Whittled down, this supposed "pundent-genius" technique, employed by Karl all his life, can be summarized as follows...

Someone: "Karl, you are fat!"

Karl: "Uh, uh,...you are!"

What is amazing is that our MSM gulp it all right down, in some kind of school-yard, scrap-battle, kurfuffle...well the bell rang, and everyone needs to go back to class!

cliff

No door remains unopened, no position can't be taken, no lie can't be told, no rules apply. That is the strategy of a trapped man. Karl has been trapped his whole life. He was always the last picked and the first shunned, and now he floats through this life, pinched and tortured, hoping to find a way out of the maze of his twisted mind. No way out of that mirror room.

By the way, I wish he would engage GG, that would be some sweet conversation. Unfortunately, Karl IS smart enough to know when his pants will be removed, so it just won't happen...still I wish.

cliff

So, if these guys are all culpable, can the president actually pardon himself? That seems to be the real question here. He can certainly pardon everyone outside his office door...we see that all the time. However, if it can be proven that he was involved, wouldn't that threaten his authority to provide relief to known co-conspirators?

lawyers???

cliff

Obama will win...we need to focus on the senate seats...put your money where your mouths our readers. Invest in the future.

cliff

We, who have been reading GG for some time humbly suggest that, once he has you in his cross-hairs, you should immediately surrender and backtrack...you will never win. He will parse your pants off!

You made a mistake...you don't fully understand the effectively functional aspects of diligent bloggers. They have more than equal footing and integrity with anything coming out of the MSM. In fact, as a regular reader of the great blogs AND MSM, I would say the score is clearly 1 to nothing.

Hail to the new media giants...Glenn Greenwald, Joshua Michah Marshall, Christy Hardin Smith, digby, Sidney Blumenthal, Joe Conason, lots of the writers over at Huff, etc., etc.

The least you can do is make room, rather than resort to denigration as a means of survival. The whole reason that dimension of reporting exists is that you and your cohorts dropped the professional reporter ball.

cliff

I hate when these pins set up in my head, but is it remotely possible that all of this "turn-on-a-dime" rollover is due to members of congress being informed, clandestinely, of some dirty little secrets gleaned from telecom spying? I mean, once the wires have been spliced and the recording devices are turned on...

"Dear Senator, please take this opportunity to vote correctly on the immunity legislation, or your conversation with Mr. Whosit on February 2, of 2004 will be leaked to the press..."

Am I too paranoid, or is that what we are observing here?

cliff

"The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them -- and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts."

We know who one of them was...who was the second person, and why can't Fitz use McClellan testimony to pinch that person?

cliff

However, if we really parse this statement.

"Willingness to support war once that inspection record was revealed to be imperfect: incorrect..."

I think O'Hanlon would simply say that what he was incorrect about was his inability to detect the lack of support once the inspection record was determined to be imperfect, not being incorrect about going to war (going versus supporting after additional information). The difference being making a decision to go, versus making a decision to support, post-invasion.

What is interesting about his text under that explanation is that it is all about post-invasion preparation, and his failure to not dig deep enough to determine how "shoddy" that was. Again, a different issue entirely, since that text is all about preparation for post-invasion consequences, which has nothing to do with bad WMD information. He is all over the map in one paragraph.

So to sum up the two things that were discussed by O'Hanlon.

1) His failure to detect and report the post-invasion support, once the lack of evidence came in about WMD's.

2) His failure to dig deeply enough in the post-invasion moments to determine how shoddily our military had prepared for protracted war.

That is how he is trying to avoid what GG is alleging. He leap-frogs over the fundamental issue about "going to war," and tries to create a fog about his incredible humbleness to admit that he may have under-estimated the lack of support for continuing, and his inability to detect bad preparation for post-invasion issues. Very slippery and slimy.

I bet when guys like Friedman, O'Hanlon and Klein stop at the local bar to get drinks, the camaraderie over how misunderstood and non-complicit they are is truly profound.

cliff

Just switch it around to Friedman, Klein and O'Reilly. I'll put up GG's pinky finger on his left hand to these "journalists" anyday.

GG has so effectively destroyed their credibility, that one can't listen to them speak without detecting the Goofy-Disney voice chortle and spittle.

Who listens to these jokers? How many times IN A ROW do you need to be wrong before someone detects that you may not have a clue.

Keep roping 'em up GG, it's certainly entertaining to watch you do your journalistic duty...the real mccoy, you are.