"My point is: at some point we have to reward Powell for his honesty. Like Scott McClellan, his mea culpa was not as full throated as I would have liked"

Holy shit! You're calling me a concern troll?

LO-fucking-L.

Honesty? Mea Culpa? What planet do YOU live on?

Uh, I don't get it. For real.

What is my supposed Freudian slip or slips?

Gotcha. I totally agree with you that the point Powell made about McCain's reaction is an important one.

Its not just torture. If you do enough research you'll find out that Powell knew his presentation to the UN was loaded with bullshit. That's why he made Tenet sit behind him. But that kind of lame CYA behavior is far from adequate.

His own State Department intelligence unit was telling him that much of what he was about to tell the UN was bunk. Some of THOSE guys resigned over it. Some of his former intelligence aides like Greg Thielemann have gone on to speak out about the lies. But not Colin Powell. Colin Powell hasn't expressed any but the vaguest, most tardy regrets.

Powell was put to the moral test and failed the test miserably. His few tiny gestures toward contrition are nothing more than attempts to save whatever can be saved of his tattered reputation. His endorsement of Obama, at the 11th hour, is probably just a gambit to get a position in the Obama Administration, which would do wonders for his effort to repair his tattered reputation.

Powell deserves to be tried at the Hague along with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz et al. But its true he was a little more hesitant than his coconspirators. So let's be charitable and say that Powell deserves a reduced sentence -- say only 500,000 concurrent life sentences rather than the full million he deserves.

"He will have a role as one of my advisers," Barack Obama said on NBC's "Today" in an interview aired Monday, a day after Powell, a four-star general and President Bush's former secretary of state, endorsed him. Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether that's a good fit for him, is something we'd have to discuss," Obama said.

Excuse me while I puke.

Obama has now chosen an Iraq War voter as his VP and the most effective Iraq War salesman, a war criminal, will be his adviser and perhaps even have a formal position in his administration.

Excuse me while I puke again.

It is clear that there will NEVER be accountability on the Iraq War now.

Excuse me while I puke my guts out.

"I'm never going to understand people like you"

Well at least we agree on something.

"What is there to be accountable for?

Nothing I guess. I suppose I just have to accept that every decade or so our country is going to annihilate a few million wogs and just sit back and enjoy it and make nice with the people who are responsible for it. Otherwise we won't be able to elect stellar politicians like Barack Obama.

I have seen the light. Kill! Kill! Kill!

The horror. The horror.

Forget it, ondelette. There will be no accountability on Iraq, torture, Unitary Executive desecration of the Constitution or anything else. It's all water under the bridge (with quite a few bodies floating in it) as we enter the new hopey changey postpartisan era of not much change at all.

I wonder where the next generation will carry out the ritual generational massacre? Oh well, hopefully not in my neighborhood, so who cares? Its all good.

Maybe. I turned out to be a terrible predicter of who won the debates because, even while I thought the Repubs were getting crushed substantively, I thought the same old b.s. was going to work for them like it has for so many years. But it didn't.

However, short-term conditions were primed for a Democratic victory. The primary variables in election forecasting models are 1) the economy, 2) favorability of the President, and 3) are we at war (especially a disastrous one)?. All of those were working in our favor A fourth factor working in the favor of any Democrat is the difficulty of the same party winning 3 times in a row. In other words there was a perfect storm of conditions that should lead to a Democratic victory. Add on top of that the fact that McCain turned out to be a far worse candidate than I ever imagined possible, the idiotic choice of Palin, and a well-timed financial meltdown and you have we are seeing now.

What worries me, however, is that while Obama's postpartisan, centrist, passive-aggressive schtick works better than I would have thought among the lunkhead swing voters, I'm not so sure it lays the ground for a real, long-term partisan and policy realignment rather than a short-term political repudiation. In other words, I think the Republicans have lost this one a lot more than the Democrats have actively won it.

I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see.

I think it is quite likely that Georgia started it, but I wasn't there, so I don't know. But I know this: Georgia was part of the Soviet Union for most of my lifetime. Georgia is literally in Russia's backyard. The idea that we would risk WWIII for a country that is clearly within Russia's sphere of interest is insane.

We literally can't afford to listen to handjobs like this Hackney fellow anymore. They cost us too many trillions of dollars of dollars, and they get too many hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed.