Mikhail Gorbachev is not a frivolous man. He was the Soviet leader who introduced the conceptual breakthrough of "mutual security" to Soviet-American relations, as well as the man who did more than any other individual to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. In my opinion, he ranks as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century (something I was able to tell him personally, when we talked in St. Petersburg, Russia in May 2006).

So, when Mr. Gorbachev says, "Every US president has to have a war," and "I sometimes have the feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world," - as was reported by the Telegraph.co.uk on May 7, 2008 -- I take him seriously. More to the point, Gorbachev's assertions probably elicited widespread agreement, not only in Russia, but also across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

As three months of news reports of escalating violence in Iraq undercut widespread American propaganda about the "surge's" success, increasing numbers of Americans, once again, are reaching the conclusion that the Bush administration's illegal, immoral and incompetent invasion and occupation of Iraq is a war that never should have been fought. According to the results of CNN/Opinion Research Poll reported on 1 May 2008, 68 percent of Americans now oppose George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

These Americans have (belatedly) gotten it right. Moreover, five years after viewing the sick "Mission Accomplished" propaganda, it's now becoming clear that the "surge" and the implementation of the counterinsurgency strategy detailed in General Petraeus' Counterinsurgency Field Manual were last-ditch and largely propaganda gimmicks chosen by Bush to avoid admitting his stark defeat in Iraq. Thus, Bush and Cheney are sacrificing lives while playing for time -- time to escape office without being impeached and convicted, time to assert that the war was not lost during their watch.

Today, Senator Barack Obama felt compelled to disassociate himself from his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Not only from the snippets of Rev. Wright's sermons - largely taken out of context by vile humans like Sean Hannity at FOX News, in order to smear Senator Obama - but also from his speech at the National Press Club yesterday, as well as from anything Rev. Wright might say in the future. It appears to be an irreparable breach.

Brainless partisans, such as those who further abuse their already limited intellectual faculties by watching O'Reilly and Hannity on FOX, will hear much about the tactics behind Obama's move, as well as repetition ad nauseam about how poorly Obama's ties to Rev. Wright reflect on his own "judgment."

If you want to catch a glimpse of what's morally wrong with a small segment of America's conservative Christians, simply look at the antics of Floyd Brown. Mr. Brown, you might recall, was an author of the scurrilous Willie Horton ad broadcast across America in 1988, in order to smear the Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis. It was an ad designed to appeal to the worst in many Americans; fear based on ignorance, a lack of decency and racial bigotry. Now he's launched another Willie Horton-type ad in North Carolina to smear Barack Obama.

Lee Atwater, who fostered the Willie Horton ad, put it this way: "You start out in 1954 by saying 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff." And by 1988, if you're Lee Atwater, Floyd Brown, Roger Ailes or George W. Bush, you run an ad featuring a menacing black criminal, in order to smear Dukakis as soft on crime.

For the first 50 minutes of last night's presidential debate between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, ABC's moderators, George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson, gratuitously blowtorched Senator Barack Obama with four trivial, but calumnious, questions that seemed to have nothing other than character assassination as their objective - largely through guilt by association.

Yes, notwithstanding the many serious problems afflicting "Bushed" America, we got four nit-picking calumnious questions: (1) Did Obama's characterization of working-class voters as "bitter" indicate he's an out-of-touch elitist? (2) Does Obama believe in the American flag? (After all, he seldom wears an American flag pin.) (3) Can you tell us again, Senator Obama about your ties to the Rev. Wright we know from four controversial out-of-context quotes? And, thanks to question allegedly supplied to former Clinton administration spokesman Stephanopoulos by right-wing hate monger Sean Hannity, (4) What about Obama's association with former Weather Underground terrorist, William Ayers?

I'd be a millionaire, if I had a dime for every time some white American expressed some variant of the opinion: "Slavery ended a long time ago. Blacks have it much better today. They've achieved equality under the law and many middle class blacks have achieved de facto equality. Why can't they just get over it?"

Well, it's one thing to insist that blacks take responsibility for their own lives, even in the face of past and present racism. In fact, a November 2007 Pew Research Center poll found that 53 percent of America's blacks believe: "blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their own condition." But, it's quite another thing to close one's eyes to the impact of past and present racism.

Part One: "Not God Bless America. God Damn America"

What are we to make of FOX NEWS hate-monger, Sean Hannity? Years after he gave Neo-Nazi Hal Turner a secret guest call-in number to WABC -- in order to assure that his calls could always get on his radio show -- Hannity recently "broke" a story about the inflammatory rhetoric occasionally used by Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Quote from Hannity: "I broke this story.")

And, now, a desperate Hillary Clinton is piling on. Not only has she said that Jeremiah Wright "would not have been my pastor," she also mistakenly compared Rev. Wright's statements with those of Don Imus -- which is something nobody familiar the moral asymmetries in racism would ever do.

Below is the letter I just sent to Bill Keller, Managing Editor of the New York Times. I was especially influenced by David Bromwich's conclusion that the Times consistently has attempted to "shift legitimate opinion toward acceptance of a large and permanent American force in the Middle East."

Dear Mr. Keller:

I was one of the individuals who canceled my [sic] subscription (of more than thirty years), when the Times decided to hire William Kristol as a columnist. Not a dime of my money will go to the Times as long as it pays that scoundrel, who I call the "effete warmonger," to write his neocon trash.

As a White liberal living in Philadelphia, who will vote in Pennsylvania's presidential primary election on April 22nd, I'm glad to have the choice of voting for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Both would bring more experience to the White House than did our current President. More significantly, they will bring to office a vastly superior understanding of the issues than did George W. Bush.

It was Bush, while campaigning for President, who smugly asserted: "I may not know where Kosovo is, but I know what I believe." And once in office, he launched an illegal, immoral, unprovoked invasion of Iraq because he "believed" that God supported it. When compared with astounding ignorance and indifference Bush brought to office, Senators Clinton and Obama are bona fide "policy wonks." Just listen to them (when they are not sniping at each other).

Now that John McCain is the presumptive Republican candidate for President, Americans should insist that the mainstream news media cease its fawning coverage of the so-called straight talking maverick and produce unbiased reporting on the inside-the-beltway elitist from "third generation Navy royalty," whose "impeccable" national security credentials consist of little more than militarism and a willingness, indeed eagerness, to impose America's "exceptional" values on the rest of the world.

In his new book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq former CIA Osama bin Laden expert, Michael Scheuer, decries the price average Americans pay for their lack of interest in foreign affairs: "The most dangerous aspect of the division between the domestic focus of Americans and the international fixation of their elite…lies in the elite's easy willingness to sacrifice the lives of the former's sons and daughters in wars meant to install freedom and democracy in the Islamic world. These men and women have consciously made the decision that they will steadily spend the lives of our children to bring democracy, women's rights, parliamentary governments, human rights, and secularism to those who want no part of any of them in the Westernized form that is offered." [p. 253]

In the wake of their recent presidential primary victories in Wisconsin, Barack Obama and John McCain appear destined to wage a fight for the office of President that not only will pit an advocate for "change" against a defender of many of George W. Bush's discredited policies (especially his war in Iraq and his tax cuts for the rich), but also pit a young, vibrant (perhaps cocky) 46 year old black upstart against a hot-headed, expletive-spewing war hero and old white man (previously disgraced as one of the Keating Five and now, perhaps, once again by revelations of past romantic ties with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, for whom he wrote letters to government regulators) who will be 72 years old by the time he's sworn into office. The election seems destined to become a choice between America's future and America's past.

Americans might well remember the hypocritical scorn that so many of their brethren -- especially among conservatives and members of the news media -- heaped upon the physically feeble and, presumably, mentally inflexible gerontocrats, who ruled the Soviet Union during the early years of the Reagan administration. Hypocritical? Yes! After all, Ronald Reagan was no spring chicken himself. And neither is John McCain.

It's generally uncontested "that on average, the decline in…basic mental abilities begins gradually in the middle to late 60's and accelerates in the late 70's," although "the rate of decline differs for various mental faculties and differs in men and women." Moreover, "'fluid' memory, the ability to add new information to memory or recall something that happened recently, is more prone to decline, beginning in the 60's." [Daniel Goleman, "Mental Decline in Aging Need Not Be Inevitable," New York Times, April 26, 1994]

On February 1, 2008, two female suicide bombers killed some 91 people and wounded another 150 at Baghdad pet markets. The two coordinated explosions marked the bloodiest day in the Iraqi capital during the past six months. Coming on the heels of increased U.S. military deaths in Iraq in January, after four months of declines, the bombings raised new doubts about the wild-eyed claims made by President Bush and Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, that the surge is working and the U.S. is winning in Iraq.

But, almost immediately, Iraq's chief military spokesman in Baghdad claimed that the female bombers appeared to be mentally retarded. Allegedly, an examination of the severed head of one of the bombers led to the conclusion that she suffered from Downs Syndrome. In addition, some Baghdad locals were reported to have claimed that the bomber was known as "the crazy lady."

I won't be watching President Bush's "State of the Union" speech tonight. And I'll studiously avoid reading about it tomorrow. Not because Bush is a lame duck - thank God for that. But, because he a megalomaniac and a pathological lair.

You know how it works. Whether it's your friend, relative or acquaintance; whenever you've reached the conclusion that he/she is an inveterate liar, you simply stop listening to him/her, because he/she has lost all credibility and respect.

Actually, Bush never had my respect. Instead, I marveled over how a punk child of privilege could drink and bluff his way through mediocrity and failure - whether it be in college, the Texas Air National Guard, private enterprise (oil, baseball) or as governor of Texas - and still emerge with the belief that "God wants me to be President."

Speaking recently at Camp Arifjan, some 80 kilometers south of Kuwait City, President Bush assured some 1,000 U.S. soldiers: "There is no doubt in my mind when history was [sic] written, the final page will say victory was won by the United States…and generations of Americans will live in peace." A few days later, speaking to ABC's Terry Moran, Bush seemed to acknowledge that people view him as a "warmonger," but he immediately rebutted that view with his assertion: "I view myself as peacemaker."

Predictably, this self-proclaimed peacemaker's hermetically sealed mind conveniently ignored a fact that has smacked the rest of the world across the face: Bush's illegal, immoral, unprovoked invasion (akin to Hitler's invasion of Poland) has lasted some 1,762 days - or more than a full year longer than it took U.S. forces (with the indispensable assistance of the Soviet Union and Great Britain) to win World War II. Indeed, quite the peacemaker!

On the eve of President Bush's nine-day visit to the Middle East, Voice of America Middle East correspondent, Challiss McDonough, reported on "waves of criticism and rancor" spewing from the Arab press. "Newspaper columnists note the push for Middle East peace has not begun until the final year of the president's two terms in office."

Mr. McDonough failed to mention that, in January 2001, Bush actually stated that he was going to tilt toward Israel by pulling out of the Arab-Israeli conflict. When Secretary of State Colin Powell objected that such a pullback "would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army," Bush responded: "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things." [Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 72]

It was an offhand remark, in 1971, by a Penn State professor to his political science students, that prompted me to become a devoted reader, then decades-long subscriber, to the New York Times: "If you don't read the New York Times, you can't begin to know what's occurring in the U.S. and the world." Over the years, I found overwhelming evidence -- much of it amusing and delightful -- to support his claim, even as I suppressed my suspicions that the "Old Grey Lady" was pimping for a muscular U.S. presence around the world. For years I lived with the conceit that sophisticated people spent much of their weekend mornings reading Sunday's Times

In his thought provoking little book, On Bullshit, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, Harry G. Frankfurt, cites an exchange between Fania Pascal and the renowned philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein: "I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: 'I feel just like a dog that has been run over.' He was disgusted: 'You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." [p. 24]

In Professor Frankfurt's interpretation, Wittgenstein issued his harsh rejoinder because he believed Fania Pascal's assertion was bullshit. In Frankfurt's view, the essence of bullshit is an "indifference to how things really are."

Liberal critics of the Philadelphia Inquirer have watched in amazement while the newspaper's management outsourced much its international and national news gathering responsibilities and promoted the famously incompetent conservative ideologue, Kevin Ferris, to the post of Editor of the Commentary Page. And when we thought things couldn't get much worse, the paper added Rick Santorum - yes, THAT Rick Santorum - to a bullpen of columnists already overstaffed with right-wing warmongers, who had gotten it so wrong on Iraq.

Representative of this sorry situation is the latest piece of claptrap written by Ferris: "An Iraq campaign for hope." There, he gushes like a child and waxes euphoric about the "passion and enthusiasm" of President Bush - as if Bush has ever been anything but passionate and enthusiastic, even as he has subjected the United States and the world to the most evil and error prone presidency in U.S. history. Remember "Mission Accomplished"? How about: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"? Such examples speak volumes about the merits of "passion and enthusiasm."

Every American of conscience should read Michael Massing's latest article in the New York Review of Books. It's titled, "Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs." As Mr. Massing makes clear, the human costs of Bush's butchery in Iraq have remained hidden largely because there are "limitations imposed by the political climate in which the [mainstream] press works."

Massing attributes the reluctance of editors and producers to print and broadcast news about Bush's butchery in Iraq to the fact that "most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name." Or, as Scott Ritter has put it, "very few Americans function as citizens anymore."

Journalist Robert Fisk recently explained the Bush/Cheney abomination in the Middle East quite succinctly, when he asserted: "The world in the Middle East is growing darker and darker by the hour. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq. "Palestine". Lebanon. From the borders of Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean, we - we Westerners that is - are creating (as I have said before) a hell disaster. Next week, we are supposed to believe in peace in Annapolis, between the colorless American apparatchik and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has no more interest in a Palestinian state than his predecessor Ariel Sharon." [Robert Fisk, "Darkness falls on the Middle East," Independent.co.uk, 24 Nov. 2007]

During his recent, hour-long interview on Al-Arabiya TV, President Bush denied "the U.S. is gearing up to attack Iran" and dismissed as "'gossip' reports in the Arab press that he has issued orders to senior U.S. military officials to prepare for an attack on Iran at the end of January or in February." [AP, Arizona Daily Star, Oct. 6, 2007] He then added: "Evidently, there's a lot of gossip in parts of the country - world that try to scare people about me personally or my country or what we stand for."

Gossip is it? Or has the Decider simply repressed or forgotten all the lies he told during the run-up to his illegal, immoral invasion and murderous occupation of Iraq? For example, has Bush simply repressed or forgotten his lie on December 28, 2001, when, after an extensive secret briefing by General Tommy Franks about a future invasion of Iraq, he told the press that his discussion with Franks focused on the General's recent trip to Afghanistan and events occurring in that country? [Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 65]

A few days ago I wrote an article ("Certain Americans") about the intellectual wasteland inhabited by "certain Americans," which facilitated the foisting of George W. Bush's benighted presidency upon decent and thoughtful Americans, as well as upon the thousands of American soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians, who now are dead as a consequence. Unfortunately, that unimproved wasteland also provides fertile soil for the sprouting of the many journalistic weeds now blighting America's political landscape. Simply consider the "journalism" of "crabgrass" Bill O'Reilly, "pigweed" Rush Limbaugh, "ragweed" Sean Hannity, "quackgrass" William Kristol and "creeping jenny" Ann Coulter. (For a hint of the sins of such weeds, go here.)

Certain Americans chose a president no smarter than themselves, an illiterate who, in the seventh year of his presidency, still mangles the English language with such sentences as "Childrens do learn." Far worse, however, certain Americans chose a president who then lied to them about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, in order to send their sons and daughters (along with our sons and daughters) to kill Iraqis and, perhaps, die in an illegal, immoral invasion - now considered the worst strategic disaster in US history.

Even so, certain Americans either shrugged their shoulders or rationalized away the evil behavior of their president when, for example, on the eve of announcing the invasion of Iraq, he "pumped his fist as though instead of initiating a war he had kicked a winning field goal or hit a home run. 'Feels good,' he said." [Paul Waldman, Fraud, p. 8]

I was reminded of my mid-1960s high school days in conservative Lebanon, Pennsylvania, when I read that Senator John McCain recommended that MoveOn.org, "ought to be thrown out of this country," because it paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times, which carried the headline, "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" McCain's outburst reminded me of the narrow-mind patriots in Lebanon, who used the illiberal cliché, "America, Love it or Leave it" to deny the patriotism of America's Vietnam War protesters.

Yet, there are at least two reasons to suspect that MoveOn's ad had merit and critics, like McCain, were wrong. First, we have Gareth Porter's exceptional reporting that General Petraeus' superior, Admiral Fallon, accused Petraeus of being "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" for serving as a "front man" for Bush's surge. Second, we have Alexander Cockburn's CounterPunch Diary report of September 15-16, 2007, in which he claims that Petraeus' testimony had been "freshly vetted and re-written by Vice President Cheney."