SUNDAY RAMBLINGS AND JOHN KERRY ON MTP

Just how crazy IS Bush? He's determined to settle the Iran problem before he leaves office. Oh goody, after all his success elsewhere in the world (read: Iraq, Afghanistan), he wants to export his preemptive war doctrine once again, and this time with nukes.

The most bizarre scenarios keep popping into my head these days. Like a reverse Seven Days In May, where the Joint Chiefs have to threaten a military mutiny because the president wants to nuke Iran.

Bill Clinton, dang it, if you'd kept it zipped Al Gore would be president and none of this would be happening.

Saw V for Vendetta last night. It was terrific, and I don't know what all the shouting is about. Actually, it was good comic book stuff, and the political comparisons to events of the future springing from events of today could have been done any time in the last fifty years. They're almost derivative from Orwell, and he died in 1950.

John Kerry is telling Tim Russert that the absence of diplomacy in the Iraq situation is negligent, it's shocking. He dismisses the efforts of Condi Rice and raises the ghosts of Henry Kissinger and shuttle diplomacy, of Jim Baker assembling the coalition for the first Gulf War. The absence of the president, of leadership, the absence of real diplomacy, is the key to this whole thing, he says. We need something like the Dayton Accords, where all the parties are gathered and a solution is hammered out.

Bush's rhetoric about Iran, he says, is more of the shoot-from-the-hip cowboy diplomacy that's gotten us in trouble in so many situations. Again, our diplomacy sucks.

Tim shows a clip of Alberto Gonzales testifying that the president can declassify information at will and determine who may see classified info at his own discretion. It's part of his "inherent powers." Kerry says, "I think it's time for the Attorney General to stand up and start protecting the Constitution of the United States of America and not the politics of this administration."

Kerry says he would vote to censure Bush.

Pretty good performance. He appears statesmanlike, speaks simply for him. I have a short plan, he said, tell the truth, fire the incompents, get out of Iraq, healthcare for all Americans...