The Snowden-Manning Axis: A Political, Foreign Policy Argument

Premise 1—The Snowden Axiom: The NSA (and inter alia its Israeli and British counterparts) is hoovering up all the electronic and telephonic signals in the world—or at least, it is claimed, those most relevant to U.S. interests and the war on terror. There are no more secrets.

There is no place more relevant at the present moment to U.S. interests and the war on terror than Syria—especially given its use of chemical weapons of mass destruction.

It is safe to assume the U.S. (and inter alia its Israeli and British counterparts) is hoovering up all the electronic signals emanating in and from Syria.
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Premise 2—The Manning Axiom: All-powerful President Obama has authorized and is using drones and drone strikes as the primary means to execute his foreign policy objectives around the world.

He has the (near-tyrannical) ability to use them anywhere, any time, and against anybody he chooses—possibly even against U.S. citizens—and has used them in the past against innocent civilians for little or no apparent reason.
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It follows, then, from the Snowden Axiom that: President Obama knows who, up and down the Syrian chain of command, authorized, ordered, and executed the recent chemical weapons strike against Syrian citizens. (The U.N. "investigation" is a sham and merely for show.)
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Therefore: President Obama can (and probably should) use targeted, surgical drone strikes against each and every Syrian in the chain of command who authorized, ordered, and executed the chemical weapons strike instead, say, of initiating a boots-on-the-ground war or the sort of air and missile strikes that would draw us into a Middle East civil war.

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Where's the fallacy in that argument? Is it in the axiomatic assumptions? You tell me.

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Furthermore, if Obama doesn't do this, he's weak and ineffectual as a leader and a commander-in-chief.

Or, he's in the thrall of his military-industrial complex overlords who have too much of a surplus inventory of unused war machines that need to be expended (so they can update their stores and build some more on a cost-plus basis) and too few military personnel in actual combat to keep the top-heavy general staff officers from getting bored.

Or else, he's a cynical war-monger who wants to take this country even further rightward using a boots-on-the-ground war to cement his grasp on power as a Bushian 'war time President'.

Or, all of the above.

[Or, alternatively, the Snowden and Manning axioms are, well, shall we say, over-stated.]

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However, if Obama does authorize the use of targeted drone strikes against the perpetrators up and down the Syrian chain of command, it's a tacit confirmation that:

• he's a tyrant and an outlaw on the world stage;
• that he does use the NSA to hoover up all the sigint in the world; 
• that he can and will authorize and order drone strikes anywhere, any time, and against anyone in the world; and last but not least
• all our worst, most paranoid fantasies are indeed true.

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Extra Credit: Agent Mike: Since, pursuant to the U.S. PATRIOT Act, each of the intelligence agencies is supposed to coordinate its efforts with all the others, and even though this is meant to be a piece of satire, you should actually use this as a suggestion to your friends at CIA—you know, run it up the flag pole and see who salutes (or has an itchy drone trigger finger)—instead of, I don't know, adding yet another ridiculous entry to some useless bureaucratic file somewhere on some idiot blogger who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Who Will Save Our Souls?

This is a momentous day:  

'President Barack Obama marked the end of the U.S. war in Iraq with a salute to American troops at a military base central to the fight and a pledge to support veterans who are returning home to face a difficult economy.

'As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words,' Obama told soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Special Operations Command. 'Welcome home.'
…
A promise to end the conflict in Iraq was a central element of Obama's campaign for the presidency in 2008. When he took office in January 2009, there were almost 150,000 troops in Iraq. That number has shrunk to less than 8,000 and the number of U.S. military bases in the country has fallen to five from 505. When the pullout is complete, the U.S. presence will be at the embassy in Baghdad, with an array of diplomats, military advisers and contractors.

'There is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long,' Obama told troops."

Indeed there is. Former President George W. Bush, using a duplicitous and fraudulent Congressional authorization, invaded Iraq under false premises in March 2003. The bases for that authorization—that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and maintained active links to al Qaeda making it a direct and imminent threat to the U.S.—were utterly false.

Declaring a doctine of pre-emption, Bush claimed the right for the U.S. to invade any country anytime U.S. leaders perceive an imminent threat to U.S. national security. Many, even some in the military, believe this doctrine and the actions justified by it are in violation not only of "just war" theory but also international law. In other words, the war itself is a war crime.

As a result of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld criminal push for war, 4,483 U.S. troops died in Iraq, 3,531 in combat.  As well, official sources note 33,183 U.S. service -men and -women were wounded in Iraq. That number is disputed, and some believe it may be three times that many.

The number of Iraqi civilian dead cannot be reliably estimated, but, based on a study that appeared in the British medical journal Lancet, some have estimated the Iraq body count to be over one million. Official tallies fall way short of this number but are nonetheless substantial.

This is why President Obama's announcement today marking the official end of the war in Iraq is so momentous. It puts an official stop to this criminal war. It puts an official stop to the 'justified' wholesale killing of civilians.

But the costs of this war go beyond body counts. The direct economic costs of the war in Iraq, by most accounts, are well over $1 trillion. This does not include the costs of extra spending to care for veterans from combat through 2050, which may itself total over $1 trillion. Nor does it account for interest to be paid on funds borrowed to fund the war.

In 2008, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz estimated the costs of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. He has since determined that estimate to be too low.  As WoW pointed out at the time, that estimate did not include opportunity costs or what he calls "what if" costs:

"two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere."

WoW's point was that if those funds squandered in destructive warfare had been put to creative use—investing, say, in green energy sources, shoring up Social Security, developing universal health care, seeding new, productive industries here and even abroad, reducing poverty worldwide, etc.—the potential return on those investments would have made a hugely positive contribution to the standard of living world-wide. Stiglitz, of course, notes that the financial crisis we are currently experiencing is almost certainly attributable to this war.

And this gets to the final component of the costs of this war: the price of our souls. Primarily, the companies that profited from this war are those engaged in arms and weapons manufactury, those providing contractual paramilitary services, and those involved in oilfield services industry. These are the destructive angels of our nature—the killing business, the resource exploitation business. Then, of course, there's their bankers and financiers—the speculators and parasites. The Iraq war has made these folks the Masters of the Universe—or at least elevated their mastery to a whole new level.

We may be able to pay back the economic costs of this war, but it will take time and sacrifice. We might even be able to reclaim our collective souls from the destructive forces that currently have us in their clutches. Occupy, I'd say, is a good start. We can never, however, recover the lives lost, U.S. or Iraqi.

The costs in human lives, the economic and financial costs, and the costs to our soul as a civilization: let us hope that the end to this war can reverse this self-destructive trend and put us on the road to a more creative, healthy, and productive future.

Thank you, President Obama, for putting an end to this atrocity. Frankly, it's about time. I know it has taken a great deal of time and energy on your part. I know you have had to battle the entrenched, corrupt forces of militarism and bureaucratic inertia and war-profiteering to get to this point. But it was the right thing to do. The project now is to figure out how to pay for this disaster without sending the entire world into a further economic tailspin and, simultaneously, recover our wounded souls—the better angels of our nature.

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From Uncle Meat:









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Now shut up 'n play ur guitar:

Occupy K Street!

I think it's pretty big news when the President of the United States announces that all American troops who have been entangled in an eight-year foreign adventure of his predecessor's doing in Iraq will be home for Christmas. There are still questions about the role of Blackwater/Xe and other military contractors, but this is the fulfillment of a campaign promise by President Obama which many of us felt should have come much, much sooner. I have recognized how institutional concerns and Obama's own trepidation in dealing with the military-industrial powers-that-be have hampered these efforts. But here it is. It is major news. I applaud it. What's important, however, is what the contenders for the Republican nomination for office think about it—which will inevitably be the focus of all the Sunday political talk-shows. Oh, and what Sen. John McCain (R. Loser) and Lindsey Graham (R. So Closeted) feel about it. One hopes the resources to support this misbegotten war-like adventure can be put to better use rebuilding our own economy.

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The Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere/Occupy Together let's call it a 'movement' (this cycle's Move On?) is standing pat. Occupistas are occupying all over the Western world. Were I a commander of forces, I would shift focus a bit, especially in Washington, DC. "Occupy K Street" should be the mantra. Yes, corporate/financial control of the economy and hoarding is causing increasing misery among the 99% of Americans (and others) who are not hedge fund, Goldman Sachs, BoA, etc. affiliated. Calls for austerity, such as cutting back Social Security or Medicare or Veterans benefits, while bankster profits soar cannot stand. But the instrumentality of this control of the economy is the undue influence of MONEY on the law-making and regulatory (and enforcement, as well) processes of government. Money and influence filters into Congress and the Executive through the law firms, PR, and lobby shops of K Street. Break this supply chain link—Occupy K Street—and you stand a chance of making real, long-lasting democratizing effects on our politics and our economy.

Speaking of banksters, Bank of America is once again engaging in the should-be criminal act of privatizing profits and socializing losses. It is attempting to shift $55 trillion of potentially toxic debt exposure to risky Merrill Lynch derivatives from its investment side to its depositor, FDIC-insured side. Glass-Steagall, anyone?

That being said:

'A recent study of the global economy by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich "combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations," New Scientist reported.[1] -- It confirms that "a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy..." '

Want to know what the top 50 organizations in this network are (using data as of 2007)?

THE TOP 50 OF THE 147 SUPERCONNECTED COMPANIES

 1. Barclays plc
 2. Capital Group Companies Inc
 3. FMR Corporation
 4. AXA
 5. State Street Corporation
 6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
 7. Legal & General Group plc
 8. Vanguard Group Inc9. UBS AG
 10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
 11. Wellington Management Co LLP
 12. Deutsche Bank AG
 13. Franklin Resources Inc
 14. Credit Suisse Group
 15. Walton Enterprises LLC
 16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
 17. Natixis
 18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
 19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
 20. Legg Mason Inc
 21. Morgan Stanley
 22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
 23. Northern Trust Corporation
 24. Société Générale
 25. Bank of America Corporation
 26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
 27. Invesco plc
 28. Allianz SE
 29. TIAA
 30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
 31. Aviva plc
 32. Schroders plc
 33. Dodge & Cox
 34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
 35. Sun Life Financial Inc
 36. Standard Life plc
 37. CNCE
 38. Nomura Holdings Inc
 39. The Depository Trust Company
 40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
 41. ING Groep NV
 42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
 43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
 44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
 45. Vereniging Aegon
 46. BNP Paribas
 47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
 48. Resona Holdings Inc
 49. Capital Group International Inc
 50. China Petrochemical Group Company
 * Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Research project: Who are the Hill and State lobbyists for these firms? What are the trade groups and organizations they support? Who are their law firms? What are their PACs and Super-PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations? Who do they pay to wine and dine and entice your Representatives and Senators and regulators and their staffs with campaign donations and contributions to their own PACs? These are their instrumentalities in the halls of power. These should be OCCUPIED!

Occupy K Street!

ABC: Always Be Closing

Okay, let's be clear about one thing: Say what you will about the former U.S. administration, they were well-versed in the black arts of marketing.

Case in point: Pres. G.W. Bush, the huckster-in-chief, and his cronies sold this country an unnecessary (war of choice, adventure) war of aggression (designed principally to stabilize the price and flow of Middle Eastern oil so U.S. and multinational oil companies could more predictably calibrate their—and their suppliers' and servicers'—profits) as an existential war on terror, just like his father, that cagey old snake-oil salesman, before him. Recall, too: George Herbert Herbert Bush tried to sell tort reform (i.e., putting a cap on the amounts juries and judges can award for pain and suffering of patients who prevail in medical malpractice and product liability cases) as a panacea for health care.



Their M.O. in both cases seems to have been identifying a real (at least for them) problem (Sadam Hussein's chokehold on the price and flow of oil, on the one hand, and "tassel-loafered trial lawyers" who are the bane of corporate profit, on the other [notice a trend here?]) and, instead of attacking the problem head-on, linking it to what they rightly-identified as a more-salable casus bellum (respectively: 9/11 + GWOT and health-care reform), i.e., something the people would buy. Right causes, wrong (pet) targets.

Now, their methodology—and this is what the current administration doesn't quite get—was not to make the end-product crucial to their own political ends (which, of course, it absolutely was), but to convince 50% +1 of the upright citizens of the direness of the threat and screw the rest: scare them to control them.

In other words: FRAUD. Got that?

To their credit, they were incredibly disciplined. They put up a unified front: the PATRIOT Act, DHS's unified control over the intelligence that penetrated the spheres of the decision-makers, the Pentagon. They bamboozled, degraded, and ostracized State, turning it into their PR organ. They cowered Congress. The bait-and-switch they pulled on Iraq was breath-taking in scope: 'we're going to take Saddam out because he's got WMD ("We know where they [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat...") and he collaborated with OBL on 9/11'; 'well, not WMD but WMD capacity'; 'well, he had WMD, we know 'cause Don sold 'em to him, but we don't know what he did with 'em'; Saddam was a tyrant: he gassed his own people for pity's sake and he's a threat to his neighbors'; 'it was all about regime change'; 'they'll greet us with chocolates and flowers'; etc.

Think about this: there were literally millions of people protesting the invasion of Iraq in the streets not only of this country, but around the world. No one paid attention to them—not the government, not the media, and hence not the rest of the citizenry. The administration just went ahead and did what it intended to do all along. Today, by contrast, a minuscule handful of shouter-downers at a few, usually-lazy August town hall meetings, because they are getting airtime on CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNBC, talk radio, newspapers, etc., are seemingly having an outsized influence on the direction of health care reform. They might even be able to kill it on behalf of their corporate and Republican sponsors. Why is that? Discipline.

Likewise, the previous administration had timing. Another thing the current admin doesn't seem to quite get. Remember Andrew Card's (GWB's PoS CoS's) great slip w/r/t the run-up to the unprovoked invasion (rape?) of Baghdad? `From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.'' We are certainly seeing the wisdom of this POV today as a highly-organized and vociferous minority is making a unified attempt to derail health care reform by disrupting congress members' and Senators' otherwise sleepy constituent meetings.

Those guys knew how to run a marketing campaign. I am not being nostalgic, simply observant. They were supply-siders all the way. They knew how to sell their product (that is to say, ram it down our throats), even though people didn't really want or need it. The Obama administration simply doesn't seem to have those chops. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying...

President Obama is, by trade, logical, a rational persuader, a consensus-builder. Yes, health care reform may be what this country direly needs right now. And, yes, his policies may indeed be exactly the right solution at precisely the right moment. But he's not willing to scare people into buying it. He doesn't want to appear to be a fraud. He wants people to accept the rightness of his POV. Base marketing (which so often is tainted by fraud) qua style just seems alien (distasteful) to him.

Today we read that "he's willing to be a one-term president if that's what it takes to get health care and energy reform." How noble. How misguided: self-sacrifice for the good of the country. That's what Jesus was famous for—and look what happened to him.

Being Mr. Nice Guy is not what's going to close the deal. The President has got to make health care (and energy) reform absolutely urgent for the people. Fact is it is, but he's got to overcome the ignorance and intransigence of the mob and the demagogs and drive home what's at stake—the rank, urgent self-interest for these people in having reform. He's got to get down in the mud and make reform as crucial and urgent as the false urgencies of the 'death panels' and 'socialism' and 'naziism' and not letting 'some gov'ment bureaucrat' decide whether to 'put grandma down'.

Maybe he's gulling us (trans. see 'rope-a-dope' ). Maybe he's letting the opposition have its say in the public square. Maybe he's allowing them, rabid as they are, to bluster and blow themselves out, exposing their own ignorance and intransigence in the process. Maybe he believes he can absorb the political blows and still come out on top. Maybe he's planning to compromise. Maybe he's planning to counterattack. It's not clear now.



Maybe he's waiting until September to unveil his true marketing plan... Who knows. All I know is coffee is for closers.

(This post is in response to this fine post by an acquaintance of mine Drew Westen, not that HuffingtonPost needs to be linked to by me.)

The Obama Code

There was something very different about Pres. Obama's speech to the nation and, incidentally, to the assembled bicameral legislature Tuesday night (24 Feb. 2009). For roughly 24 of the past 28 years (ignoring the truculent George Herbert Herbert Bush), these speeches have felt more like performances: there have been stock muggings and pauses for applause lines, there have been rote coded 'dogwhistle' turns of phrase geared to excite certain key constituent bases, there has been preening egotism and petulance. I could go on.

Obama claims he wants to change the tone of the rhetoric on Capitol Hill. Of course, so did GWB and Clinton. Clinton, I think, tried but failed. GWB, as per usual, lied. Obama, on Tuesday, sounded like a roll-up-his-sleeves-and-get-to work problem-solver, something I've asserted here. This is different—at least for now. We can only hope he doesn't become corrupted by the status quo.

One of Obama's advisers, George Lakoff, Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, gave us fair notice of what Obama was hoping to accomplish "because tens of millions of Americans--both conservatives and progressives--don't yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about." Thus, we have what he calls: The Obama Code. It's been all over the Web.

Briefly, Lakoff asserts Obama is focusing, first, on values over programs. Obama has a vision of the fundamental values of this country and with his budget he is looking to implement, cut, or expand programs based on the values they inculcate. Second, the key value behind our avowed national emphasis on freedom, fairness, and equality is empathy:

"empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider--who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire "free market," which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone's interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama's foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states--with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world."

{Seems to me like he takes to heart the values inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and is not a faux Constitutional strict constructionist.]

The third aspect of Obama's appeal is "biconceptualism". Essentially, this means he can work with, let's say, Sen. X on economic matters because they share the same values even though they have to agree to disagree on foreign policy or other issues. This builds a fluid, issue-based web of value constituencies which excludes only the most ideological 'my way or the highway' hardened partisans.

The fourth idea reconceives the role of government as two-fold: protection and empowerment. "The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims, and investors." Obama recognizes there are more stakeholders in the role of government than the party in power and its base. [We discussed this idea of broad base of stakeholders here.]

The fifth idea is a recognition that budgetary and economic priorities represent moral choices. The Bushes and Reagan never got this, or else their morality was perversely skewed to aid multinational corporations and the wealthy elite on the backs of the lower and middle classes. Don't kid yourself: there has been a transfer-of-wealth class war going on in this country, with little respite, since the Reagan days. It's just that the assets of the public sector have been pillaged by the well-connected, moneyed classes who, in turn, further received favorable marginal tax rate cuts. Viewed as a moral issue, this is reprehensible—and any honest religionist will tell you so.

Further, according to Lakoff, Obama recognizes the 'big picture' aspects of economics and government: there are systemic causes and systemic risk. That is to say, we as a society have a social responsibility to the rest of the world not to consume all its natural resources and destroy its environment, for example. No single SUV or carbon dioxide spewing factory is going to destroy the global environment, but the collective risk of doing nothing about the totality and proliferation of such things is huge. To ignore this is not only morally bankrupt, it could be suicidal.

Finally, because Professor Lakoff can say it so much better than I—and because it sounds suspiciously like it ties into a theme I've been pursuing lately here at WoW—I quote:

"As President, Barack Obama must speak in patriotic language. But all patriot language in this country is "contested." Every major patriotic term has a core meaning that we all understand the same way. But that common core meaning is very limited in its application. Most uses of patriotic language are extended from the core on the basis of either conservative or progressive values to produce meanings that are often opposite from each other.

I've written a whole book, Whose Freedom?, on the word "freedom" as used by conservatives and progressives. In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used "freedom," "free," and "liberty" over and over--first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending "freedom" as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a "free market" based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women's health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of "freedom." It was anything but a progressive's view of freedom--and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

For forty years, from the late 1960's through 2008, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to reframe much of our political discourse to fit their worldview. President Obama is reclaiming our patriotic language after decades of conservative dominance, to fit what he has correctly seen as the ideals behind the founding of our country.
"Freedom" will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama's inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration."

Again, Lakoff, echoing my previous post:

"The conservative message machine is huge and still going. There are dozens of conservative think tanks, many with very large communications budgets. The conservative leadership institutes are continuing to turn out thousands of trained conservative spokespeople every year. The conservative apparatus for language creation is still functioning. Conservative talking points are still going out to their network of spokespeople, who still being booked on tv and radio around the country. About 80% of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are as strong as ever. There are now progressive voices on MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Air America, but they are still overwhelmed by Right's enormous megaphone. Republicans in Congress can count on overwhelming message support in their home districts and homes states. That is one reason why they were able to stonewall on the President's stimulus package. They had no serious media competition at home pounding out the Obama vision day after day."

Indeed, language matters. Policies matter. Budgets matter. Values matter.

David Brooks, the credentialed conservative columnist for the New York Times, called Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's response to Obama's speech an "insane", "nihilist" "disaster". That sounds about right. Obama is seeking to be transformative, and Lakoff's Code, if accurate, represents nothing other than a true "transvaluation" of the so-called values that have driven this country's and, in point of fact because of our power and influence, the world's economy and environment into the toilet. They hate him. They will try to tear him down; it's what they do.

Thirty-five Words

Yesterday, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, John Roberts, had one task: to administer the Constitutionally-prescribed Oath of Office to the incoming President of the United States. He blew it.

Disregarding, for the moment, his political antipathy to one of few Senators who voted against him, was it an act of:

1. Freudian slip?
2. Conservative hostility?
3. Malice?
4. Judicial malpractice?
5. Arrogance?
6. Nervousness?

Without evidence, I won't speculate over what's going on in his psyche or what his motivation was; I'm not a novelist. Oh, wait...I am.

Regardless. I'm not going there. Chief Justice Roberts couldn't spit out the words as he stood there facing President Obama.

Charitably, we could assume he simply choked due to jitters at such a historic moment in front of those 1.8 million assembled and the eyes of the entire world. Anybody would get the butterflies.

Apparently cognizant of this, C.J. Rehnquist used to use a notecard at these swearings-in as a prompt. Roberts eschewed it, thinking, I guess, he could wing it. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? We've had eight long years of people thinking they could just wing it. Let's hope that era is over.

The wingnuts, and even Fox News, are frothing over the fact that Obama cannot legitimately execute the office of the presidency because he didn't mouth the words precisely as they are set out in the U.S. Constitution. Fact is, any judge can swear him in, anywhere, anytime—if he wants a do-over. Bush's Presidency* ended at noon Jan. 20, 2009. There's nothing these people can do about it. And just remember, these are the same folks who managed to overlook the Constitutional rules regarding the Vice President's proper role and function, separation of powers, the honoring of treaties and international accords, the Establishment Clause, habeas corpus, unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., for the past eight years.

In my opinion, Roberts should proffer his resignation forthwith. He had one job to do yesterday: thirty-five words long. It is, perhaps, the most important task of his office. And he botched it. Badly. If he had any professional or personal integrity, he would resign, realizing he can no longer do his job with any respect for the Office of the Presidency, the Office of the Chief Justice, or himself. He has been exposed: the man's a hack.

UPDATE: 1/21/2009—22:00 E.S.T.: CNN and Fox News are both reporting that C.J. Roberts just re-administered the oath to Pres. Obama. I guess the President decided to give the Justice a do-over and forgive him for trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works.