It's starting to be that time of administration again. We're into the second year of the term. The campaign high has worn off. The honeymoon has been over for months and months. The "blame it on my predecessor" free pass has expired. The "learning curve" excuses are wearing thin.

It's time to be president, to own your government and to take responsibility for whatever happens on your watch.

Which means it's officially time to start figuring out who to can. 

As it happens, round about the middle of the second year, early appointees who managed to get confirmed by the Senate start to go. Some are burned out. Some are starting to realize that most government jobs are not remotely as glamorous as they seem from the outside. Most bureaucracies are dull, grey and full of lifers who fall into two categories: the few, inspiring dedicated public servants upon whose shoulders the weight of governing a great nation sits ... and a bunch of hopeless drones who have lucked into jobs from which they can never be fired. (You know who you are. You're the ones reaching for the keyboard and getting ready to post an indignant comment about how the Constitution requires us to hire people who couldn't be an assistant manager in a 7/11 and give them some modicum of responsibility for the welfare of millions.)

Then, starting now as a whispers and insider buzz and then building to a crescendo in the weeks after this coming November's elections, we'll hear the names of those who need to move on for political reasons, to help the president regain his footing.  You know, the scapegoats.

A few folks have already come and gone, of course. White House Counsel Greg Craig is one, victim of a stealthy court assassination worthy of the Borgias. White House green jobs czar Van Jones was Glenn Becked into submission. 

Read on

In the past few days, the Obama team has alienated Republicans by showing them to be the empty poseurs that they are, the EU by deciding not to attend their summit later this year, and the green community by apparently backing away from including cap-and-trade revenues in the upcoming budget and thus sending a message that they're no longer expecting them. 

But of all the alienating that has taken place in the past week, the most meaningful has to do with the president's decision to send $6.4 billion in arms to Taiwan and the resulting, inevitable Chinese pique at the U.S. action. According to the foreign ministry, the step "constitutes a gross intervention into China's internal affairs."  They're "extremely indignant."

Frankly, following the administration's unsteady performance with China during its first year in office, this willingness to stand up to the Chinese is welcome. On the President's China trip and throughout last year, the Obama team seemed altogether too passive in accepting criticisms from a Chinese government that lives in a Forbidden City full of glass houses. They may be gaining strength but clearly their economic policies are compromised by corruption, a weak banking system, a real estate bubble, and the manipulation of their currency. Their businesses and their people are hampered by their efforts at censorship and their continuing readiness to employ authoritarian tactics. Their foreign policy consists of a willingness to engage when it is in their interest but not to play any kind of real leadership role on global issues where their intervention could be key -- from Iranian nukes to combating climate change. 

They are an important partner to the United States on many issues but they are one that is deeply flawed and unsure of themselves. They know they are changing. They know they need to change. But they are unsure how rapidly they can go or in what direction those changes may take them.

China will not be influenced by carrots or kindness alone. Indeed, cozying up to the Chinese leadership will be ineffective with a hard-nosed government motivated by a laser-like focus on national self-interest. For example, they will complain about America's arms sale to Taiwan or our recent criticism of their Internet policies, but they won't let it derail the relationship. Because their growth and national stability depends on us even more than we depend on them for the capital to finance our debt -- although we ought to focus more on the symbiosis that is required by circumstance and less on who has the edge.

All this is to commend the Obama administration for its resolute stance with regard to the Chinese these past few weeks. Having said that, I'm concerned that we are likely to fall victim to several traps.

Beating up on the Chinese is as popular with the Democratic base as beating up on Arabs is to Republicans or beating up on Mexicans is to border-state populists and the thankfully now relatively silent and almost forgotten Lou Dobbs. The problem is, letting the domestic politics of having a whipping boy drive foreign policy is dangerous and on some key issues, like trade, the temptation is likely to be so great that it stands as the single biggest threat to President Obama's surprising State of the Union goal of doubling U.S. exports and strengthening the international trading system. It is a treacherously tempting (and I would say rather likely) first step on a protectionist slippery slope that would make the half pipe at the recently concluded X-Games look slow and shallow.

Another problem is that we need to avoid demagoguing the issue of Taiwan. While many in the U.S. feel that Taiwan, as a democracy, deserves our unquestioning support and that the island nation affords us an "aircraft carrier" just off the Chinese coast, it is not clear to me that this particular issue should be allowed to play as big a role as it has in the past in coloring the U.S.-China relationship. 

Taiwan is small. It offers us very little in the way of true strategic advantages (in the final analysis, it really is China's for the taking ... and it is certainly not worth going to war for regardless of what U.S. rhetoric has been for decades). Further, our policy does not really bear too much scrutiny.  Imagine, for a moment, if the Chinese were to make a $6.4 billion arms sale to Cuba as part of a program to provide them with a strategic foothold just off our shores. We've been down that road before. We know how the U.S. would react. While I believe that there is a certain place in foreign policy for a modicum of well-thought-out hypocrisy (a fairly prominent place, usually), we have to realize that this issue is a potential distraction from much bigger questions.

It is one of those issues for the Taiwanese and the Chinese to work out among themselves. Just as are the issues between China and Tibet. Just as are countless other border issues of nothing more than regional significance ... unless we continue to choose, in our desire to aggrandize our role on the planet in Yertle the Turtle fashion to involving all issues we survey. Should we support democracy everywhere? Yes. Are we willing to go to war everywhere to defend it? No. Should we support international efforts to preserve the rights of minorities and small states against bullying neighbors? Yes. Is it up to the U.S. to be the last bulwark of defense for all those states (especially the ones that have movie stars or highly-financed lobbies behind them)? No.

We are entering The Era of Limits for the United States. We can only actively get involved in those few places where our vital strategic interests are involved and where involvement will actually advance those interests. That should mean a spring cleaning of the attic of U.S. foreign policy and an effort to identify vestigial positions we can no longer afford to support. This will mean some wrenching decisions ... and in some cases, it's probably just as well we keep our changed policies to ourselves. But we don't have the balance sheet we once had.  Economic trends are not in our favor on that front.  And so we have to accept that we simply can't afford to be the country we once were ... or over-reaching will prove to be the ultimate threat to our security.

Remember the scene in Annie Hall in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are talking and there are sub-titles indicating what they really were thinking? I regularly wish such a thing were available when listening to politicians speak. Not always, because frankly most of the time that politicians speak the best filter is ignoring them altogether. But Barack Obama is the president of the United States, the country is ass deep in alligators and so his State of the Union address takes on special importance. 

We know he and his team have worked for weeks on the address. They have spent the past few days pre-gaming the press hoping to get the "Obama Does It Again: America Starts Believing in Change They Can Believe In ... Again!" story they really want. And we also know that every single phrase in the speech has been viewed through multiple lenses-impact on the media, impact on the left, impact on the right, impact on the center, impact on donors, impact on November 2010 election prospects ... well, you get the idea. With the pros in the White House you often get the sense they're looking at dozens of angles associated with any phrase or idea. It's not triangulation. That's so 1990s. It reeks of Dick Morris'a mouth full of toenail polish. Today we're dealing with polygonulation of a much richer sort. With three political factions, U.S. and foreign media, 50 states, the G20, Michelle, Malia, Sasha, the White House dog and the Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol, and Oprah that would make it octacontakaihenagonulation. (There's a change you can believe in.)

Anyway, to help cut through it all, we watched carefully as the president delivered his address and have selected ten key phrases in which the president said one thing but actually meant something else. Then, we added the real or alternative meaning. So now, you can truly understand.

And as for knowing what you yourself were really thinking while you watched, perhaps it's best to return to Annie Hall in which Annie says "Well, to me, I mean it's all instinctive. You know, I mean, I just try to feel it. You know, I try to get a sense of it and not think about it so much." But while she says it, the subtitles let us know what she (and you) are really thinking: "God, I hope he doesn't turn out to be a schmuck like all the others." 

The following are not necessarily offered in the order they came in the speech:

1. "Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit."

This actually means: "Holy crap, what a mess. But let's not panic. Please do not give up on me. Please do not quit on me now. It's early yet...and look at this way, you could have elected John Edwards. Imagine where we'd all be then with the economy in the tank, the First Lady moving out and him having to turn the Situation Room into a nursery."

2. "We have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now.  We face a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years."

This actually means: "We've got a gigantic deficit of dollars right now, but let's change the subject. Let's blame it on the past. I sure hope that you don't notice that throughout this speech I blamed problems on the past like 9 or 10 times. Christ, I hope some nutjob pundit doesn't dub this the "Blame It On the Past" speech tomorrow."

3. "To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists, to do our work openly and to give our people the government they deserve."

This actually means: "By both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, I mean in Congress.  As for the ending the outsized influence of big money I sure do hope people weren't watching Tim Geithner's mugging on the Hill earlier today for being too cozy with Wall Street.  No seriously, I hate lobbyists. The guys that fund them, the donations they give, the issues they advance, those things I'm ok with. But lobbyists, I wouldn't bend over to scrape them from my shoe."

4. "Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't."

This actually means: "Anything that pisses Rachel Maddow off this much has got to make centrists a little happier, right?  And where's she going to go?  Who's she going to vote for? Mitt Romney? Ahahahahahahhaha... I could appoint Bill O'Reilly Secretary of Banning Abortions and Distributing Assault Rifles to Schoolchildren and she would still have to vote for me.  As far as the families on a budget line goes, I hope no one does the math. We're freezing 18 percent of the budget. And the rest we're not touching. That's like a family trying to balance its budget by cutting back on what it pays the paperboy."

5. "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."

This actually means: "See my little liberal friends, there's something for you in here too. Oh sure, I know this reeks of Clinton era small ball and a kind of something-for-everyone approach. But hey, gay people, enjoy it ... because in terms of my list of priorities going forward, you're way behind big things like health care and fighting global warming and cutting the deficit and defeating terrorism and winning in Afghanistan and virtually none of those things are actually going to happen either."

6.  "Now, the price of college tuition is just one of the burdens facing the middle-class. That's why last year I asked Vice President Biden to chair a task force on Middle-Class Families."

This actually means: "So, ok, here's the one area we are going to spend.  Jobs for the middle class. Tax breaks for the middle class.  We can't afford anything.  Except for programs for the people who will determine whether we get to keep our jobs.  Ha...we're part of our own jobs program."

7. "Now let's be clear -- I did not choose to tackle this issue to get some legislative victory under my belt. And by now it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics."

This actually means: "Let's be clear, while I did take this on because I wanted a big legislative victory and because I thought it was good politics, this dog is clearly not going to hunt.  So let's just walk it back. Did I say I wanted this done by the State of the Union?  What I meant was the first bill I want on my desk this year is a jobs bill." 

8. "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong."

This actually means: "Geesh, this is a bit awkward. They're sitting right there. And they don't look happy. The reason I'm all for separation of powers is that if they were any closer they'd bite me on the leg. And frankly Alito looks like he has rabies."

9. "Throughout our history, no issue has united this country more than our security."

This actually means: "Ok, I have to get to national security for a few minutes. Admittedly, I am going to do about 8 minutes out of a 75 minute speech on foreign policy tonight. Pity because I really am getting us out of Iraq, that's a pretty big deal. I wish I could talk more about this stuff ... but right now, America seems to want a time out from the planet earth."

10."Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation. But I also know this: if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight."

That meant: "Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation. But I also know this: if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight."

But as I said, all politicians have multiple meanings with their speeches. Overall, the speech was not bad. No grand new ideas. But overall ... not a bad domestic stump speech that was particularly effective when it turned to condemning the dysfunctional mood of Washington at the moment. Admittedly, if you're a foreign policy fan, there really wasn't much here ... but Bush was all national security all the time and that didn't turn out so well for anyone. Grade: B.

It's ironic. At precisely the moment that Secretary of State Clinton was rightly striking out at the Chinese for their infringement of the rights of their own citizens to open Internet access, democracy was dying in America.

In fact now, following an era that might well be defined by America's twin credibility crises of the past decade, another looms.

The first two blows -- blows that have left America's standing in the world weaker today than it has been at any time in the past half century, even with the many steps President Obama has taken to reverse the missteps of the Bush era -- undercut two of what might be seen as the three pillars of American standing on the planet.

The initial credibility crisis was triggered by the Bush administration's reckless disregard for the values upon which the republic was founded. From Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, from the illegal invasion of Iraq to the rendition and torture of prisoners, America's role as a leader by virtue of our moral standing was called into question. The champions of the rule of law were now seen, rightfully, as one of its enemies, arguing as we were that there were two standards: that to which we held the rest of the world and that we chose for ourselves.

Next, America's role as an economic model for the world, champion of free markets and opportunity for all came under fire. In the run up to the economic crisis of 2008-2009, growing inequality in the United States was leading many critics to question our "leave it to the markets" approach. But then came the crisis and once again, the United States demonstrated that the doctrine we had preached worldwide were not going to be applied at home and moreover, that our system was deeply and fundamentally flawed. Doubt about "American capitalism" were only amplified in the aftermath of the crisis, in which middle class victims of the crisis were hardly helped and many were hurt but in which Wall Street fat cats called the tune, reaped the rewards of government intervention and then flouted their power by shrugging off the government when it was no longer necessary to their business plans.

What was left for Americans to cling to? Our moral standing and our fundamental message to the world had been built on the ideas of respect for the rule of law and free markets. And now the world was left to wonder, if not America, then to whom do we turn? Should we embrace other models?

Admittedly, the Chinese model, which might have had a shot at greater influence given the damage done to the U.S. brand, wasn't doing itself any favors with its attempt to deny its people both basic rights of all international citizens of the 21st Century ... which would also have the effect of making Chinese workers less competitive in the global economy. Hillary Clinton's speech attacking this was forceful and utterly appropriate. The Chinese whining in response to it was a sign of weakness and with some luck, the Obama administration will ignore it, shrug off the Chinese threats of consequences in other areas of the bilateral relationship, and continue to press home this essential point.

But the argument on behalf of the American way was made immeasurably harder yesterday by the Supreme Court's devastating blow to several of the most fundamental precepts of American society -- equal rights, for example, or truly free speech (which is to say the right speak and be heard, without having to pay for it).

By a 5-4 vote the justices of the court, with the Republican right in the majority, struck down limits on corporate campaign spending. Further building on the dangerous fiction in American law that corporations ought to have rights akin to those of individuals, the decision effectively unleashes the floodgates of corporate and union money into the political arena.

This is certainly a more powerful threat to democracy than terrorism. It may well be a more powerful threat to democracy than was the fatally-flawed Soviet Union. Because to the extent to which politicians depend on donations to remain in power, they are inevitably influenced by those who have the most money. Not surprisingly, corporate entities, representing many people and often vast economic enterprises, have vastly more financial resources than individuals. Arguing, as American right wingers do, that campaign donations are form of free speech and thus cannot be constrained, ignores the reality that by equating money with free speech we effectively say that those with more money have more free speech, are entitled to greater influence within our society.

The implications are stark. Should this decision go unreversed by subsequent action of the Congress, a future court or a future constitutional amendment, it tips the balance of power in the United States even farther away from average people and in the direction of elites. Since campaign donations do not flow from companies primarily for ideological reasons but rather to advance narrow self-interests, the business of U.S. political class will necessarily be driven by the politics of the business class.

In a nutshell, yesterday's Supreme Court decision made it very likely that America will not be an effective leader in combating global warming or preserving global resources, it will not be able to effectively resolve the internal threats to its own society like a failing health care system, and it will pursue international policies that are driven less by the broad national interest and more by the agenda of companies that in fact, have increasingly little national identity.

In this respect, this compromise of the third and most important pillar of U.S. international leadership-democracy, may be the most damaging of all. We can repair, as the Obama administration has attempted to do, the abuses of the Bush years. But if the court's action does in effect institutionalize Calvin Coolidge's old idea that "the business of America is business" it will be impossible to either effectively redress the flaws in the American economic model or for us to continue to argue that the nation that was the most important pioneer of representative democracy will continue to be able to play that role.

The disaster in Haiti did not occur yesterday.

While the nation's latest tragedy was triggered by yesterday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake, its real roots were not 10 kilometers beneath the earth's surface as seismologists concluded. Rather, they were in two centuries of misfortune that have plagued the country and most heart-breakingly in the particular failures of the international community and the country's leaders to help the country during the most recent decade and half -- a period when real hope backed with real money seemed to bloom and then, just as quickly, fade.

It was the crushing poverty in the hemisphere's poorest nation that resulted in Port-au-Prince being a city of ramshackle homes of unreinforced concrete or worse, shanties assembled of odd-shaped bits of rusty, corrugated metal, scrap wood, cardboard and old packing crates. It was decades of neglect that made rebar an unaffordable luxury for virtually all on the island or that left communications, power and water systems so underdeveloped that even prior to the earthquake they were operating at what even other poor nations would consider crisis levels.

While it would have been impossible to know precisely when an earthquake of this magnitude would hit or that when it did it would hit so close to this hemisphere's most fragile city, it was known that such a calamity was possible, and not only by seismologists. We have watched repeatedly as hurricanes have battered Haiti and left it staggered because just a few hundred miles away from the richest country on earth was one so deprived that it was ill-equipped even for the predictable weather that came with so many autumns.

We knew all this and yet with every failure to act or to follow through on a good intention, we assured yesterday's outcomes.

In all its benighted history, perhaps Haiti's greatest moment of hope since its independence came just a decade and a half ago. Back then, America finally took interest in its near neighbor as a consequence of a political crisis that, thanks in part to our intervention, resulted in the departure of a dictator whose family had oppressed and raped the island and his replacement by a quiet priest who was embraced by many in the United States as our hemisphere's Mandela. As it turned out, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was hardly the saint that Hollywood stars and misty-eyed journalists had seen him to be. 

But we in the Clinton administration did not know that back then -- or at least many did not. We saw his restoration to the country as possibly the latest in the wave of hope-inspiring political upheavals that marked the end of the eighties and the early nineties. We committed thousands of troops and billions of dollars to the country to help give it a new chance. We offered a window of opportunity to tap into real financial resources from us and from the international community. We sent in AID and the Army Corps of Engineers. We trained police and built schools.  

I was given the assignment of helping lead the inter-agency effort tasked with assisting Haiti's economic recovery. We brought a trade mission of business leaders to consider investment opportunities in Haiti ... though there were very few. We tried to identify projects of particular promise...ones that might bring phone service to the 70,000 villages that lacked it or electricity or water to the millions who risked life and limb stealing power from exposed wires or drinking water that was less than pure. 

But we made serious errors. The first was misreading Aristide. This was the result of an intelligence failure as serious as any in the news in the past few decades. Many in our own intel community knew he was a bad guy, affiliated with bad guys, not a good ally. But top policymakers ignored the intel, even firing folks who had the temerity to tell the truth. Later, we made the mistake of demanding Aristide leave at the end of the term of office he had largely not been able to serve due to his exile ... which may have seemed logical at the time but resulted in his effectively become the opposition to his own party from the moment he left office so he would have a chance to run again for office against his own closest political allies a few years hence.

Read on

U.S. national security is too important to be left to foreign policy specialists, the media or politicians. These are the clear lessons of the Post-Underpants Bomber Era. 

Before Christmas and the disturbing revelations of a man setting his balls on fire on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit (rendering himself only slightly more uncomfortable than those flying economy class), there was at least a feeling that America was regaining her senses following the 8 hysterical years of the so-called War on Terror. 

But within hours of the bungled terror attempt, we saw once again America's true vulnerabilities. And while they are linked to intelligence failures, it is not the ones on which the media and the president's political opponents have focused that are most salient.

Obama's reaction to the junkbomber incident was precisely right and just what you want from a leader: Dispassionate, thoughtful, and calculated. He gave his team the time to assess the threat, the breaches and the right next steps to take. At least one person in the United States, Barack Obama, seemed to recognize that the objective of terrorism is to promote terror and sought to defuse that effort by handling the threat with the proportionality and common sense that has long been missing from U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

But almost immediately, the foreign policy establishment -- acting with the acuity and purity of motives of Tila Tequila squeezing a few extra minutes of undeserved fame out of the untimely death of her "fiancé" Casey Johnson -- whipped itself up into a critical lather. Why? Because it was good for America or because it was in their own self-interest?

I'll leave you to work that out on your own, but here are a few clues:

First, we have seen very few such attempted attacks carried to the stage of that of the underpants bomber in the last decade. Second, we have been successful in foiling many such attacks -- successes for which those responsible get little credit. Third, the attempt revealed as much about the genuine and enduring weaknesses of even terrorists affiliated with major league terror operations like al Qaeda as it did about our own counter-terror efforts. Fourth, terrorism by definition is only successful if it produces "terror" -- the kind of hysterical over-reaction we are once again seeing -- yet this fact does not seem to have resulted in very many critics toning down their hysteria or shrillness. (The Republican Party has the collective cool on these matters of Prissy helping to birth Melanie's baby in Gone With the Wind. As for the media, given that the "news" networks probably devoted more live news coverage to the balloon boy hoax than were devoted to say, the invasion of Normandy, you recognize that they are actually in the business of emotional over-reaction. In fact, their constant refrain that every event is an earth-shattering pinnacle of human experience that could well be the biggest thing they have ever seen suggests they have more in common with folks in say, Ashley Dupre's line of work than that of, say, a journalist.)

Most important, however, is that within days of what may go down on record as the world's first and last attempt at plastic explosive-assisted self-circumcision, news stories kept popping up that underscored the fact that the terror attack paled in significance for those concerned with America's future to other concurrent global developments. To begin with, the intelligence failures involved were not even the biggest problem of the week for the intelligence community given the devastating blow to some of our most senior field operatives in Afghanistan. 

But the biggest threats to U.S. leadership and security ... to our very ability to protect ourselves at home and abroad ... manifested themselves in other stories that have simply not gotten sufficient attention among the accusations and inflammations of the holiday season terror frenzy. Like unemployment staying at 10 percent. Or, over the weekend, like China passing Germany as the world's largest exporter. Or like the fact that our impending health care bill will still not actually fix the financial threats to our system posed by grotesquely under-funded health care liabilities. Or like the fact that the world is far away from solving the biggest security problems it faces from stabilizing Pakistan to stopping Iran's nuclear program (and thus the WMD proliferation that poses the one great terror threat) to reversing climate change or addressing resource disparities that will trigger many of the wars of the century ahead. (It is worth noting that for America today ... the greatest threats to the nation's future well-being don't involve things that explode ... always the favored topic of foreign policy elites ... but rather things that are imploding ... like our economy, about which most big time foreign policy specialists haven't  a clue.)

If one terrorist can in one failed attempt distract America from addressing priorities and will almost certainly lead to further billions and billions being misdirected to the global whackamole game of trying to snuff out the geopolitical pipsqueaks who lead international terror networks it explains more about why terrorists will keep trying than any in-depth analysis of the conditions on the ground in terror-prone regions. 

Thus, what this incident really reminds us is, terrorists only have the power we give them. And that the emotional, the shrill, the over-the-top, the self-promoters, the hyper-political, and the other tummlers responsible for the inside-the-beltway mob mentality are as complicit in the spread of terror as those who are too soft on it. If the president's rhetoric was slightly too weak for some tastes, he erred in the direction that also weakens our enemies rather than, as did his most vocal critics, the direction that turns operational failures like the one on Christmas Day into strategic successes for the bad guys.

P.S. I'd like to add that not only is the over-the-top nature of the terrorism debate of late done damage to U.S. interests, the appropriate response is not only not more spending, more programs, more rules ... but that complimenting the moderate response would actually be improvements to our anti-terror efforts all of which would actually be in the direction of narrowing, focusing and spending less. For example, want to improve Intel sharing? Let's start with getting rid of the Directorate of National Intelligence, a legacy of Bush's big government response to 9/11, that amounts to precisely the opposite of what we need: an additional layer of thousands of bureaucrats who actually do not enhance (apparently) our analytical capacity and undoubtedly reduce communications efficiency. The Central Intelligence Agency was created to do all the coordinating the DNI does and easily could do it again if sufficiently empowered? Want another step to improve our intel sharing? How about reducing and eliminating many of the unnecessary levels of information classification that make it impossible for policy makers to actually have access to all the information they need to make decisions? Want another? Heed the advice of former advisor to Dwight Eisenhower General Andrew Goodpaster, who laughed to me during our last intel "crisis" after 9/11 that Eisenhower would have had no patience with it because he knew -- from bitter experience during World War II -- that intelligence can be useful but expectations must be set at the right level. It was always an imperfect tool and one that could not be perfected. Want another? Let's get out of the unwinnable mess in Afghanistan and focus some of those resources on directly targeting terrorists, some on better tools for early warning and the rest on the domestic needs that are actually essential to maintaining long-term U.S. strength.  I could go on. But it is clear ... when it comes to responding to terror, the lesson of the past decade is that we need to think a lot harder about proportionality and the unintended consequences of our understandable horror and outrage.

So, here we are at last, the big ones, my choices for winners and losers of the decade on the global stage.

While these selections are slightly less subjective than, say, the Golden Globe nominations (which are, I believe, selected by three drunken expat Latvian critics in a bar in West Hollywood), they do represent just the views of one man. If you agree with those views, please post your congratulations below ... or go ahead and add a few other names. If you disagree, just remember, there will be other lists -- only I decide whether to include you among the global losers of tomorrow (alongside, say, the Tiger Woods of 10 years from now when he is running Tiger's "Just Do It" Mini-Golf Course in Melanoma City, Florida) or the global winners of the future (alongside, say, President Timberlake in 2030 or so).

The Losers

The People of Iraq: George W. Bush was our Washington loser of the decade, but all he lost was his reputation such as it was. He's still rich and will probably never pay for a round of golf again. But somewhere between 100,000 and 800,000 Iraqis are dead as a consequence of the war, the country is shattered, its government held together with chewing gum and bailing wire and the random killing continues. Oh, and there was absolutely no justification for going in and breaking up the place from the get-go. This isn't a tragedy ... it's a crime, as I suspect international courts will conclude in the years to come.

The People of Afghanistan and Pakistan: These countries are no playgrounds, they are home to plenty of bad actors and, as Barack Obama has demonstrated, no U.S. president, regardless of party, could stay disengaged from the festering political sore on the planet that is AfPak. But while the pursuit of al Qaeda and the Taliban is justified, the wars that continue to percolate here will kill countless thousands, impoverish hundreds of thousands more and at the same time, support for terrorists and other enemies of civilization will grow. That there are no good choices here is a cliché ... that there are going to be no winners is a related tragic reality.

The British Government (Lifetime Achievement Award): Well, let's book at the worst problems the world has faced during the past decade -- Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine...what do these diverse countries have in common? They were all cooked up or stirred up by those fertile minds at the British Foreign Office and their colleagues elsewhere up and down Whitehall, either as they were dismantling their empire or fiddling with the region after one war or another. Thanks guys for your creativity...and for the foresight you showed by actually bequeathing your handwork to yet another remnant of your empire as you shuffled off the world stage so you could focus on counterbalancing your past contributions to global culture by producing Simon Cowell and the likes of Susan Boyle.

The U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Dollar, and American Capitalism: It was a tough decade for the pillars of U.S. society. We should have seen it coming when the decade began with the Supreme Court fiddling with an election and when a central theme of the Bush years became undercutting the Constitution. Thanks to the U.S. government's similar callous disregard for the laws of economics and fiscal responsibility the dollar began a downward spiral that many experts see as a semi-permanent feature of our future.

Democracy: Oh, yes, we know that Churchill called it the "worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried"... but as my grandma would have said, "there's democracy and then there's democracy." In other words, some forms of democracy are worse than others, and among those that that have flourished during the past decade are Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, and, yes folks, Honduras -- where leaders took advantage of the common misperception that voting equals democracy.  

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As promised -- trumpet fanfare -- "The Winners and Losers of the Decade." Or, as I like to think of it, "The Winners and Losers of the Oughts," in deference to the zeros in each year of the decade's numbering, the zeros who were in charge and all that we ought to have done that we did not do.

The Losers

George W. Bush: It almost seems too easy. But upon reflection, it's not even close. Bush wasn't just born with a silver spoon in his mouth -- he inherited America, the world's sole superpower, with a budget surplus and clear skies ahead. When we were attacked on 9/11, the immediate consequence was unprecedented support for him and for the country. And yet, almost immediately thereafter, he started on a catastrophic set of missteps and bad decisions that had alienated the world by the end of his term. George W. Bush was not just the biggest loser produced by the American political system in the past decade, he was in all likelihood one of the worst presidents in American history and he presided over what was almost certainly the worst international relations calamity since, I don't know, maybe the Alien and Sedition Acts.

How did he get there? What was the worst of all the bad choices he made? Was it invading Iraq or picking Dick Cheney to be his vice president in the first place -- or more properly, letting Dick Cheney choose himself? In the literary biz, we call that foreshadowing ... but in the history biz they will almost certainly call it the beginning of the end for a president who undercut American stature like no other, compromised our historic values and at times, seemed like he could barely speak English.

Not only does he get my nod for loser of the decade in the United States, he takes the international crown as well. All hail George W. Bush. Thanks to his bumbling in the highest office in the land, he also achieved the rarest form of comic apotheosis: He became the punch line that didn't even need a joke. Sadly, for us all, it will always hurt when we laugh.

Al Gore and the American People: There are losers and then there are those who lost.  For the remainder of our lives we will always wonder what might have been. Seldom have there been forks in the road of history as clear as the 2000 U.S. presidential elections. The difference between the two candidates was as thin as the sheet of paper on which the politically stacked Supreme Court reached its compromised decision. In retrospect, it is ever more clear that the election was stolen and America, and countless victims worldwide, were sent hurtling toward a destiny that we and they did not deserve. Gore later would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work battling climate change and has handled the defeat and its aftermath with a grace that would warrant the prize had he done nothing at all. But we cannot help but think how much more we would have done by now to combat climate change had he been in office, how much stronger our relations would be with the world, how many innocents killed by our wars in the Middle East would still be alive. It is the decade's defining political defeat.

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