Unraveling …

Shifting leadership is an effect rather than a cause of disintegrating policy, and the shift from Gen. Stanley McChrystal to David Petraeus — back to Petraeus — seems OK in that it brings a familiar face and the appearance of stabilization to an Afghanistan war policy on CTD status. (Not yet dead, but Circling the Drain.)

Let’s hope he’s not a fainter. But things are getting bad now in the Gulf. A liberal blog reports that there’s “been a viral message spreading over the web that there's a life and earth threatening methane bubble in the gulf, caused by the gushing well, which will explode and even cause an earthquake and a real volcano, in some versions of the story. Some accuse Obama of hiding nefarious goings on.”

Not wanting to spread any “tinfoil hat conspiracy theories” the author, a regular at Huffington Post, checked with a source at BP, asking him: “There's talk that there's a giant methane gas bubble waiting to explode and start a volcano and earthquakes in the Gulf. What's your take?”

“There is no huge gas volcano ready to come forth,” he was told by the BP source. “It's true that this well is 40 percent gas by volume, and that the average is 5 percent, but that's just more doomsday crap from conspiracy nuts.”

Good to know. Because those conspiracy nuts are everywhere with that doomsday crap

End-of-the-world scenarios were prominent liberal reactions to the George W. Bush presidency and the stressful war on Iraq. Now Obama gets them from his own crowd. These are leadership issues, symptoms of disintegration policy or lack entirely of policy. It is unraveling.

Maybe we are just missing something here. A king or a queen or something.

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.