Obama: Off Message and Loving It!

Message to Barack "Why is this fool smiling?" Obama: Lighten up, Dude! If you don't take it easy on that old man, he's going to hand you a slice of your own tongue quicker than a Benihana.

Analysis: John McCain is a provocateur and a counter-puncher, and if you get into a debate with him, he'll get interested, start to engage and finally clean your clock. It doesn't matter who's right or wrong. It matters who's standing last.

Conclusion: Get with the program, immortalize McCain like the authentic war memorial he is (but it's the wrong war, remember? Vietnam? The old dude remembers Vietnam??), and let the pigeons poop on him. From now to Labor Day, all you talk about is how Republicans tanked the economy better than Herbert Hoover.

You can also make the argument that the Administration has deliberately been hiding war inflation (cf. Sun Tsu, On War) behind a dollar that's grown progressively weaker since 9/11. It's a neat trick, and it's only obvious in hindsight, and I haven't got a clue how they did it. Maybe Bernanke and the Fed? But war inflation is now affecting consumers and has broken out like wildfire. We might see third-world inflation levels by October, say, 30 percent.

And that means the war is over. George W. Bush has given us the spectre of the German Reichsmark of 1945. The war in Iraq can no longer be sustained, and U.S. war policy will now be driven by economic disasters brought home to roost.

Oh, wait...! That was David X Letterman talking about $30 bucks a gallon gas... Never mind.