Had the Bush administration not spent 8 years sticking its tongue out at Iran, and refusing to have any dealings with them whatsoever, it's likely we would have some backdoor channels through which to engage in the kind of quiet diplomacy and subtle pressure which would be the only way to effectively address this situation.

It is entirely possible that we don't have the slightest clue who among the mullahs might be willing to speak with us, since we've been so adamant about not speaking to them.

Of course, it's also entirely possible that some grown-ups in the State Department have maintained low key but active contact with certain elements in Iran that are not aggressively anti-America, and that even now the Obama administration is exerting such pressure as it can to get the real powers in that country to recognize the crisis for exactly what it is.

If the latter is the case, I doubt that Kristol, et.al., are being made privy to those efforts. And if the former is the case, I don't expect Kristol and his idiot bretheren to acknowledge their great hero's massive fuck-up.

Good lord, did any of these folks even take a course on the US Constitution in HIGH SCHOOL?!?!

Last I checked, the President made foreign policy, not the House Minority Leader. The Senate has some limited role to play, but the House gets NO voice in foreign affairs. Pence should sit down and let the grown-ups do their jobs.

And the comment noted in the Update was supposed to make things BETTER? Sheesh. The original tweet could be written off as the result of the usual thought process that goes into such blurbs. The "clarification" just reinforced what a tool Hoekstra is. And what a competent staff he has!

It's a FUCKING JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKE.

The next time Limp-baugh says feminists have no sense of humor, he will successfully be able to point to this article.

Sheesh.

Fake.

Two things essentially "prove" this.

First, she looks pretty blase about the whole thing. But perhaps she's just blessed with incredible cool. The real giveaway is that the folks cleaning up aren't wearing gloves. I'm pretty sure that OSHA regs - if not common sense - would dictate a little latex here if the blood was real.

"Keep it in your pants" is in fact the only thing to do, unless you have agreed with your spouse to have an open marriage.

As Jimmy Carter noted long ago, we all lust in our hearts. What separates man from beast is our ability to overcome base urges.

When you get married, you make a promise to be faithful. If you believe you can no longer keep that promise, you owe it to your spouse to do the right thing, and seek divorce. You will, of course, in doing so cause great hurt to your spouse and your children (if you have them). But your sneaking around on the sly is going to cause at least as much -- if not more -- pain as well when it is discovered. And it will almost certainly be discovered at some point, particularly in this day and age of emails, texts, etc.

You could, alternatively, decide that the only one in pain will be yourself, in denying yourself the pleasure of acting on those base urges and remaining faithful to your spouse and a good and honorable parent to those children.

The problem is, so many of these bozos who wind up in public office are people of privilege. They believe the rules the rest of us schlubs live by do not apply to them. They have either been raised with a silver spoon in their mouths, being denied nothing and thereby expecting everything they desire, or they have been born with such great gifts that virtually the same conditions exist (even though they may in fact have had to work for their accomplishments).

The bottom line is, you can't have everything you want. Most of us know that. Folks like Sanford, Spitzer, Clinton and so many others, simply don't accept that.

For many of the same reasons I noted in a post earlier today on Broadsheet, I'm not surprised Sanford intends on staying.

He, like so many people in the privileged class, believes he is above the rules you and I play by. Many have said: "where were all you liberals when Clinton was in the docket". Well, I'll tell you. I thought what Clinton did was dispicable, and I would have been fine if he had resigned. But I wasn't surprised when he didn't.

And I wouldn't be clamoring for Sanford to resign if I lived in SC and had a dog in this fight. Not for the affair, anyway. That's between him and his wife. (Although, while I don't condone adultery, it ranks far below hypocrasy on the scale of PUBLIC offenses, and he's clearly a hypocrite of epic proportions.) If I did have a voice in SC, however, I'd urge that he go because he left the state without notice to anyone else in state government, leaving a void which could have -- in the event of an emergency -- wreaked havoc.

He's only a little racist, which would make him -- using his own calculus -- REAL stupid.

The $126M (and counting) that they're spending shows just how bloated and profitable the business is, and suggests the extent to which the consumers are currently getting gouged.