Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was reading over the news wires and learned that Pierre Nkurunziza has just been elected President of Burundi.

As soon as he saw the headline he started smiling. By the end of the article he was chuckling to himself.

If you haven’t seen Eddie Izzard’s “Dress to Kill” comedy routine you will have no reason why.

Your Maximum Leader will commend “Dress to Kill” to you if you’ve not seen it. Well worth the cost of a DVD rental.

Carry on.
—–
EXTENDED ODY:

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is stunned. Just stunned. If your Maximum Leader were Andrew Sullivan he would be gobsmacked. (But lucky for you your Maximum Leader is not Andrew Sullivan or he would have hit you up for money to pay for all this expensive bandwidth…)

He was just reading over Brian’s blog and saw this update. Go and read it. Follow the link… Read the link…

Yup. Go understand that right… The poor people who lost the recent Kelo cases in front of the US Supreme Court are now being charged rent for living in their own houses during the appeal process.

Your Maximum Leader just doesn’t know how he should react. The red curtain of blood (as Kim Du Toit calls it) fell over his eyes. It has now lifted a little. All he can think of his what a heartless bunch of cruel bastards are running the city of New London, Connecticut.

Your Maximum Leader does believe that there is something you can do. You can go and visit the Institute for Justice and make a donation to their Castle Coalition project. Your Maximum Leader is a big believer in IJ. He was as shocked as they were that they lost the Kelo case. Now they are fighting eminent domain abuse around the country.

You can also write/e-mail all of your elected representatives (from city/county councilman all the way up to US Senator) and ask them to pass legislation that would nullify the Kelo decision in your state, county, or city.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader keeps poking around in Movable Type and learning new things about his blogging software. One of the little tidbits he’s started to look at is the activity log. From the activity log he’s learned that some Naked Villainy readers are perverts. A recent sampling of keywords entered by readers in the search feature on the right-side toolbar includes: “Tricia Helfer,” “Jaime Pressly,” “tits,” and “naked 80 year old.”

Your Maximum Leader understands the first three. But that last one sorta grosses him out a little.

For those of you who want perversion… Check out a few pics that your Maximum Leader has used before. Here. Here. And finally, here. He isn’t sure if he would classify them as NSFW. But seeing as your Maximum Leader has your best interests in his heart, you might as well forego clicking on them at work andwait until you get home…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader saw on the news wire that one Pieter DeHond has cut a personal ad in his cornfield.

Your Maximum Leader read this and thought of Smallholder. It must be the farming connection. Because the good Smallholder is happily married he doesn’t need to send a personal to anyone. Although if the Smallholder needed to do a personal he might use the personal-in-cornfield approach.

Except he doesn’t have a cornfield. Perhaps he would direct the grazing pattern of his small herd to spell out the appropirate letters…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was reading a news analysis peice today in the Washington Post. The general thrust of the article was one of how difficult it is for Democratic Senators in DC to satify the highly-motivated elements of their party in blocking the Roberts nomination. It appears as though liberal advocacy groups want a vigorous and strident opposition, while many Senators want to play it safe and low-key. You can read the bit yourself. Here it is.

It was actually the last paragraphs that struck a chord in your Maximum Leader. Here is the salient portion:

The divide between the Washington Democratic establishment and the party’s activists first manifested itself in 2002, when the activists angrily denounced congressional Democrats for refusing to make Bush’s tax cuts an issue in that year’s midterm campaigns.

Democratic leaders feared that a campaign to roll back Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans could hamper their efforts to win House seats in more rural or conservative districts. But activists saw it as a betrayal of the party’s traditional positions on fiscal responsibility and tax fairness.

The fissure became a chasm after the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to go to war against Iraq — supported by many congressional Democrats but opposed by many grass-roots activists. The disgust with what was seen as a submissive Washington-based leadership helped launch the presidential campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean and first signaled the growing strength of an Internet-based movement of activists who intended to make their voices heard in Washington.

Earlier this month, another quarrel broke out over the party’s tactics in a special House election in Ohio, in which Democrat Paul Hackett came within 5,000 votes of upsetting Republican Jean Schmidt in an overwhelmingly GOP district. Hackett enjoyed strong support from progressive bloggers, who helped him raise more than $400,000, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did not put money into the race until the final weekend. Some grass-roots activists complained bitterly that the DCCC had missed an opportunity to score a stunning upset.

The worlds of the bloggers and of the liberal advocacy groups are different, but both share concerns that the Washington-based leadership’s strategy may condemn Democrats to permanent minority status.

Much has been written about the impending doom, that is to say dissolution, of the Democratic Party since the 2004 elections. Frankly, much has been written about the impending doom, that is to say dissolution, of the Republican Party over the same course of time.

The problem here is that the articles all focus on the hard-core activists and their views vis a vis the elected leaders and DC party staff. The views of activists and politicians will never be aligned. The activists are true believers. For them one can never be too vocal, too strident, or too impassioned. For a politician you must always avoid being too vocal, too strident, and too impassioned. Activists can rarely get elected, and politicians hope not to offend. They are naturally at conflict. Activists want to pick every fight, politicians understand power better and how you have to pick your fights.

If one steps back one can see the interconnectedness of the two groups. Activists need politicians to advance even a meagre part of their agenda. Politicians need activists to spread the word. If the activists get frustrated and decided to stop helping politicians what happens? The agenda goes no where. What choice do the activists have? Where do they have to go? This is America. Given how our electoral system works there really isn’t anywhere to go. If we had some sort of parliamentary system where every party was entitled to representation based on the percentage of vote they recieved the situation would be different.

There is no coming crack up in either the Democratic or Republican party. What we are seeing is a reorganization of how the parties have to interact with their activist cores. They haven’t yet worked out the new relationship between those “in” pwer and those who fight for “the cause.” They are working on it. But they aren’t there yet.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has found some new eye-candy. Yes indeedey! He’s seen those Dove Ads. He’s seen them on TV. He’s seen the billboards and lit up advertising kiosks in the mall. The women in the new Dove advertising campaign are dead sexy.

What? You haven’t seen them. Well check them out on their website: Campaign for real beauty.

Well. It seems as though the arbitors of taste and style at the Chicago Sun Times are claiming that this Campaign “challenges” viewers. It makes some people “uncomfortable.”

Who exactly are these people who are challenged and uncomfortable? Are they supermodels who fear that they will become obsolete?

Damn. The women in this campaign are beautiful. As others have said, they’re hot. That is in no small part because they are physically attractive AND comfortable with who they are.

One can only hope that more companies will start using normal women in advertising.

Your Maximum Leader thanks the following bloggers for their links on this story: Tea Fizz, Bad Example, Lynn, and Pound.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is not the type of person who sees a doctor for every little ache, pain, or sniffle he gets. Frankly, none of his immediate family are that type. In a way, people who do see a doctor for every single little ache, pain, or sniffle they get annoy your Maximum Leader. They annoy him for a number of reasons.

Allow him to ennumerate them.

First, if you happen to have health insurance through some group (like your employer) those are the people that drive up the group rates. If you’ve never thought of it your Maximum Leader is here to make you think of it. Organizations are charged their premiums based, in part, on usage. More usage means higher premiums. Many organizations do a 60/40 split of health care premiums. (Meaning the organization pays 60% of the premium, the insured person(s) pay 40%.) That added chunk of your income that goes to health insurance every year if you are part of a group plan is dramatically affected by others in your group going to the doctor. Your Maximum Leader was once very familiar with an organization that had one health plan for the whole organizatin - except one branch office. That one branch office had a separate plan. Why? Because the one branch office, before it was split off, accounted for 25% of annual spending on healthcare across the whole company. Crazy…

Anyhow…

The second reason is that many people who visit the doctor for every single ache, pain, and sniffle they get are ignorant of basic medical facts and thus insist on receiving a precription for SOMETHING before they go. Now most Doctors are sensible and will refuse silly requests. But there are plenty of doctors who are, in some ways, just as ignorant as their patients and thus WILL prescribe SOMETHING to someone who needs NOTHING.

You see, much of what ails us is viral. Viral things, as they are not bacterial things, are not treated by antibiotics. But when people suffering from viral things are given antibiotics the result is often times bateria growing stronger and resisting antibiotics. Frankly, when you are suffering from some bacterial ailment and do not complete the prescribed regimen of antibiotics you are likely contributing to the problem of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.

Thus we come to the issue of streptococcus suis. Streptococcus suis is a pig-borne bacteria. Under normal conditions it can be killed by penicillin. Of course, under normal conditions you would only find this strep strain in pigs.

That is unless you happen to find the streptococcus suis in Asia. In which case you now find streptococcus suis has mutated, jumped over to people; and now rather than being treatable by penicillin, it laughs at your puny antibiotics and kills you.

Of all the things in this world that your Maximum Leader thinks have the potential to do in most (if not all) of humanity the killer bacteria is the one that both scares and annoys him most.

It scares him because with every stupidly prescribed antibiotic given to a complete waste of DNA is a little baby step towards the mutated bacteria that will one day kill the masses of humanity that don’t have near-perfect immune systems.

Your Maximum Leader had a great-Aunt who died in the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. He knows this because his grandmother told him that her sister died of influenza on Christmas Day 1918. (And thereafter, Christmas Day was never celebrated by her family.) The potential for a pandemic many times worse than the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 grows greater with each passing day. In 1918 the mortality rate from influenza was 2.5%. Check out that mortality rate from the pig article. You read that correctly 20%.

Let’s see. The population of the world is roughly what? 6 billion people. 20% of 6 billion is roughly 1.2 billion people. The population of the United States is roughly 300 million people. Humm.. That is an unsettling prospect.

(Excursus: Your Maximum Leader started adding the populations of all of the countries in North America together to see how close he would come to 1.2 billion. Let us just say he started working on South America to get his number…)

The fact that this pandemic could be coming annoys your Maximum Leader because in so many ways it is completely avoidable.

But hey… If the pandemic comes and kills at least 20% of humanity think of how it will help the environment…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader can hardly imagine the fun they will be having down in the heat outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford. Surely you’ve heard? Now Cindy Sheehan will be joined by FBI-wistleblower (and Congressional Candidate) Colleen Rowley.

Also joining the party is Minnesota State Senator Becky Lourey, who’s son Matt was killed in Iraq.

The fun in the Texas sun should make the news! Maybe the Sheehan/Rowley party-cum-protest will be so loud it will make the neighbours want to shoot off their guns…

Now your Maximum Leader has nothing against Colleen Rowley or Senator Lourey, but he must ask (if only rhetorically) why? Does Ms. Rowley think that the exposure will help her in her race for Congress? Does Ms. Lourey think that the exposure will help her in her race for Governor? Why exactly would standing at the side of a woman who seems to be so grief-stricken that her rational faculties have left her be a good campaign move? It would seem to your Maximum Leader like cheap political opportunism.

It didn’t work for Max Cleland, he doubts it will work for Rowley and Lourey.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader received an e-mail asking how his weekend away with Mrs. Villain went. It went very well thank you. We stayed at the Willard Hotel, had dinner Saturday at Galileo, and had brunch Sunday at Georgia Browns.

Dedicated readers of this space will remember that this was not the first time your Maximum Leader and Mrs. Villain have visited these two fine (indeed among the finest) Washington area eateries.

At Galileo your Maximum Leader decided to go with a chef’s tasting menu. But rather than getting celebrity chef Roberto Donna’s tasting menu he went with Executive Chef Amy Brandwein’s tasting menu.

Here is the breakdown of your Maximum Leader’s meal:

Marinated and Grilled Baby Octopus served with Grilled Baby White Eggplant and Tomato.
Fettucine tossed with Chiodinni Mushrooms and Fava Beans.
Handmade Cappellacci filled wtih Crabmeat served with Yello Tomato Sauce and Peas.
Risotto with Red Beets and Scallop.
Sauteed Filet of Black Sea Bass served with Braised Belgian Endive and Garlic Sauce.
Roasted Rack of Lamb served with Potato Puree. Hen of the Woods Mushrooms and an Orange Anise Sauce.

He did finish off the meal with a canoli.

Mrs. Villain got a “do-it-yourself” tasting menu. Her courses were:

Sauteed Scallops wrapped in bacon and served with a Ragu of Cherry Tomatoes, Pattypany Squash, Chiceri Beans and Asparagus in White Wine Clam Broth.
Half-moon shaped pasta stuffed with Mozzarella and Tomato served with Basil Cream sauce.
Gilled Filet of Austrailian Free-range Beef served with Tomato puree, Sauteed Chantrelle Mushrooms and Black Truffle Sauce.

She finished things off with a Sorbet sampler.

Of all the dishes consumed, the best one - by far - was the Red Beet and Scallop Risotto. Your Maximum Leader could have eaten so much more of it. He is salivating just thinking of it…

So while his dinner (and brunch the next morning) were excellent, he does have one bad food thought to share…

In the area where your Maximum Leader grew up there is a bakery. It has been there for as long as he can remember. One of the baked delicacies from this bakery is their chocolate eclair. Your Maximum Leader could (and has) bought and subsequently consumed many dozens of these eclairs over his lifetime. They had the perfect pastry crust. Firm enough to keep in the rich egg custard filling, yet light enough not to feel like you were eating crusty pastry. They were topped with a generous swath of milk chocolate. These eclairs were the greatest. Your Maximum Leader has been known to drive miles out of his way to get eclairs - since he doesn’t live in the area any more.

On the way back home from his weekend getaway, your Maximum Leader and Mrs. Villain stopped at the bakery to get 6 eclairs to take back to the Villainschloss…

Later that evening, after dinner, your Maximum Leader opened (with great anticipation and glee) the box containing the eclairs.

And they had changed…

They were covered with dark chocolate frosting and white icing; not the luscious milk chocolate as they had for the past 20 odd years. He bit into one. The pastry was thick, somewhat brittle, and very very dry. It almost crunched as he ate it.

Then the last dagger into your Maximum Leader’s heart was the custard. It was no longer the thick egg-y custard that he craved. It was a thin vanilla creme.

The eclair was ruined. Your Maximum Leader nearly wept of a broken heart. His favourite pastries in the world had changed. Changed after 20 years. He is still getting choked up thinking about it.

So… While he will give the Willard, Galileo, and Georgia Browns an A+ for his weekend getaway, the weekend ended on a sad note. The eclairs of youth are passed. Long live the eclair!

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, as you know, is want to peruse the new wires. Well today he found a profile of a young man who, to improve his web development skills, decided to create a searchable compendium of official North Korean press articles. The site, nk-news.net, is great. Webdesigner/webmaster/imperialist stooge, Geoff Davis has done a great job.

Your Maximum Leader is particularly impressed with the random insult generator. With just a few clicks of his mouse your Maximum Leader was called the following: “You extra-large bloodsucker!” and “You black-hearted political dwarf, your ridiculous clamour for ‘human rights’ is nothing but a shrill cry!”

That bit about being a black-hearted dwarf hurt…

Anyhow… Go and visit the site. Alas there are very few practioners of the fine art of Stalinist Propaganda Writing left in the world. You might as well get this one while the getting is good.

Geoff Davis, your Maximum Leader doffs his bejeweled floppy cap in your direction.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is wearing his black armband today. Yes, he is in mourning.

Mourning for “E” that is.

Yes, on this day in 1977 the Lord took his servant Elvis Aron Presley from us. Your Maximum Leader wishes he could be in Memphis, among the faithful, for the celebration of Elvis Week.

Take a moment out of your day to remember the King.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader asks you, “Have you a blog?” Then he clairifies his question, “Have you an old ugly blog in need of a facelift and back-end upgrade?”

Well if you do has your Maximum Leader got a recommendation for you…

Apothegm Designs.

Yeah baby. Apothegm Designs. They rock. Or for the classically trained amongst you, Si momentum requiris, circumspice. Look at how cool Naked Villainy is! Your site could look this cool (even if there isn’t a chance tht you could actually be as cool as your Maximum Leader…).

Have you seen the Llama Butchers site? Apothegm.

Fiesty’s site? Apothegm.

Confederate Yankee? Apothegm.

Seven Inches of Sense? Yup. You guessed it. Apothegm.

If you have a blog and think it needs a face-lift (blog-lift if you will), give Phin and Sadie at Apothegm Designs a call.

And by call he means send them an e-mail. Don’t really call them. They like e-mail better…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads on the news wires that Cindy Sheehan’s husband is filing for divorce.

You know… Your Maximum Leader doesn’t blame him. If your Maximum Leader were married to Cindy Sheehan he’d divorce her too. Well… Actually… Your Maximum Leader doesn’t believe in divorce. He believes in living together and making your spouse’s life miserable… He is old fashioned like that.

But back to Cindy Sheehan…

At first, that is to say a few weeks ago - or whenever we started hearing about her protest, your Maximum Leader had some feelings of sympathy for Ms. Sheehan. He can’t imagine the pain of losing your child. His heart went out to her. He didn’t feel that gave her the right to meet with the President again, but he was sympathetic.

Now he wishes a great dark hole would open in the earth and Cindy Sheehan would fall into it.

Why is she still news? Your Maximum Leader saw no fewer than 4 programs over the weekend all detailing Ms. Sheehan’s connection to various anti-war groups. Indeed the general consensus of reporters and pundits alike seemed to be, “Yeah, Cindy Sheehan is a partisan hack. But it is a slow news cycle.”

So because we are in a slow news cycle we are subjected to the daily Sheehan update. Somehow your Maximum Leader feels his knowledge of the American political landscape is not enhanced by knowing that Cindy Sheehan spent another day in the 100+ degree heat outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford.

Now it seems that Cindy Sheehan’s husband has had enough. Your MaximumLeader read that Sheehan’s other son, while supporting her anti-war stance, begged her to come home and be with her family.

What the hell is wrong with Cindy Sheehan? Your Maximum Leader is fully supportive of her right to protest outside of the President’s ranch (provided she is not encroaching on the property rights of the President or others). Your Maximum Leader, while disagreeing with Ms. Sheehan’s views on the war, is all in favour of petitioning to meet the President. But outside of her rights as a citizen to protest your Maximum Leader wonders what is wrong with Cindy Sheehan? She seems so focused on a cause that she will sacrifice the remaining members of her family to the cause. But what is worse than that is that she will lose her husband, and possibly alienate her children, for something that will not bring back her dead son.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Cindy Sheehan gets to meet with President Bush what will happen then? Does she honestly think there will be cameras present if they do meet? Not a chance. Does she really think that anything she will say will change the policy of the President? Not a chance. So, for the sake of argument, Cindy Sheehan and George W. Bush spend a few minutes together in Crawford. Then what?

Cindy Sheehan goes on a number of news programs saying how she told the President that the war was wrong and that the US needs to stop backing Israel. Then she goes home. She goes home to discover she no longer has a husband. She may no longer have a good relationship with her children. She may no longer have a home. Her son is still dead. Her nation is still at war. And aside from a few moments of celebrity she has accomplished nothing.

It is pityable actually. Your Maximum Leader hopes she fades into obscurity soon.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has read in newspapers and seen various pundits on TV make much hay out of the revelation that President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge John Roberts, is a “good Catholic.”

The fact that Judge Roberts appears to be a member of the Roman Catholic faith (in good standing) seems to upset many on the political left. They say that Judge Robert’s personal faith may sway his judgement on issues that come before the court. Most notably left-wing pundits say that Roberts the Catholic would definately vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Now leaving aside the fact that “Catholics” like Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass) or former Governor Mario Cuomo (D-NY) (for example) never seemed to be questioned about how their faith might have affected their thoughts on the abortion issue; it seems as though being a Catholic is now a litmus test for pproval from the left.

This is very curious. Because as your Maximum Leader sees it, other than the abortion issue Roman Catholic theology is often aligned with political programs favoured by those on the left. Concepts of “social justice” and faith-based principles that lead to socialism and wealth distribution in practice have long been in alignment with Roman Catholic theology.

Which would you rather have? Abortion or Welfare? That seems to be an unasked question in the on-going punditry over the Roberts nomination. Those on the left, it seems, would rather object to Judge Roberts on the basis that a good Catholic wouldn’t support abortion; than possibly win the panoply of other issues that Judge Robert’s faith should hold sway over.

Frankly, those on the right appear to want to overturn Roe v. Wade more than limit some of the New Deal/War on Poverty programs to which they (purported) object.

This whole discussion of Robert’s religion seems oddly out of place. First off, groups that should be supporting him (if they knew anything about his faith) are objecting to him. Secondly, if he was a Protestant would this discussion be ongoing? Doubtful. Is Roman Catholicism still the boogey-man religion of the 19th Century? It seems as though if someone is Catholic it is assumed that their faith is somehow more important to them than if they were Presbyterian or Episcopalian.

Perhaps we should hope that our Senators will elevate their discussion above the level of religiously motivated sniping.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been watching with some interest the articles about the Israeli removal jewish settlers in Gaza. Allow him to say, upfront, that this move causes mixed emotions in his mind.

On the one hand, he does not (by any stretch of the imagination) believe that the Palestinian Arabs are competent enough to run their “state.” Furthermore, he does not believe that they are able to, or interested in, providing a peaceful border between Israel and their state. So from this perspective he doesn’t think that Israel is doing itself a favour by moving the settlers and closing the settlements.

On the other hand, he realizes that there are very few settlers in question here. And the cost (in blood and treasure - so to speak) to keep the settlers safe is very high. So high in fact that over the long-term those settlements might be untenable.

In the end, your Maximum Leader believes that the closure of the Gaza settlements is a required good-faith move on the part of the Sharon government. One that he hopes the Sharon government is willing to undo if the situation demands it.

Allow your Maximum Leader to explain.

For decades now the Israelis have been slowly pulling back from areas they conquered during the various wars of survival in which they had to fight. Now allow him to say that your Maximum Leader is all in favour of the “right of conquest” insofar as land is concerned. If you attack me and in the course of defending myself I happen to wind up in control of land that was formerly yours - well too bad. It is mine now. (Excursus: Henry II has that wonderful line in “The Lion In Winter” about a small French county in his discussions with King Phillip of France. Phillip demands the county - the Vexin - be returned. Henry refuses and says the county is his. Phillip asks by what right and Henry responds, “It’s got my troops all over it. That makes it mine.”)

On the balance, your Maximum Leader believes that these land for peace swaps started off reasonably well for Israel. He thinks that exchanging the Sinai for Egyptian recognition of Israel (and the consequent stable relationhip between the two nations) was a good one. But the withdrawl from southern Lebanon hasn’t enhanced Israeli security. And the withdrawl and allowance of “self-governance” to areas of the West Bank and Gaza haven’t gone nearly as well for Israel.

That said, your Maximum Leader believes that much of the fault for the West Bank and Gaza not working out up to this point lay on the (rotting) shoulders of Yasir Arafat. With Arafat gone it seems sensible to do something to give his successor a chance to prove himself. Looking at is available as a “give” to Abu Maizen it makes sense to “give” the Gaza settlements.

This “give” is not without pain for Sharon and the Israelis. The settlers in question have fought for their existance every day. The settlers turned a waste-land into productive farmland (in most cases). Many settler families have lived in Gaza for going on 30 years. Moving them is painful for everyone involved. But in the interests of fostering a relationship that might bear fruit, you have to give something. By making the first move (and not forcing the Palestinians to do so) shows just how serious the Israelis are.

But if the forced removal of the settlers doesn’t bear fruit in the form of a more peaceful relationship with the Palestinians; then Sharon should let the settlers move back.

You see, land for peace only works if giving up land gets you peace. Recently it hasn’t worked out very well for Israel. They’ve given land and gotten momentary quiet. But that was under Arafat. There are some new leaders on the PLO side now. This is the olive branch for them. They can make it work - or not.

If the Palestinians can’t make it work, then Israel should be prepared to take back the land.

Of course, your Maximum Leader doesn’t know if the Israelis could actually take back the land. He doesn’t wonder about their ability to do so. He wonders if they have the will to do so. And that may be just what the Palestinians are betting on. They may be betting that Israel and her leaders don’t have the will to put settlers back in Gaza. To the Palestinians once the Israelis are gone they are gone for good and it is time to move onto the next bit of land they want.

This cycle is what makes the Arab/Israeli problem so intractable. One side (Israel) gives way a little. The other side (the PLO) says they will do something - then they don’t. The situation is deadlocked for years. Then they one side (Israel) gives a little something. The other side doesn’t live up to the bargain. Etc. Etc.

To prove they are serious perhaps the Israelis need to undo part of the “agreement” if the current round of land for peace doesn’t work out to their satisfaction.

Carry on.