It’s late, I’m watching Colbert and it occurs to me that neither of the following two news items surprises me in the least:
* Despite a massive, overwhelming “surge” totaling 20% more troops the violence in Iraq has moved from Baghdad to other provinces without decreasing at all. Of course Baghdad remains plenty violent. Unless we scoot the goalposts all the way back to the line of scrimmage and declare our “surge” a success as long as we don’t lose yards, someone needs to put a fork in this war and get the troops out.
* When you take away oversight and grant law enforcement officers a vague, open-ended set of new powers, they will overstep the law. In this way FBI agents are like every other group of people on the planet.
It ought to depress the hell out of me that our army is bleeding to death in the mideast without accomplishing a thing while the FBI has started getting cozy with its J. Edgar Hoover roots. We live in the crazy black helicopter land that used to exist only in Tim McVeigh’s fevered imagination, but with extra incompetence abroad. Governmentally speaking it’s like living in some parody of a Michael Bay disaster movie where sixteen existential crises happen all at once. And the whole time I get to enjoy the sight of Joe Klein and David Broder tut tutting about the terrible unseemliness of the Democrats if they make too big a deal about that asteroid thing. It’s surreal.