Are we back to talking about body counts? Didn't we do this in the Vietnam era, how'd that work out?

One thing I wanted to point out, which I bet people like O'Hanlon and Pollack will point to at some point in their efforts to absolve themselves of blame for pushing the whole Iraq mess. In the articles and columns Glenn quoted, O'Hanlon appears to be referencing the actual military defeat of Saddam's army when discussing the "success" of the war. If you look at it in that narrow view, Rumsfeld and Franks were exactly correct and DID send in adequate troops to accomplish the mission...of defeating the Iraqi army. That phase of the "war" was over in six weeks, just as Rumsfeld promised, and American casualties were light, and we were initially greeted as liberators.

This is the thing Glenn and others who are fighting to end our participation in this debacle are going to have to make clear: planning for what happens AFTER the successful military defeat of the Iraqi army is even MORE important than the actual defeat of that army, which was never really in doubt. This (in my opinion) is the true reason that the Bush 41 team didn't want to go to Baghdad (remember, Schwartzkopf was BEGGING to be allowed to go all the way); they foresaw that the coalition that was in favor of liberating Kuwait would dissolve when it came to occupying Iraq, and that the United States would have to shoulder most of the burden in blood and treasure for what came after, and that was a price they weren't prepared to pay. These bozos we had in 2003 didn't care about all those niggling little details, they were laser-focused on using our wonderful military power to shock and awe our "enemies" into submission, lest they in their turn be subjected to that power.

I think the first six months of Mukasey's tenure will show us whether he is going to be an impartial administrator of justice or just another Bush/Cheney rubber stamp/stonewaller. We should withhold judgment of him until then.

Of course, it may take six MORE months to make double sure.

On my lunch break I caught the last ten minutes or so of Rockefeller defending telecom amnesty. It was nothing we hadn't heard before, of course. But to actually hear him say it, on the record, on TV, in the well of the Senate, it was breathtaking.

His defense of telecom amnesty was:

-if we don't give telcos amnesty now, they won't cooperate with the government in the future;

-if they don't cooperate with the government, we'll be vulnerable to The Terrorists because the government can't get The Intelligence It Needs any other way, and he knows this because the Intelligence Community told him so;

-why should the telcos be penalized for doing something the Attorney General assures them is legal;

-why should the telcos be punished for accepting on faith that what the Attorney General told them was legal was, in fact, legal;

-suing the telcos will not result in the bringing to light of any possibly illegal actions on the part of the Bush Administration, because the information needed to argue those lawsuits is (and will remain) classified ("properly, annoyingly, but properly");

-it will take many years to litigate those telco lawsuits, some of which are individual, some of which are class action; while those lawsuits are pending, telcos will be reluctant to cooperate with any requests the administration might make of them, and that will make us vulnerable to The Terrorists;

-allowing the telcos to be sued for cooperating with the administration will cause all corporations who are asked to cooperate with the administration to look askance at the government, which is not an attitude we should encourage in our patriotic corporate sector; we should instead grant proactive amnesty to any corporation which is acting pursuant to an administration request for information, because the presumption should be that the administration is asking for that cooperation in good faith and under the law.

That's of course my paraphrasing from memory, but that's the gist of what he just told the nation. It was, again, breathtaking. This is a Democratic Senator, of long experience, advocating granting this unsupervised and unsupervisable surveillance power to the Executive Branch. After 7 years of BushCo, after all those years in the minority, he has NO sense that the administration might try to abuse its authority?