I have always thought the question must have been posed with a quagmire full of dripping subtext:

Can we do it? Can we put together a case for war?...(or are we gonna have to fire you and get a director who will make the case. Because one way or the other, buddy boy, there will be a case made. That's not even the issue.)

Okay, I guess, yeah sure. It's a slam dunk. Whatever.

What the president vetoed was not time limits or deadlines or giving "our enemy" hope and comfort or any of that nonsense. This veto, like every single thing the Bush whitehouse does, was only about oversight. The entire Bush agenda can be summed up quite easily in that one little word. Oversight.

Bush believes there should be known. Not a jot, not a tit, not the slightest small miniscule portion of it. He should be beholden to no one, accountable to know one, free to redefine reality from moment to moment if he should need to do so.

The congress needs to overturn this veto. Any Republican hold outs who still think this is about emboldening "terrorists" to just sit tight until X day are either being determindedly stupid or else they simply don't care that the president wants to accrue so much personal power.

I'd bet a zillion billion dollars that if it was Clinton who had just vetoed the bill for the exact same stated purpose, they'd be frothing at the mouth to overturn the veto.

So many serious replies to such this hilarious essay. Say what you want about healthcare, or political philosphers, and who inspired whom, but Maher really has the whole think nailed to the wall in the first paragraph. The French looked at the road ahead, didn't like what they saw, and refused to jump on the bus to Freedomville. We still can't get over it. How could they not want to go to Freedomville with us?

But my take on it at the time is that they might have gone along, at least in some degree, if we'd had a plan of operation that wasn't - can't we all agree by now - completely insane!!!!

But no, they insisted on some kind of bizarre rationality in order to act, and for that they simply can not be forgiven. Cheese eating surrender monkeys indeed.

His appearance in the first debate was utterly refreshing for his candor. After all these years of the Bush disaster, Democrat candidates are still sounding to me like they are pushing yet another version of "Republican Lite." They couch everything in the dull dead language of politics. They still want to navigate some middle road course when the country is dangerously close to go over the cliff. An enormous amount of things need to be undone before we can even begin to think about the middle of the road. (Bush says torture and extraordinary rendition, we say no torture; isn't there some way we can split the difference?) No! We need to roll back that idiocy, we need to reclaim our soul in as loud and furious and defiant a way as possible.

Gravel, may be a crank or a crazy old coot, or whatever, but in the first debate he was the clearest voice to declare that anything even remotely resembling business as usual will only continue our slide down the road to further disaster. I hope he can keep lobbing those hand grenades into the debate. Get the other candidates off the dreary soundbite loop, so that maybe, just maybe, we can start to get to something that's real.

It's just that they don't understand the issue given the context of Gonzales having an R after his name, and his being appointed by a Bush. To them, that "R" is some kind of guaranty for... what ever it is they associate with it. They don't have a problem with tyranny, per se, because they see it as being a compassionate tyranny, necessary for the good of the country.

They are not stupid, just blindly partisan. Remember back in the late '90s when they were all howling about the dangers of an "Imperial Presidency." Now that is an actual fact and reality, not one of them seems to give a shit about it at all. It's the same deal here.

If Gonzales had been up to the same tricks and was a Clinton appointee, they would understand the issue completely, and that right quick. Special prosecuters would have already been assigned, with a blank check attached for investigative powers.

Great strip with a much needed lesson.

was not a charitable one. But then, I consider his life to have been hypocritical and uncharitable.

For good or bad, afterlife or no, heaven or hell or no, only now can he speak with any actual authority. Everything else he uttered in life was sheer conjecture posed as absolute truth. He couldn't prove a single syllable of it, but he'd have us run the whole nation by it.

I have the feeling that if he does appear in heaven, Jesus or God or whatever might be saying things like "What part of humility, compassion and charity could you not understand?"

I'm sure Falwell will think that he's gone to hell.