Admiral Fallon resigns as any honest man, and an admirable soldier, because he realizes that the Cheney-neocon network is still at work. We are at best hoping for a holding action in Afghanistan, and the same in Iraq, yet the madmen of the administration believe they can still pull a rabbit out of their hat before next November.

Back in New York, a blackmailing bully who has studied Hollywood movies on how to act tough, drags his wife for support to a press conference where he announces his first priority is to regain their confidence. Whatever happened to manhood? Why did this pimp-like figure have to drag the wife along? When I was young I used prostitutes, so I’m no one to throw stones. But when I was busted, the last thing on my mind was to make excuses and, even worse, drag my poor wife into it. Spitzer is what Jonathan Swift described as “the most pernicious little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

And now to higher thoughts. Israel approves construction of 700 houses in the occupied West Bank. The Jerusalem attack must have been music to the ears of the extremist element of settlers, most of them American, incidentally. And it sure takes pressure off Elliot Abrams, Deputy National Security Adviser, and Poddy’s son-in-law, who was a prime mover in inciting a civil war between Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah militias. Abrams as an honest broker to a Middle East peace is equivelant to Adolph Eichmann acting for the Red Cross for Jewish refugees during World War II. And it gets worse. The administration has “encouraged” the great Saudi kleptocrats, in cahoots with the dictator Mubarak, to isolate Syria in boycotting the annual Arab summit. I see more Abrams-Poddy-Cheney machinations there. Lebanon was since time immemorial part of Syria. Of course Syria is prolonging the political vacuum in Lebanon through its support of Hezbollah. Why shouldn’t it? American warships are threatening Syria while cruising Lebanese waters. America is Israel to Syrians. And Saudi Arabia and Jordan are American-Israel lackeys to the Syrians. The Saudi head—I refuse to call him by the phoney title he goes under as his grandfather awarded it to himself—let’s call him the chief towelhead—hates Assad and wants to punish him. And Uncle Sam is helping this great crook have his way. If one superimposed the present Middle East to the American continent in 1776, Assad would be a Washington man, as, dare I say it, Bin Laden would. I better stop before I’m dragged in front of a court charged with sedition.