Glenn, thanks for this:

"On April 9, 2003, he published a piece for the Brookings Daily War Report entitled "Was the Strategy Brilliant?" -- in which he struggled with the deeply Serious question of whether Don Rumsfeld's strategy was unprecedentedly brilliant or merely mind-blowingly smart..."

It cracked me up, and I needed a laugh after being assaulted by O'Hanlon's mendacity.

Does this guy actually call himself a "scholar"? That's like calling Rush Limbaugh a man of integrity.

I am writing a blog entry about the primary right now, and I am certain that I am doing ten times more research than O'Hanlon did for any of the quoted pieces. It is remarkable how content-free and unsupported so much of his blather is.

These bogus "think tanks" are not part of academia.

And these people don't qualify as scholars.

Please be more precise with your language.

I was too goddam mad to sit and compose something to mine, who is on the list of voted-with-Bushers.

So I spat out:

"How dare you.

How dare you vote with that criminal Bush on FISA. How dare you help him destroy what is left of our constitutional democracy.

You COWARD."

Vote Green, people. We need another party. I'll be damned if I vote for another one of these "Democratic" bastards. Look at the latest spectacle of Obama trying to out-macho Clinton with his hawk talk. Sickening.

Wow, that's some recommendation. I keep hearing this about the "Democrats," who have adopted the new slogan, "Slowing down our inexorable slide into fascism!"

Well, guess what. That is just not good enough.

And I am not going to vote for any Democratic candidate who is acting so wholly against my interests and those of the vast majority of Americans.

Maybe the outrageous demonization of Nader can stop NOW.

as they are coldly and calculatingly following the right's lead because they see how the right has managed to become completely unaccountable to the public. How easy it is now to ignore the public will! --and to feed propaganda to the MSM with barely a challenge, no matter how ill-conceived or irrational the assertions. I don't doubt that they see value in the tactics of the master manipulators of the current regime.

From David Bromwich at HuffPo:

"...In a recent talk with liberal journalists, Nancy Pelosi offered a second kind of prudential reservation: impeachment or censure, of either Cheney or Bush, would "divide the country." That is the same species of wisdom that prevailed with Al Gore when he withheld his support from the late petitions charging voter fraud in Florida in the election of 2000. He was choosing not to divide the country.

The trouble is that Cheney and Bush are happy to divide the country. They mean to play their terrible hand to the end; and they do not take no for an answer. Compromise with them, and you are the one who is compromised. The statement by Dick Cheney in January 2007, about the impact of the election on his plans for the Middle East, showed the curious streak of frankness that marks his political character. "It won't stop us," he said.

Now, in a constitutional democracy, there are two ways of stopping the claims of a leader out of control. One is by an appeal to the voters; the other is by an appeal to the laws. The vice president (and, therefore, the president) having declared his independence of the people, it would seem that the best remaining protection is the laws. If, on the other hand, the opposition are unwilling to resort to the laws--if, from a combination of timidity and tactical reasoning, they refuse to defend their own function as lawmakers--for what purpose do they exist?"

Dodd said to Glenn: "They say what have you learned from all of this, and I say -- I need to be more of a skeptic. It sounds quaint, the story about de Gaulle - he was prickly -- but the fact that he said the word of the American president was good enough for him. Part of why I'm running in a sense is I'd like to get back to those days."

Seriously, you have got to be kidding me. At this stage of the game, Dodd is bringing up some rosy picture of bygone days when Men Were Men Who Spoke the Truth?? He is just figuring out now that he has to be "a skeptic"?? Where the hell has he been all this time? Anyone who was paying attention knew, from the moment that George Bush emerged on the national scene, that he was a vicious, lying sack of shit. Over and over and over he has proved himself hostile to the truth, to the people, to the constitution, and, of course, to the Democrats. But so what, says Dodd. Let's give him every benefit of the doubt, let's cling to some imaginary masculinist notion of honor.

This concept that he is trying to hide behind is completely at odds with what the founders knew about how power works.

I just don't know how these Dems have any time left in the day after spending all of it trying to reconcile the endless and appalling stream of contradictions.