Is it just me or does anyone else get the impression that Elephantman gets all his political philosophy from the Klingon manual?

Let me see. Hamas either commits or underwrites atrocities. Therefore, the only reasonable solution is for U.S. to ally with Israel commit greater atrocities, at the expense of the underclass while the upperclass reaps tremendous profit. At least we have the "Glory of the Battle."

Did I get it right?

Low-level grunts both in the military and out have always dehumanized their perceived enemies with a "catch-all" term. Over the years we have had Charlie, chinks, gooks, wogs, nips, ragheads and whatever. Al Qaeda is unusual only because it is harder to say and type than any of the others.

Of course this phenomenon wasn't invented by anyone, but Bush and McCain use it pro-actively and retroactively to justify further military aggression. At the start of the Iraq war, I would bet that less than one in three Americans knew the difference between an Afghani and an Iraqi. Forget about the difference between Sunni or Shiite. To them they were all ragheads that needed to be cleaned out. Bush/Cheney hope to exploit the conservative yearning for simple "us vs. them" solutions once again to go into Iran, and McCain hopes to exploit it to get to the White House.

Wow. Another scathing letter from a Democrat. What's next?

Oh, I know. It will all be forgotten with the discovery of some other Bush administration outrage. All though it is true they have been beaten back for now, there will be no serious consequence for wrongdoing.

How's that subpoena to ex White House aides thing going?

Where ever are destroyed e-mails? Those records were protected by law.

Will the DoJ ever have to comply with the Hamden decision?

There must be a thousand such incidents, and even where they didn't work for the Bush administration they pretty much have gotten off scott free. I guess all we can do is wait it out another 7 months.

I always was under the impression that ex high-officials would be hired for their competence, but for A) name recognition, and B) insider contacts.

Just look at Cheney's performance at Halliburton. He made some of the stupidest CEO blunders ever, but in the end the stockholders made out because he ended up sneaking in as VP, and re-inventing the office to serve Halliburton stockholder's needs. I wish I had bought stock in 2001.

Competence is a secondary commodity.

In AG's case, he alienated anyone within the government that might have been an asset to him. And as with Bush himself, he is a name-recognition liability, not an asset. This is at a time when things have gotten so bad that Richard Mellon Scaife is willing to write an op-ed friendly to Hillary!

AG will do OK for a while on speakers fees, mostly as a freak show.

You have to wonder. Time and again Glenn (or other great bloggers) catch these guys in blatant contradictions, based on what they wrote some months or years before. Do these people think that's all forgotten about (in the age of the Internet!) or it doesn't matter?

They are like little kids who don't believe the evidence will get them into trouble once an adult comes around to see what they have done. And then when the evidence is presented to them, they get furious as to why you don't believe them. Just about anyone who has raised kids has seen this. Most of them grow out of it by age 10 or so, but it seems the movers in our political press never have.

If you are really going after root cause, you would have to reach down to our K-12 educational establishment. I would say a majority of Americans are too ignorant of basic history to be even aware of what the 4th Amendment even is, much less why it would need defending or what the consequences would be if we didn't have it.

Instead what they consume is titillating factoids about Clinton sex life or Obama's alienness. It is very much like watching people eat high-fructose sodas, potato chips, and white bread instead of whole foods that are healthy but cost more and take some preparation. Same thing: health does not come by default and it takes knowledge and effort. So does liberty.

I have long suspected that this might actually be the basis for the long-term Republican hostility to public education and certainly university-level education when it does anything other than the utilitarian objective of turning out worker-bees.

But if you're a woman, good luck trying to get a guy to talk to you in bed.

...

Thank GOD for vibrators.

You mean your vibrator talks to you in bed? I think your problem isn't what you think it is.

Just see if you ever get a response back from DoJ after this.

Why not hook up with Eric Alterman for a joint tour? Have you run into him yet?

Is it legally possible for Congress to recall an AG?

I'm not saying the Dems would actually do it -- after all that would be considered just too partisan by Dean Broder. I just want to tell our representatives that they are also culpable for this atrocity in an ongoing sense.

Does anyone besides me remember the huge protest marches before the invasion began, and how all the newsprint pictures of it were carefully cropped to depict much smaller crowds than there actually were? (With "reporting" to match.)

I would appreciate it if someone could post some links to those pictures.