The column reminds me of a Leonard Pinth-Garnell offering.

More sobering: the President was off saluting the war dead, including the dead DEA agents, all of whom may well have been collateral damage to the CIA's poppy ventures.

Europe continues to encourage the US to fight, while offering only minimal assistance itself.

Clinton visits, hundreds die.

Very bad, very bad indeed.

Monumentally ill-advised.

He would have had to apologize to whores!

Front page today.

So, while DEA agents are being sent to their deaths in Afghanistan, the CIA is doing business with the poppy mafia.

Maybe the real civil war is within the US government.

And doth protest too much

Of course not.

Hypocrites.

Insist on a condom. Yes, get hip to this timely tip. If you have plans to motor west. He sounds like the highway that's the best.

Oh, and you are not actually in love with him, phew! Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty--but you wouldn't want to live there.

Don't forget Winona!

Broadsheet is going to declare jihad on your brave ass, man.

Death is but the most extreme example. What about the totalitarian monolabel "friend.". Couldn't multiple labels exist: coworker, boss, family, acquaintance, lover, frenemy, guru, adversary...and couldn't users have the freedom to create their own?

If only friend must exist, I'd recommend changing the term to "Comrade," which is at least honest in its Sovietesque cringeworthy insistent sameness.

As far as the dead--take them off entirely after 40 days and nights. Move on.

too!

I'm sure that will result in a lot of laughs. They've already done so much for office parties.

Good God the Obama era sucks. No health insurance, torture, pc prima donnas, domestic surveillance, wars, taxes to pay bankers and elites, no jobs. Total epic fail.

Fuck the Democrats.

We need change we can believe in.

"in the decade or so it would take for the US to be forced back into the conflict."

Wait a sec--who would be forcing who "back into" the conflict? The US is in the conflict now, Europe is barely there.

Why the continued effort by you, Obama, Cole and others to ignore Europe's insistent isolationism and exceptionalism?

Why the continued disregard for the US cost, and the maiming and deaths of Americans.

Why not Europe? Why not multilateralism?

But attitudes toward men definitely have.

Our Secretary of State has even been pressuring Britain to cover up gendered violence against men.

Some may find castration threats a greater crime than insults about appearance.

Others, not.

Let's just state the case:

An enormous largely unilateral US military presence in Afghanistan, onstensibly about nation-building there or perhaps Osama-hunting, but inevitably seen as offensive by Iran and Pakistan.

Cole is being both myopic and cavalier about American lives. He dices up these countries as if each were a separate puzzle, rather than pieces of a whole.

Obama's unilateralism may be more savvy than Bush's, but that is saying little, and particularly so when unilateralism itself is the largest part of the problem--as Obama, Cole, and Europe themselves admitted in more honest times.

If Obama was doing such a great job pulling levers in Pakistan, we wouldn't have to send 20k more troops to Afghanistan.

And if he had achieved his promised multilateralism with Europe, half the troops would be European.

The most descriptive word, the one that the honest have used for months.

A word that became inevitable after the Times editorial page finally said "torture."

But words that are still banned from the Times news articles.

Going bellyup. You may prefer Salon over the NyTimes say, but Salon's news coverage is comparatively tiny. Instead, Salon piggybacks on the same msm it despises. Salon qoted heavily from Rohde's pieces, but the NYTimes paid for Rohde to report from AfPak. Salon commenters rightly noted the importance of Rohde's pieces, but it was Rohde who risked his neck and got kidnapped.

So, what happens when the despised msm disappears? That's a new question, but we keep giving old answers. Dowd particularly has been eloquent on the topic, Walsh has not.

Choice is good, in news and opinion, and we're getting more opinion sources perhaps. But the opinions are based on increasingly fewer reporters.

The opinions are narrowing as well, the intolerance expressed by Diable seems to have infected Democrats from the DNC down. We already know how well intolerance worked as an election strategy for the Republicans. It's at best a short-term game plan.

FOX is crap, but we seem to be on a familiar slippery slope of blind self-righteousness.

No worries about that.

When Clinton did grand plans, he sought to please the elites. Otherwise Dowd was basically right, hw was a penny pinching pothole fixer.

Some of those potholes were significant fixes in their own terms though, exhibit A being FEMA. Clinton's appointees actually DID do a heckuva job.

But ameliorating short-term natural disasters does not compensate for undermining longterm political/economic structures.

Of course Bush was a diaster for potholes and everything more complicated.

Where you can express any opinion, as long as it's Joan's. Where questioning the legacy of Bill Clinton gets you labeled a terrorist. Bush redux.

I suspect my liberal credentials measure up to your own, Diable.

All of Bill Clinton's grandest policy measures: deregulation, trade, welfare, even health care were like time bombs set to go off after his term. And now they have, the damage greatly exacerbated by his successor Bush.

I for one will be honest enough to say it.

No one complained (but me) about this indecent journalism.

But almost all of you react in syncophantic rage because Russert sang a mocking parody about the most powerful man on the planet. The man largely responsible for the economic woes of most Americans today.

You people have a strange sense of outrage.

She must have been damaged by an interaction with the media.

Oh that's right: she is the media.

Nevermind.