Whenever the Bushes get into a tight bind, they call in their leathery old troubleshooter, James Baker, the man who architected the strategy that led to Bush winningstealing Florida in 2000. That they have called him in again, this time to help the Codpiece in Chief disentangle America from the Iraq catastrophe he created, speaks volumes. According to this intelligent article, it could actually mean an abrupt change in strategy, just in time to save the Grand Old Party from annihilation in the November elections.

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in–or, perhaps, to get the hell out of–Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there’s a deeper political agenda at work as well. “Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home–that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics,” a member of one of the commission’s working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. “I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they’ve called in Baker to try to reroute the train.”

The article charts Baker’s history of influencing the Bush family, and concludes if anyone at all can sway Bush from his God-ordained course, it’s he. With less than 80 days to the election, I can’t imagine Baker coming up with any solution that would change the nation’s mind about our misadventure in Iraq. But never sell Baker short: he’s ruthless and he’s smart. The piece concludes:

But with each passing day, the country is closer to the train wreck that Baker and others are said to fear. In the end, avoiding it might ride on the ability of Jim Baker to persuade the president that it’s time to declare victory and exit.

“The object of our policy has to be to get our little white asses out of there as soon as possible,” another working-group participant told me. To do that, he said, Baker must confront the president “like the way a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone in, and you say, ‘Look, my friend, it’s time to change.'”

I always said this would be the way the war would end: Declare victory and leave with as much face as possible, knowing, as we did in Vietnam, that the “victory” would be short-lived. But it’s the best we can do. At least we can say we gave the Iraqis the tools for democracy and we left them to do with it as they will. That’s what Baker will try to convince Bush to see and accept. What they sneer at today as cutting and running will be touted tomorrow as winning and gracefully exiting.

G.O.P. Corruption? Bring In the Conservatives.

By THOMAS FRANK
Published: August 22, 2006

In the lexicon of American business, ‘cynicism’ means doubt about the benevolence of market forces, and it is a vice of special destructiveness. Those who live or work in Washington, however, know another variant of cynicism, a fruitful one, a munificent one, a cynicism that is, in fact, the health of the conservative state. The object of this form of cynicism is ‘government,’ whose helpful or liberating possibilities are to be derided whenever the opportunity presents.

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With their arteries popping, eyes bulging and limbs trembling, the antique paranoiacs who head SARFT (the useless and obsolete government body that’s trying, in effect, to banish youtube and all other forms of unapproved video from China’s Internet) are making a last-ditch effort to prove they deserve to exist. This blogger (who is finally back to serious blogging after a long hiatus) almost makes you feel sorry for the scoundrels.

I feel genuinely bad for SARFT: I used to think of them as joyless grey cogs of the type that inhabit Chinese government bureaus and American university administration, but now I see them more as a bunch of sad, frightened old men who control next to nothing, and guard it jealously. On quiet days, they sit around talking about how much better things were before all of that dad-blasted “iinter-web” hoo-ha that they keep hearing about, back in the good old days when the Red Guards – the original viral marketers – were as cool as Li Yuchun is today and when the only movies they had were from Albania, Russia, and North Korea. They’re scared, frail old men, and when they hear from their grandkids that there’s now technology allowing people to disseminate video content without restrictions, they get chest pains.

(There’s more, so check it out, and his other posts, too. ) This would be really funny if SARFT wasn’t serious about accomplishing their mission. The censors have shown that with the flip of a switch they can black out huge swathes of blogs and news portals, so why not “vlogs” as well? Personally, I think it would be an obscenely wasteful and stupid thing to do, considering how online videos have so rapidly caught on with China’s youth, who will be fittingly pissed if SARFT tries to pull the plug on their fun. As Brendan notes, most of the content is utterly harmless, and they’re only going apeshit because they can’t control it. If they pull this off, it’s another big step back for the reforming PRC.

A funny-sad essay on a phenomenon most of us are familar with. Just a small sample:

There was another beggar working the same strip of sidewalk as the kid. A middle-aged woman in the standard beggar’s outfit: blue cotton coat, white towel wrapped around her head, shoulder bag, stick and white enamel cup. She had perfected the beggar’s misery-ridden shuffle but once, as she crossed the street, an approaching taxi forced her to break character and she hustled energetically out of the way. The begging woman didn’t compete with the kid. She was a practitioner of the “persistence” approach, shadowing a mark for fifty or a hundred meters tugging at the sleeve and shaking the few coins in the enamel cup. She would return to the space of sidewalk between the restaurant and store for a minute, but often follow marks to the end of the block or cross the street to work people in front of the hotel. The kid would stay put and focus on his small patch.

Which reminds me… I remember once in Kunming I made the mistake of giving a few coins to this sweet-faced young girl who’d been pulling at my arm as i walked down the sidewalk. Within half a second, I was literally surrounded by a swarm of children, all pulling at me, holding their hands out for their own piece of the pie. Any attempt to wave them away was futile. It got so bad, I had to dart into some retail shop and wait until the crowd dissipated.

Paul is shrill again. (That last graf!)

Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 21, 2006

Yesterday The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service would outsource collection of unpaid back taxes to private debt collectors, who would receive a share of the proceeds.

It’s an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920’s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

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What a great read. The only question: Why on earth did it take this long?

For 10 minutes, the talk show host grilled his guests about whether “George Bush’s mental weakness is damaging America’s credibility at home and abroad.” For 10 minutes, the caption across the bottom of the television screen read, “IS BUSH AN ‘IDIOT’?”

But the host was no liberal media elitist. It was Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman turned MSNBC political pundit. And his answer to the captioned question was hardly “no.” While other presidents have been called stupid, Scarborough said: “I think George Bush is in a league by himself. I don’t think he has the intellectual depth as these other people.”

You have to read this mind-blowing article. America’s smartest conservatives are saying they’ve had enough of man-boy Bush. Only the shills at Fox News and the Weekly Standard are keeping their deck chairs on the Titanic. We all have to face it: our president is a miserable failure in every conceivable way, and anyone who wants to defend him does so at their own peril. Ater six painfully frustrating years of raising our voices in protest, the message has finally sunk in. Once the realization is made, there is simply no going back: We elected a moron to be the king of the world, and now each of us has to pay the price, from higher prices at the gas pump to the shame of having to confess you are an American when overseas to seeing our dreams of a great America crack and crumble. Bush is a tragedy and we have to live with him until January 2009. All we can do is work hard at planning for something better, hoping against hope that after he leaves there remains enough of the stuff that made America great to rebuild and recover.

Congratulations, America. You had a choice, and you chose fear over intellect, bravado over critical thinking, and hollow slogans over cautious planning. The result: more terror, more fear, more very rich and very poor people and the deepest social divide in our nation’s history. Once, not so very long ago, we were loved and envied. Now we are universally despised and ridiculed. Let’s all hope that the lessons of this article mark a turning point, at which true believers drop their blinders and confront the ugly reality, painful though it may be. This is all part of the great catharsis America must undergo to void the toxins of the Bush Nightmare from its system. It’ll have to be a colon cleansing on an unprecedented scale, but it has to be done. Kudos to the conservatives like Will and Buckley and Scarborough who had the courage to defy the omerta of the inner sanctum. The fact that they and so many others have all done this tells us something is very rotten in Denmark and America has had enough. Enough.

The election is only 80 days away. Barring a miracle (and Karl Rove is great at producing miracles), it should mark the end of the Bush free for all and a return to more reasonable times, when a president had to back up what he said with facts, and when the checks and balances that made America great could do their work as envisaged by the Founding Fathers, separating America’s rulers from royalty and demanding their full accountability. It looks like we are heading there now, finally, but the worst mistake would be to get cavalier and consider it a done deal. One thing the Bushies do not do is go gentle into that good night. The good fight is now raging, and we can’t let our eye drift from the end goal for even an instant. This is the home stretch, and Americans with short memories need to be reminded of George’s shortcomings and foibles and fuck-ups again and again, at the highest decibel levels. I’m going to do my part, as I hope each of you will as well. Silence equals death. Complacency equals more of the same. No more. Never again.

..of the scariest social experiment of all time. This is an amazing article for those with the fortitude to suffer through the whole thing.

Oh boy.

China’s non-communist parties have vowed to improve their competence in political participation and raise theoretical level by strenuously studying the Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, former chief of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The country’s non-communist parties have organized group studies, symposiums and lectures on Jiang’s Selected Works since it was published last week.

They also studied the speech made by Hu Jintao, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, at a meeting on the study of Jiang’s works.

Leaders of the Association for Promoting Democracy, the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party and other non-communist parties said the parties, as CPC’s close friends, will organize further studies of Jiang’s works among their party members.

They said the publication of Jiang’s Selected Works, which have summarized the valuable experience of the CPC in pushing forward socialism with Chinese characteristics, marked a major event in the political life of the CPC and the state.

They noted the works have combined the basic principles of Marxism with the actual conditions in China’s contemporary socialistic construction.

Somebody please straighten this out for me: Are these actual “political parties” and if so, why are they all such “close friends” with the CCP? Has the world been in error all these years, seeing the PRC as a one-party system?

Note the use of the neutral “they” in describing how these various groups look upon Jiang’s momentous works, all of them thinking and saying the same thing in adherence to the strict regulations of Groupthink. Remarkable.

Anyone with information on elections that these separate parties have won recently is free to tell us about them in the comments. And if anyone believes that there is even a single iota of truth in this article, even in its punctuation, let me know why.

I saw this being discussed in the forum recently and I see it’s becoming a big story.

Most of the engineering students in China are not qualified to practice the profession upon graduation, a newspaper reported Friday.

Educators from China and abroad cited a lack of quality education and professionals working in the field as the source of the problem in the country with 8 million engineering students, the largest number in the world, the Shanghai Daily said.

As a result, only 14 percent of engineering graduates become qualified engineers, and most graduates give up engineering and take up other careers within nine years of graduating, according to research conducted by East China University of Science and Technology and presented at an engineering-education symposium at the Shanghai institution known for its technology programs.

“An increasing number of employers began to raise the embarrassing question that engineering majors lack professional knowledge and have poor communication or teamwork skills,” said Tu Shandong, the university’s vice president.

Such a low percentage of graduates going on to practice the profession shows that their education suffered in both content and methodology, said He Renlong, director of the university’s higher research institute.

I know from my years in Silicon Valley that, for whatever reasons, a hugely lopsided percentage of the engineers there are Chinese (or at least that was the case back in the mid/late-90s) who got their PhD’s in America. So it’s not the students themselves; something is seriously amiss with the way China’s universities are educating its engineers and until they start to get serious about it, China is still going to rely on Taiwanese, Hong Kong and other expat middle managers to keep the economic miracle moving.

Interesting to see one of America’s super-pundits take on a topic that most Americans don’t even know exists. To do so in the Sunday Washington Post is even more surprising.

Young soldiers leaving Japan during that war often would say, “If I don’t come home, I’ll see you at Yasukuni.” The souls of 2.5 million casualties of Japan’s wars are believed to be present at that shrine. In 1978, 14 other souls were enshrined there — those of 14 major war criminals.

Between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China. But both of Japan’s most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan’s 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices .

Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA. The choice by China’s regime is more interesting. Marxism is bankrupt and causes cognitive dissonance as China pursues economic growth by markedly un-Marxist means. So China’s regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.

Actually, most of China’s resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao’s enemies. And Mao, to whom there is a sort of secular shrine in Beijing, killed millions more Chinese than even Japan’s brutal occupiers did.

Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s prime minister, made a campaign promise to visit the shrine regularly, and has done so, most recently last Tuesday, the anniversary of the end of World War II. Shinzo Abe, a nationalist who is almost certain to replace Koizumi, who is retiring next month, seems inclined to continue something like Koizumi’s policy, and for at least one of Koizumi’s reasons: China should not dictate the actions of Japan’s prime ministers.

He goes on to condemn the infamous museum but notes that Koizumi and Abe never visit it, and he let’s them off the hook with the observation that it’s possible to pay tribute to those who died in a war without paying tribute to the cause for which they died. Still, he recommends that Abe stop visiting the shrine altogether,using as an excuse the fact that Hirohito stopped his own visits there after learning of the war criminals whose remains are hosted there.

I love his observattion that China “decided to be incensed about Koizumi’s visits,” dragging Chinese-Japanese relations to a new low.