During the lastest Iran War Scare, a number of bloggers have indirectly alluded to the 1979 “novelty” song, “Bomb Iran,” by Vince Vance and the Valiants. For those of you too young to remember this jingo-pop classic (much beloved of “wacky” drive-time disc jockeys during the Iranian Hostage Crisis), here are the full lyrics.Bomb Iran (to the tune of “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys)Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, BOMB IRAN! Let’s take a stand, bomb Iran. Our country’s got a feelin’ Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks. Tell the Ayatollah…”Gonna put you in a box!” Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Our country’s got a feelin’ Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Ol’ Uncle Sam’s gettin’ pretty hot. Time to turn Iran into a parking lot. Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Call the volunteers; call the bombadiers; Call the financiers, better get their ass in gear. Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Our country’s got a feelin’ Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Call on our allies to cut off their supplies, Get our hands untied, and bring em’ back alive. Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Our country’s got a feelin’ Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, BOMB IRAN!Let’s take a stand, bomb Iran. Our people you been stealin’ Now it’s time for keelin’, bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. In terms of compelling political lyrics, it sure ain’t Dylan, eh? Predictably, ol’ Vince and the boys did a 2002 retake of this song, redubbed “Bomb Iraq,” which I never heard but that probably made a few Clear Channel playlists. And to show that this band’s strange connection to the right-wing zeitgeist wasn’t limited to foreign affairs, Vince Vance and the Valiants penned a song in the 90s entitled “I Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.” Well, no, you didn’t really know what that means, did you, Vince?I used to have a theory, back before the WWF turned rasslin’ into a slick entertainment empire, that you could get a good insight into American fears by checking out the latest villains of the pro wrestling circuit. When I was a child growing up in the Jim Crow Deep South, the reigning bad guy was a Yankee named Freddie Blassie (later the protaganist of Andy Kaufmann’s peculiar takeoff on My Dinner With Andre, entitled My Breakfast With Blassie), who would stand on the ropes at Southern wrestling venues and call the howling crowds “a bunch of grit-eaters.” Later came the pseudo-Commie wrestler Sputnik Monroe. During the 70s there were “Arab” rasslers, and in the 80s, various Asians.But jingo-pop has always produced a more efficient glimpse into American hostilities. The early 1980s-era tensions with Libya generated one of the best, or worst examples: a “song” called “Pluck Khadaffy Duck”, by someone named Roger Hallmark. I can’t find the lyrics, but I do recall from its high popularity on Atlanta stations at the time that after several verses of chortling about what “Uncle Sam” was going to do to kill Libyans, Hallmark, in his best redneck voice, concluded: “I ain’t afraid ‘a no Chicken Shi-ite,” exhibiting a bit of confusion about the religious orientation of Libya.All in all, this is a bit of Americana I would be happy to leave behind, if it didn’t keep coming back.

Kevin Drum has an astute comment up at Political Animal about the brouhaha over Sy Hersh’s New Yorker piece on Pentagon planning for a possible nuclear air strike against Iran:”The United States military has contingency plans for everything, they say, so it’s hardly a surprise that the military has contingency plans for Iran. William Arkin even tells us their names: CONPLAN 8022 and CONPLAN 1025.”You’d think maybe the President of the United States would make this point, if he addressed the topic at all. But here’s what Bush actually said at an appearance at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS today:

… We hear in Washington, you know, “prevention means force.” It doesn’t mean force necessarily. In this case, it means diplomacy.And by the way, I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation, by the way. What you’re reading is wild speculation. Which is, kind of a — you know, happens quite frequently here in the nation’s capital.

Maybe it’s just me, but given the elaborate recent revelations of the extent to which the administration secretly and systematically planned its Iraq campaign, and its manipulation of Congress and the public to secure the right to pursue it, the “prevention doesn’t mean force” and “wild speculation” arguments, coming from George W. Bush, aren’t terribly credible, are they?But it gets worse the more you think about it. Kevin Drum raises the possibility that a little buzz about the possibility of military action might encourage the Iranians to take negotiations to rein in its nuclear program seriously, and observes: “A subtle and well orchestrated game of chicken might be appropriate here. But please raise your hands if you trust this crew to play a subtle and well orchestrated game of anything.”And that gets right to the heart of one of the great under-acknowledged blows to national security created by this administration’s behavior in going into and prosecuting the war in Iraq. Its mendacity, secrecy, recklessness, disregard for world or regional opinion; its defiance of military and diplomatic advice about the consequences of an undermanned invasion and a cavalier, let’s-make-some-money occupation; and its perverse, election-driven determination to divide the American people by deliberately misrepresenting almost every fact about its reasons for going into Iraq and for staying there: all these decisions have undermined this country’s credibility in facing future national security threats, including that posed by Iran.Let’s just say for the sake of argument that it becomes necessary a few years down the road to seriously rattle sabers at Iran. I don’t think there’s much doubt that a Democratic administration would have far more credibility and support in rattling those sabers convincingly, and in convincing others to rattle sabers as well.My colleague The Moose suggests today that the Bush administration’s reputation for impulsive international behavior might help deter Tehran. That’s one way of looking at it. But the other way of looking at it is that threats–especially empty threats–from this administration provide Iran with the comfortable assurance that any overt move towards military action under George W. Bush will meet a firestorm of protests not only throughout the Middle East and in Europe, but in the United States itself.These guys have blown the one opportunity they had to demonstrate that unilateral U.S. military force is the indispensable source of security and stability for a troubled world. I doubt they will be vouchsafed a second chance. The case for a regime change in Washington must include the argument that true national security requires different leadership.

You might well share my surprise today in learning that the Senate immigration reform “compromise” announced yesterday afternoon had fallen apart by this morning. I followed this pretty obsessively over the last few weeks, and after watching Frist, Specter, McCain, Reid, Leahy and Kennedy high-five each other over the “deal” at a press conference yesterday, I pounded out a New Dem Dispatch praising the compromise as a “one sane step” towards immigration reform, while warning that the Troglodyte House GOP position on the subject might well make the whole thing meaningless.Turns out that Frist, who reportedly told Harry Reid he could definitely corral a majority of Senate Republicans into voting for the compromise, was talking through his hat, or worse. Republicans insisted on the right to provide for votes on a vast menu of Troglodyte amendents to the “deal,” and Reid quite appropriately said “Hell, no.” A deal subject to unlimited amendments is no deal at all. And so, the motion to move to a vote on the compromise went down hard.So basically, here’s what happened this week: Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan proposal reported by the Judiciary Committee they controlled. Senate Republicans then unveiled a face-saving compromise, got Dems on board, and then proved they couldn’t muster support for their own proposal. Now, incredibly, they’re pretending Democrats are at fault for sticking to the compromise and not agreeing to let it get unraveled through hundreds of amendments on the Senate floor. And let’s not forget that throughout this fiasco the President of the United States, who supported both the Judiciary Committee bill and the discarded compromise, sat on the sidelines, unwilling or unable to sway his partisan troops.It’s increasingly, abundantly clear that Washington’s paralysis on the immigration issue is an intramural Republican problem more than anything else. It would be very helpful if the news media, which typically described today’s developments as some sort of bipartisan breakdown, would figure out the GOP’s singular responsibility for this mess, and report it accordingly.

Aside from the Delayniac hijinks mentioned in my last post, there’s a far more serious example of House Republican misbehavior on display in Pennsylvania. Rep. Curt Weldon has launched a series of attacks on Democratic rival Joe Sestak that began with a Swift-Boat-style attack on the service record of the 31-year-Navy-veteran and retired three-star admiral, and quickly strayed over every conceivable line of decency by questioning the Sistak family’s choice of treatment for their daughter’s potentially fatal brain tumor. Jonathan Kaplan of The Hill has the whole outrageous story today, but here’s a precis: Weldon is retailing charges that Sestak, a Clinton administration National Security Council staffer, and more recently director of the Navy’s internal think tank, Deep Blue, made his subordinates and superiors unhappy with his hard-driving style. You can read the back-and-forth on this subject in Kaplan’s article, but it sure looks to me like Sestak was a tree-shaker who discomfited the notoriously change-averse Navy establishment, which is a good thing. But whatever the facts on this case, it’s incredible that Weldon would have the chutzpah to attack Sestak’s service record, while continuing to support the policies of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. After all, the former Texas Air National Guard veteran Bush spent much of the Vietnam War running an Alabama Senate race. And his hireling, the current Secretary of Defense, has caused a lot more unhappiness in the armed forces than any one figure in recent history, while compiling a disastrous record of incompetence. How can Weldon possibly suggest that Sestak’s service actually disqualifies him from serving in Congress? It gets, unfortunately, a lot worse. Weldon also attacked Sestak for merely renting a home back in Pennsylvania, while living in suburban Washington (a criticism which I am sure Weldon would not make of Leesburg, Virginia resident Rick Santorum). When Sestak explained that he lingered in Washington because his daughter was undergoing chemotherapy and various surgeries in a local hospital, Weldon breezily suggested that Sestak should have relocated his daughter to a hospital in Pennsylvania or nearby Delaware. This is beyond disgusting. My first impulse on reading Kaplan’s story was to propose that Weldon be horse-whipped. My second impulse was to demand that every other Republican repudiate Weldon’s tactics. And that’s why it’s especially troubling to me that Sen. John McCain, proud Navy veteran and war hero, and the victim of Weldon-style scurrilous attacks on his family by the Bush campaign of 2000, headlined a fundraiser for the Pennylvania Republican just last Saturday. Fine, support your party’s candidates. Fine, praise Weldon’s legislative record. And fine, maybe you didn’t know what Weldon was saying about his opponent. But please, don’t lend your name to a man willing to smear the record and family of Joe Sestak. There are some things that cannot be justified by partisan politics, and if this doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what ever would.

I have to tell you, Tom DeLay’s staff and supporters reflect his allegedly deep Christian values about as well as the Hammer himself. Aside from the fact that two of his former top aides are up to their necks in the dreck of the Abramoff scandal, and the additional fact that DeLay himself and a couple of close Texas associates are one trial away from a possible trip to the hoosegow, there’s the chronic habit of Delayniacs of engaging in some rather un-Christlike physical intimidation tactics. Remember the infamous Brooks Brothers’ Riot of 2000, wherein a bunch of pasty Young Republican types, including a DeLay staffer and a DeLay fundraiser, shut down a South Florida presidential recount effort? A group of Houston DeLay supporters brought back memories today by organizing a disruption of a press conference by Nick Lampson, the Democratic candidate for DeLay’s seat. It’s all of a piece with DeLay’s own snarling, unrepentatent attitude towards the behavior that has cost him his leadership position and his seat in the House.Somebody needs to tell DeLay and his friends they should stop while they’re behind.

Given all the well-deserved attention being paid to Tom DeLay’s resignation from the House, you might have missed an important new story in the L.A. Times, by Tom Hamburger and Ken Silverstein, about the latest stomach-churning tale involving Jack Abramoff. In 2001, the story goes, Abramoff proposed a $16-18 million lobbying contract to the Sudanese ambassador to the United States, offering to help dampen down Christian conservative hostility to the pariah state, partly through his connection to Ralph Reed. He made this pitch in his favorite site for such transactions, his Fed-Ex Field skybox, during a Redskins game. The allegation comes from the Sudanese ambassador, Kidir Haroun Ahmed. Through a flack, Abramoff denied the claim, and said he actually took the occasion to lecture the ambassador on his regime’s terrible treatment of Sudanese Christians during the long-raging North-South civil war. But the Times reporters obtained a second (by-request anonymous) eyewitness account of the exchange, from a “former associate” of Abramoff, that confirms the ambassador’s story. Abramoff’s protestations of innocence–yea, of righteousness–certainly smell to high heaven. Who would choose to coddle and feed a high-level foreign official in a posh skybox in order to deliver an objection to his government’s policies? And why would any Sudanese official pay any particular attention to Casino Jack’s personal point of view? Moreover, it’s certainly not as though Abramoff was above taking money from people he should have deplored. After all, he solicited and accepted $1.2 million for setting up a meeting between the anti-semitic president of Malaysia and George W. Bush. What really strikes me about this story are two things: First, the continuing importance of the Ralph Reed/Christian Right connection to Abramoff’s various shakedowns; and second, the bottomless avarice of this man beloved of the conservative movement and on very friendly relations with a wide variety of leading Republican officials in the executive and legislative branches in Washington. In that meeting at Fed-Ex Field, it’s clear both Abramoff and his prey were dealing with the devil. Just when you think there cannot possibly be more to the Jack Abramoff saga, yet another bad apple turns up, and you have to wonder what’s at the bottom of the rotten barrel.

This morning’s papers brought glad tidings: Tom (the Hammer) DeLay, after a long consultation with his pollsters and lawyers, has decided to resign from Congress, apparently next month. And in order to allow Texas GOPers to hand-pick a replacement (he has already won the primary for the November General Election), he is abandoning his Texas residency, which legally disqualifies him from the ballot, and formally becoming a resident of Alexandria, Virginia.It’s hard to exaggerate the power this unpleasant and ruthless man has wielded in Washington until recently, and hard to believe the lack of even minimal contrition he is exhibiting now that he’s been all but forced to resign. Just last week, he delivered a fiery speech to a Christian conservative gathering that implied he was a victim of discrimination for his faith. Indeed, his need to wallow in self-pity and invite his last-ditch supporters to do the same led him perilously close to expressing hatred of America: “We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition.” No wonder, then, that our infidel nation would contrive to find fault with DeLay’s crass and chronic money-hustling and power-muscling behavior in Washington and in Texas, eh?DeLay’s invincible arrogance was nicely illustrated by a couple of comments he’s made after disclosing his intention to resign. As Think Progress reports, he told Time Magazine that his proudest accomplishment in office was in skewing K Street campaign contributions to the GOP. And this morning, appearing on Fox News, he luridly suggested that the Republican-controlled Texas legislature would soon act to strip Travis County prosecutor Ronnie Earle of jurisdiction to pursue cases like the corporate campaign violations for which DeLay was indicted last year.The timing of DeLay’s announcement is pretty easy to figure out: as the Republican nominee for the General Election, he’s been able to amass a little over $1.2 million in campaign contributions.Now he can convert that money to his already-depleted legal defense fund, essentially tricking his contributors into banking his efforts to stay out of the hoosegow, as TPMMuckraker explained today. No wonder the Rev. Rick Scarborough, host of the pity party where DeLay made his Blame America First remarks last week, said of the Hammer: “This is a man, I believe, God has appointed … to represent righteousness in government.”The Bugman’s next move will apparently be to hook up with some conservative organization in his new home turf of Northern Virginia. Don’t be too surprised if he lands some lucrative consulting and lobbying contracts as well: After all, the Republican-controlled House remains largely his creature, even if he’s no longer directly pulling the strings.

A brutal day-job schedule, followed by a business trip to an area of Florida with very unreliable internet service, has stilled the bray of the New Donkey the last few days, but I’ll try to make up for it this week.Speaking of Florida, the political buzz down there is all about the death spiral of Katherine Harris’ Senate campaign. Check out these lines from an AP story today:

Representative Katherine Harris’s Senate campaign lost what was left of its core team when a top adviser, her campaign manager and her communications director resigned this weekend….Ms. Harris’s candidacy, which had received lukewarm support from Republican leaders in Washington, has struggled since she announced plans to challenge Mr. Nelson last summer. Fund-raising was slow from the start. Turnover has been a problem. She also lost a pollster, a national financial director, a treasurer and a media consultant in recent months.

Advisers urged Ms. Harris to leave the race. She refused and announced last month that she would spend $10 million of her own money to compete with Mr. Nelson, whom she has trailed in the polls.”This is a campaign that is spiraling downward by the minute,” said Jim Dornan, who resigned as campaign manager in November.

In a supreme testament to the power of denial, Harris’ comment on the latest series of defections was inexclicably upbeat:

Ms. Harris, a Republican who is challenging Senator Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent, said Saturday that the campaign had already lined up people who believed in her candidacy and that she would introduce them in the coming week.”We are stronger as a campaign today than we were yesterday,” Ms. Harris said in a news release. She did not return a call for comment.

Word is Harris is turning her campaign into an explicit Christian Right crusade. This, along with her heroine status among hard-core Republicans for helping George W. Bush hijack Florida’s electoral votes in 2000, will probably get her over any last-minute primary challenge. But for all her invocations of divine favor, her campaign continues to represent a God-given burst of sunshine on the fortunes of Bill Nelson, and Florida Democrats.

With most of the vote in, the Israeli elections appear to have confirmed the much-expected mandate for Ariel Sharon’s creation, the Kadima Party, to lead the next government, though with fewer Knesset seats than expected. The real shocker, however, was the collapse of Likud under Bibi Netanyahu, who wrested control of the party from Sharon: it will apparently be the fifth-ranking party in the next Knesset, behind Kadima, Labor, the Sephardic party Shas, and the Russian-immigrant dominated Yisreal Beiteinu. Indeed, Likud, the dominant right-wing party in Israel for decades, barely finished ahead of the Pensioner’s Party, a purely domestic- oriented political group that surprised everybody with its straightforward representation of the interests of the elderly.The scattered partisan results, and the remaining uncertainty regarding the imminent negotiations over the shape and size of a Kadima-led governing coalition, make all sorts of interpretations of the election possible, as evidenced by insta-reactions in the Israeli press and the blogosphere. Some will emphasize Kadima’s emergence, and note the vindication of Ariel Sharon, who, as Haaretz’s Robert Rosenberg noted, spent his last night as Prime Minister of Israel in a coma. Others will focus on Labor’s relatively strong showing under its new leader Amir Peretz, an Algerian-born union leader who represents a break with his party’s long identification with an Ashkenazi, kibbutz-centered elite. Still others will send up alarms about the rise of Yisreal Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, who could wind up being the leader of the official opposition. And the Pensioner’s Party, whose performance was so unexpected in a country long obsessed with security issues, will get attention as well.But the most compelling analysis I’ve read was actually written yesterday, by The New Republic’s Yossi Klein Halevi, which predicted low turnout and an inconclusive result, and suggested it was “Israel’s saddest election,” based on widespread despair. The “Greater Israel” ideology that once enlivened Likud and other right-wing parties is dead, said Halevi; it’s really an academic question as to whether Sharon was a lot or just slightly ahead of the curve in recognizing that and adjusting his policies accordingly. And just as importantly, the Hamas victory in the recent Palestinian elections confirmed the experience of the Second Intifada in largely extinguishing the “peace party” in Labor and on the Israeli left generally. Nearly all Israelis, said Halevi, have endorsed Sharon’s “separation strategy,” with the arguments being over time, place and manner of that separation. Even Lieberman’s right-wing party has distinguished itself by arguing for a strictly ethnic-based “separation” in which Jewish settlements would remain in Israel while Israeli Arab enclaves would be ceded to the proto-Palestinian state. Invidious as that idea is, it’s a far cry from “Greater Israel” and a permanent occupation of Palestine as a whole.Halevi’s hypothesis helps explain the historically low turnout in today’s elections (63 percent, which is robust by American standards, but is well below the traditional Israeli benchmark of 80 percent), and also the emergence of domestic-policy-only focused parties like the Pensioners. But he’s right: it’s very sad. Israelis are largely united on a “separation strategy” that every major faction in Palestinian politics rejects, most notably the hyper-rejectionist Hamas, which can’t bring itself to even accept the legitimacy of Israel according to any configuration. Perhaps the most important question about today’s Israeli elections is whether anyone on the Palestinian side recognizes and acts upon the challenge and the opportunity of the new Israeli consensus for a two-state solution, which is becoming a reality beyond all the past rhetoric on both sides.

Andy Card’s resignation today does not, as my colleague The Moose has noted, mean much of anything in terms of the direction, or lack thereof, of the White House or the Bush administration. The official explanation will likely be that Card is simply tired after five years as chief of staff. This raises a question that I thought about while staring at a recent Washington Post article that essentially blamed some of the blunders being committed by the administration on systemic fatigue among key White House staffers. Fatigue from what, exactly? I mean, it’s not like this administration has been terribly active in terms of meeting the big domestic or national security challenges facing the country, right? It has horribly mismanaged the war in Iraq; is frightenenly sloppy in terms of securing the country against terrorism; botched Katrina; refuses to do anything about the burgeoning fiscal crisis; and can’t find its collective butt with both hands on much any other issue. Moreover, as we know from a variety of sources, most notably the famous DiIlulio disclosures, this is a White House whose burdens do not include any particular interest in policy development. I guess we have to assume that bad government is, to use the president’s own favorite phrase, “hard work.” And 24-7 spinning of bad government is really hard work.