THE LEAD OF SPITE

Anyone who doubts the reach of PNN need look no farther than Maureen Dowd's plagiarizing piece in the Saturday Dec. 2 NYTimes under the moniker, "What's In a Name Barry?" Maureen was 18 days too late on that story about Barrack Hussein Obama. PNN, in its Tues. November 14 article, "What's In A Name?," published Maureen's story 17 days before she wrote it, and 18 days before she published it.

It's like the old quip about the Fed's ability to predict the future: "The Fed predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions." In predicting 9 of the last 5 major setbacks in Iraq, PNN had gone a long way toward disputing the Yogi-ism that prediction is tricky, especially about the future. Without taking away anything from PNN's Godlike qualities, predicting the future of Bush escapades is like peeking through your fingers at a toddler tugging at the tablecloth.

When Maureen Dowd is tied to the tracks and coming around the bend is billowing black smoke and the rising Doppler woooo, woooo of the whistle, it doesn't take Uri Geller's mind-bending spoonerisms to foresee the columnist getting cut into thirds (fourths if you count her legs separately). Squaring the outcome, one can predict 9 of the 5 things that are going to happen to that poor plagiarizer.

Why square the outcome? How arbitrary, you say. Squaring is the essence of prediction. Squaring magically gives you two dimensional area. Squaring magically gives you unknowns, like the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And the grand prize, squaring gives you the reality of our universe: that mass and energy are somehow equivalent.

Energy does not equal Mass times the Speed of Light; that generous but limiting cosmic speed limit. You must square the speed of light. Far from intuitive, Einstein's genius was in discovering the predictive magic of that square. Peering around the corner of time, one can see a train wreck waiting to happen. Squaring makes under-performing data useful.

That all 9 dire predictions following the big bang in Iraq have coalesced into the 5 disasters most Americans have come to embrace (namely, loss of infrastructure, loss of civilian control, fractionating factions, sectarian genocide, and civil war) does not trade the truthiness of the square for the prime. The ugly American can more quickly count to 5 using fingers, and thus one's undivided attention can focus on the problem at hand.

Derailing Bush, to stay with the train metaphor, is something Democrats are showing little stomach for. Off in la-la land, Bush and company tell us they'll be no "graceful" exit under his command, and we have no reason to dispute this.

Congressman Henry Waxman would like to investigate not only the misadventures in Iraq, but the scandals of Katrina and Corruption as well, to see where it leads. Yet good Democrat Congressmen and women say Americans have had enough impeachment for one lifetime. And Nancy Pelosy thinks impeachment counter-productive.

Coinciding with its business hours, PNN predicts 9 to 5 that this reticence will prove to be a disastrous course in the course of human events. As Alfred Spooner once said of due diligence, "At The Speed of Light, take The Lead of Spite.

Those who don't predict the future, are condemned to repeat it. Ask Maureen Dowd.