No Fear---I accept cscs' advice and I announce my intention to drop out of support for either camp in the Democratic Primary race. I will announce the actual stoppage of support at a future time of my choosing, but I will for now stand down, institute a cease-fire, hold advice in abeyance, table any suggestions, refrain from comment, sit on my hands, and generally shut the hell up.

I know many of you will be glad to read this, but I am actually not quite done with this sorry mess we call the Democratic Party. There are questions of who was trying harder to get the Canadians to stop worrying about our intentions. There are questions of who will fight dirtier when the fight gets dirtier. There are questions about which candidate has longer guilt-tails.

There are questions about which camp has more boors, which crowd is more addle-pated, which group harbors crypto-racist misogynist fascist Rezko-ite Penn-suckers. If I'm any kind of example, the Obama camp includes Pollyannas that can imagine voting for the dreaded Other. This alone implies Obama is unfit to answer phone calls---he might say "OK" to all sorts of crazy stuff, like "Can I sleep over at Auntie Auma's in Kenya?"

The population of Clinton voters seems to include people with a strongly revisionist bent, since they argue for a candidate that slept right through some midnight ramblings. But they also include people that know grownups have, in fact, learned things in those impossibly ancient, long lifetimes, like how to make other people look bad. Isn't that the essence of foreign policy? After all, it seemed to be the main activity during the Cold War, which consisted of saying bad things about the other side, and inciting small wars to make the other side act out and look bad.

I hope that holding the convention in mile-high Denver will suck the oxygen out of the current meltdown. Maybe we need a more mixed metaphor, so let's hope that the convention brings much-needed rain to the desert of this house ablaze that is the Democratic Party. Maybe the Party's over. OK, I'll stop now.

There is one question that tops them all: why am I still here? Just nostalgia, I guess. Too bad nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

When George Bush was informed the WTC had been hit it was too late to do anything except hunker down. It meant we had already blown it. Even an infamous event when Zbigniew Brezinski considered whether to inform Carter, at three in the morning for real, that Lt. Gen. William Odom had informed him there were 220 Soviet missiles incoming, was too late. Brezinski hesitated, wanting more confirmation. Odom called back in a couple of minutes to say it was actually 2,200 missiles. Fortunately, he called back a third time to explain it was a training tape that had been misinterpreted, after the alert had already begun, not waiting for Presidential approval..

That is a real-life 3:00 am situation. It mattered not at all who was asleep in the presidential bedroom. Either we were toast, or not.

Another unpleasant surprise from history is Pearl Harbor. In that case, no Presidential rapid response was needed, in that the sailors on duty responded on their own. Diplomatic decisions were made, but not in a precipitous manner.

These days, a 3:00 am call will be handled by the security staff, unless it is aliens landing. This straw man is like the "ticking time-bomb" in that it doesn't happen in any meaningful sense.

If the phone rings, say you're not there, because you've blown it.