In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt met secretly with Winston Churchill off the rugged Newfoundland coast. The two fabled leaders took an immense risk in waters lousy with U-Boats, but therein charted the course of World War II and its European aftermath. Bush’s stealth Thanksgiving performance carried none of the gravitas of his predecessor’s exploits – why only hours after he slinked away on Air Force One, Hillary Clinton sauntered into downtown Baghdad under the cover of broad daylight. On the ground for a scant 2 1/2 hours, Bush told a surprised gathering of 600 soldiers, “America stands behind you.” And he was half right. According to the latest CNN-Gallup poll, only 48% of citizens support the President’s war.

As military personnel are killed daily, the President took pains to clarify a mission that has become an amorphous series of failures. He reminded members of the 82nd Airborne and 1st Armored Divisions that they were helping to establish democracy in the Mid-East and told them that, “You’re defeating the terrorists here in Iraq so we don’t have to face them in our own country.” As I see it, this is a flawed strategy. The way the Army is getting kicked around over there, I’d rather take them on in Cincinnati. Adding up all the fighter escorts, chestnut dressing and extra secret service, W’s turkey dinner cost us $43 million. And the question begs: Does democracy warrant such profligacy? Five states, including battleground Michigan, think not as they have scrapped their 2004 presidential primaries due to budget constraints. Three more states are poised to follow.

The rest of the Bush clan was busy over the holidays as well. The First Lady was hosting her in-laws in Crawford while brother Neil was finalizing a messy divorce. Neil Bush disclosed in a deposition that he was being paid $2 million by a Chinese semiconductor company for doing little more than having sex with young Asian women. Attorney Marshall Brown challenged Bush, “You have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors do you?” “That’s correct,” came the reply. “And you have absolutely over the last 10, 15, 20 years not a lot of demonstrable business experience that that would bring about a company investing $2 million in you?” Bush then seized the offensive and said that he’d been working in Asia for years and that he had spent more nights in the Lincoln bedroom than Johnny Chung. He further cited his success in defrauding Silverado Savings and Loan, which cost taxpayers $1 billion and garnered him only 40 hours of community service. “And all those hookers in Thailand and Hong Kong,” boasted Bush, “I never paid for any of ‘em.”

The economy, for its part, seems to be booming. First time unemployment claims hit a three-year low, while incomes grew and consumer confidence spiked to a reading of 91.7. In the corporate sector, a 5.7% increase in advertising spending and a 14% hike in business investment couldn’t restrain a 10 1/2 % rise in after-tax profits. All this conspired to expand GDP by 8.2% in the third quarter – the sharpest gain in nearly 20 years. In response, domestic money managers and mutual fund patsies are pushing the NASDAQ towards 2000 and are taking the Dow achingly close to 10,000. Why then is gold trading smartly above $400 an ounce while the dollar continues to make new lows against the euro? Yes, the euro, currency of striking diplomats and massive federal deficits. Perhaps the rest of the world doesn’t believe the joyous economic news coming out of Washington. Perhaps a sagging dollar will lead to higher interest rates and put a fork in our recovery. Perhaps those stories of Iraqi WMD and uranium caches will cost us more than a soldier a day. Perhaps.

Donald Rumsfeld insists that Iraq is not another Vietnam. And he’s right… it’s much worse. It took four years to rack up 397 active duty deaths in ‘Nam. Bush has done it in just seven months. In 1965, combat troop levels stood at 130,000, the same number on the ground in Iraq today. So the comparisons, unlike this Presidency, are legitimate. While students are yet to be gunned down at Kent State, Americans are beginning to sour on the war. Polls show that George Bush’s popularity is dwindling rapidly and when an Italian Provisional Authority official resigned after 19 of his countrymen were blown to smithereens, the President, shaken and distraught, fled to London.

Buckingham Palace, sadly, provided no refuge: During his first night, W. was repeatedly taken as one of Paul Burrell’s male prostitutes. The next morning he awoke amid the greatest security scandal in the history of the empire when news broke that a Daily Mirror reporter had infiltrated the royal staff. Ryan Parry said palace security was so lax that his bags were rarely checked and that he had been shown “the secret hiding places for keys” which gave him “access to every member of the royal family.” In a 15 page exposé which hit newsstands as the President was soiling his ER-II bathmats, Parry wrote, “ Had I been a terrorist intent on assassinating the queen or American President George Bush, I could have done so with absolute ease.” The president’s downward spiral continued when tens of thousands of anti-American protesters filled the streets and reports filtered in from Istanbul where twin bombings against British targets killed more than two dozen people, including Consul-General Roger Short. During a joint appearance with Tony Blair who vowed not to retreat “one inch” from terrorism, Bush pointed at the Prime Minister and said of the war, “It was all his idea.”

Actually, according to Newsweek’s cover story, it was all Dick Cheney’s idea. It was Cheney, apparently, who exaggerated Saddam’s nuclear capability and embellished sketchy reports linking Muhammad Atta to Iraqi Intelligence. It was Cheney who promoted international fugitive Ahmad Chalabi as some kind of Iraqi George Washington. Well, now the pressure is on and if the Vice President wants to remain part of the Republican ticket, he needs to come up with some Weapons of Mass Destruction, and soon. This explains recent special ops forays into the Bekka Valley and Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Yet the question begs: Why would the Vice President be so hell-bent on orchestrating a regime change?

Perhaps that $4 billion asbestos settlement is still stuck in his craw. In an effort to make amends, the administration handed juicy no-bid reconstruction contracts to Halliburton. With this largesse in hand, Dick Cheney’s oil company reported a third quarter profit of $58 million. Halliburton’s latest results were indeed goosed by government payments for work in Iraq, including a hefty bonus for price gouging imported gasoline. The Army Corps of Engineers is paying Halliburton $2.65 a gallon for the same Kuwaiti petrol that the Iraqis bring in for 97 cents. And if that weren’t enough, the nitwits at the Pentagon are only charging 15 cents at the pump. Well, you can imagine where our $87 billion dollars is going. Certainly not for high-powered military equipment as the third helicopter in as many weeks was brought down by a street gang armed with nothing but rocks and a book of matches. We seem to lose personnel daily and things have gotten so bad that some politicians want to pull out the Army and redeploy the Marines.

They might be better served by sending over a platoon of lawyers. Where Halliburton reamed the U.S. Army, a Houston litigator made the firm his bitch, taking $70 million out of corporate coffers during a contract dispute. And what soldier measures up to Gerry Curry, an attorney who sustained six shots at point blank range outside a Los Angeles courthouse? Despite being struck in the neck and upper body, Curry walked away from the scene and even managed to bill his assailant for half an hour’s work. Let the Iraqis try to deal with that.

In the course of his rampage through Europe, Napoleon observed that history is but a set of lies agreed upon. General Bonaparte, possessed of great intellect and having ravaged civilizations both old and ancient, spoke with great authority and so it’s especially regrettable that Les Moonves over at CBS never got the memo. All across the dial, conservative talk show hosts are grousing that the fraudulence delivered in the two-part miniseries “The Reagans” does not conform to their consecrated set of fabrications. After Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie angrily protested the eye network’s portrayal of Ronald Reagan, the Media Research Center called for an advertising boycott. In a letter to potential sponsors, center President Brent Bozell accused the producers of “deliberately defaming” the Gipper by unleashing “a blatantly unfair assault on the legacy of one of America’s greatest leaders.”

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, outraged by such a willful distortion of the facts, accused the screenwriters of plagiarism. “This could,” she mused, “be the beginning of a perilous drift in which fact and fiction are wantonly juxtaposed. Imagine Dan Rather telling you that Hustler magazine has nude photos of Jessica Lynch or that Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have polio.”

The saga thickened as the media whipped itself into a self-important frenzy. The public helplessly watched as Truth and Fairness were set against the First Amendment in what can only be described as a high-class cockfight. Pressure steadily mounted until Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone’s Depends could no longer restrain the violent offerings of oatmeal and stewed prunes. (Note to self: Don’t follow Viacom honcho into Wal-Mart men’s room.) Redstone finally caved and cancelled the show – well, moved it from CBS to Showtime, which is essentially the same thing. I mean how many times have you watched “Dead Like Me,” or “Odyssey 5?”

With the impending purchase of one-third of DirecTV, News Corp. satellites will finally cover the globe, solidifying their role as the HMS Victory of the media sea. The company sees itself as omnipotent, so it came as a great affront then when U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said Fox’s case against comedian Al Franken was “wholly without merit.” Further injury was inflicted when Franken’s right-gouging book zoomed to the topped of the best-seller list. Upon learning that the words “fair” and “balanced” would stay in the public domain, Rupert Murdoch became only more determined dispatch his lawyers like a squadron of flying monkeys. Sadly, no suitable victim crossed his bow and Rupert was left with only one course of action: Master and Commander would sue himself.

Fox News went after their entertainment division for running a news crawl on “The Simpsons” which spoofed Murdoch’s conservative bias by asking, for example, if Democrats caused cancer. After realizing that Fox was remunerating attorneys on both sides of the docket, the case was settled with the stipulation that producers are hereby banned from running ticker tape across the bottom of cartoons because viewers might mistake them for real newscasts. What! Cartoons aren’t real? I guess Dennis Kozlowski won’t have Krusty the Clown at his birthday party after all.

When Donald Rumsfeld was dethroned as King of Iraq, he did not go quietly into the night. Only months ago the Secretary of Defense was brushing aside the media’s nettlesome concerns and predicting a reduction in troop levels. Now his tune has changed. While surrendering his scepter and crown, the erstwhile optimist remonstrated that the war is only getting started and that we are “in for a long, hard slog.” Our clumsy efforts in the Mid-East, he posited, are creating terrorists faster than we can kill them. The highly respected International Institute for Strategic Studies quickly validated Rumsfeld’s newfound realism, noting Washington’s assessment was “over-confident” and that our presence in Iraq has “inflamed radical passions among Muslims and thus increased al Qaedas’s recruiting power.” For all his vindictiveness, Rummy somehow dodged the wretched hand of fate. Condoleezza Rice had barely taken over as Iraqi overlord when the occupation’s worst spate of violence tore through Baghdad. The day after a coordinated rocket attack on the Al Rasheed Hotel killed 18 people, a series of car bombings at the offices of the Red Cross and several Iraqi police stations claimed 35 additional victims.

Unable to protest this regime change over the airwaves, Rush Limbaugh commandeered the rec room at the methadone clinic. His angry-white-guy act barely roused the half-comatose dope fiends folded into the creases of the vinyl sofa; no bloodshot eyes trained on his bulging veins as he decried Rumsfeld’s demotion in favor of a black woman. I’m sure Rush fell mute and slumped away from the community TV when Condi Rice announced on Oprah that her first order of business is dispatching the Queer Eye cast to Baghdad where Paul Bremmer’s hideous combination of dark suits and tan work boots just screams for a makeover. Executives at NBC confirmed an Iraqi episode would begin filming as soon as the Fab Five finish cleaning out Katelyn Faber’s underwear drawer.

Gray Davis is busy cleaning out his closet as well. And though Arnold’s dumbbells remain unpacked, a second recall may be festering given California’s progressive decay. A devastating array of wildfires has consumed 725,000 acres and has reduced 2,600 homes to windrows of ash. To date, the toll is twenty deaths and $2 billion in damages. As parting smoke gives way to flinty sunrise, hazy shadows fall across a landscape of turmoil and ruin. Surrounded by a ring of charred mountains, L.A.’s transit strike pumps an additional half a million commuters onto clogged freeways, transforming a jaunt to the corner store into a weekend project. Fresh from their drive, shoppers are affronted by surly butchers and hostile checkout clerks. The 70,000 grocery workers picketing 850 supermarkets are making cheese doodles harder to find than Osama Bin Laden. And if what your wife makes for dinner is reservations, consider the 33 cases of E. Coli poisoning served up at Pat and Oscar’s restaurants. You should probably stay inside anyhow, given The Center for Disease Control identified California as the next epicenter of the deadly West Nile Virus.

Before you pack up the Volvo station wagon, consider this: While the other sunshine state has lower taxes, it’s not all orange juice and early-bird specials. In a case that has one brain-damaged person helping another, Florida Governor Jeb Bush shoved a feeding tube back down the throat of Terri Schiavo. The 39-year-old Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state since 1990 although it is less clear how long the Governor’s brain has been dead. After a decade of legal battles, Mark Schiavo finally won the right to allow his wife to die, although the court was overruled when the legislature hastily passed a law giving the state the right to subvert families’ health care decisions. This is merely the latest example (school prayer, partial-term abortion) of how the Republicans demonstrate their distain for government intervention. While legal experts find the new law unconstitutional, Terri’s parents remain grateful. “She drools on her own,” said her father as he refastened her plastic smock, “ so what’s to stop her from bolting upright and singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy?’” What indeed.

Is it any consolation to Rush Limbaugh that Donovan McNabb tossed an interception and completed only 9 of 23 passes for a trifling 64 yards against the hapless Giants? Probably not. The Eagles’ quarterback again proved feckless, but at least he was out on a field playing games. Limbaugh, for his part, never saw the light of day; his hours were consumed by endless 12-step meetings punctuated by quick breaks to slurp down plastic bowls of unsweetened Jello and supervised visits to the bathroom.

Truth be told, many of us are guilty of Monday morning quarterbacking, especially when we’ve frittered away our kid’s lunch money on a weekend of unproductive gambling. Inside the beltway, the stakes are being raised on who outed CIA operative Valerie Plame. The White House office pool has most staffers betting on one of three sources. The heavy favorite at 5:2 is political advisor Karl Rove who has a firm grip on Bush’s puppet strings. Dick Cheney’s sinister grimace places him a close second while the three spot is taken by National Security Council senior director Elliott Abrams. Abrams plead guilty of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings but resurfaced in Washington after being pardoned by Bush One. If it turns out Abrams is the culprit, being pardoned by Bush Two would make him the greatest long shot of all time.

A mere glance at your retirement account is reminder enough that the stock market is fraught with risk. Some analysts worry that the mania of the 90’s may be back, pushing the market to unduly elevated levels. Evidence of euphoria abounds as Moody’s raised their rating of Russian sovereign debt to investment grade despite two defaults in the last 12 years. Junk bonds have handily outperformed Treasuries this year while companies with the worst prospects have watched their stocks soar past more steady performers. Since the market bottom last October, the S&P 500 is up 30% while the more labile Nasdaq has jumped 70%. After such a big run, investors might be inclined to buy a little downside protection, especially if it was available dirt-cheap. But with such giddiness pervading Wall Street, the thought of insurance seems superfluous.

If I may digress: In 1972 a couple of eggheads came up with a model for pricing options. It was important enough work to land them, years later, a Nobel Prize. So pay attention. What this model tells us is that once all else is known, the two main drivers of an option’s price are time and volatility of its underlying asset. Unless you’re Einstein or Salvador Dali, the clock on your wall operates at a fixed rate and thus you are left, at any given moment, to focus on volatility. The CBOE Volatility Index currently reads 16.42, versus 39.69 a year ago and is at its lowest level since 1997. This means puts are a dime a dozen. But a put/call ratio of .64 (half of where it was a year ago) means that no one’s buying. Imagine your broker rock climbing without a rope.

Or driving his jeep through a crocodile-infested river, or cleaning a toilet bowl without gloves or any other ridiculous activity shown on television with the rejoinder, “ don’t try this at home.” As if anyone would be stupid enough to try. Well, apparently some people are. Given the Siegfried and Roy debacle I didn’t expect to read that a pet tiger attacked Antoine Yates in his Harlem apartment. I was dumbstruck by the fatal shooting spree in which two Tennessee boys said they were mimicking the video game “Grand Theft Auto III”. And after Demi Moore reduced Bruce Willis from a leading action star to a balding oddity I certainly didn’t foresee Ashton Kutcher risking his looks on matrimony. What surprised me the most, however, was the announcement that Willis will give away the bride during the Valentine’s Day ceremony. This serves to remind us all that in Hollywood you never lose your wife; you only lose your turn.