Glenn, my responsive interlineations below:

What's the point of inventing imaginary arguments in your head, attributing them to me, and coming to argue against it?

> Didn't mean to do that. <

I don't really have a problem stating what my point is. I don't harbor secret points that you need to discern using powers of intuition. If I don't make a point, it's probably not very constructive to fantasize that I really meant to make it and then spend your day trying to disprove it.

> Fair enough. <

If you don't consider the fact that someone re-writes their own arguments and contradicts what they said in the past to be relevant to their credibility, that's fine -- that's a bizarre why of looking at things, but fair enough.

> Seems like an exercise in pluperfectionism - a lot of pointless picking of even more pointless nits. <

That, though, has nothing to do with my point. I said what my point was pretty clearly:

But with this intense Friedmanesque revisionism well underway -- whereby war cheerleaders like Friedman were Right and Good all along and it was only the incompetent Bush and Rumsfeld who ruined everything with their "bumbling" -- it seems increasingly likely that the opposite lesson will be learned. Attacking, invading and occupying other countries in order to change their governments to ones we prefer is the smart, wise and just thing to do. Friedman's term for it today is "collaborating with them to build progressive politics." Especially if there is another terrorist attack on U.S. soil -- but even if there isn't -- the only lesson being drawn from the Iraq debacle in these precincts is that from now on, we just need to plan and execute it better, so that the Good and Just people who cheer these wars on have their noble schemes vindicated a lot sooner and a lot more proficiently.

Sorry, Tim, Greenwald is trying to invalidate the veracity of Friedman's most recent observation by saying, in essence, that since this guy was so wrong before, how can anything he says now hold any water. That's the same logic that climate change deniers use - pointing to goofy predictions of global freezing made by scientists in the 1970s. Stop complaining about the cards you're being dealt.

Why don't you stop the group groping and get back on point.

Friedman's putative revisionism aside.

Since there's no going back, going forward with something that resembles - however imperfectly - rational, objective, and participatory rule is only another sign of failure because?

Another contrarian from Story Book Land chimes in with predictable nonsense. Tantaena animis caelestibus irae?

You're right, Timmy. You guys are really funny. You should all join Mensa, too. Then you could be funny with real conviction.

You guys are just so cool. I mean, like, I never met a bunch of more together people. All the facts. All the answers. All the time. A veritable Fox News for the cranial/anally inverted.

Walter, that sucking sound you hear ("suck this") is the last vestige of thought being expelled from the vacuum between your ears.

Tim, Hag . . . you guys are just too smart for me. Your arguments are just too perfect in every way. You've got all the facts right - and all the answers. You worked, perhaps, in the Bush White House?

Greenwald seems to belong to an intellectual sub-phylum intent - at any cost - on denying any possibility of civil evolution in Iraq. Friedman's past blunders, while notable, do not negate the fact that something positive occasionally happens there. Greenwald's small minded consistency is at least as bad, perhaps worse, than the revisionism about which he complains.