I've been following the comments, asked a couple of questions, and so far this looks like good old conservative bashing. I've seen nothing positive, just another bitchfest.

Oh, quit whinning. You earned ever word against you and yours.

You folks might want to consider, that unless you offer something better, authoritarianism is the only game in town.

How about the Constitution of the United States? Or doesn't that qualify in your sick little world?

Who turned out to be right? The Neoconservatives or the panglossian liberals, who in some demented Orwellian distortion warp now call themselves realists!

Who turned out to be right?

For a start, the ones who warned invading and occupying Iraq would be a disaster. (hint: it wasn't Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfwitz, or the other Neocons)

Keep your fantasyland revisions of history and reality if that's what it takes for you to live with yourself. We've come to expect nothing better of you.

But don't pretend for an instant you've any cretibility on this issue.

Perhaps they'd care to define precisely what the following terms mean, just so we all understand their thinking:

evil

the enemy

winning in Iraq

justice

the rule of law

ethics

morality

torture

genocide

Of course I'm not naive enough to think they have the moral courage to actually answer any of these, but still one feels obligated to at least ask them to behave like civilized beings.

I'm not outside the mainstream, the bulk of commenters here are.

That presupposes you answered the questions honestly. Based on your track record of unsourced assertions and factual fallacies, distrust of any claim you make is justified.

Feel free to defend how "authoritarianism is the only game in town" with an actual argument and you might earn a bit of creditability here. Or don't. Your choice.

Frankly, I doubt you have the intelligence to do so even if you wanted to, but feel free to surprise us.

That liberal vision in 18th Century America?

It was, actually, and a surprisingly progressive one given human slavery was an acknowledged and accepted institution back then.

Call it moral relativism if you wish. I call it viewing the past for what it was.

In any case, we are talking about what is at issue today, in the early 21st century. Feel free to join the conversation on those grounds. Or don't and keep making a fool of yourself.

Your choice.

78% of respondents think Saddam was responsible. Now where do you think that idea came from? It certainly wasn't Bush.

Perhaps from the 'source' as the likely 99% of respondents in western Europe in 1491 who would have responded affirmatively to the poll question "Is the Earth is flat?".

After all, back then everybody just knew the Earth was really flat as a pancake and you'd sail off its end if you went too far out.

Obviously they were wrong.

What people believe or disbelieve at any given point is so rife with their own opinions, prejudices, and preconceptions its difficult to trust it (certainly during a crisis like 9/11). Its been established as far as humanly possible that there was no Saddam-Al Qaeda link back then and certainly no involvement by the Hussein regime in 9/11.

Why I'm bothering to even trying to explain this to you, I've no idea. You've shown neither the intellectual nor moral capacity to actually discuss these issues in an intelligible manner.

Still, one feels the obligation to be the adult here.

In politics as in life, everything is a matter of degree.

There you have it: the hypocrit finally admits he has no fixed standards about anything.

What a surprise.

Leaving aside all the technical issues concerning the original anthrax strains used, I have to ask:

Would it really make any real, positive difference for ABC News to issue a mea culpa retraction of its Saddam-anthrax stories at this point in time?

The media's creditability is pretty much gone now on this and most other issues. ABC News admitting it was flogging a discredited story all this time is unlikely to help it any in that regard and indeed may make further alienate the public from them.

Over 150,000 US troops are still in Iraq and the White House shows no sign of changing its current non-strategy in that regard. The whole "Saddam had WMD" meme has been accepted as an outright lie that, again, ABC News admitting one of the hydra-heads of that particular angle was outright false isn't likely to do more than confirm the already accepted fact the Bush Administration lied its way into this disaster.

Am I suggesting there should be no retraction? Emphatically, NO! ABC News, like CBS and MSNBC and CNN and all the rest, should come as clean as possible and admit they were sounding a drumbeat for war where one wasn't justified. But they (and we ourselves) should know that in itself won't be enough to undo the damage done.

It in fact would only be a start, and a small one at that.

Would a retraction by ABC News on this make any practical difference to current opinions or circumstances? I don't believe so.

Should they do it anyway? Absolutely, if only to demonstrate they are indeed serious about rebuilding their creditability as a news agency. Whether they can actually do so remains to be seen.