repetition of long disproven lies and falsehoods from the mouths of people who doubtless -- DOUBTLESS -- know what they are saying is false.

Scarborough is just as bad ... it's short attention span theatre in which they are still asserting that Valerie Plame somehow wasn't really "covert" ... and so on and so on and so on ...

I cannot imagine what is like to have your own hard word, carefully edited, footnoted, read and reviewed by those near and dear as well as your editor, simply -- poof -- dismissed. I cannot imagine the cascading emotions provoked.

As I think is attributed to Mollie Ivans, "We're all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts."

Chris Matthews simply ignores the long refuted falsehoods gussied up and put out on the airways one-more-time ... and appears unable to distinguish between opinion and fact. It's true sometimes we don't know ... but he's the epitome of the on-one-hand school of mediocrity ... I can no longer stomach even 5-10 minutes. I feel personally disrespected when I am lied to so baldly.

How long he'll last doing his schtick? Much much too long ... Hell, it Pat Buchanen and Lou Dobbs are allowed to polute the airways for decades, I suppose Chris Matthews' TVQ is worth a golden anniversary. He used to seem like "fresh blood," at least honest about the opinions he holds. Tucker Carlson (who I never agree with) now appears at least principled and less inclined towards "overreaching" in comparison.

Reminds me of Geraldo ... and yes, I remember when Geraldo had some credibility to go along with his showboating back in the 1970s.

the nail-biting revolving about the use of nuclear weapons.

A rabid dogs needs to be put down. Iran has many powerful allies, historical associates (France and Russian foremost perhaps), but there are plenty of other countries who have been "burned" when they expected simple cooperation and reciprocal "discretion" from BushCo, England and Germany come to mind, but so do the populations of Spain and Italy ...

America's actions have made fighting terrorism and prosecuting suspected terrorist in many countries MORE difficult,

Yes, Bush has said publically he wants other countries/leaders to consider him somewhat "crazy", unpredictable because that will encourage their cooperation.

I think it the stakes are high enough (and taking out Iran's oil production would be pretty fucking catastropic for a lot of the world), they may be prepared to call his bluff.

think good thoughts ....

Gotta wonder how religious Blair really is. This sounds very much like crusader pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die now that we've baptised you, sooner rather than later, talk ....

In large part, what they managed to accomplish was to transform Iraq (minus Kurdish regions) and its admittedly brutal socialist-model totalitarian regime with a working bureaucracy and delapidated but limping along infrastructure

<<< into >>>

a ** new ** Iraq based on the Afghan tribal back-to-the-stone age model -- in which gasoline, electricity, white gas (for cooking and heating), medical care, and personal security became scarce to nonexistent, often available only out-of-pocket, on the "privatized" black market or as charity.

We have fairly destroyed the Iraqi middle class, while the peasants and manual laborers in the rural areas may well be largely carrying on as usual.

God bless America. One, two, three, many Afghanistans ....

... they could not understand why OUR army, which was after all present and well equipted, stood by and did nothing as looting and chaos compounded the war damage ...

They did not understand this.

... they could not understand why we were not ensuring their well-being ... Saddam has at least done that with his food baskets and nationalized utilities and health care ....

They came to suspect we simply did not care.

With regard to infrastructure destroyed or damaged, they could not understand why WE, the richest, most technologically advanced country in the world, were "unable" to get the electricity and water running ....

Why we insisted on replacing power plants with the American technology rather than fixing existing plants and building new ones later.

They wondered if we were just "cheap" ... or just greedy (wanting the contracts in perpetuity) ...

Again, they came to suspect we simply did not care about them .... because they were Muslim ... because we were only really interested in their oil and the money that could be made off of them ... and it made them angry.

I was dumbfounded as we approached this conflict ... that to hear theoretically sane people proposing and defending an out-in-the-open military coup on a soverign nation that had made no attack on us or anyone else. These people have A LOT TO ANSWER FOR ...

The CIA has a long spotty history of fomenting numerous third-world coups, many military, but - pssst -- they were IN SECRET -- with America assistance concealed ... with some local Saddam-like military strong man suddenly rising to power ... fwiw, those usually didn't turn out very well either ...

FWIW, there have been periodic rumors that we are backing a possible Allawi coup in Iraq ... (since before we handed Iraq provisional government over to him in June 2004, continuing until today ...)

I think we've all noticed certain pundits approach and retreat from the complaints of "ungratefulness" ... using settling for stand-up, stand-down promises that usually ignore the "challenges" faced by Iraqis attempting to "stand-up" ... as if it were just a matter of will-power and/or resolve or maybe "faith."

Gotta wonder if Blair believes in "god's will" ... now, that would be a minefield I like to see excavated with both Bush and Blair ...

The racism is so-very just right-there palpable.