He is the true voice of consumers, the real anti-poverty candidate. He'll get us a true single-payer national health care system. He'll stand up to the corporations and the insurance companies. He'll fight for clean air and water and he'll be committed to a plan to reverse the growth in production of greenhouse gases.

Nader should run. He more truly stands for what the majority of the Salon readership believes in, than Clinton or Obama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcy-Ir6q5ZQ

I was just wondering if any middle-east scholar, or Prof. Cole himself, can point me to anything he has written for the Arabic press in which he condemns terrorism's links to Islam, and Islam's links to terrorism?

Can there be any doubt that one of the most repressive regimes on the face of the earth in the last half of the 20th century was the Taliban's reign in Afghanistan? Is any government more responsible for clutural repression and destruction? Is there any doubt that the most potent, deadliest, and most destructive terrorist movement of this generation has been the movement that might variously be called 'jihadism,' or 'al Qaeda' or 'Islamofascism'? If none of those terms is acceptable to Prof. Cole, is there any term he would accept? Or does he simply deny that there exists any generalized terrorist movement that threatens the United States in the post 9/11 era?

Professor Cole's article is largely a collection of inconsequential throwaway comments by candidates or their staffs. Is there any news, any polling, any evidence of any kind, suggesting that the Republicans can expect to suffer in a Presidential contest for their emphasis on national security issues? Will John McCain's courageous support for the recent troop surge hurt him? Polling suggests the opposite, with McCain currently holding strong leads in both a hypothetical McCain-Clinton race and a hypothetical McCain-Obama race.

Before November, I hope and expect that if the Republican nominee is John McCain, the Democrat nominee (for whom Professor Cole might be consulting) is asked this question: "Seantor McCain pledges that he will win the war - and the peace - in Iraq. Will you make the same commitment?"

Hillary especially. I think there are about eight years' worth of lesbian stories smoldering away in some warehouse in northern Virgina.

And then there's Obama's record from his days hustling in Chicago.

So yeah, Joe, for once I agree with you. The Democrat nominee is going to be savaged. You, for one (but not many others) will try to do the same to McCain, or perhaps Romney.

But you won't have much success. That's a bitch, isn't it? It seems so unfair. It probably is unfair. I know I'll be losing sleep over it.

Yes, the Khmer Rouge, and the Soviets, and Amin and Mugabe were/are all bad. So, too, Castro and the North Korean ant colony. All bad. I'm glad we agree that the Taliban, al Qaeda and whatever Juan Cole wants to call them/it, are of a kind with those genocidal forces. Are they not all worthy of military confrontation?

As to that "Christianist" McVeigh: I suppose that if you multiplied him by about 200,000, you might have a comparison to make. (Even then, it is a stretch almost beyond comprehension to compare McVeigh's self-funded scheme to the kind of state-sponsored terrorism we see with Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah, and Islamic Jihad.) And gee, the government of the United States showed McVeigh all kinds of support, didn't it? We executed McVeigh. Is that worse than 'waterboarding' him?

That's pretty clear, isn't it? And to the extent that Stalin or Castro or the Kims or Gaddafi or Saddam did threaten us, we did confront them militarily. That all seems pretty rational and pretty consistent to me.

You really are on to something. Yes, the payback to any country, any force, any organization that would openly attack the United States would be unthinkable destruction.

Isn't that precisely the way we want it?