ARMY OF ONE. America's favorite psychopath, Umpty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, is on one hell of a mood swing. His ravings on the Olympics in today's New York Post start, "I RARELY watch sports on TV. I'm a doer, not a viewer." Right off the bat the General is reminding us that he has killed men with uncurled paper clips. Then he tells us that "Beijing's post-Mao mafiosi dropped their (dirty) drawers." Context is unclear; maybe the General just emitted it in a spasm of journalistic Tourette's, and his editor -- well, what am I saying: clearly nobody edits the General.

A strong believer in useless gestures, The General will "boycott" the Olympics -- that is, he will refrain from watching it on TV, instead curling up with a Faces of Death marathon. He is also boycotting Chinese goods, which probably means (if he is serious) that he goes everywhere in his old Army uniform. Even the General admits "it can be hard" to do without Commie provender, and he wants you to know how hard: "A work-out bench ordered online recently turned out to be made in China." Again, the General is unclear: was the online ordering done by him, a neighbor, or another imaginary character? Doesn't matter, the key words are "work-out bench," to remind us that the General is out running the obstacle course while you maggots are still raising your morning wood. Now drop your dirty drawers, Chinamen, and he'll give you twenty!

You know I'm not fond of the Chinese Government, either, and would like to make common cause with the General on this issue, but that would lead to the same sort of problems William Holden had with Bo Hopkins in The Wild Bunch.

THE GENERAL'S MODEST PROPOSAL. Like a star athlete of insanity, 5-to-the-infinite-power-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters keeps making us raise the bar. His latest essay at the Journal of International Security Affairs, to which we were tipped by Brad Reed (goddamn him), begins with several propositions which are bold but unexceptionable -- for instance, that the all-volunteer army has put added distance and tension between the military and civilian worlds. But even in his warm-up phase, the General shows an inclination to go off-track and head straight for the brain-baking desert. For instance:

Fifth, we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit; the privileged among us have lost the sense of grit in daily life. We grow up believing that safety from harm is a right that others are bound to respect as we do.

Okay; we've grown litigious. Maybe we don't take bloody noses as stoically as we used to. Still, does the General really mean that in "daily life" we shouldn't presume a right to be safe in our persons? But the General has already sprinted far ahead:

Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue.

Apparently he sees no difference between the social order of Main Street and that of Mogadishu. If you don't accept daily life as a slugfest, you're going to wind up playing patty-cake with terrorists.

But this is only the General's ordinary madness, which divides the whole world into wimps and warriors. Our terrorist enemies are warriors, and the General respects them, but the pussies from the State Department down to ANSWER don't have what it takes to get inside their enemies' heads. They can't comprehend their homicidal religious mania, for instance, because they don't share it themselves, which the General finds a fault: "Even officials and bureaucrats who attend a church or synagogue each week no longer comprehend the life-shaking power of revelation, the transformative ecstasy of glimpsing the divine, or the exonerating communalism of living faith." If you're not incited to kill for your God, how are you going to handle enemies who are?

For the General, it's not a matter of simple preparedness, reacting coldly to present threats, and the reason why not becomes clear in the course of his essay: everyone is a threat -- not just the Islamists (who must be wiped out), but also the Chinese, with whom "we could find ourselves tumbling, a la 1914, into a conflict." And we must also consider the "unexpected rise of a dormant power." How do you war-game that? You don't; you just get pumped, ready to kill or be killed at a moment's notice.

And as is his wont, the General wants America to sharpen its talons on a homegrown menace:

Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.

Though this is an old theme for the General, I've never seen him get quite this worked up about it. Maybe he had a vision, or heard the final trump. In any case the traitorous media are now more than wimps to him: "Rejecting the god of their fathers," he roars, "the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar." He invokes Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Book of Joshua. The rest of us nervous nellies may not be getting pumped, but the General sure as hell is! And here's his big idea:

Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.

This will be an easy kill, as journalists tend to be unarmed; it will give raw recruit much needed practice; and it will show the world that we mean business. Best of all, it will finally get Michael Yon in Newsweek.

The Pentagon had better call him up fast; if they hesitate he may, like Coriolanus, grow disgusted with us and take his winning ideas to our enemies. Though I think his ideas will not be new to them.

IN THE LAST DITCH. Indeterminate Number of Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters continues his bilious streak with an unusually brief and at least more-than-usually incoherent rant on Georgia:

WAR doesn't change anything! How many times have we heard the claim from self-righteous leftists protected by their betters?

Tell the dead in Georgia.

Pausing, even only for a moment, ruins nearly all of the General's arguments, and in this case even interventionists would have to wonder upon reflection what righteous act of war would have saved the Georgians from their fate. The one Truman et alia were too chicken to declare on Red Russia, back when only America had the Bomb? Or the one Bush is too chicken to declare now?

Attend: the answer is blowin' in the General's wind. Condi Rice doth "huff and puff," NATO dithers. But the "hardcore Left," without any of Rice's and NATO's power, is always worse, for one thing because it mocks the General:

Over the years, as I've tried to explain the human reality I've encountered, the leftist response has been "Shoot the messenger!" (presumably, with a water gun). When I wrote that a dangerous minority of men enjoy tormenting and killing others, the response was that I obviously believed killing was good.

I've never even kicked a cat.

This is a startling admission from an author who has never, in my experience, seen or heard of a difficult situation that he didn't think would be improved by a whole heap of killing. (Or maybe he's just saying that he's fond of cats, the way Patton was of Willie.)

When the General asks, "what solutions does the war-doesn't-change-anything Left bring to the party now, in Georgia?" he's just offloading his own disgust with the current Administration, whose huffing and puffing he obviously considers no more efficacious that whatever the Berkeley City Council would propose (or Barack Obama, whom the General fantasizes "gobbled up in one bite" by Putin -- as opposed to Bush, whom one imagines would take longer to digest, at least when Putin got to his liver).

Maybe, because Bush's and NATO's officers don't wear distressed denim or love beads, the General feels protective of them. Or maybe he's just protecting himself. "I don't think a military response at this point would do any good," the General admits, "only more harm." What then does the General bring to the party? Only a deep-seated faith in force, regardless of its usefulness in the present situation, and an equally profound lack of faith in, or perhaps understanding of, anything else.

THE TREASON OF TECTONIC PLATES. Gazillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters says that not only is the press lying about our glorious war in Iraq, it's enlisting Communist help:

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn't get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there's a virtual news blackout.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People's Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Is Jane Fonda on her way to the earthquake zone yet?

Today the top stories on the website of the New York Post, which carries Peters' column, concern Governor Patterson's migraine headache, a pay raise for the NYPD, and SPITZER AND THE HOOKER BY TV'S "LAW & ORDER" -- GOV. SCANDAL INSPIRES SHOW. Not a word about victory! Maybe Jane Fonda will bring Rupert Murdoch to the People's Republic. Oh wait -- he's already there.

THE HORMONAL SURGE IS WORKING. I was worried for a while that I would have to bust Gazillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters back down to Lt. Colonel. His recent columns have been normally ridiculous, but lacking in that special madness that has made him an alicublog favorite. But in Saturday's New York Post the General uncorked a classic. It sings from the very beginning:

WORKING out last Monday, I heard a campaign flunky on TV insist that progress in Iraq is an illusion. "The war isn't over until all of the troops come home!" she grumped.

Guess we're still at war with Germany. And Japan. Even Italy. Oh, and let's not forget all of our military bases occupying the Confederacy.

Maybe the General's workout stimulated an epinephrine cascade that inspired this column. I imagine him banging it out on the Selectric with one hand and pumping a gazillion-kilo handweight with the other, high off the idea that an operating base in Iraq is a direct equivalent to Fort Bragg.

And one look told you she didn't even know any "troops."

You can smell it on 'em, even through the TV. Probably drives a Prius and eats pussy, too.

But after my initial shrug (back to the bench for more crunches)...

The General is a man of action.

...Since that woman on TV "explained" victory last Monday, I've thought about the different kinds of people who refuse either to accept that the situation in Iraq has improved remarkably or that quitting now would have serious consequences.

Even in the grip of raging catecholamines, the General holds the game together: Iraq is always in a delicate balance between total conquest and all hell breaking loose. And pay attention, because he redeploys this strategy in his big finale.

The General identifies three enemy battalions: First, "Protesting university students," an easy target: "Once they graduate and get a dose of reality, most of the kids will do fine. The need for liberal-arts undergrads to prance to the left is virtually hormonal." (Certainly the reality of the post-graduation job market will put an end to all hormonal prancing. Try prancing in a tiny apartment with three roommates!) Next, "Hollywood stars and other celebrities." Their only ordnance is "self-righteous anti-war (anti-military) films" and Susan Sarandon. The General orders you to laugh!

But he can't so easily shake off that most formidable of foes: "My generation. Those of us from our mid-50s into early 60s. The florid youth of yesteryear... the high point of whose lives came in a protest march down University Boulevard, chanting, 'Ho-ho-ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!'"

You'd think that, now that Dennis Hopper is selling them retirement plans, reality long ago put an end to the Boomers' hormonal prancing. But the General's got that thousand-mile stare: he doesn't see a bunch of greyhaired time-servers -- he sees the Mongol hordes, animated by "bitterness toward the military," looking in the last ditch to "rise above their disappointing lives and to recapture, for one Viagra-assisted moment, their glory days of raised little fists and bell-bottoms."

As the General describes them, his generation is a pathetic bunch, with only "tenure at an obscure college, serial divorces and a failed book or two," while "the nerds in the comp-science classes, the geeks with punch cards in their shirt pockets... became billionaires."

So it's the General and internet billionaires versus a "soured minority" of former commune dwellers. He seems to have this thing sewn up. Can't we just have the McCain victory party now? The General wearily shakes his head: "I'd pity them," he whispers, "if the stakes weren't so high."

So the homefront is really just like Iraq: the enemy is merely a pathetic rump, but the General must fight on, sparing neither troops nor firepower. The enemy is just as weak as he needs for morale-building purposes, and just as strong as needs to justify continued involvement. Most likely he imagines himself, and us, at it for another 100 years.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Song's been going through my mind for some reason. Weep, sad freaks of a nation.

•    I guess 2012 was the last year I paid attention to "Human Achievement Hour," the annual chest-thump in which the Competitive Enterprise Institute says Fuck You to the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour by asking True Sons of Liberty to burn up as much energy as possible in celebration of the stinking shithole we've made of the earth, I mean progress. The event remains hilarious. Got some links from a CEI publicist to "Human Achievement of the Day" posts about how guitars only exist because of capitalism and so forth. My favorite is about bitcoin:

These are still very early days, and bitcoin is still thought more as a volatile store of value rather than an emergent system of property rights, but the prospects for this particular human achievement are incredibly bright, if regulators do not find a way to stifle it (by regulating people rather than the system, for example).

This puts me in mind of Hearst on the trail of The Color in Deadwood, except Hearst's psychosis was not the type that kept him in his parents' basement. Murder and dismemberment were more his thing -- the sort of activities in furtherance of capital that the CEI pencil-necks are more likely to dress up in purty language than directly perform.

•   In the high-decibel world of wingnut blowhards it's tough to rise above the din, but in a column about the Bowe Bergdahl prosecution at PJ Media Michael Walsh amps it up:  In addition to standard-issue slur-slinging -- "the Coward-in-Chief and his deliberate thumb in the eye to the honor of the American military," "pathetic little pansy Bergdahl," "painfully stupid Jen Psaki," aargh,  blaargh -- Walsh bellows:

...it’s a rare instance of the military finally asserting itself against a rogue commander who is imperiling the nation and insulting it as he goes. Unlawful orders do not have to be obeyed, even from Fearless Leader; that’s a principle the U.S. clarified at Nuremberg. 

One imagines Walsh parachuting into Fort Bragg, a cigar in one hand and a pearl-handled revolver in the other, crying PATRIOTS! NOW IS THE TIME! Or maybe not: see, everyone's a disappointment to Walsh:

John McCain and Mitt Romney should both be hanging their heads in shame. They could have defeated him, and they chose not to. But that’s America in the 21st century — it never saw a fight it wanted to finish.

Maybe Walsh can stake out a little corner of his mental ward and declare that The Real America. I'll have to read Walsh more often; I haven't seen anything like him since the heyday of Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters.

•   The composer John Adams recently remarked at Avery Fisher Hall that Rush Limbaugh exercises "casual brutality toward women" -- which, really, is about as close to an incontrovertible statement as you can get -- and to National Review's Jay Nordlinger this is Hitler plus Big Brother:

To this remark, the audience responded with sustained and robust applause. In 1984, Orwell writes of the two-minute hate. The applause in Avery Fisher Hall did not last for two minutes, but it went on long enough... 

You’re never supposed to analogize anything to the Nazis. That’s the rule. But sometimes I break the rule. And I believe I got a whiff — just a tiny whiff — of Nuremberg in Avery Fisher Hall tonight. Collective hatred, and self-satisfied hatred, based on damnable lies.

I suppose this makes me Genghis Stalin, but Nordlinger is a fucking idiot.

INK-STAINED RETCH. The opening of a museum dedicated to journalism stirs the wrath of our old friend, Zillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters:

There's no museum in the vicinity of the National Mall dedicated to our military.
Tells you a lot about the vanity and priorities of today's governing and informational "elite," doesn't it?

On the Mall a hippie couldn't spit without hitting a bronze servicemember or a military memorial. It's practically a Valle de los Caídos. But there's no reasoning with the General, and thank God, because that gives him a whole column to expound on the lowest form of life on earth:

Let's be honest: Journalists are parasites. Whether war correspondents or metro-desk editor, we live off the deeds and misdeeds of others. They do, we tell. Without the soldiers, cops and firemen (or the politicians, terrorists and criminals), there ain't no stories.

He forgot death-sniffing dogs and Britney Spears. But, again, leave him the floor:

Of course, any biologist will tell you that there are good parasites and bad ones, so we're not condemning the entire profession here. Just noting that journalists piggyback on the courage or failings of others.

Kind of like novelists and playwrights, and all those other inky bastards who engage the world with a lousy pen instead of a manly bayonet. Why, Washington gives a whole library to Shakespeare, who never shouldered a rifle.

The General digs in: once journalism was "something of an outsiders' profession," but "today, big-media journalism is a white-collar, insiders' profession that grows more elitist by the year." Well, it is too bad that "big-media journalism" has grown more elitist, though I doubt big-corporate, big-pharmaceutical, etc. are hiring many kids off the turnip truck anymore. (Astonishingly, some of my friends and I have written for the media without J-school degrees. Perhaps we were the equivalent of mercenaries, though in that case I expect we would have been better paid.)

From "All The President's Men" forward, journalism was the ultimate career for the well-educated, well-connected young voyeur who didn't want any bottom-line responsibility (just a byline, thanks). No need to get dirty, at least not for very long. Just make fun of the young soldiers or cops who get dirty every day.

There is something to this. Just scan the headlines in today's Washington Post: "Police Say Man Has Robbed Six Banks Since January" -- clearly implying that the cops are too stupid to catch him. And: "Iraq Fires Policemen, Soldiers" -- there's a twofer! Couldn't the Post have just referred to them as "downsized" and left them their dignity?

To further prove his point, the General bets you can't "name one decorated hero from Iraq or Afghanistan," while some TV newsmen may be familiar to you by sight. And I'll bet you know who Simon Cowell is, too, you treasonous bastards.

His rage spent, the General pleads for simple justice:

Would it be too much to ask for a little humility on the part of the privileged? Yesterday, at Ft. Bragg, I met a Special Forces sergeant-major whose courage won him the Distinguished Service Cross. He'll never earn what a TV anchor earns.

Insolent civilians may be tempted to mention the earning disparities between TV anchors and schoolteachers, home health care workers, etc. But that kind of talk won't fly with the General. For him, your respect for the Armed Services is not satisfactory until you admit you aren't fit to lace their boots -- unless you're a Republican politician, and even then you dast not cross him or he will unscrew your head and shit down your neck. Now drop and give him twenty, maggots!

THE REAL END OF COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM. If you're wondering what Phil Gramm was thinking with that "nation of whiners" crack, let me suggest that it may just be part of a new charm offensive from the right, at least if these bits from the weekend's New York Post are any indication.

"The baby boomers... have once again spoken. What they have said is, 'Waaaaaahhh,'" says Monica Hesse, who reads a Pew study showing boomers "worry that their income won't keep up with rising costs of living" and "that things don't look too good for their kids." They sound like most Americans of whatever age, but Hesse responds, "Oh, the drama! Oh, the anguish!" A separate study "found that boomers have never been happy," so there's no need to pay any attention to them now -- only Hesse does, and at column length, because "the rest of us are doomed to study them, analyze them, wave shiny objects around for them," though by what coercive mechanism she doesn't say. "BUCK UP ALREADY!" she shouts, or she may have to write another column about them, instead of one about "The Google Ogle Defense" ("'Orgy' might be a popular [Google] search term not because it's a popular practice, but because it's not. How do all those limbs fit together, anyway?"), or "Things that are 'awk-ward,' according to a group of University of Maryland students hanging out on the campus quad," or other topics of national importance. Trend reporting seems like an easy gig, even when the economy's in the toilet and some fossils are bitching about it.

Younger people get it -- at least the ones in Iraq, reports movie reviewer Kyle Smith, who pimps LiveLeak, "a destination spot for short war films that are awesome or disgusting, depending on your viewpoint." Smith's own viewpoint is clear: "LiveLeak is doing a much better job presenting the facts than, say, the latest foamy-mouthed drivel about corporate masters of war from the formerly popular actor John Cusack." The lead featured item at LikeLeak at this writing is "Man Shows Unique Ability To Put Hands Into Cauldron Of Hot Fat," but Smith seems to be talking about stuff like this:

...a clip of gunship attacks set to the metal song by Dope called "Die Mothe - - - - er Die." The video wasn't gruesome, though, since the enemy was well off in the distance and disappearing tidily under puffs of white smoke. One of the troops is overheard saying, "This was great. I need a cigarette. This was like sex." And a few more shocked grad students get some fuel for their eroticization-of-violence papers...

Actually it sounds like "Jackass," except instead of injuring themselves Johnny Knoxville and Wee Man kill other people from a distance. Smith believes "the primary message fired-up young men are likely to take from [these films] is that fighting for your country is a lot cooler than the mainstream media make it out to be. " One wonders why the Army hasn't dispatched teams of movie-makers to Iraq to do fan-film versions of Halloween and Saw, casting the natives as terrified teenagers, and release them with titles like Be Kind Re-enlist.

The gem of the bunch is of course by Umpty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. The General's been on a roll lately, and his opening here is a classic: "We all have irritants that make us want to reach for the revolver." Don't I know it! But what gets the General in a killin' mood is bumper stickers -- "One per car is OK, but anything more is public masturbation"; get it, maggot? -- people who call dissent patriotic, and Barack Obama. The dissent fans misquote Jefferson, who was of course against dissent, as shown by his accommodating attitude toward the Alien and Sedition Acts; as for the "last refuge of a scoundrel" thing, though the General admires Samuel Johnson ("I've got a huge two-volume replica edition [of Johnson's Dictionary] -- it's so heavy you could bench-press it"; real he-man writin'!), he reckons the Great Cham was just blowing smoke. "I'd rephrase the line," announces the General, "to read: 'Attacks on patriotism are the last refuge of the coward.'" Get some REMFs on it most ricky-tick, and then fetch the General a copy of the Constitution and a blue pencil!

But you know what really chafes the General around the chaps? Obama and that "Hope" bull-hockey. "Hope is the opposite of audacity," says the General. "It's passive, an excuse for inaction. Medicating ourselves with fuzzy hopes, instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing things, has wasted countless lives and entire cultures..."

So, to sum up: Don't hope, don't complain, and enjoy your free war videos. It's the new conservative message! They must really be counting on those Diebold voting machines.

AS OF THIS MOMENT, THEY'RE ON DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION! Zillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters must have been a great hand-to-hand combatant back in the day. Just when you think you've got him down, he comes back at you with a surprise.

For instance, take the lede of his latest column:

WONDER what Iraq would look like if we left to morrow? Take a look at Gaza today.

One is inclined to laugh. Civil war and chaos if we leave Iraq? What have the past few years been, rehearsal?

Cornered, the General pulls out his Ka-Bar!

Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse.

Gasp! A thousand times worse? Now I'm scared! But I can't show it, or Peters will move in for the kill with Ten thousand times worse! Hundred thousand times worse! Infinity!

No worries, though -- eventually I'll pass out from the powerful fumes of the rest of his column. To encrapsulate: Arabs are sub-human and incapable of self-government, and our last hope of victory -- this month anyway -- is... (opens the envelope) "As fine an officer as we've got in uniform, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey." Start molding the statue!

Reading the General for sense is useless; persist if you must for his style, full of ripe analogies such as this:

Four years ago, the neocons fantasized about a post-Saddam Age of Aquarius. Now the Murthacrats insist that, once we bail out, Atlantis will rise from the Tigris and Euphrates.

I begin to suspect that Peters learned his trade -- the writin', not the killin' one -- from old police comics.

THE FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY, THE SECOND TIME AS FARTS. Obama's talking about moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Sensing an opening, General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters storms the breach with a squad of Howlin' Paradoxes:

Now their presidential candidate has announced that he won't bring all those troops home, but will simply transfer combat forces from Iraq to Afghanistan -- expanding that war. (He's discussed possibly invading Pakistan, too.)

And the left's quiet as a graveyard at midnight.

Where are the outraged protests from MoveOn or the DailyKos? I thought the extreme left felt sorry for our service members in harm's way and wanted to reunite them with their families.

Having nothing to say against Obama's prescription ("Yes, we could use more combat forces in Afghanistan") -- nothing coherent anyway ("I'm not quite ready to invade Pakistan without weighing the consequences and costs") -- the General instead directs his fire against a squadron of straw pacifists. Like a true action hero, the General likes to wisecrack while he rips through the enemy:

If the next president yanks our troops out of Iraq, all the progress disintegrates, Iran moves in and we have to re-invade to clean up the mess, will you enlist and do your part?

I know, I know: Educated people like you are too smart and too important to serve in uniform. The military's for dummies, for losers. Serious players stay home and blog and bitch over double espressos.

Along with their effete choice of beverage (real men drink instant, boiled over a flaming skull), the imaginary peaceniks are also assailed for "sitting in your basement blogging in your underwear at 3 a.m." Speaking of which, Ace O'Spades gets the General's back, and also gets credit for additional dialogue:

I'm not a big fan of the chickenhawk argument, but the left has long made it. And I asked similar questions a hundred times in the past: Fine, you're against the Iraq War. But you claim to be in favor of the Afghanistan War and even, on occasion, in favor of the Great Overmountain Invasion of Pakistan. So, um, Chickenhawk? How's blogging from Kabul?

Then he pours his Pibb Xtra over the crotch of his Stupid Hippie doll, and laughs the laughter of the righteous over the Hippie's weak bladder.

Inside jokes like these are fun for us dorks, but McCain's mainstream operatives are not likely to pick them up, figuring that John Q. Citizen won't know what the hell they're talking about. So if they want to ride their meme to glory, the General, O'Spades, and their comrades might try a public education campaign, alerting America to the perfidious people who blog for war from basements. As examples, they can take some of their old posts and change the names; for strats and tacts, they can emulate the left in 2004. It probably won't even work as well as it did last time, but let us encourage them to try.

A LITTLE CLOSER TO UNDERSTANDING. We've considered the case of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters at length here, yet while we have gotten a full load of his mania, we have not learned much about the man. His peroration in today's New York Post, though, offers clues.

A FUNDAMENTAL reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can't understand Afghanistan is that they don't recognize that we're dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We're divided into two sexes (more or less). And we're mortal.

But that's about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that the General finds opposing life-forms inhuman and "more divergent from our behavioral norms than the weirdest crew member of the starship Enterprise." But he also reveals something of where he got this perspective. No, he doesn't mention whippings by his father or his time in that special CIA program where he was broken and rebuilt, but he does tell us this:

I was an effective intelligence officer. Why? In junior high, I matured past the French Existentialists and started reading science fiction. The prose was often ragged, but the speculative frameworks offered a useful approach to analysis.

Begin with the view that all opponents are aliens from another cultural planet. Build your assessment from a blank slate. What do the alien collectives desire or fear? How do they perceive the galaxy? What are their unique weaknesses?

Son of a sea cook! The General's a libertarian!

THE GENERAL PLAYS ALONG. "Negotiations are the heroin of the chattering classes," writes More-Stars-Than-There-Are-In-Heaven General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, "blinding them to every reality except the next fix they can inject into our foreign policy." The General's disdain for talky-talk is keen as ever, but what's got him fearing an outbreak of negotiations this time? An anti-war march? Impending Democratic rule? No, it's his hero General Petraeus' reported interest in talking to Taliban forces to secure peace in Afghanistan.

The General wants to clear something up: when a fightin' man such as Petraeus talks about talking, he doesn't mean, as do Washington milksops, that he wants to "make talks the centerpiece of the new administration's Afghan policy." He simply means them as a prelude to, or perhaps an entertaining respite from, killing. "The equation is simple," says the General. "We kill them, or we lose... History doesn't reveal a single exception."

As Petraeus is a real general and not one, like Peters, merely promoted by alicublog for his services to humor, Peters takes care not to criticize him. So he carefully differentiates Petraeus' nobly worthless overtures -- which may "peel away" some "disenchanted Taliban supporters," which is okay because it will leave less bodies to clean up after the killing spree -- from Obama's plan, which Peters characterizes as "begging the hardcore Taliban for talks."

This is not based on any quoted statements from Obama or anyone else, but on the General's conviction that such people "live in a lovely bubble (lined with mirrors)," and worship negotiation because they're lawyers who "get rich by talking" and don't understand the implacability of Muslim fanatics because "religious passion is as foreign to Washington as integrity in the budget process." Whereas men of action like himself and his buddy the CentCom Commander know it's a waste of breath; after all,

If Taliban elements agree to talk, most will view the talks as a chance to weaken our resolve -- and to buy time. This is the con for which we always fall. The Iranians, Saddam Hussein, the Palestinians, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians all have played "Paralyze the Gringos" with endless talks.

We always wake up alone, with the sheets stained and torn.

I'm not sure whether the General meant for that last bit for the article, or whether he scrawled it in the margin (along with variations on OPE) and some confused editor left it in.

But you get the picture: there's no point in talking to these people, and Petraeus is only going along because... well, Peters never tells us why. He probably never thought about it, or did so only long enough to realize that any reason he could think up -- a deceptive maneuver, perhaps, meant to confuse the Taliban, or Obama? -- would, if revealed, compromise the security of the mission. Ever the good soldier, Peters knows that the decisions of his superiors (excepting the incoming CinC, of course) must be right whether he kens them or not. His not to reason why; his but to hue and cry.

UPDATE. Fixed typos.

WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF. Lord knows there is plenty of comic potential in the President's speech, and some of his fans have been making the most of it. Like noted Sadly, No commenter Ann Althouse:

I doubt that President Bush has any capacity to inspire Americans about the war in Iraq. I vaguely wish that he could.

Well, that'll get them up and out of their seats! Brave troops, muzzily march to your vague doom!

He's made his decision, and I think people need to support what he's doing and not undercut him by revealing to our enemies that we can be worn down and demoralized. Yet it doesn't bother me that much that Americans are not fired up by presidential speeches. We don't like war, and we especially don't like to live with a long war that doesn't reward us with distinct successes from time to time. We express our dissatisfaction, but I think most of us realize it's the President's responsibility to get us through this. Electing Democrats to Congress can be read as an expression of dissatisfaction, but does it also mean that we expect or even want Congress to interfere with the President's plan?

It's like this stain in my blouse. From my perspective it sort of looks like the continent of Africa, but from your perspective, it would look like something entirely different. You might see an arrowhead, or a flame. Or you might say, "That's some big stain, Ann." Wait, what were we talking about again?

But strangely, some of the more reliable laugh-getters leave me depressed. From Infinity-to-the-tenth-power-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, I expected a yuk-fest, especially after Bush told Peters' beloved grunts and swabbies and whatnot they were now free from "restrictions" -- kill and kill again, General! But there is something rote in Peters' performance. The last thing one expects from our favorite kill-crazy madman is equivocation, but Peters' opening is painted in pastels as pale as Althouse's:

...Will the plan work? Maybe. It's a last-hope effort based on steps that should've been taken in 2003, from providing basic security for the population to getting young Iraqi males off the streets and into jobs.

The added 20,000-plus U.S. troops to be phased in over the coming months will make a tactical difference in Baghdad and Anbar province - but that may not translate into strategic success...

Of course, there's one topic on which Peters never disappoints, and that's the media, which he predictably and pre-emptively blames for the failure of Bush's shitty plan:

Our troops can stand up to any enemy. But I'm not as certain President Bush can withstand the onslaught of an enraged media - and any prospect that we might be turning the situation around will certainly enrage them.

But even this doesn't have the old Peters kick -- it's almost as if he's phoning it in.

Maybe it's just me. Because, when you think about it, the loss of lives this crackpot scheme will bring isn't all that funny.

UPDATE. Oh thank you Michelle Malkin for bringing teh funny! Such a cute widdle Iraqi boy-with-US-flag! Next time put a Hershey bar in his other hand -- if he has one -- and we'll run that baby on page one!

UPDATE II. Thanks also to John Podhoretz! You tell 'im, hoss -- that guy can't use that word, that's your word! Like "politically correct," "feminazi," and "America"!

UPDATE III. Paul J Cella -- now that guy cracks me up:

What prevents me from supporting President Bush amounts to this: I do not trust his judgment. Put another way, a man whose judgment has been demonstrated to be so suspect cannot claim my trust.

Alternately, my trust I do not in him entrust, because I judge his judgment untrustworthy. Conversely, were he judged trustworthy I would trust his judgment. Or judge his trustment. Also funny: Democrats are "cynical" to oppose the Iraqi quagmire because "everywhere else we look, Democrats are urging that we 'do' something for somebody" like poor people and chicks, so why not people in other countries we've recently blown to shit? Also funny: "Alas."

THE GENERAL SORTS THE SUDAN. General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters is mad -- quit nodding, I wasn't finished; I mean Peters is mad at the carnage in Darfur. Like all the General's rages, this is righteous anger, aimed at those most responsible: liberals and Europeans.

"One begins to suspect," Peters says, "that all too many on the left enjoy pitying Darfur as they wait in line for their lattes" -- not like the General, whose violent, blinding headaches of true empathy cannot be relieved by latte, but only by human gore, Jack Daniels, and the destabilization of the entire world:

The killing will never stop until we stop pretending that every dictator or junta seizing power is entitled to claim sovereignty over the millions who never had a voice in choosing their government. After the oppression of women, the sovereignty con is the world's greatest human-rights abuse. And for all of its damnable incompetence, the Bush administration understood that one great truth.

If this sounds familiar, it is not only because you once heard a bum screaming it in Tompkins Square Park, but because it was the lunacy du jour in the run-up to the Iraq War, when people like Lee Harris were talking about "the end of classical sovereignty," whereby nobody gets to call themselves a State unless we say they're a State.

Those were the days! We were going to finally realize that long-delayed Pax Americana, all without raising anyone's taxes -- that was the Romans' mistake, after all, and we certainly are smarter than the Romans.

This is why the General is blames libs and latte-sippers everywhere for the dead/raped/tortured Africans, rather than the Bush Administration, which has some actual military means but has chosen to blow it all on destabilizing nations such as Iraq. In fact, Peters wonders why lefties haven't "formed a new Lincoln Brigade to take on Sudan's Muslims fanatics." I would seriously consider joining such a Brigade if the General will consent to lead it. The training sessions alone -- sequestered in our offshore quonset huts, watching the general snap the neck of a Thai prostitute, endless showings of Zulu -- would be worth the price of the ticket, I imagine. And once we landed in-country, we could always sell our allegiance to the highest-paying warlords, and thus give Sudan a real taste of American democracy.

ANOTHER FEDERAL HOLIDAY ON WHICH I STILL HAVE TO WORK. Happy Patriot Day. Let do our memorial duty, and visit the graves of warbloggers' frontal lobes.

To paraphrase Shakespeare's Claudius, we perform this duty with an auspicious and a dropping eye -- for these folks are surprisingly cheerful about the progress of the War on Whatchamacallit, though they still make the mad face as they instruct us to abjure the real enemy -- whatever (as they say at AA meetings) each perceives it to be.

Jim Lileks, who in the months after 9/11 wrote perhaps the craziest war stuff not physically rendered in magic marker on cardboard -- visions of himself frothing with anthrax and hunting Bin Laden ("Be vewy, vewy quiet..."), and declarations that New York would be destroyed by a nuclear bomb -- now says everything's great:

Five years ago the skies were silent, except for the high whine of the circling fighter jets; now the planes roll in, one after the other, low over the green rich land. Five years ago the TV was showing the horrors of the day; now the TV shows a story about the events that led up to the attack, a story ten years old. Five years ago I woke from nightmares of seeing pox on my daughter; now I sleep hoping she’ll eat her pears tomorrow at school.

So, except for all the dead people here and abroad, it's just another day at the ranch.

But lest we forget -- the real enemy: the ministers of the National Cathedral, Time magazine, and Marcel Duchamp.

Fifty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters says it's all going great, too. Iraq's not our new Vietnam, it's Bin Laden's Vietnam! Ha ha! And "Despite tragic mistakes in Iraq, we've already accomplished one crucial mission neglected for a generation: We've resurrected the reputation of the American soldier... The importance of regaining our street cred can't be stressed enough."

So, except for all the dead people (made dead to preserve our cred), a big, bloody thumbs-up from the General.

But lest we forget -- the real enemy: the media ("terror's cheerleaders"), the left ("suggesting that our president's a worse threat to civilization than Islamist terror"), "hysterical media culture," "Clinton-era cowardice," and (I love this one) "haters."

Hugh Hewitt finds all good Americans united against the real enemy: Democrats.

There are other sorts of lunacies posted today, by all species of loons; but I think you'll find, in the Baghdad or Bust section of the memorial gardens, that the most unrepentant Iraqi invasionists believe, or affect to believe, that we have that country well in hand -- it's America that needs pacification.

ALL IS WELL! We seem to be getting lots of panicky Don't Panic messages about Iraq these days. The authors of these messages curse liberals and the media, as usual, but increasingly include on their shit list the American people as a body.

Victor Davis Hanson, for example, reads a list of negative features of our occupation (tendentiously conflating Abu Ghraib with the flushed Koran story, as if torture/murders were the equivalent of a newsman's gaffe), and then dismisses any and all concerns with this ineptitude and depravity as "American hysteria," "acrimony at home" about which there is a "disturbing sameness." (Well, what the hell, why not throw in an aesthetic objection?) Among the wrong-thinkers, Hanson interestingly names not only his usual despised liberals but also some conservatives "who insisted that we needed more initial troops are often the same ones who now decry that too much money has been spent in Iraq."

In fact, we -- not the Royal kind -- are to blame, at least as compared to the sainted military: while "we point fingers at each other," says Hanson, "soldiers under fire point to their achievements." This is followed by patriotic mush, Kiplingesque complaints about how hard war is to do properly ("Put too many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we earn the wages of imperialism... Yet deploy too few troops, and instability arises in Kabul and Baghdad"), and finally the warning that we are in danger of losing the war at home. (That means you, citizen! Put out that light!)

A similar tactic is employed by Fifty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters only, as we have come to expect from the General, more hilariously. The Kipling musk here suffuses the entire column: the Iraqi people are portrayed as children whose "moral infrastructure" was "wrecked" by Saddam Hussein, and who must be re-parented by the U.S. Armed Forces. Like a good Daddy, G.I. Joe will "deliver expertise and spare parts, but won't do their work for them." That's how they learn! (And all those bombs we dropped on them? That's like a skinned knee.)

By God, these little monkeys may yet make it -- if you treasonous Americans don't fuck things up! "I didn't see any of our self-righteous critics in the Risalah slum," sneered the General. "But I did see Sgt. Maurice Harris, Spec. Victor Tsung and PFC (hey, promote that guy!) Brad Sheets, along with their comrades in arms. They were soldiers to the core..." And we see them marching into history, superimposed over an American flag on a hill, while the soundtrack plays "Have You Forgotten When Saddam Bombed the WalMart?" So who are you punks to question the soldiers' successes at sewage treatment in this little town -- and, by extension, throughout the Middle East? In a sidebar the General warns the People: "You are being lied to. By elements in the media determined that Iraq must fail. Just give 'em the Bronx cheer." And we'll be paying attention to who blows and who doesn't, maggot!

The thing you have to remember is: these people have been in charge for years. They run the Executive and Legislative Branches of the Federal Governments, and most Statehouses and State Legislatures. We are ruled, for all intents and purposes, by an unfettered and barely-challenged Republican Party. They have been left free to put their heaven-sent recipes for glory into operation.

And yet, citizens who are not commie-faggot-punk-MSMers are still losing faith in the cooked-up Iraq adventure.

So the Party in Power scrambles: they're going to shift from blaming whatever little troubles (be it a humorously misplaced Koran, or a man beaten to death by U.S. military "consultants") on that bale of straw called Libruls, to blaming it on us, by which they mean you.

It's worth a try. If it doesn't work, South Dakota can always float a law instituting the Rule of the Saints up to the Supremes. For every problem, there is a solution.

UPDATE. Must be something in the air because lots of smarter people than me are on this case. (Warning: some of this stuff involves Jeff Goldstein, so if you follow the links back to their source be prepared for long debate-club dissertations about how you don't understand English etc.)

BIG BROTHER CONSERVATIVES. As we have seen, many conservatives made a show at least of free-speech solidarity in the Danish cartoon case. Other prominent right-wingers, however, noticed that the uproar has left freedom of speech lying defenseless by the side of the road, and could not refrain from putting in the boot.

We have previously examined the case of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, who denounced the cartoonists as Europeans and arty-farties. Now we have the loathsome Maggie Gallagher, who adds, quite unnecessarily, to her cartoon column this hint of what sort of democracy she feels America ought to be encouraging in Iraq:

Frustrated and appalled legislators in five states are seeking to ban protests at funerals. Sounds reasonable to me. I don't think such a law would be inconsistent with democratic freedom, any more than I believe the First Amendment really does require us to permit flag burning.

And so too I can imagine with much disturbance that (say) a democratic Iraq could choose to ban depictions of Muhammad. It is perfectly possible to protect sacred symbols or sacred moments in ways that do not violate core principles of free speech necessary to robust, democratic life.

The wording's a little tricky -- how much "disturbance" do you think she'd put up with? -- but given that she smooths her path with flags and funerals, I assume that the readiness she expresses at the top of the column "to sign onto the First Amendment absolutist brigade" is merely the prologue to a conversion narrative.

To this Hugh Hewitt adds, "The freedom to publish anything doesn't mean we ought to," his "we" in this case seeming to mean whatever War Emergency Board he dreams of heading up when Bush gets serious about the War on Em Ess Em.

We'll see how they run now that David Irving has been found guilty by an Austrian court of fraud for his Holocaust-denying crap. Already Roger L. Simon is doing the "normally I'm a free speech extremist, but..." thing with the same suspender-snapping sanctimony that usually accompanies his "I left the left or the left left me" schtick.

This could be fun, in a grim kind of way. As the philosophical basis of conservatism is increasingly revealed to be a mere cover for Republican looting of the Treasury, and the "movement" sprouts the kind of millenarian fringe-groups that presages a crack-up, it may be that the authoritarians in the bunch feel they might as well say what's really on their minds and see how the rabble react.

(edited for clarity, believe it or not)

UPDATE. Commenter RobW points out that Irving was nailed for denying the Holocaust, not fraud. Apologies for the slop. Meanwhile an anti-Danish-cartoon guy cites the Irving verdict as a good model for legal protection against blasphemous funnies. Guess when this all shakes out, we'll all end up on the appropriate sides.

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT WE'RE ALL NOT THINKING! I rool. While other blogs just yapped, growled, and heh-indeeded about Mohammedian censorship, I gave the cartoonophobes something to jihad about.

Yet thanks to their Good Old Blog network connections, those fake freedom fighters still get all the attention, while I labor here in obscurity -- probably a good thing, as my fatwa has come through: "Oh, a wise guy?" wrote one Latrell X in a note that came covered in white powder (which our lab has determined to be Desenex); "Why, I oughta..." Here the note ominously trails off.

Ah well; this story, like all blogospheric proclamations of Clash of Civ endtimes, will not last long. Soon the self-soothing that'll-show-those-Europeans gurglings will lull their authors into the next news cycle, which I understand is all about tapping phone calls made between the U.S. and Batavia, New York.

But there is no soothing (self- or otherwise) our old friend Twelve-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, who, while giving the back of his hand to maniacal Muslims, plants his bayonet in the belly of the real beast -- European godlessness!

The Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons last September was not standing up courageously for freedom of expression. The editors and cartoonists were so oblivious to any reality beyond their Copenhagen coffee bars that they just thought they were pulling an attention-getting prank.

They got attention, all right. As did the papers elsewhere in Europe that reprinted the offending cartoons last week. In the name of press freedom, of course.

The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility, a quality to which Europe's become allergic (nothing is ever a European's fault). Breaking a well-known taboo of Islam was irresponsible. No other word for it.

One of the things we love about the General is his tendency to sprint -- usually naked, frothing, and waving his pearl-handled pistol -- off the reservation: while the Malkins of the world have to make believe (thanks, I believe, to some ancient treaty with the glibertarians) that they care about freedom and stuff, the General just hears the word "Yurrup" and visions of limp-wristed espresso-drinkers start bonking around inside his helmet.

And you know what his problem with these here Yurrupeans is? Not just that they're a little light in the Birkenstocks -- but that they ain't got God ("Today's Europeans consider religious belief as beneath their sophistication"). And without God, you can't have the sort of war the General's been practicing his whole life for: a total, orgiastic, scimitar-versus-bunkerbuster, real rain that'll wash all the scum off the streets.

This is partly why, after a long fun run with the General, I don't quote him so much anymore. He has no agenda other than his own madness, while the usual targets of our wrath are more calculating and dishonest. You will see their freedom flags dip, as their "Support Denmark" flags have already started to do, once we go back to talking about American citizens again. The General, bless him, never shifts tactics.

UPDATE. If you get tired of brainless wreckers like me, one of the very, very few intelligent discussions of this subject is at Sisyphus Shrugged.

BLUE MONDAY BARF BAG: A CLEVERLY-NAMED MISCELLANY. Someday I'll graduate from this blog bush league and become a real live pundit. Then I can talk about TV celebrities whom I think have gone too far:

...I found Penn Jillette's "This I Believe Essay" on NPR this morning to be particularly grating and representative of a strand of atheistic libertarianism I loathe...

First off, you've seen Jonah Goldberg, right? Try to imagine him saying the word "loathe." Goldberg's a full tank shy of the George Sanders hauteur necessary to pull off a word like that. In fact I don't even think he pulls off "atheistic libertarianism." It's like Cousin It reciting the Gettysburg Address.

The object of Goldberg's loathing is Jillette's ode to atheism. Jillette finds the idea of God ridiculous; Goldberg finds this "a form of bullying" of the sort that the large and powerful atheists' lobby is always pulling on the small, underprivileged Judeo-Christian caucus. Then Goldberg drags in the theological support of... Greg Easterbrook! Finally a colleague of Goldberg finds a way of saying he's a hypocrite and an ass without getting fired -- smart fellow -- and Goldberg says, you don't understand, it was Jillette's tone of voice. "Perhaps you should listen to the tone of Jillette's comments," he dudgeons, "as it's difficult for the printed word to capture the full extent of his smirking condescension." Yes, folks, Jonah "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey" Goldberg accuses someone else of smirking condescension! Then he deep-throats a pound cake. Well, no, I mean I don't know but I believe and who are you to judge me, heathen?

But as I was saying: when I go big-time, I'll be able to impose my bullshit paradigms on children's entertainment:

J.K. Rowling's bleak vision of government

Well, I...

No. I can't submit you good people to a lengthy blockquote from this thing -- you have lives, families. Here, though, is a perfectly illustrative short section: "I recall a variety of businesses that come off rather well in Rowling's books, including the Weasley twins' burgeoning joke business..." The author also addresses countervailing POVs on the specific, hidden political orientation of a fucking kids' book. It's so Dungeonanddragony you could puke. In the great Scrabble match that is glibertarian blogging, those Jane Galt boys get the Triple Nerd Score.

But lo, in bitching out these bitches I have become the very thing I despise! So let me add to this post some political roughage -- and the trade doesn't get much rougher than General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. If there's one thing he hates worse then Frenchies (against whom he even sides with Muslim rioters -- or, as he usually calls them, "Allah's butchers"), it's the Demmy-crats. Some flecks of his latest spittle:

Forget about our dead soldiers, whose sacrifice is nothing but a political club for Democrats to wave in front of the media. After all, one way to create the kind of disaffection in the ranks that the Dems' leaders yearn to see is to tell our troops on the battlefield that they're risking their lives for nothing, we're throwing the game...

The General argues that the Democrats' antiwar shtick is nothing but treasonous vote-grubbing ("As long as the upcoming elections show Democratic gains, let the terrorist threat explode"). Were we dealing with a sane man, we might ask whether these "Democratic gains" are not signs that the average American voter is also turning treasonous, and if so, how many men the General will need to effect the obviously necessary military coup d'etat.

Oh, finally: Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Mother Night, Welcome to the Monkey House, and many other deathless books; James Lileks collects matchbooks and Glenn Reynolds just sucks.

ALL MY FAVORITE CARTOON CHARACTERS COME TO LIFE! Lileks works himself into a lather over Opus the Penguin, though he's "reasonably sure" Berkeley Breathed isn't an anti-Semite. Plus: evil & duplicity from Entertainment Weekly, tensor lamps. "I haven't edited this at all," says Lileks. That's a relief.

"Ol' Blood 'n' Guts" Peters says we are worthless and weak for allowing Al-Jazeera to broadcast, especially since the TV station single-handedly defeated us at Fallujah. (Surely you remember the shock-troops of Arab cameraman filming bombed civilian homes, which our G.I.s were forced to view while strapped to chairs with their eyelids peeled back by John Kerry.) The General explains why this "freedom of speech" thing of which you civilians are so inexplicably fond "doesn't export well" outside the Anglophone world: for one thing, in the U.S. of A., "we have libel and hate-crime laws that work." (That's one of the interesting things about hate-crime laws; while a lot of their backers are gentle folk who think they're outlawing racism, others are of the General's sort: people who will clutch at any excuse to punish not only deeds, but thoughts and words as well.)

Meanwhile Professor Reynolds says he's working really hard, contrary to what his frequent posts in the middle of workdays might imply, and shows us a picture of his car in the faculty parking lot as proof. Save it for the tenure committee, Professor. (Hey, I don't see a datestamp...)

Is the moon full or something?