This Government Wants Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli dead.

(Theodore Roosevelt said this in 1904.)

Do you know who’s fallen off the news charts for over two weeks, and has been in jail since January 27? A fellow named Raymond Davis, an employee of the US State Department security detail. He was arrested for killing two men on motorcycles in Pakistan.

The facts of the shooting are in dispute, Davis claiming self-defense while Pakistani police say definitely not.

What is also in dispute, but shouldn’t be, is that Davis enjoys diplomatic immunity. The Pakistanis now claim he is CIA, again without clear evidence. But if attached to a diplomatic post, it doesn’t matter. We (and they) have all sorts of spies using diplomatic cover. If caught, they get sent home.  That’s been the case since Hitler was a corporal. Raymond Davis has been sitting in a Lahore jail now for five weeks, while his effigy is burned, protest marches are held in his “honor” and local media mentions his name daily.

And suddenly, for about two weeks, the story has just fallen off the media plate.

What is not in dispute is what the US State Department is doing about it. Davis should have been out in 2-3 days and been home by 2 February. We’re now into week six. “Tense negotiations” are underway, only, I ask, what is there to negotiate? We haven’t even pitched a fit, and God knows, of all Hillary Clinton’s sterling attributes, throwing lamps is way up there among them. So how come no one in Asif Ali Zardari’s government is ducking them? 

UK bookmakers are probably already laying odds that Barack Obama will be the man who loses (or gives away) Pakistan, so Vegas oddsmakers can’t be far behind. Get your bets down now, for they will only narrow.

Pakistan’s nuclear inventory? Can the Taliban get it? Consider it a work in progress, for the inability of the Pakistan government to deal with a local constabulary, and the American State Department’s inability to deal with the Pakistan government tells me the Taliban won’t be long shots for long.

This should have been over 30 days ago.