How amusing that you claim you are not here to sell the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq, when you have tried so hard to do precisely that. As for your supposed "WMD manifests" (and your Babil, Able Danger, Salman Pak, meetings in Prague, aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium from Africa, mobile weapons labs, 45-minute delivery systems, terrorist training camps "in a part of Iraq not under Saddam's control," so on and so forth, ad nauseum) -- you need to stop. Really, just stop. You've had every chance to argue your case for war -- and your compatriots in that effort had all of the resources of the U.S. government and the corporate media at their disposal -- but you failed to make your case. It's over. There were no WMD. There was no connection to 9/11. The 9/11 Commission didn't believe you; and at long last nobody other than the deluded followers of the authoritarian faith-based world still believes you or your "president". So no more lies. That train has sailed.

Incidentally, I learned about 'The View' second-hand, and did not hear what Ms. Elisabeth Hasselbeck had to say about Saddam. But I did happen to see the 'Oprah' in question, and it was in fact the best discussion I saw of the pros and cons of invading Iraq. Though, given the horrible state of U.S. "he said she said and now it's on to celebrities" news, that probably should not be too surprising. Friedman's flustered defense, like yours, basically came down to: Saddam is [was] a bad guy, and did some especially terrible things many years ago (under Reagan and/or Bush Sr., who did nothing about it at the time).

It's now 2007, Osama bin-Forgotten, and the criminals responsible for 9/11 remain free.

As many times as you feel compelled to repeat the neo-con lie concerning Saddam's non-existent "connections to terrorist groups", I will confront you by calling a Big Lie a lie. There was no connection, no link, no cooperation, no "operational relationship" with al-Qaeda or Hezballah, etc. You will not be allowed to rewrite history in an attempt to justify the "worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam" -- at least, not here. Bush-Cheney were not simply unlucky in Iraq, or even merely incompetent. They knowingly lied to start a war that any educated person outside of the right wing echo chamber knew would end very badly.

You, to whom I justly attribute the many previously disproved and discredited arguments in favor of Bush-Cheney's war in Iraq, have had a full and fair opportunity to litigate your claims, as the lawyers say. But there must be an end. Even mass murderers in the U.S. eventually run out of appeals and are forced to face justice. So it is with the neo-con case for war, from which all reasonable republicans have long-since distanced themselves, leaving behind only the true believers who can not or will not accept objective truth, and those who continue to make their living by supporting a failed administration and its failed policy. I don't know the category you're in; but the lies used to sell this war will not stand.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I hope we all are aware that the corporate media's bias toward Hillary typically is betrayed by what they call her. Those who admire -- or at least respect her -- refer to her as Hillary Clinton, or Hillary, or Sen. Clinton. Those who abhor her refer to her as Hillary Rodham Clinton; and it is worse than using her middle name as if she were a presidential assassin. In the angry authoritarian world of the radical right, "Rodham" apparently is code for uppity feminist bitch, or in their parlance, "Feminazi".

Among the declared candidates, I like Edwards-Obama '08; but I also am intrigued by the possibility that after a decade of 'The Daily Howler', the corporate media might be shamed into finally giving Al Gore a fair shake this time around. But Hillary Clinton would be a fine president; and in light of the atrocious behavior of the so-called republicans in the last ten years, I will vote for whomever the Dems select. The republicans have behaved SO badly, they deserve to be punished for a generation, just as the Dems have been punished as "tax and spend liberals" for a generation following LBJ's Vietnam and Great Society.

CDR42, yours was a pretty damn good list. I would quibble that the U.S. middle class is not overtaxed, though I agree the top 20% is undertaxed. The CEO who just received a $210,000,000 golden parachute should have to pay at least 99% of it in federal and state taxes. And illegal immigration really is suppressing our wages (and is grossly unfair to would-be legal immigrants from places other than Latin America). Tom Brokaw recently did a pretty good report on illegal labor; but he naively trumpeted $14/hour wages as proof that Americans are "unwilling" to do labor, without also revealing how terribly scarce and expensive housing is in and around the Colorado mountain resorts. Illegal workers temporarily willing to live ten-to-a-small house and carpool long distances are the only people able to survive even on such wages; conversely, U.S. employers would have to pay a living wage, even if it is $25/hour or more, if illegal labor were not readily available.

Tucker Carlson is a Rodham man, meaning he refers to the Dem front-runner not as Hillary Clinton or as Senator Clinton, but as "Hillary Rodham Clinton" which is Angry Authoritarian-speak for Feminazi, and thus places her with presidential assassins (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald) and infamous mass-murderers (John Wayne Gacy). Wolf Blitzer, too, is a Rodham man, betraying his abhorrence of this uppity feminist. I suggest Salon readers note all further sightings of Rodham men (they're usually men), in the interest of identifying specific instances of corporate media bias.