Sadly, the suit Mr Obama wove out of pretty campaign pledges is in tatters. Now the Nobel Committee, like a modern day Rumpelstiltskin, has spun him a new one of pure gold. But like the maiden in the story, he may not be able to deliver what's expected of him. He can convince the world to believe in him (at least the intellectuals); but can he convince his backers to forego their very lucrative occupation of that world? There's the rub.

Torture remains the absolute most important topic for discussion. It's fortunate that Glenn Greenwald covers it because his articles produce a great deal of commentary - which at least means the article is being read. As opposed to, say, Huffpo, where the many excellent articles on torture and detainee abuse garner barely a handful of comments. So it's a bit disappointing that the topic of comment etiquette has jammed up the current thread, so to speak. There does seem to be something of a clique among the commenters - which is fine as long as any attempt to sanitize the comment section doesn't automatically result in all the outsiders being left out in favor of this clique. Granted, the frequent commenters always have something worthwhile to say; but sometimes even the outsiders do too.

Those who find the prospect of Iran ever having a bomb so terrifying have never quite explained what their big fear is. We have all the nukes we'll ever need to defend ourselves; so do many European nations. The Israelis have all the nukes they're ever likely to need to defend themselves. So do the Indians and Pakistanis. If Iran gets a bomb, what's it going to do with it? An exploded bomb immediately loses 100% of its strategic value - and leaves the exploder open to retaliation in kind. Is it because "they're" so "crazy" they just might do it anyway? Sorry, but when you look around the world, and see the mess it's in, it isn't the Iranians who come to mind first.

Since the USA is bigger than Sodom and Gomorrah, let's say, instead of finding ten people who give a damn what's really going on, would it be possible to find a million? I don't mean a million who get all riled up over the latest headline; but a million who might actually attempt to piece things together to get a better idea of where this nation is headed. I can't, in my wildest dreams, imagine the existence of that many people able to comprehend how dangerous our obsession with 100% perfect safety 24/7 is. Can you imagine the people who say it's a good trade - civil liberties for absolute safety - refusing to start their cars of a morning to make the infinitely more perilous journey to work? The guy in the next lane yapping on his cell phone is a thousand times the threat of the most war-hardened terrorist. It's increasingly difficult to see this as anything but the kind of mass madness that sends a colony of lemmings over the cliff.

I would only add one thing. The Geneva Accords of 1954 called for national elections by 1956. The US of course refused to be bound by these Accords. Why? Because Ho Chi Minh was a national hero - the Vietnamese equivalent of George Washington - and would have won any national plebesite. He defeated the French. But, of course, he was a Communist. So that was the end of Vietnam's national election. By the way, for those who are busy re-writing history to make Vietnam into something the US had any business "winning" in the first place, what became of our primary reason for being there - you know: that Domino Theory? The Theory all our military strategists assured us was fool-proof? It fell by the wayside pretty quickly when nothing came of it, didn't it? It now sits at the bottom of that wastebin of history that its successor - The War on Terror - will eventually occupy as well. Yeah, the military always gets it right, eh?

Since the oligarchs Mr Brooks takes his marching orders from are out of control, how could their puppet not also be out of control? Our ruling class has passed the point of no return; not only can it no longer check its maniacal obsession with ruling the entire world, its even lost the capacity to hide that obsession from the public. It assumes that because "the Terrorists" have replaced the "Red Menace" as the ultimate bogeyman in their minds, the American people have fallen in line behind them. So when their mouthpieces stomp and cheer and give out the war whoop, the oligarchs imagine everyone else will stand up and follow suit. It would never occur to them in their euphoric state that the American people actually may not like being fooled a second time. That's why it's of no consequence to them that everything they had their toadies say seven years ago has been proven erroneous. It is, after all, one of the highlights of real, true madmen to imagine that everyone else thinks the same way they do.

Wall Street and Washington have become one and the same, so it's not quite accurate to say that Wall Street bought Washington. Think of Washington as Wall Street South. It's where they send their operatives to govern. Which, of course, makes "voting" as bizarre as it is meaningless. Voting is like donning your Sunday-Go-To-Meeting clothes only to find yourself at a wake.