Useless idiots

Kevin Drum is shrill.

On a related subject, more here on the Shia takeover of the Iraqi army. It's not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely aligned with Iran. As far as I can tell, no one has even a colorable argument that things are moving in any other direction, and equally, no colorable argument that there's anything we can do to stop it. Maliki is using the U.S. military brass as useful idiots to fight his battles for him, and George Bush is his Useful Idiot in Chief.

And don't forget: every single major Republican candidate for president wants to continue our useful idiot role. They're practically duelling each other to see who can be the most fatuously naive about foreign policy. Quite a spectacle, no?

Speaking of making a spectacle of himself, David Broder inhales some of the rich, manly morning breath of Fred Thompson and starts seeing stars.

When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly. Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats -- and prescribing tough cures that he says others shrink from offering.

In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he "will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it's going to cost" to ensure the nation's future.

Well, do tell.

After spending most of the past few years on TV's "Law and Order," and starting a new family, with two children under 4, the 65-year-old lawyer says he finds himself motivated for the first time to seek the White House.

I can imagine the campaign looks pretty good to a 65-year old former lobbyist with two kids under four who are constantly getting into his humidor.

"There's no reason for me to run just to be president," he said. "I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there -- different, more far-reaching ideas -- that is worth doing."

Emoluments? He better watch those five dollar words when he's campaigning next month in South Carolina. Oh, and Fred, I'm pretty sure you ain't gonna "clever your way" anywhere...unless you mean getting the rubes to fall for the red pick up again. And by "rubes," I mean the Washington press corps.

But lets, Dear Reader, listen to the "far-reaching ideas" The Dean so gushes on about. But first, it wouldn't be a Broder column if there wasn't a "pox on both your houses," moment.

Thompson, like many of the others running, has caught a strong whiff of the public disillusionment with both parties in Washington -- and the partisanship that has infected Congress, helping to speed his own departure from the Senate.

But he says he thinks the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. "I think a president could go to the American people and say, 'Here's what we need to be doing. And I'm willing to go halfway. Now you have to make them [the opposition] go halfway.' "

Ah, yes, Thompson has such a long, detailed history of forming consensus on legislation he crafted in the Senate. What's that, he never crafted any? Whatevah.

The approach Thompson says he's contemplating is one that will step on many sensitive political toes. When he says "we're getting a free ride" fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, "wearing out our people and equipment," it sounds like a criticism of the president and the Pentagon.

"A free ride?" And no, it doesn't sound like criticism of the president and the Pentagon, it sounds like a guy who wants to double-down on Iraq. He sounds like all of the GOP candidates (except Ron Paul...Microsoft should create a shortcut for that phrase) in wanting to increase defense spending and continuing to fight Bush's War.

When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, "a $17 trillion add-on to a program that's going bankrupt," he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the last Congress.

"Bipartisan judgment of the last Congress?"

When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow.

Um, David, J. Edgar Hoover's been dead a long while. The agency's not quite so fearsome to politicians as it once was.

Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country's future. One is "Government at the Brink," a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president's budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems.

The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain, Thompson said, and increasingly "threaten national security."

His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending "unsustainable" and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government's fiscal ledger -- spending and revenue -- the next generation will suffer.

I can buy that. What's Thompson's "far-reaching idea here?" Health care plan, anyone?

"Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it," Thompson said. "So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges."

Thompson readily concedes that he does not know "where all those chips are going to fall" when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could ensure a better future for their children.

There, he said it: the children. I don't see a whole lot of sacrifices in repairing Social Security and universal health care. Unless he means sacrificing some of that defense spending we'd otherwise use to invade Iran and to fight that "necessary war" in Iraq. And sacrificing some of the insurance companies' marketing budgets (and paying all those people to deny coverage).

But these issues -- national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath-care costs -- "are worth a portion of a man's life. If I can't get elected talking that way, I probably don't deserve to be elected."

Thompson says he feels "free to do it" his own way, and that freedom may just be enough to shake up the presidential race.

And with that, Broder was forced to call the Post's IT department.

Let's review the far-reaching ideas:

• Iraq: More, more, more.
• Defense spending: More, more, more.
• Medicare: Entitlements are the problem, not our defense spending that is already nearly double what the rest of the world spends, combined.
• Domestic security: You've seen 24, haven't you? It's not like that stodgy old FBI. On the show, they have flat screen monitors.
• Fiscal responsibility: Let's show some.
• Aging population: Yikes.
• Interest groups: He was a lobbyist, so he's uniquely qualified to tell them to shut the fuck up.
• On campaigning: If I can get elected by talking to David Broder over a couple of Whiskey Sours, then, hell yes!

Next week, Broder sups with Mitt Romney and declares him a Methodist.