Shifty. Untrustable.

So this happened:

At the recent CPAC gathering, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, seemed to stumble on one of the basic facts of the Middle East. “The reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” the Florida Republican said.

Alas for Senator Rubio, Iran and ISIS are enemies. (Much like al Qaeda under bin Laden and Iraq under Saddam were , although that didn't stop the Cheney-Bush administration, did it?)

Still. Iraq, Iran, ISIS -- all four-letter adversaries beginning with "I." You know who's next, don't you?

Ikea.

I mean, seriously -- what's the deal with those sneaky Swedes?

Winifred Ames: What have they done to us?

Conrad 'Connie' Brean: What have they done for us? What do you know about them?

Winifred Ames: Nothing.

Conrad 'Connie' Brean: See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable.

The unforgiving minute: Conspicuous by his absence

John McCain didn't appear on a single Sunday talk show yesterday. Not one.

Should we declare a Silver Alert? Might he have wandered across the Turkish border into Syria again?

Or could it be that the network bookers finally have realized he's been irrelevant since late 2008, and that his only contribution to the national discourse since then has been his incessant clamoring for war (with Iran, with Syria, with somebody), and have therefore decided to let somebody else blather on in his place?

Nah. We couldn't be that lucky.

Minute's up.

Quote of the day: On the continuation of foreign policy by other means

Trade is foreign policy. The environment is foreign policy. Energy policy is foreign policy. Human rights are foreign policy. Drought is foreign policy. Starvation is foreign policy. War is generally only foreign policy when one of those other things I mentioned get completely out of control. However, as I suspect we will see argued enthusiastically from both sides tonight, war, and not its historic causes, has come to define foreign policy.

- Charles Pierce on his steadily-diminishing expectations for a “foreign policy presidential debate” in 2012.

This goes out to Charlie.

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The unforgiving minute

Remember the good old days, back when you'd read that Dick Cheney was getting hot to shoot some seals and at least you could still assume it was harp seals or Pacific harbor seals--not Navy SEALS?

There was a dozen ideas proffered [by administration officials meeting in Cheney's office] about how to trigger a war [with Iran]. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

"Might cost some lives."

Minute's up.

Follow along in your Farsi phrase book: "We are here as liberators."

Eric Alterman assembles several pieces of information--most of it widely-reported--places them side-by-side and asks, quite reasonably, shouldn't the White House press corps be worrying more than this than about terrorist fist bumps?

[A]s Joe Klein reported a year ago, President Bush proposed an attack of Iran's nuclear sites in December 2006 to the Joint Chiefs, and he was rebuffed. And after becoming head of Central Command, Adm. William Fallon made it known he wasn't on board with bombing Iran.

But Cheney did not relent.[…] Cheney then simply proposed striking the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, because of alleged involvement and interference in Iraq, a fact reported by McClatchy last August. As Porter reports, this wasn't a compromise on Cheney's part, but rather "appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm resistance of military leaders." Cheney anticipated much less resistance from the Pentagon for such a narrow attack, tied to the Iraq war, but apparently held the private belief that Iran would launch a counterattack, which could lead to a full air war with Iran, which could of course allow for strategic bombing of (known) nuclear sites.

This bears repeating. The Bush administration at the highest levels -- the same people who failed to anticipate strong Iraqi resistance before the invasion -- both anticipate and invite escalation with Iran in order to achieve their "strategic" goals.

We don't know where this all stands now. We do know that Fallon is gone and Petraeus is in his place -- and Petraeus is on the record supporting the so-called "limited" strikes on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The Russert wake is over by now. Let's get back to work, people.

No Republicans were harmed in the making of this film

You know, it's all so much simpler when these things are settled for you:

Annotation and documentation here.

Is Bush having his Strangelove moment?

And what happens next, if he is?

Little bits of this story were just starting to poke through into the daylight this morning, and by this evening the rumor--fantasy? theory? speculation? ugly truth?--has circled the blogosphere several times already:

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

Read the rest, including the evidence, at the Washington Note, whose foreign policy mojo has--unfortunately, tonight--always been pretty reliable.

I popped in at the anti-war march at Pioneer Square tonight--didn't know about it until I found out from the Skirt--and it wasn't one of Portland's best. (Rule of thumb: When the demonstrators meet up, then confer with the onlooking cops about the actual, you know, necessity of a parade permit before marching down Broadway, things haven't been thought through.) There were lots of flags, bumper stickers, and homemade signs calling for impeachment.

In general, I've been one of the people who's stayed fairly mum on the subject of impeachment during the Bush administration. True, Bush richly deserves it. (And Clinton didn't--so it's not like the system's perfect.) Truth be told, when Pelosi said that impeachment was "off the table," I was secretly delighted, because I took it to mean--albeit in an indirect, coded way--that it was inappropriate to talk about impeaching Bush when, for six years, his actions had gone completely uninvestigated by the Republican Congress. First things first. The impeachment process has already been tainted as a partisan witch-hunt tool; no need to reinforce that impression.

There's a thing called "due process"--at least in theory--and even someone who believes in it least, like Bush, is entitled to it. It's also political insulation for the Democrats: First the Congress resumes its normal oversight activities, as required by the Constitution. And if evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors turns up in the normal course of oversight hearings, well--then the "I-word" would legitimately be back on the table.

But if, in fact, Bush is cowboying around trying to give his Iraq war a second front in Iran or Syria, without even the congressional fig-leaf of an Authorization of the Use of Military Force (forget for the moment about that quaint old custom, the congressional declaration of war)--trying to get us irrevocably committed before anyone can stop him--then yes, let's start the impeachment process. I'll bring the coffee and doughnuts.

I realize that a lot of the Republicans who are now distancing themselves from Bush's war in Iraq are doing so because they face re-election in 2008, not because they've seriously reconsidered their votes that helped get us into this morass. And the Republicans in Congress just re-elected the worst among their ranks as their leadership, although Pelosi's 100-hours agenda has peeled off a lot of GOP votes. Nevertheless, a sizeable number of the congressional GOP may well be in a position to do the right thing (if only for the iffy-est of reasons) on this subject.

The Watergate hearings had the clout they had because they were clearly a bipartisan effort.
My main objection to impeachment talk during the Bush Reich has been that with the hyperpartisanship that is the Gingrich/Lott/Delay legacy, no grounds for impeachment could be taken seriously without a substantial number of votes from across the aisle.

What I'm thinking is that popular support for Bush and his war is running so low, and his domestic and foreign policy adventures are are so widely recognized as being so far beyond the bounds of constitutionally and politically defensible behavior, and the political lock into the next generation that Republicans seemed until recently to have on Congress is now so nearly in tatters--so much so that the impeachment move might be able to draw enough Republicans (by conscience or expedience) to make it legitimate.