In truth, it should be hard for an internationalist Democrat to argue that Obama's experience living in Indonesia as a child is irrelevant to understanding the Muslim world.

The differences among cultures are not trivial and Indonesia has a culture of which Islam is only a part. Many Americans seem to think that people of other cultures will think like they do when, in fact, they won't. They also seem to think that they will understand another culture by simply vacationing there. That's like thinking that you understand Biology by reading the first paragraph of the intro that says, Biology is the study of life.

I have lived overseas for extended periods of time (Belgium and Iran) and discovered long ago that I simply don't think like other (as I would have it) insular Americans do. Why? Well, I've absorbed other cultures and understand how they see things differently than we do. I don't have the arrogance that says that we know better than anyone else what ought to be done about . I personally think that we have way too many people making foreign policy decisions who grew up in small town America and maybe went on a senior trip to France or Italy or some other European country and have essentially zero clue about the rest of the world that could be described as viscearial or autonomic. I also suspect that to be the source for the group think that seems to infect our foreign policy establishment that caused us to have foreign policy issues even before The Current Occupant demonstrated why he was a "C" student.

While I agree with the point of your article and in general agree with your assessment of the clarity of the language of the bill insofar as it clearly refutes the garbage Joe Klein put out, there is language that will allow this regime to continue to trample our civil liberties. To wit:

persons that are not known to be United States persons

Language is a funny thing, English more so than the average. This portion of the sentence could also have been written:

persons that are known not to be United States persons

Does the position in the sentence of the negation (not) alter the meaning of the sentence? Yes. In the first instance, there is no requirement that you know something. With the sentence written as is, one could be listening in to an American's conversation and simply claim, "I didn't know he was an American, he sure as hell sounded furrin to me." This is not so in the second instance which requires that you know something, i.e. that neither of the callers are American.

This arises because in the first instance, the not modifies the verb "known". In the second instance it modifies the infinitive "to be". Sloppy, sloppy English. The fair minded will see right through this and understand the intended meaning of the sentence. For the rogue regime in Washington today, this is a hole you can drive a truck through.

Political reportage tends to focus on the unimportant, trivial, bullshit minutiae all the while being oblivious to the forest all around it. Viz this article. While I will grant you that the idea of apportioning cabinet positions based on religion (separation of church and state?) provides a bit of amusement to while away a snowy November afternoon, that's not the forest. The forest is that this bozo actually believes that you can have a war on terror. He actually equates Muslims with the Japanese.

Surely anybody with two brains to rub together realizes that "war on terror" is a code phrase for "war on Islam" And he equates a religion to a nation state. Clearly he is conceptually challenged. At least as conceptually challenged as The Current Occupant. And we all know what that has meant.

When you cut to the chase, Clinton has exactly the same imperial mindset that Shrub has. And the same cluelessness.

1. He was prepared to go to war because Saddam was doing things (he thought) that we didn't like. (Who died and made us God?) He was prepared to go to war when we had neither been attacked by Iraq nor could we have conceivably been threatened. War is not an instrument of diplomacy. There are lots of people I see every day who are doing things I don't like. That doesn't give me the right to stop them or, worse still, beat the crap out of them and make them stop.

2. Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist Sunni group. Who's not going to like them or go along with anything they want? Any Shi'ite. Any secular government. Iran is Shi'ite and Iraq was (note the past tense) secular.

3. Please don't piss me off by trying to drag 9/11 into this. 9/11 was perpetrated by a rag-tag bunch of religious fanatics with a lot of money - not a nation state. Iraq was no more going to be supporting Al-Qaeda than Iran would be.

I would like to note that, in the past 40 years, the United States has attacked more countries than any other two countries I can think of (civil wars don't count). All the while proclaiming that we want peace. Apparently, our idea of peace is like management's idea of cooperation - everybody doing what we say.

Surely one of the world's most mendacious newspapers during the Soviet era in Russia is actually a Russian word that does not have a direct English translation. It means something along the lines of "ultimate truth" i.e. what you get all sides of an event (Americans seem to have a form of bipolar disorder in thinking that there are only two sides to things) and winnow the truth out of each to form a whole.

Our press does not do that. I'm not sure they ever have.