Calling this Perfumed Prince from Versailles-on-the-Potomac - as my old friend David Hackworth used to call these scum - "General Betrayus" is exactly right.

The bastard betrayed his oath as a West Point Cadet: "A cadet will neither lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate among us those who do" - this obviously-now-quaint bit of "honor" nowadays being a career killer for those who desire high rank in the Imperial Wehrmacht - as well as his oath as an Officer to "defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."

General Petraeus is a "good general" the way Erwin Rommel was a "good general" - happy to support The Leader so long as he was winning.

Above the rank of Major, the American Military is mostly run by carreerist war criminals and has been for 43 years (at least) by my own experience as a participant in The Tonkin Gulf "Incident" - the lie that began the war in Vietnam. They're about as "honorable" in comparison with the Army that won the Second World War as Caesar's Legions were in comparison with those citizen legions who won the First and Second Punic Wars.

The truth is, the entire American lifestyle as created since 1945 is now unsustainable - economically as well as environmentally.

The suburban lifestyle created back when we had 55% of the world's gross economic product during the 20 years following World War II (while the rest of the world rebuilt the ruins), the "leave it to Beaver" world where dad had a job that paid enough for mom to stay home and take care of the 2.3 kids, is now the world where both parents work for 5% less than they made 10 years ago, where their unsustainable suburb is no longer an hour away from work and their job isn't just 40 hours a week. Their kids grow up as "latchkey children" because mom and dad arrive home after a2-3 hour commute on top of an 8+ hour day and fall asleep in front of the TV by 9pm,leaving the kids to their own devices (as they were between the time they left school and the time mom and dad steered the SUV into the driveway), and we wonder why there are gangs in suburbia? Not to mention the SUV - on top of being a prime contributor to global warming and a major cause of America's wars in the Middle East to control the resources to fill their tanks - now means the average suburban family has to decide whether to eat or fill the tank.

But of course sprawl will continue because it's every American's god-given right to be taken to the cleaners by developers and the whores they get elected to office to do their bidding, to live "the American way."

And it takes ten times the resources to provide the food value found in the burger that adds to your cholesterol and reduces your life, as it does to receive the same food value from vegan sources.

Like Mencken said, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

As someone who has watched Dianne Feinstein's career since she was first elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 - and who was part of the Democratic opposition to her in San Francisco in the early 1970s - Dianne Feinstein has never ever been a "liberal" Democrat. She was an ally of conservative Democrat Mayor Joe Alioto when she first ran for office and she has never changed her positions since. How she ever got this reputation for being "liberal" can only have been done by people who think all Democrats in San Francisco are raving liberals, which is not now nor has ever been the case (Pelosi is a centrist Democrat from San Francisco). Feinstein was actually on the way out politically, and would have been gone but for the assassination of George Moscone. As President of the Board of Supervisors that year, she became acting mayor, rose to the occasion, and was elected Mayor by campaigning on the grief over Moscone and with the full backing of the Alioto Machine.

The only people who are surprised by Dianne Feinstein are those who have never been to San Francisco and who buy the "liberal myth" of the place. She's exactly what she's always been, which is why the only time I ever voted for her was in 1969, when nobody knew.

She explained how the hotel seemed to parcel out jobs by race and ethnicity: Jamaican waiters, Austrian chefs, Hispanic housekeepers and grounds crew, Caucasian drivers for the horse-drawn carriages.

Nice of the Republicans to demonstrate so thoroughly the kind of world they'd like to impose on the rest of us. Further proof if proof was needed that my great-grand-uncle who worked for Harry Truman was right when he told me "the only 'good Republicans' are pushing up daisies."

And of course now there is a strike against GM over that non-existant contract.

Actually, if one reads the article here in Salon last weekend, about the Republican get-together at the Grand Hotel at Mackinac Island, where men must wear coats and ties, women can't wear slacks, the wait staff is all-black and the "front desk" staff all-white, while the main form of transportation is horse-drawn carriages, that's a description of the world our "leading Republican candidates" (all of whom found time on their busy schedules to show up and say "how great" it was) want to take us back to.

Today's Republican Party has nothing in common with the party my abolitionist great-great-great-grandfather helped found in Pennsylvania in 1856. He's spinning in his grave to see that the forces he would have called The Enemy hafe assumed control of the party over the past 40 years.

But it's good. Let them keep on contracting the membership back to all the small-brained losers who prove that white people are lower on the evolutionary scale than lemurs.