You can’t hug your children with nuclear arms, but can you still trout-slap your leaders?

I should be shaving some work off the rather pressing heap I've got at the moment, but in perhaps the most persuasive case for procrastination to come along in recent memory, if Dubya could feasibly start dropping nukes on Iran any day now, I don't want to have wasted any of my final, pre-World War III hours as a non-radioactive, tumorous mass of glow-in-the-dark pulp (OK, I arguably already glow in the dark, but still) working on work that was not absolutely imperative.

It started this weekend with this report by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker (which is required reading for everyone reading this, and it will be on the final exam) detailing the plans the Bush administration is apparently crafting for taking military action against Iran should that be necessary to keep it from gaining nuclear competence.

Though Bush is now trying to write the whole issue off as "wild speculation" (for Hersh is truly one to wantonly toss out baseless accusations with no testimony or documents to back them up–just look at the piss-poor job he did getting it right with Abu Ghraib and the military cover-ups of atrocities in Vietnam) and reassert his commitment to diplomacy with Iran while also claiming it cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, so therefore military action is still "on the table," this is utterly terrifying.

With Iraq, this cast of characters has already proven itself borderline delusional, if not downright psychotic. And even though new calls for cabinet member resignation seem to be popping up every other day (Defense Secretary Rumsfeld now has a third retired general calling for his letter), it's still precisely the same company of fools running the show, for whom admitting to and learning from mistakes is the utmost sign of weakness and basically amounts to fellating the ubiquitous and nefarious "tehr-rists."

So, yes, let's entertain dropping bunker-busting nukes to take out Iran's capabilities–and if we do that, it naturally and obviously follows that the Iranian people will be inspired to rise up and overthrow their government to save us the trouble. You know, just like the Iraqis welcomed us as liberators, but this time they'll thank us with democratic revolution instead of flowers and IEDs.

And the current U.S. political climate makes this all the more unnervingly plausible. (By the way, April 19 is spoken for in the unofficial Freak Typography Commencement of Bombing, Skyrocketing of Presidential Approval and Maintaining of Unaccountable GOP Monarchy through 2008 Pool: that's the anniversary of such spectacular disasters as the Oklahoma City bombing, the fiery end to the siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the start of my parents' marriage.) As Paul Kruguman noted today in his New York Times column:

And it's not just Mr. Bush's legacy that's at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.

I swear, if the world ends in nuclear holocaust before I get to wear each and every pair of my new spring shoes, I hope at least some cockroaches survive to, whilst gorging on Twinkies, go make lewd feeler-gestures at the White House.