It would never occur to the serpents in the Bush Admin that Wilson was motivated BY THE TRUTH! It's such an alien concept to them, it never even crossed their reptilian minds.

We got Jim Webb because of George Allen's "Macaca" moment. Now we're going to watch our own people drop like flies because of "gaffes" like this. Something like what Biden said is only a gaffe because it gets repeated over and over alongside the word "gaffe," but that's all it takes.

From MSNBC's rah-rah piece on how GREAT the economy is doing (complete with Grinning Shrub shaking hands at the stock exchange):

More brisk government spending also helped the fourth-quarter GDP. Government spending increased at a 3.7 percent pace in the final quarter, up from a 1.7 percent growth rate in the third quarter. Federal spending on national defense rose at a rate of 11.9 percent in the fourth quarter, the most since the spring of 2003, when the country went to war with Iraq.

All those positive contributions to GDP helped to blunt some negative forces.

Which means, when we take Shrub's credit card away, the bill for all this fun will follow shortly after.

Bush, with his "I dare you to defund" gmabit, uses the troops as chess pieces.

It's incredible that a general -- a man who has navigated the politics of the military for decades and now wears five stars on his shoulders -- would allow himself to be set up this way. Shrub calls himself "the Decider" but is perfectly willing to let Casey take the rap for all the bad decisions in Iraq. What are they paying this guy, and in what currency?

Make that four stars. But still...

I fear death as much as anyone else. Or maybe a little less, because what I tell myself when (I'm pushing sixty) the darkness looms at four in the morning when I can't sleep, is that Mozart is dead, Shakespeare is dead, Ghandi is dead...so why shouldn't I be dead, too, I who have accomplished so little? Now I have Molly Ivins to add to the list of those who have gone before me, who have made a difference and left behind so much that lives on after them. Not that I welcome death, when it comes, but I certainly have nothing to complain about.

But 'twas ever thus. As a Vietnam vet, you have to have seen, or experienced, battle-hardened troops being led on patrol by a 2nd Lieutenant fresh out of OCS with his d**k in one hand an a field manual in the other.

Can't you leave Paris Hilton to the lesser rags? Have a little pride.

For those who feel we should be tolerant of PH showing up on Salon, where do you draw the line? Should we not discriminate at all, or just discriminate enough that we can be considered "intelligent, well-rounded" sorts of people by our Salon-mates?

I'm sorry, but the fact that someone like PH sucks up so much media energy, gives people who just don't want to have to think about all those nasty, depressing problems in the world something to focus their tiny minds on -- it just plain depresses me. I come to Salon to get away from that, just as others dive into the latest Enquirer hot off the press to escape the parts of reality they'd rather not deal with.

The language in this report is spinnable -- and will be spun -- to support our continued presence in Iraq, the surge, and whatever other diabolical shit Cheney et al. can come up with.

Thanks and kudos in return. How frustrating it is, upon finding like minds and souls here in cyberspace, that we can't sit before the fire with a glass of wine and randomly explore the things we have in common and the things we might argue about, with mutual respect. On the other hand, how good it is that we do manage to connect, however insufficiently.

The Mutual Admiration Society stands in recess.

On the strength of your recommendation, I rented "Infernal Affairs." Boy, I don't get it. The dialogue (I have to assume the subtitle translator was at least in the ball park) was painfully expository, the story moved over the tops of the changes rather than through them. Maybe I'm not properly tuned into the cadences of the Hong Kong style, but to me "IA" was "show and tell" where "TD" was "slog and feel."

Let's do it.

Iraq is important, no question. But with Bush's massive military budget and (according to the NYT) bigger ones down the road from an increasingly demanding Military-Industrial Complex, there will be more Iraqs to come if we don't put pressure on congress to stop this wildly unnecessary build-up. Where is the threat? We're becoming the most dangerous country on the planet. Ending the Iraq war is important -- but it's all "Deck Chairs on the Titanic" if Military America is allowed to grow unfettered.

A few more lives ruined - the quick and the dead - to soothe the collective Bush-Cheney ego. And congress dithers on.

As that poor young airman so elequently put it: "Shit fucking damn."

With the hundreds of billions that have already been spent, with the complaints one hears regularly that the military's armory has been worn to a frazzle, and with defense contractors making money hand over fist -- how is it possible that they don't have enough equipment to send these new troops to Iraq? Not that I'm for it, quite the contrary, but something doesn't smell right here. Am I the only one who feels that, "We don't have enough equipment to protect our fine young soldiers, so we'll have to wait to send them into battle," sounds like a not-so-subtle bit of p.r. hype supporting the president's jaw-dropping new military budget?