This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan's "The Transformer," an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post "sometime in 2011." The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates's views, they read: "He favors substantial increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global military presence."

Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still call "foreign policy." Remind me: When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase—part of a superannuated world in which "diplomats" and "diplomacy" were considered important—in a meaningful way? These days "foreign policy" and "global policy" are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called "the Greater Middle East," where what's at stake is neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."

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Paul Conrad, who we lost this weekend, was an idol to me and all caricaturists and cartoonists who wondered at the power of ink on paper as a force in the world. I slotted in here his rendering of Nixon as Richard III, a favorite of mine. Conrad's lines were simple but contained great energy and unraveled anger. He, Bill Mauldin, and Herblock were the big three cartoonists who went into battle in America's clearest moments of truth. Media played an important role; it was fact-based then. All three men had the power of major-circulation dailies behind them. There isn't an equivalent today. LBJ and Nixon had as much to fear from the cartoonists as they did from the great editorial and column writers of the day: Vietnam, Watergate, and Jim Crow America were clear and vitally important targets. Conrad did us proud, and he inspired this artist, among many others. Below is the Los Angeles Times remembrance by his friend, Tim Rutten, and the complete documentary on Paul by Barbara Multer and Jeffrey Abelson. Happy to present it here. Remembering Conrad today, and always.

Paul Conrad was powerful, inspiring—and a friend

By Tim Rutten

He never lost his sense of outrage.

My friend Paul Conrad, who died Saturday at 86, was the premier editorial cartoonist of his generation and, for many years, this newspaper's most visible public face. Outrage informed his journalism and animated his art. He woke up each morning angry about some new injustice and allowed sleep to overtake him each night only so that he could get up mad the next day and do it all again.

He was always and everywhere on the side of decency and ordinary men and women. His targets were the self-satisfied powerful, those indifferent to or antagonistic to our common good, and they included presidents—as in these cartoons—as well as governors, mayors, popes and corporate executives. Among his proudest accomplishments was making Richard Nixon's enemies list.

Conrad had the strength to speak out so forcefully—through his incomparable drawings—because he was, in Yeats' phrase, a "rooted man." His values were rooted in the New Deal's politics of remedy, in the social gospel of his Catholic faith, and in the experience of the family he treasured beyond all else. The astonishing thing about his three Pulitzer Prizes was that he won them in three decades that were among the most tumultuous in modern American history. His willingness to engage our common condition, intensely and personally, was a hallmark of his work.

For those of us who came of age on the Times in the 1970s, he was an inspiration. Those of us who worked with him got up each morning hoping we'd live up to his example and knowing we'd fall short.

As a battle rages behind the scenes over who will head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we play a speech by bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as a frontrunner for the position. [includes rush transcript]

We speak with veteran journalist and Truthdig editor, Robert Scheer, about his latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. [includes rush transcript]

It’s the economy, stupid. As President Obama faces devastating unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates, with no end in sight, he’s begun a ten-week campaign around the country leading up the November midterm elections. We speak with John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine, who says Obama should borrow a page from FDR and call for economic justice. [includes rush transcript]

Santorum's problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the "definition of marriage" has never included "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to "memorialize the scandal." The winner came up with the "frothy mixture" idea, Savage launched a website, and a meme was born. Even though mainstream news outlets would never link to it, Savage's site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on the site or linked to it from their blogs. Eventually it eclipsed Santorum's own campaign site in search results; some observers even suggested it may have contributed to Santorum's crushing 18-point defeat in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey.

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Months later John Yoo's emails have surfaced—some of them, at least. But these are probably not the records the OPR gumshoes were after. So the mystery of the missing Yoo emails remains.

In response to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department has produced 900-plus pages of email records, and it says it has identified but is withholding an additional 147 documents for as-yet unspecified reasons. This might sound like a lot, but given that Yoo's tenure as a top political appointee in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel spanned almost two years, from July 2001 to May 2003, the emails account for what would be less than week's worth of email traffic for most routine email user. Though the OPR noted that the supposedly destroyed records included "relevant documents" to its investigation, nothing of the sort was included in the files Justice handed to CREW. These emails are remarkable if only because they are so mundane—and because virtually none of them have anything to do with Yoo's official Justice Department work. If the messages are at all representative of Yoo's stint there, they suggest that the bulk of his time was devoted to arranging speaking engagements, authoring journal articles, and, as CREW put it in a release, "expanding his credentials" for his return to academia.

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