It at least seems as though Zimbabweans enjoy a robust, brave and spirited opposition party which aggressively opposes such measures. I wonder what that's like.

Ha! Good one!

But seriously, the Zimbabwean opposition is showing true courage. These guys face torture and death at the hands of their government.

What's the Democrat's excuse for their timidity?

On the other hand I'm concerned that analogizing Bush with current dictators just isn't hard-hitting enough. How about bringing in Pol Pot, or Stalin? You know, real mass murderer kind of stuff.

These words are meant as sarcasm (see rest of shooter242's post). But consider this: by our own standards, as set by the Nuremberg war crime tribunals, waging aggressive war is a crime. In the case of our invasion of Iraq, this crime has cost anywhere from 30,000 (Bush's own estimate) to 660,000 (Lancet study) needless Iraqi civilian deaths. Bush isn't quite as crude as Pol Pot or Stalin, but these people are just as dead as any of their victims.

BTW, Bush, Stalin and Pol Pot share a predilection for torture. In fact, one of Bush's favored torture techniques, waterboarding, was also a Khmer Rouge fave. So shooter, you're sarcasm is unintentionally apt.

He doesn't seem to have noticed that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is now an American trading partner -- and of course he doesn't mention that by the time we left Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans had died there.

We usually only mention our own deaths in these wars we should not be fighting. But our killing capacity far exceeds that of our enemies in what the Pentagon euphemistically calls "asymetrical warfare."

From the Wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties:

• Approximately 1.1 million NVA soldiers by Vietnamese count, ~500,000 by US military count.
• Approximately 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers dead
• Between 900,000 and 4 million civilians for the time period between 1954, when the French began their attempt to regain their former colony, to 1975, when the war ended after our withdrawal.

We should not forget them, just as we should not forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of our actions, from installing Saddam in the first place all the way to Bush's war of aggression. But as long as we do not see these wars as the moral outrages they are we will continue to go down this bloody path.

--"Why doesn't the Dem Congress defund the war? They are gutless......They couldn't if they wanted to. You'd need 60 votes in the Senate to start with and then 67 to over-ride.

Wesley Powell, this is just not true. Because the Democrats are the majority, they control the congressional agenda. To defund the war, Democrats would simply have to do...nothing! The president needs money to prosecute the war. He can get it only from Congress. And if Congress does nothing, he doesn't get his money. It's as simple as that. No super-majority or veto-proof majority needed, because there is nothing to filibuster or veto!

So why don't the Democrats do this? Not because they can't. They simply are too timid, believing that this would cost them politically. They are wrong. It's true that when Newt Gingrich did just this in '95-'96, he failed miserably. But Democrats could succeed, if only they tried. Where Newt was facing down president Clinton, who was very popular at the time, congressional Democrats would be confronting a highly unpopular president Bush. And Gingrich was trying to push tax and spending cuts that did not have a broad cross-section of support; ending the Iraq war does. I would characterize this tactic as a hardball tactic. But only tough guys & gals play hardball. The Democrats failure to do so exposes them for what they are.

As for Fraud Guy's suggestion that pollsters ask why these institutions are so unpopular, well, that's a damn fine suggestion.

Hey, at least they're consistent: they are bringing to Iraq the same "democracy" they've inflicted on us.

But seriously. Can Zelikow really be believed about not knowing about his own firm's dealings with Iraq? First there is the fact that he works in a smallish firm. Surely they don't keep secrets like that amongst themselves? And second, BGR would certainly wish to have some control about what their employees are saying publicly to the media, if only so that it doesn't work against their paid clients, or put them in a legal bind. Finally, Zelikow has owned up to aspects of his involvement with BGR and the Bush administration only when unimpeachable sources have forced him to. His admissions have followed statements to the contrary. He is not credible.

Ktwdawg asks:

How has it come to this, that a troubled Veteran is treated as a terrorist and a criminal?

The answer, I'm afraid, is that it's not difficult to imagine how. We first start by demonizing some marginalized group: ragheads, illegal immigrants, whatever. (Yes, "We". As citizens we all bear some responsibility for accepting and even participating in this culture of hate and fear.) They're not Us, see, so we don't care. But once this mentality becomes mainstream, once we've gotten used to the idea that some amongst us aren't quite human, well, it's not a difficult transition to transfer that attitude to some "drunk hick" in a farmhouse.

Ktwdawg is absolutely right. This was a crime, pure and simple. Justified?!? So now, all cops have to do is to provoke you beyond human endurance and they're "justified" in using deadly force. What have we come to? Communities should beware: when they arm police with military weapons and train them in military tactics, they are preparing them for war--against their own citizens. I'll leave it to the readers to make up their own minds as to who was the real danger to their community: Jamie Dean, or the Maryland State Police? And the saddest thing is that Jamie's sister called 911 so that they might help her brother.