Hammer Mill Days

I'm not sure about that, Matt. I don't know if I want to play that song. How about "Dinos"? No? Are you sure? Okay... you suggest one. "World of Satisfaction"? Naaaah. Oh, hello. Didn't notice you peering through that LCD screen. As you can see, we're working on a set list for our first engagement on Big Green's [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. No, that's not a place keeper - that's the name Tiny Montgomery suggested last week, and none of us has come up with anything better (let alone tried to, you know, insert the name). It's always kind of a back and forth on the set lists - that's only natural when you have hundreds of songs. Yes, literally hundreds... all wrapped up in a little box. We take turns, reaching a hand into the box. I'll read one song title and Matt will knock it down. Then he grabs one and reads it. I'll say he's an asshole. Then he throws the box at me. And I'll yell, "MOM! HE'...

Gates is leaving, but his wars will remain with us, it appears. He didn't start them, of course, but he was brought in to manage them after they went seriously off the rails. In what I will always consider to be among the clearest evidence of the existence of a permanent institutional foreign policy consensus, Gates was hired to replace Rumsfeld in 2006 when it was obvious that the Bush team's invasion of Iraq was shaking the American empire to its very foundations. I imagine there was resistance from Bush himself, from Rumsfeld, of course, and from Cheney - they had problems with the Iraq Study Group's findings and doubled down on their Iraq disaster, but they had lost the confidence of that institutional elite by that time, and the loss of Congress to the Democrats nudged Rumsfeld over the edge. Cheney was effectively sidelined for the remainder of Bush's second term. So it goes with empires, I guess. Ours rolled along swimmingly for the last century, gathering steam ...