I eat alone in the desert, With skulls for my pets

Aw, crap. Sy Hersh, writing in The New Yorker, says that:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.

. . .Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

. . . Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

God dammit to Hell! I'm not going to ask any more what's wrong with GWBushCo and his advisors. Clearly they're hell-bent on attempting regime change and world domination, regardless of whether that's immoral or even feasible.

But what's wrong with the House & Senate Democratic leadership? As Feingold said just the other day, "It is a capitulation".

But it turns out that there is dissent within the administration. Hersh continues:

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.”

I'm not sure what that means, except that it may be Gates telling the Democrats to grow a pair, and stop his idiot boss and his bloodthirsty gang of advisers.

We'll see how that works out. I'm not optimistic. Meanwhile, read the whole article. It's 7 pretty depressing pages.