The media was unfair to "WarHeroJohnMcCain"?

Since we've never met, I know I'm not one of your "liberal friends on the coasts". I've never lived on the coast. People in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota (et cetera et cetera) do not live on "the coasts".

"Blogs have poisoned the political atmosphere." That's where I stopped reading. Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, The WSJ editorial page and a whole lot of other media Borgias were out there long before anyone ever spoke the word "blog". There were no blogs when Tom DeLay tried to impeach Bill Clinton on "secret evidence". There were no blogs when Robert Novak came up with "Amnesty, Acid and Abortion."

Ms Pelosi needs to do a bit more reading, and whole lot more thinking, before she lectures anyone about politics.

Haven't we learned our lesson about political legacies, at least for a while?

....but I believe I saw Ricks say that if the message of Fiasco was that Iraq is even worse than you think, the message of The Gamble is that Iraq isn't as good as you think. Do I have that wrong?

Even as the goals for the Iraq war grew more modest and realistic, they remained out of reach. Ricks' reporting backs Democrats' claims that while the surge succeeded militarily, it failed to create the political opening that would allow Iraqis to govern and defend themselves.

Ironic that Joan Walsh has fallen into the trap that so many Republicans and warhawks set in the last few months. The "Surge" was a military means to a political end. This sentence pretty much undercuts all of Ms Walsh's very Reasonable review.

Arguendo, let's say Petraeus' and the Surge's success in Iraq is clear cut. If we still can't leave Iraq, spending billions of dollars a month to keep our finger stuck in a dike of violence, with an Iranian ally holding the Presidency of the country, the Sunnis biding their time, the Kurds seething, Pakistan (and its nukes) growing more precarious by the day.

This is a victory?

...that the title of this review has changed since it was first posted.. I think some of the text has been edited too.

But I don't see any acknowledgement of either.

To all the posters making snide remarks about red-faced Greenwald apparatchiks reading from crib sheets:

If the surge worked, why do Ricks and Petraeus both say we are, after six years, closer to the beginning of this occupation than the end?

Ms Walsh-

I read your piece, and all the self-contradictions it contains ( and I don't remember the "--sort of--" qualification from when I first read this piece last night).

You're Salon's editor-in-chief, so I assume you approved the headline of your own piece? Did you think it would not be provocative? You've been with Salon a while, discussing politics on the web and on TeeVee. I assume you've noticed that Iraq is a hot button issue. Are you surprised that people are reading your review through the lens of that title? That's kinda how headlines and titles work. Especially when you make the choice to lead with your chin. As you did.

As we say in the internets, "preview is your friend". Maybe you should have re-thought your own headline before hitting "publish".

I was worried about the Executive getting too much power when the author of theory of the Unitary Executive was nominated to the Supreme Court. Senator Byrd voted to end the filibuster of Samuel Alito because he was deeply concerned about the nominee's wife starting to cry during the hearings.

Priorities.

"Nixon's the One"? Rushin '12? These people are hilarious. But a twenty-one year old girl screaming "Are you single?" at a bloated, thrice-divorced (and apparently impotent) sexagenarian who, for reasons he has chosen not to make public, takes a suitcase full of Viagra to a third world country? That is truly sad.

Same reason she wrote that review of Tom Ricks' book that said the Surge worked and Democrats now had to admit that it worked and Bush was right: It's so darling and contrarian to disagree with your liberal readers! It proves that Joan is independent not afraid to stand up to liberal group think. I bet Joe Scarborough told her she was very brave to stand up to her own allies like that. And I bet Tweety Matthews and Pat Buchanan agreed!! Trouble with her review of the Ricks book was (according to every other review I've read and the many interviews I've seen with Ricks about the book, haven't had the chance to read it myself), trouble was, Joan really didn't seem to have a clue what Ricks was saying.

Which is rather a long way of saying that Joan sometimes gets a bit too clever and "daring" for the good of her credibiilty.

As for the idiot Paglia, everything worth saying about her was said almost twenty years ago by someone a hell of a lot smarter than Camille Paglia

• There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "Poor dear, it's probably PMS." Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "What an asshole." Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole. [Molly Ivins about Camille Paglia]

Drudge? Is that where they came from? That explains a lot.

Also says a lot about Joan Walsh. But maybe I'm underestimating her cynicism and she's using the internet nitwit network and Paglia to drive up hits.