senior administration officials -- including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Alberto Gonzales -- were going to meet today to discuss it.

Boy, talk about a rogues' gallery. I bet if somebody used the Kohlberg Scale of stages of moral development to rank them, they'd come up with a negative number for the whole lot.

I think they're highly motivated to keep the extralegality (what a buzzword, how about "criminality" or "illegality") going as long as they can. And even if the Gitmo facility is shut down, they've got Turkey, Libya, and any number of Eastern European places they can likely warehouse people faster than you can say "Hostel II." So, don't put away the waterboards just yet!

The GOP is kinda fascinating, like their worship of power and their ideological blindness -- counting on power (legal or otherwise) to protect them from the consequences of their actions. They really are thugs, and don't underestimate shadow president Cheney, he certainly puts the "vice" in the Vice Presidency.

The wrong metric? Whatever happened to yardsticks? If the Pentagon is relying on the metric system to determine progress, it's like the terrorists have already won! There's nothing sexy about death by centimeters -- too cold, too clinical -- but death by inches has a ring to it, by jingo!

Metrics? Is this an American war, or what? We must inch our way forward, one foot at at time, yard-by-yard, with acres of land pacified, until all of the milestones have been crossed. It doesn't matter how many ounces of blood are spilled, how many pounds of ammunition we use, how many tons of materiel we send over there -- we shall prevail! Break out the hogsheads of Budweiser for Victory in Iraq (VI) Day!

Pace's pacing is off when he says this...

"He will take a look at what you're measuring and try to defeat that measurement, so to speak."

By that standard, ANY progress in Iraq plays into the hand of the Enemy, right? We build a new school, the Enemy blows it up. We restore an oil refinery, the Enemy cuts the pipelines. And so on. Seems like the Pace Principle would be something like this: Measure nothing, destroy everything.

That's the only way to beat the Enemy? Kinda like a rehashing of the Vietnam paradigm of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." No wonder the Iraqis want us gone; we're just tourists; they have to live there.

*koff koff koff* So much smoke. Can't breathe. Can't see.

I'm still trying to parse this one...

I don't think that there's any -- think there's been any complaint about compliance except for, in this regard, to the vice president's office

That whole "except for, in this regard, to the" is clunky and confusing. Is "Super-Tricky Dick" Cheney upholding the law by breaking it?

*koff koff*

Great piece, Mr. Koppelman; the neocons certainly cribbed some from Plato to give themselves a fig leaf for their agenda. As for whether any Greek thinkers offered much for Democrats...

I'm afraid none of them were what we'd call good liberal Democrats.... I think that if you want to keep your feet on the ground, then Aristotle is the famous antidote to Plato.

What about the Sophists? For all of their demonizing at the hands of Plato, I think the Sophists offer views that are more suited to liberal attitudes -- that virtue can be taught, for example, and their belief in the subjectivity of truth surely necessitated tolerance for diversity of opinion (versus pursuing a One Truth[tm] model that is suited for neocons, reactionaries, and totalitarians everywhere).

Sophists' mastery of and understanding of rhetoric is something we're sorely lacking in today's America -- for all the influence of mass media, public relations, propaganda, and advertising in our daily lives, there really is very little clear awareness of rhetoric's influence and power, which makes people more, and not less vulnerable to it.

Of all of the classical liberal arts, poor Rhetoric is barely taught anymore, which I think is a loss for any free society -- clearly it was a valued liberal art for centuries. Ancient Greece's democracy thrived in the time of the Sophists, and their professional teaching certainly had to help that democracy grow, by enhancing people's powers of persuasion. The power to persuade is an important power; without persuasion, what are you left with? The brutality of force, and the duplicity of fraud.

My sense is that no Sophist would've found the GOP's ham-handed and hasty deceptions terribly convincing in the march to war, and would probably have been able to muster mighty rhetorical rebuttals to it.

Today, the most propagandized people think they're immune to it, paradoxically enough, and even the Platonic wannabes heading the country almost seem to believe their own lies.

It's unfortunate that the lion's share of knowledge of the Sophists comes by way of their biggest enemy, Plato, akin to asking Newt Gingrich to characterize liberalism for you.

Bring back the Sophists! Plato is so last century. ;)