Bush 41 bears twin albatross of Willie Horton, Clarence Thomas plus all they wrought

His blue blood roots and reputation for decency aside, George Bush greatly advanced hypocrisy, race baiting and cynicism in US politics, fertilizing the ground for his presidentially illegitimate son’s unconscionable invasion of Iraq and the current White House occupant’s brand of outright lies and division.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

How not to handle a hostage situation

As I watched Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta give a televised news conference about the horrific attack on a shopping mall in Nairobi, I thought the hostages had been freed and the attackers, reportedly part of Somalia’s al Shabaab group, captured. I allowed myself a sigh of relief. As someone who once worked at the US Embassy in neighboring Tanzania that was destroyed by al Qaeda in 1998, I know that terrorism in East Africa is real and not to be underestimated.

But as Kenyatta continued, I realized that he was holding a media briefing while armed attackers were still holding hostages and the Westgate Shopping Mall. Worse, Kenyatta was giving the hostage takers information about people hiding undetected in the mall and security forces strategy. Most troubling, Kenyatta used his bully pulpit to threaten retaliation against the masterminds behind the attack. That’s not likely to hasten peaceful resolution of the situation.

I can’t imagine how Kenyatta thought taking center stage would help get the hostages free, unless it was clever camouflage for a raid (which it wasn’t). I also am stunned that he couldn’t think of anything more useful to do in the midst of a crisis. But then I remembered that Kenyatta and his deputy president William Ruto, face charges from the International Criminal Court for coordinating violence by their supporters after Kenya’s 2007 election. Kenyatta was following form by making the wrong call in a crisis.

His performance brought to mind another presidential offspring who followed in his father’s footsteps, George W Bush. In the wake of 9/11, which like the Westgate attack reflected an extraordinarily failure of his administration’s national security team, Bush first looked like a deer in the headlights, then mouthed off – “You’re either with us or against us” – then used the tragedy to push forward an unrelated, ill-considered and criminally mismanaged war in Iraq.

With accusations of crimes against humanity already under his belt, Kenyatta seems well ahead of Bush’s pace. Beware of what he’ll do once the crisis really is over.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Chutzpah runs for president

This US presidential election campaign features chutzpah as never before, most notably on the Republican side. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word for extreme nerve, classically defined as murdering your parents then pleading for mercy as an orphan.

In the past, I’ve urged Americans to vote for Tan Shwe, Burma’s former dictator. This time, it’s about overcoming a process that’s broken and increasingly remote from the public interest. We can do better, and voting is the key first step.

This campaign’s glaring recent example of chutzpah is Republicans’ cry that Obama has failed to build bipartisanship in Washington. During the first two years of his term, when Democrats enjoyed a filibuster-proof Senate majority, Obama infuriated supporters by continually reaching across the political aisle, only to be rebuffed.

Since Republicans won the House majority in 2010 and broke Democrats’ stranglehold on the Senate, they’ve done all they can to thwart Obama. Most egregiously, Republicans turned formerly routine bipartisan votes to raise the debt ceiling, to pay for the checks Congress writes, into pitched political battles that have wrought chaos on financial markets and self-inflicted wounds, including the downgrade of America’s credit rating.

Obama didn’t reject bipartisanship, Republicans did and still do. But Republicans blame Obama for it – that’s chutzpah.

Similarly, Republicans blame Obama for failing to fix the economy they wrecked and cut the deficit they caused. They act as if a balanced budget is some distant dream when in fact the US had a budget surplus when George W Bush took office in 2001.

Republicans say that things have gotten worse for the middle class under Obama, and they’re right. It’s part of a three decade decline brought on by Republican policies that began under Ronald Reagan to make the rich richer that have reduced opportunities for upward mobility. Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan is leading advocate of expanding trickle down strategies that will further concentrate wealth at the top while cutting programs that give the middle class and poor a fighting chance.

Romney points to the millions of people on Food Stamps under Obama, as if Obama put them there, rather than an economy torpedoed by ultra-rich bankers gaming the system and getting bailed out (talk about socialism) after years of jobless growth. The number of people on Food Stamps would in all likelihood fall dramatically under Romney, because Ryan’s budget proposes to gut the program. To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat less.”

The Food Stamps example and Romney’s 47 percent remarks are part of a Republican myth that the fortunate ones in America aren’t the super wealthy who are earning a bigger share of national income and paying less in taxes – and now financing electoral politics to an unprecedented degree – but people who earn too little to pay federal income tax. So it’s better to earn $15,000 than $15 million, the Republicans contend, though you don’t see any of them volunteering to trade places.

This degree of chutzpah is a logical progression from the Karl Rove tactic of blaming your opponent first for whatever they might (more justly) accuse your side of doing. For example, with draft dodger, warmonger George Bush facing war hero, antiwar activist John Kerry in 2004, Republicans attacked Kerry’s military record, presenting apparent eyewitness accounts from people who were no where near the incidents they described, adding the words Swift Boat to the political lexicon.

For the past two election cycles, Republicans have cried class warfare when Democrats propose raising taxes on the wealthy. They’re right about class warfare. But it’s a war that Republican policies have instigated and perpetuated, and one that the rich are winning decisively.

Then, there’s healthcare. Obama’s health insurance reforms are almost a carbon copy of what his Republican opponent Mitt Romney enacted as governor of Massachusetts, a policy that traces its roots to the conservative Heritage Foundation. But Republican interests spearheaded the faux populist Tea Party that found traction with a disinformation campaign against the reforms embodied by the sign, “Government hands off Medicare.”

So Romney has fiercely backtracked, denying his own record and attacking Obama for doing what he did. That’s another major theme of the Romney campaign: lying. For the past six years, Romney has been saying anything he thinks will get him elected president, contradicting his own longstanding and recent positions. Although the Bush name is never spoken, the same Republican establishment behind W are the folks supporting Romney, expecting him to be similarly empty vessel for them to fill.

We may not know what we’ll get from Romney, but you already know what you’ve gotten from Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton and their ilk. And they have the chutzpah to want to give it to you again.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Collateral Dynasty: the Colorado Iraqis story

As the US winds down its military involvement in Iraq, it’s easy to overlook the many successes of this far-reaching American crusade to extend freedom and our way of life. Among the great advances in this cradle of civilization since US-led liberation, let us not neglect the feats of the Colorado Iraqis.

“I know even less about baseball than I do about hair care,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. “But I am moved by the success of the Colorado Iraqis since the advent of freedom in Iraq.”

The Colorado Iraqis were conceived in the wake of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s widely condemned invasion of Kuwait in 1990. After US forces expelled the invaders, the Pentagon and Major League Baseball officials established the Iraqis franchise. “From Abner Doubleday through Tim Johnson, there’s been a strong, positive relationship between baseball and the military,” Gen. Colin Powell, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman during that first Gulf War, explained. “So we believed that establishing a major league franchise could help moderate the regime’s behavior.”

After two inaugural losing campaigns, the Colorado Iraqis reached the playoffs as the first-ever National League wild card team in 1995. However, the franchise failed to continue its winning ways. The growing misrule of Saddam Hussein led to increased international scrutiny. Consistent major league leading power output fueled suspicions of an illegal nuclear program. The team’s Blake Street Bombers nickname suggested connections with international terrorism.

“In a post-9/11 world, those risks were unacceptable,” former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush, who served as US President from 2001 to 2009, said. “Plus, we wanted to create a government and a team that the Iraqi people could support.” So the US led an international coalition to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom to oust Saddam Hussein and bring democracy and winning baseball to the Iraqis.

Regime change didn’t make the Colorado Iraqis successful overnight. Replacing Saddam Hussein with L Paul Bremer didn’t do the Iraqis any more good than replacing Jim Leyland with Buddy Bell had. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s experiment with the Iraqis using a seven man lineup set back their progress. But the rising tide of freedom would eventually propel the Iraqis upward in the standings.

While the US-led invasion uncovered no weapons of mass destruction, the Colorado Iraqis retained Todd Helton. The Coalition Provisional Authority’s efforts in the immediate aftermath of the invasion to nurture democracy and development enabled the Iraqis to develop Matt Holliday and Troy Tulowitzki.

However, it wasn’t until advent of the surge strategy in 2007, championed by Senator John McCain and implemented by manager Clint Hurdle, that the Colorado Iraqis returned to the postseason. With a 6 1/2 game deficit on September 16, the Iraqis won 14 of their last 15 games, including a one-game playoff, to become the National League’s wild card team for a second time.

The Colorado Iraqis fantastic 2007 postseason run became known to all as Iraqtober. The Iraqis swept the Philadelphia Phillies to advance to the National League Championship Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Iraqis repeated the sweep to win their first National League pennant, giving them an unprecedented 21-1 run from mid-September. But Iraqtober came to an abrupt end in the World Series against the Boston Red Sox, which the Iraqis lost four games to none.

“The surge strategy enabled the Iraqis to make meaningful, sustainable gains against opposing forces,” General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq in 2007, recalled. “The past four years of learning to defense the hit and run really paid off.”

Not everyone was as pleased as Petraeus with the Colorado Iraqis’ results. “After nearly one million Iraqi deaths, you ought to get a least one game off the Boston-effing-Red Sox,” Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said. “The only thing worse would be losing to the apostate Cardinals or Padres. And, to be honest, I don’t like those Indians much either.”

The late season surge strategy has become a regular feature of the Colorado Iraqis’ finish every year since 2007. In 2009, the Colorado Iraqis rode September winning streaks of eight and five games to another wild card berth. They didn’t get beyond the first round of the playoffs, but they’ve become a force to be reckoned with annually, transforming the season’s closing weeks into the fall of Iraqis.

“Whatever you think of the original circumstances of the invasion of Iraq, it’s indisputable that the Colorado Iraqis are established as a thriving, successful franchise, right in the center of the Middle East,” President Barack Obama said. “That’s allowed my administration to focus on the current threat to global order from WMDs – the Wilpons of Mets Destruction – and to dare hope we can duplicate the success of the Colorado Iraqis in our efforts to assist the long-suffering Detroit Libyans.”

Totally globalized native New Yorker, reforming baseball writer, and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. See his biography, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com.

America’s new war on poverty

From half-way around the world, it seems obvious what’s going on in America. The rich keep getting richer, in part because they’re getting their way in politics, where money talks louder than ever. With their political handmaidens, they’re declared war on the poor.

Especially in these hard times, gains for the rich come at the expense of the middle class and poor. In fiscal matters, today’s politics mean bailing out the banks and tax cuts for the rich – so the US economy can reprise the jobless growth of the George W Bush years – and then insisting that gaping budget deficits need to be addressed by cutting government services that benefit the non-rich. It’s class warfare of the worst kind, and, following the Karl Rove playbook of accusing your rivals of precisely what you do, class warfare is precisely the term the plutocrats use to decry any attempt to reverse their advantages.

Strangely, there are few voices in America presenting this case intelligently and intelligibly. Fortunately, one of them is Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Princeton economist and New York Times columnist.

Have a look at Krugman on the Wisconsin budget standoff and what it really means. As he so often does, Krugman speaks the plain truth here as few liberals manage these days:

The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

Amen.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.

Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks

The US midterm Congressional election is a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency so far. His Democratic Party is likely to lose one if not both houses of Congress due to a single simple fact: Barack Obama stinks. In case you haven’t been paying attention for the past two years, here are 20 key reasons why.

He was elected by a national vote.
Supreme Court Justices are much better qualified to choose a president.

Not a single US landmark has been destroyed by terrorists during his presidency.
George W Bush got a pair of landmark buildings destroyed and a third attacked in less than half the time Obama has dallied.

He has two daughters, but they’re not even twins.
Neither one has even been arrested for getting drunk either.

He’s part of the elite.
Bush only went to Andover and Yale because the rest of his family did.

Lived with much older white women while underage.
Called them “Mom” and “Grandma” – what a sicko!

Works in a government job and lives in public housing.
Geez, don’t they all.

Only cut taxes for middle class and poor.
He has a deep-seated hatred of rich people.

His father was never Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
His own vice president never patriotically funneled tens of millions in government contracts to his former company.

People say he’s Muslim.
Where there’s smoke, something’s not kosher.

He speaks proper English.
What does he think, he’s like better than us?

He’s never been arrested for drunk driving.
See above.

Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd died during his presidency.
Bush made the hard choices to keep them safe. Now it’s ObamaCare for all.

Says he roots for the Chicago White Sox.
But never even tried to buy the team and get a sweetheart land deal out of it.

Doesn’t have a ranch.
He owns a house across from a synagogue. Wow, there went that neighborhood.

Condoleezza Rice never called him “my husband.”
And Susan Rice isn’t even Condi’s sister.

Distinguished himself earning an advanced degree at Harvard.
As if Law Review matters more than poker at drinking clubs.

Name ends in a vowel.
Typical Chicago backroom politics.

Lousy bowler.
Lousy pool player, too.

Hasn’t invaded a single country under false pretenses.
Bush didn’t do that until his third year, but he had Congressional authorization for it by now.

Never warned anyone he would be the first black president.
At least with Bush, what you saw was what you got.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.

Shame on Laura Bush and fellow 9/11 liars

Watching the 9/11 commemorations stirred appropriately somber memories and emotions of that tragic day, until I saw Laura Bush speaking at the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial to Flight 93 passengers. The National Parks Foundation, which organized the memorial, must’ve invited Bush because Osama bin Laden and shoe bomber Richard Reid sent regrets. No telling where Bush found the gall to attend.

Bush, of course, is the wife of former president George W Bush, who held office when al Qaeda struck on September 11, 2001. Yet Bush shoulders none of the blame for the attacks, even though his administration downgraded the fight against al Qaeda, and Bush’s national security advisor, serial incompetent Condoleezza Rice, ignored an August 2001 memo titled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.”

Despite all that, plus the administration’s botched conduct of the operation to capture bin Laden that’s become the nine year war in Afghanistan, Bush evades responsibility for this monumental tragedy. Moreover, he and fellow Republicans wear 9/11 as a badge of honor, using it as a political weapon to bludgeon opponents. By contrast, the Obama administration came under a firestorm of criticism over an attempted attack where the primary fault was overseas airport security failing to detect explosives.

Laura Bush is no innocent bystander but an active part of the Bush propaganda squad. As first defender of her husband’s administration, two years ago at the Republican National Convention, Mrs Bush fibbed, “Let’s not forget, President Bush has kept the American people safe.” That’s not true, Laura, unless 9/11 is your idea of safe. Maybe it is, since you and W came out okay.

Today in Shanksville, Bush even had the temerity to mention Iraq, the misbegotten war her husband’s team justified by abusing 9/11 and telling other, bigger lies. The invasion of Iraq cost more Americans lives than 9/11, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and extinguished any opportunity for the US to build on the global goodwill the attacks created.

For future 9/11 anniversaries, let’s hope that memorial organizers have the good sense to keep members of the George W Bush administration off the podium, and that administration members, starting with Laura and her husband, have the good taste to spend that day, and every day, with their heads bowed in shame and regret, at least until they take responsibility for their errors and apologize to the families in America and beyond that lost loved ones due to the administration’s incompetence, malfeasance and arrogance.

Make no mistake, Bushies, you’ll find Osama. You’re all guaranteed to meet him in hell.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.

Don’t boo Andy Murray because he’s Scottish

Watching the US Open tennis tournament, once Taylor Dent beat Ivan Navarro to set up a third round match with Andy Murray, I found myself hoping the New York crowd would boo Murray off the court. Not just because Dent is an American and the tournament’s top feel-good story after two operations for back trouble that could have left him in a wheelchair. Not just because I don’t like Murray’s playing style, personality, bad teeth, or rock star entourage before he’s topped the charts. No, I wanted the fans in my home town to bury Murray because he’s from Scotland. But as soon as I thought it, I knew it was wrong.

Scotland, you’ll recall, released convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi from prison last month. Most of the 270 victims of the Christmas week 1988 airliner bombing were Americans, bound for New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, about 15 kilometers from center court at Flushing Meadow (note from Queens native: Flushing Meadow is correct; Flushing Meadows is wrong, no matter how often it’s repeated). Scottish Justice Minister Kenny Macaskill marked himself for near-universal approbation with his smug claims of superior compassion for al-Megrahi while showing none for the victims of the cowardly attack and their families.

Documents released since the release show the British government, Murray’s other national flag, shares culpability in the abhorrent decision. Moreover, the release seems so wrong, so ill-conceived, so irrational, that suspicion lingers – and evidence mounts – that there must have been an under the table deal with Libya, trading al-Megrahi’s freedom for oil or some other commercial consideration.

Americans and decent people all over the world have a right to be angry at the governments of Scotland and Britain. But that doesn’t give them any right to be angry at Scottish people like Andy Murray. Americans, of all people, should understand that.

For most of the George W Bush administration, America was the most vilified nation on earth due to the invasion of Iraq. (For some, Ameriphobia dates to Vietnam, Hiroshima, the dawn of the military industrial-industrial complex, or back to that Scotsman Adam Smith.) As an American living overseas, whenever nationality was mentioned, I took great pains to explain I didn’t support Bush or the Iraq invasion. I didn’t want to get blamed for the stupid things my government did.

Holding civilians responsible for the sins of their governments is precisely what terrorists do. Al-Megrahi and his co-conspirators, or whoever bombed Pan Am flight 103, didn’t ask any of the passengers what they thought about US support for Israel or its enmity toward Libya. No one checked the nationalities of workers filing into New York’s World Trade Center twin towers on that clear morning eight years ago. They became victims simply because they were presumed to be Americans by madmen who considered their nationality a criminal act.

Like ordinary folks, athletes don’t deserve to be victimized for their citizenship, but it happens. Recall the 1972 Olympics in Munich or the March ambush of Sri Lanka’s national cricket team playing in Pakistan. Tennis has escaped the violence but not the politics. Israeli players are routinely denied entry visas for tournaments in Arab countries. In the Fed Cup, the women’s international team competition, Indonesia chose to forfeit rather than play in Israel. On the other end of the scale, Murray, like his British number one predecessor Tim Henman, faces extraordinary pressure from the home fans at Wimbledon, the biggest tournament in tennis, where no British man has won the title since 1936.

Some years ago, I experienced a version of politics and sports mixing badly on a basketball court in Washington, DC. Some guy I’d never played with began roughing me up from the first dribble, pushing and elbowing in an otherwise relaxed game. I’m not that good a player, so hardly merited the special attention. It took me a couple of points to realize it had to be because I was white (the only white player in the game) and this young black man hated white people, or at least hated playing basketball with them. I’d never done anything to him, and I wasn’t a racist (certainly not as far as he knew). But he judged me solely on my membership in a certain target group and acted out, just as the terrorists do.

Athletes, like the rest of us, deserve to be judged on who they are, not what they are or where they’re from. So fellow New Yorkers and tennis fans everywhere, show your sportsmanship and enlightenment: don’t boo Andy Murray just because he’s Scottish. Boo him just because he’s Andy Murray, and delight with me that he crashed out of the US Open in the fourth round.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.

Bushie Bellyaching Bombs

Amid celebrations over the return of journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling from captivity in North Korea, George W Bush’s former United Nations ambassador John Bolton has been leading a chorus of critics. Bush people and their far-right cheerleaders just can’t stand to see anyone, especially Democrats, succeed where they so dangerously failed.

Bolton, too extreme to win Senate confirmation, lambasted Bill Clinton’s mission to free the women, “I think this is a very bad signal because it does exactly what we always try and avoid doing with terrorists, or with rogue states in general, and that’s encouraging their bad behavior,” Bolton told AFP news agency. Bolton’s fellow travelers are ignoring White House denials to insist Clinton’s visit carried an official imprint, including a message from US President Barack Obama to North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il. Instead, they choose to believe the account of a North Korean regime that asserts Kim shot a 38 under par in his first-ever round of golf, between composing the world’s greatest operas.

This rightwing reflex rejectionism is shameful, not just for its heartlessness or disregard of facts, but in light of the Bush administration’s track record on North Korea. After the Clinton team negotiated a tentative end to North Korea’s nuclear program, the Bush people abandoned that track in favor of isolation, declaring North Korea part of its “axis of evil.” Predictably, North Korea resumed its nuclear program.

When US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted Pyongyang with evidence of its nuclear activities in October 2002, the Bush administration already had plans to launch an attack to eliminate the threat of unsanctioned weapons of mass destruction – against Iraq. Rather than act on legitimate evidence of a nuclear program in North Korea, a rogue regime with a history of state sponsored terrorism and other international criminal acts run by a cash-strapped madman, the Bush administration chose to trump up a phony war against Iraq, the longtime neoconservative nemesis.

North Korea learned the lesson of the Iraq invasion, but it wasn’t the lesson the Bush administration wanted to teach. After scrapping its nuclear program and enduring more than a decade of sanctions, Iraq could offer only token resistance to US-led regime change. Kim Jong-il realized that without nuclear weapons, he’d be a sitting duck for a similar attack. The Dear Leader didn’t realize that the Bush people’s strategic map didn’t go east of Pakistan. East Asia was strictly for political posturing and business.

North Korea escalated its provocative acts, from kicking out nuclear inspectors in late 2002 to shooting missiles between South Korea and Japan in early 2003. The Bush brain trust with its mantra, then and now, that it would not reward “bad behavior” responded by opening direct talks with North Korea in Beijing. After more bad behavior, the Six Party Talks began.

When North Korea exploded its first nuclear bomb in 2006, the Bush administration that antagonized, then ignored Kim Jong-il to set the stage for this spectacular failure did the only thing it could – it blamed Bill Clinton. If Clinton had followed Bush’s formula, Pyongyang would have created his nuclear arsenal on the Democrat’s watch. Clinton’s role in another North Korea success has the Bush people nearly apoplectic.

Without the Bushie bombast, seeing Clinton might remind Americans that in its eight years the Bush administration struggled mightily first to undo the progress Clinton made toward defanging North Korea and then to redo a fraction of it. In between, the Bush people gave North Korea a window to develop its nuclear arsenal. From a list crammed with contenders, history may judge letting Kim Jong-il build the bomb the Bush administration’s worst foreign policy blunder.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.

W’s Monica

The burgeoning revelations about former vice president Richard Cheney’s effort to conceal CIA operations from Congress reveals a link between the presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton. It seems neither one of them could control their Dick.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.