McConnell's most comical line in the whole article:

"To state the facts plainly:"

But then he threw off a line about opinion being shaped by people still living in their mother's basement.

And, you know, for some reason that set me off. Because I said to myself "Like who? Name me one influential blogger who is living in his or mother's basement. Atrios? Markos? Glenn? Most of these people are carrying around graduate degrees."

And Attorney Christy Hardin Smith, Movie Producer Jane Hamsher, Brilliant writer/commentator and all around intellect Marcy Wheeler and many others. As many of us here know, those people are all incredibly talented and well established citizens who aren't living in Mom's basement.

Another of the Firedoglake contributers is Siun.

From Siun's bio: When not swimming in the Lake,[FDL] she [Siun] leads a consulting team working on corporate responsibility communications.

Yes sir, that ol' living in 'mom's basement' gag is, in most all cases, pathetic attempts at so called humor intended to degrade the target and upgrade the flimflam who is doing the attempted degradation.

I saw most of that Lanny Davis Washington Journal on C-Span. I noticed many of the same things you mentioned. I also noticed that he kept repeating the same sickly sweet 'best intentions, wish we'd done better, but' and nonsense like that over and over again. He was hard to watch. Very hard.

I saw it on the original 5 or 6 am session of Washington Journal so the program pretty well wrecked my morning. That's why I almost never watch Washington Journal anymore. Between the horribly dishonest or ill informed guests, and the ignorant or dishonest callers...I just can't stomach it.

I'm with you on most all of that. Especially the soft or hard warmonger mindsets that we're contending with. I used to watch Journal with the same idea in mind as you have...get a feel for the latest talking point strategy and so forth. But, like I said, ouch. Too hard to take most of the time.

One thing I do take some pleasure in, though, is when a caller makes this or that claim, and then the host, oh so very seemingly innocently, asks conversational tone questions, which are really for the purpose of possibly exposing any dishonest claims the caller has made of who they are or what they do and how it pertains to how they claim to know what they claim to know. I can just about hear the caller squirming as they try to bluster their way through. They usually just fall apart. They weren't prepared to be called out. Not even a little bit.

narcissistic - characteristic of those having an inflated idea of their own importance

Bingo!

I just did dishes and ordered a pizza.

-- L.W.M.

Yeah, I just practiced my playing of "Johnny, Don't Come Home Drunk" about 15 times on my banjo.

half a million Muslim supporters of al Qaeda within our midst?

You use that annoying rhetorical tick that Michelle Malkin uses of repeating the punch line again and again and again. So charming.

500,000

Perhaps he's repeating the figure because you can't seem to get it through your head

-kasimira

You mean kind of like the way we heard about nothing but "Clinton's cock" for how many years was that?

So that 500,000 figure is just general consensus now, huh?

a respected poll reveals that a quarter of Muslims in America support al Qaeda,

So now you have moved on from just tossing out a number, to just flat out saying that the poll, rather than you, "reveals" that a quarter of muslims in America support al Qaeda. So you've gone from bullshi*tting to flat out lying.

You 're right, I read that article about McClatchy. Everyone of us need to get their backs.

PS...What happened to your 'tinyurl' love affair?

Hey, Ramadi? What's your real name? Or are you like Joe Klein's anonymous sources who, for some reason or another, get to hide behind their "specialness" and say any damned thing they please without saying who they are or why we should believe them?

In your case you even Include a lot of sarcastic insults to Glenn Greenwald, which is really classless while hiding who you are from him and from us.

If your are who you say you are, and you're going to come on here and try to own the conversation, you need to buck up and tell us who you are. Otherwise...fob off.

That was just another whiny version of Joe Klein saying "trust me". Big deal. You buying that? I'm not.

I think it's important to include this part of that post by Juan cole to have a better perspective on what he was saying. I think it's also important to keep in mind that he posted this over a year ago. I suspect he has some different ideas about some of what he hoped for back then.

The US needs to get out. Its troops are a constant provocation of the local population, stirring insurgency rather than quieting it. They have never developed the kind of local intelligence or even language skills that would allow them to do real counter-insurgency. When hot civil war nearly erupted in February, US troops could not intervene between Sunnis and Shiites anyway, without becoming a party to it. So what good are they in such a crisis? Better to get them out of harm's way. Moreover, the Bush administration is both incompetent and corrupt, and therefore cannot hope actually to accomplish anything good in Iraq. The longer the US is there virtually unilaterally, the worse the final crash and burn is going to be. But the US has a responsibility, having thrown Iraq into civil war, to make the best arrangements it can for the aftermath.