahh... if badmouth was tank warfare, they'd be rolling across France, again.

Apparently amused by the naked political motives of scheduling the September Gitmo hearings so close to the Presidential election, some in the foreign press are charting new developments in our swerve back to the Dark Ages.

Today's Guardian has several stories on the subject of our extra-legal detainees, the main piece about the floating dungeons we've stationed in the Indian Ocean. Remember the Pelelieu and the Bataan? Not the World War II battles - but the prison ships the U.S. admitted had housed battlefield "assets" and redition abductions in 2001-'02. That story surfaced a few years ago, and just sort of faded away, but, it turns out, the operation didn't. In fact, the two vessels mentioned in 2005 have been joined by other ships. Also, Diego Garcia - the mysterious military base near Sri Lanka - has been mentioned as a detainee stopoff, as well.

The Guardian notes: "According to a US Congress report, up to 14,000 people may have been victims of rendition and secret detention since 2001. Some reports estimate there have been twice as many. The US admits to have captured more than 80,000 prisoners in its 'war on terror'."

And a Guardian sidebar also makes the chilling point that out of all those round-ups and midnight dragnets, 39 detainees have simply disappeared. Something makes me doubt they've been given new names and identities, and work as cable installers in Idaho and Wyoming.

It seems the attacks of 9/11 did more than kill people and knock down some buildings. It produced a toxic alchemy that transformed the American strategic and security apparatus into South American police death squads, circa 1975.

Oh, and to top it all off - and to absolutely no one's surprise - the redition program evidently is still going strong.

This is the kind of juicy, real-world coverage you just can't find in America's "biased liberal media." It's at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/terrorism.terrorism