When Ahmadinejad was elected I felt the hairs on my neck go up - Black Bart had just bellied up to the bar. Just what Cowboy Butch was looking for - damn, the National Guard was never like this, Mr. Dick.

If we could just lock them out into the dusty street and let them have at each other. But noooo, they have to drag all of us into their high noon drama. They've got to bring us along as they try the horses on for size - war, pestilence, death. They've got to yoke us to their B-movie tunnel vision.

In six years we've gone from a country that had for decades led the fight in the Middle East for peace to one that provokes wars on the cheap to stir it up.

I wonder if the writer who offered the President support - to round up those who seek to harm our country - would like to extend the corral to the Zion-brand neocons, the idiot syncophants, corporate enablers, and duplicitous Saudis who have brought us to this point? I sure 'nough would.

Wow - thanks for that penetrating q&a with the ever-so-self-effacing Ledeen. What a sweetheart - clearly he has our nation's best interests at heart.

Here's a list of attibuted Ledeen statements, via Wikipedia (I know, I know - too bad the interviewer didn't have time to verify them personally):

.......Writing in The Nation, a left-wing magazine, Jack Huberman, who describes Ledeen as "the most influential and unabashed warmonger of our time", attributes these quotes to Ledeen:[15]

"the level of casualties (in Iraq) is secondary"

"we are a warlike people (Americans)...we love war"

"Change—above all violent change—is the essence of human history"

"the only way to achieve peace is through total war"

"The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people"

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business".......

And speaking of democratic revolution: I'll bet that close to 70% of Americans would agree with him about regime change - although the crappy regime they'd like to boot out is the one he's spent so much time enabling. Lots of people might offer to throw him against a wall too. Faster, please, indeed.

I never thought the day would come when the story of the WWMD would leap from the pages so handily into our laps. I see a mini-series. Steve Buscemi could play Bush, playing Ahab. Come to think of it, he could play Lt. Rice too, and all the leads, like Dr. Strangelove. ABC airs it - the Disney touch!! - but with a Beckett edge.

A bare stage, debris, an albatross. "Shall we go?" "Yes." (They do not move. Curtain.)

Aleve Commercial. Diet Pepsi. Desperate Housewives.

".......who was fully conscious and anguished at the disaster unfolding......."

Thanks to Mr. Blumenthal for the above reminder about Johnson and his Vietnam, which summed up in two words and one phrase the essence of Bush's bleak tenure: in short - he doesn't know, and he doesn't care.

No president in my lifetime has been more oblivious to his country's (or the world's) true welfare, or less caring about putting citizens in harm's way - from poverty and environmental disasters, to blood for oil. At best, he is a rubber-souled cheerleader, with a diminishing turnout, and a deepening scowl. At worst, he is....the worst.

How on earth did a man of so little quality attain the highest office in the land? If only he will be available to us as a benchmark from now on. If only we will not stoop so low again.

how he got there, and I'd like to make sure it doesn't happen again, at least not while we who see Bush's insanity up close are around to testify. I'll bet a majority of us agree on that one.

I don't agree that Bush represents America any more than I think Jerry Springer represents America. This country is a lot broader than TV programming and beltway pundits can possibly claim. And I don't think that lack of intelligence is the final culprit in the making of an idiot president - there's too much of a think-tank agenda to his crowning.

There's one thing that can overcome the self-centered, the dim and the recreationally venal - sound leadership. People of conscience who attain power and don't lose their humanity along the way. Politicians of some substance who ask us to live up to our better selves, and rise to the occasion. We've had a few in the past and we can have them again, if we require it. They can make all the difference in the world, just as Gore has done for global warming awareness. That's some mighty fine leadership. We should choose carefully.

The Bush fiasco proves that we are deeply malleable. Yet by being so morally bankrupt he's also caused a great number of people in this country to wake up, even for a moment, to the train-wreck corporate manipulation and media complicity all around us.

He got there; it's up to us to make sure he's the last of his kind for a long time.

For me the definition of a defeat-ocrat is someone who doesn't stand up and speak truth to nonsense like last night's SOTU. Jim Webb just blew that nasty cliche right out of the Dome.

He said, in prime time and on MSM, what so many on this board and elsewhere have been saying for years. How about we all get on the horn and tell our Congresspeople we want more of the same, and fast? Encore.