It's amazing how little time it took for the liberals to turn on Afganistan.

Eight years?

Here's a question for you: how many of the 9/11 terrorists were Afghan?

Back in 2001, I supported the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy the training camps that Al Qaeda was using. I didn't sign on to the notion that the US should occupy Afghanistan forever. Having read a couple history books, it seemed clear to me that previous attempts at imperialism in Afghanistan, by the British and the Russians, had failed at a great cost to the occupying power.

If the USSR, a neighboring power that could in theory send hundreds of thousands of troops into Afghanistan, could not keep this mountainous country under control, what hope would a physically remote power like the US have?

Yes, we can launch air strikes until the cows come home, but I'd thought that we learned from Vietnam that air strikes alone will not pacify a country.

To really pacify a country you need an extremely long and bloody war, preferably one that wipes out or cripples a signficant fraction of the population of fighting-age men. Japan lost over 2 million soldiers in WWII - Germany lost more than 5 million.

It seems strange to me that this kind of war is necessary to prevent the possibility of a terrorist attack in the United States when competent airport security could have done the same job.

is the complete lack of journalism. It really is not that hard for Time to make one, maybe two phone calls to get a proper estimate of the size of the crowd. Everybody in DC knows who you call to get a crowd size estimate - the police. But Time couldn't be bothered to do so.

And one has to suspect the motives of a "journalist" who intentionally chooses to report a "he said, she said" story when the facts are readily available.

Prostitution is only wrong if you're poor (see Sen. Vitter)

Defrauding the government is only wrong if you're poor (see billions of dollars lost in Iraq)

Getting a government handout is only wrong if you're poor (see Goldman-Sachs, etc.)

The real crime is being poor!

When you say ACORN "stood to gain" X billion dollars, you are definitely implying that they've already won a contract for that amount of money, not that they are going to be competing in a grant pool whose sum total will be X billion dollars.

The notion that ACORN would have won all of that money, or even a sizeable amount of it, is absurd.

I'm curious - did you show this kind of anger when billions of dollars disappeared in Iraq? A story from 2005 (!) reports that, at that juncture, $9 billion had already been mislaid.

I always wonder why these so-called fiscal conservatives don't appear to give a damn about military spending. Or even worse, they don't give a damn about fraud perpetrated on the Defense Department.

but I think it's also worth noting that Time essentially ignored much larger anti-war protests in 2002-2003.

I mean, you didn't expect Baucus to come out and say so, did you?

I didn't see a single person that you asked for comment who positively affirmed that they thought the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. I see a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the official investigation, as I am.

I think it's entirely reasonable to ask questions of the Bush administration about why they let the attack happen, without the overtone being laid on the questioner that he believes that the administration was complicit. Personally, I think the Bush administration was grossly incompetent, and that the weakness of the 9/11 panel was because it had to cover up, to a great extent, their incompetence.

Somehow, at the end of the investigation the public was led to the conclusion that the 9/11 attack happened because Bush wasn't allowed to spy on enough people, and because the CIA wasn't allowed to torture enough people. And because PETA hadn't been put under enough surveillance. Do I jest? Sadly, I do not.

The Bush administration had the same amount of information about a coming attack that the Clinton administration did in December of 1999. Yet somehow the Clinton administration managed to thwart a terrorist plot while the Bush administration ignored Richard Clarke and Bush simply went on vacation. And when he was briefed, he told the briefer "You've covered your ass".

I don't really see a fair analogy with the "birther" movement. There is absolutely no existential cause for "birthers" to think that Obama was born somewhere other than where the State of Hawaii says he was born. But there really was an attack on 9/11, and we really do need more investigation into the events of that day.

Let me help you out a bit:

we have no right to detain them as criminals. We have a right to detain them as POWs.

That is, presuming the war itself is legal. In the case of Iraq, that is a legitimate legal question. (Perhaps also with Afganistan, but the arguments w.r.t. Iraq seem obvious: we launched a war of aggression.)

if a white Republican in South Carolina could get kicked out of Congress by the voters as punishment for disrespecting a black Democratic President, that would go a long way towards persuading the Republican party that the days when they could win elections by race-baiting are over.

Not that it'll happen. Not in South Carolina, not yet.

But it certainly would be historic if it did happen. It'd go a long way towards establishing the notion that the electorate cares about decorum, and that the days when the voters regularly rewarded pure negativity as a campaign strategy are over.