An excerpt from yesterday's MTP interview with former CENTCOM Commander, General Zinn:

What has disappointed me is there hasn’t been this debate on the strategy, on the policy, a regional strategy on policy, let alone an Iraq policy. We’re, we’re debating the tactics. The, the surge is a tactic. In what context is the surge? You can make an argument for a surge if you were going to withdraw, to cover the withdrawal, for example, or to contain, to reposition forces or to re-engage in a different way or a stronger way. And why we got caught up in the tactical debate, in my mind, is an indication that we don’t understand what we want to do. What should our Middle East policy be? What should our policy be in terms of Iraq and, and the war against the extremists out there or the conflict against extremists? We seem to be strategically adrift, in my view.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18094428/

Once again, it's down the rabbit hole.

From Sid Blumenthal's latest Salon article:

Wolfowitz's willful behavior, as though no rules bound him or facts constrained his ideas, should not have surprised anyone. At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz was an insistent force behind an invasion of Iraq, bringing it up at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration, months before Sept. 11. For years he had been a firm believer in the crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie, a neoconservative writer, who argued that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and even the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. After Sept. 11, Wolfowitz pursued his obsession by sending former CIA Director James Woolsey on a secret mission to attempt to confirm the theory. Woolsey came back with nothing, but Wolfowitz continued to believe. His beliefs are stronger than any evidence.

One of the key bits of evidence used to support the transfer of WMD to Syria meme is-- wait for it-- pictures of covered trucks crossing the Syrian border just before the war began.

Which leads one to wonder: what was in all those covered trucks that proceeded every other well telegraphed war and occupation in the twentieth century?

If you knew a gang of thieves were about to move into your neighborhood, I suspect that you'd be on the phone to Ryder in a heartbeat.

Maybe reporters should begin asking both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates how they view signing statements, how they would or would not use them.

...can put you up in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House.

Sorry, don't mean to be snarky at a moment like this, but I can't help but think of you and your family as anything but refugees from the Forbidden Planet of George W. Bush's monstrous Id.

It's well over Salon's 1000 word limit,so here's where you can find it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37679-2004Dec5.html

So, while Rove is busy reading Machiavelli, Matthews, the Politicos, and the other Beltway courtiers are busy adapting a much earlier work, Capellanus' The Art of Courtly Love, the better to woo Washington royalty like Queen Nancy at her Simi Castle.

Too bad the camera didn't catch her reaction to Matthews' probing question about how the candidates would feel should the Clinton's return to sully the DC throne room.

National journalists are as integrated into the Beltway elite culture as much as the political figures they are supposed to investigate and scrutinize.

Probably why the most critical reporting on the bogus pre-war Iraq intel was provided by outsiders Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel from Kight-Ridder (now McCLatchy), which has never had a D.C. office.

Sorta like bloggers...

The central premise of the Bush presidency has been that this Middle East agenda -- the Epic War of Civilizations for Our Very Existence -- is so paramount that no limits can be tolerated, whether those limits be expressed by long-standing worldwide conventions, moral and political taboos against torture and lawless detention, or even the basic limits imposed by our constitutional framework and by the rule law.

"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad" -James Madison