nuballzlikr said:

If God forbid [Obama] ever became president, the Clintons' troubles with Whitewater, etc. will look insignificant by comparison.

Listen up, you raving militia twits: Whitewater WAS insignificant.

What part of "nothing ever proven" and "no charges ever filed" can you not understand.

Boy, I am sooooo scared that the Fux Nooz clowns might some day confront President Obama with blurry video footage of a disguised unnamed man claiming that one time Obama lost money on a rental apartment.

It was not without accident that Noam Chomsky often chose to take on the liberal defenders of hawkish policies, since they were the ones who supposedly gave the smartest, most informed justifications (even though in reality that supposition was more nonsense) for the US establishment's hawkish or even directly warring foreign policies.

It's not so difficult to intelligently dissent from arguments from the hawk right, which typically consist of "America great! We love bomb! Make bomb fall now and we are safe with bomb!"

Memory fades, or perhaps never even existed, and somehow the liberal hawks' roles are always forgotten, and they retroactively sanctify themselves as having fought some eternally more crazy right. ('But so & so wanted to nuke them! All we did was recommend carpet bombing!)

Yes, you had the paranoid raging World Anti-Communist League right expressing glee as their hired henchmen slaughtered civilians in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique (got to be tough with these potential Russian fronts in Central America and Southern Africa, you know).

But the raving right always agrees instantly with hawk recommendations. Intellectually you need the liberal hawks to dress up your bloodbaths with High Moral Justifications, so thus you also had plenty of serious, impressive, 'liberal hawk' politicians and pundits defending the same slaughter, although they would of course add a few criticisms of the degree of bloodiness involved.

Valerie Plame was not a covert agent.

We know this because she did not live in the sewers and heat tunnels beneath Moscow wearing a trench coat and dark glasses while using ancient books to locate magical doorways to other dimensions.

Cover agents are easily identifiable by their cars which are also submarines and also by the fact that they frequently use manholes which are actually elevators that take them down to the underground laboratory where scientists keep the extraterrestrial artifacts.

All Valerie Plame had was a job which was supposed to be a commercial firm but was really a front company for the CIA which was designed to keep track of materials related to weapons of mass destruction.

What could possibly be covert about that?

Even anti-war critic Robert McNamara has been convinced that our new Phase 3 strategy is soon to consolidate power and democracy throughout Vietnam and that soon what seems like a beleaguered South Vietnamese government is really on the cusp of asserting firm and positive control.

Evidence has emerged that we are beginning to spread stability and positive Phase 3-related efforts to Cambodia and Laos. Our carefully used democracy delivery devices, the stalwart and patriotic B-52's, have proven quite a hit in these areas.

Sure, the typical raving carpers from the maniacal extreme left suggest that this is some sort of unwinnable guerrilla war situation, but Responsible, Serious moderate observers & anti-war critics such as Richard Nixon, whose presidential campaign is likely to benefit from an anti-war, pro-peace platform (albeit probably secret) would give the Generals the chance to work, we will avoid the Communist dominoes about to follow us home.

I'm going to guess that we're going to go through yet another stage in the counter-hippie reaction from the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

We already see the outlines of the dolchstosslegende (i.e., the Nazi's favorite Scooby-Doo based recruitment theory, we woulda won that war if it weren't fer them meddlin' peaceniks). But that's limited mostly to the Republican partisans and a few crazed liberal hawks.

One of the next stages will be the more general lesson aimed to be taught by the hawks and liberal hawks: and that is that the Iraq debacle CANNOT be allowed to make people think that the hawkish and aggressive use of force by U.S. is problematic in any way.

The imperative for the hawks and liberal hawks is to make Iraq into its own most special, unique situation ever, and deny that any lessons are to be found about the use of force in general.

Soon they will begin sagely concluding that while Special Circumstances A, B, and C were at play in Iraq, and Mistakes 1, 2, and 3 were made, any new idea for the aggressive use of force by the U.S. in international affairs is completely free of A,B,C or 1,2,3, and no, no, no, this new case where we want to use force against nations X, Y, and Z?

Nooooooo, noooooo, they will say, this new situation is tooooootally different from our hawkishness on Iraq, we have toooootally learned our lessons and now we're using special Post-Iraq Wisdom Mode to advocate attacking these places.

However, as a very insightful commenter said, it took WW2 to get Germany to truly learn the lessons of WW1, and so it may take Iraq War II to get us to truly learn the lessons of Vietnam.

I'd be glad to sit back and enjoy your 30 pages of vehement clarification!

After all, as someone who could be described as a leftist liberatarian believer in economic democracy, obviously I think that every single discussion on any topic be brought back to this subject, somehow or another, or else I should insult someone else who may or may not have brought it up.