Your comment is just the catalyst for this one, so I don't mean to target you specifically but ...

Had you considered the possibility that you could have been *wrong*?

I know it's out of fashion. In this election season, going back over your initial impressions (which, among human beings, have a long history of needing subsequent revision) seems like a sign of weakness or lack of conviction.

What's more, you're behind the curve, what with all that second-guessing, admitting the possibility that your initial impressions might need further elaboration to correct what might ... might ... be flaws. It's tough out there. You've got to grab onto the first thing that pops into your head and stick with it, otherwise you're just weak and flawed and worthless, after all.

Everytime I (masochistically) wade into a thread like this, I see a lot of the same: people who would never even DREAM of the notion that their faultless first impressions of what was going on inside someone's head, whom they've never met, whose everyday movements, tracked as they are throughout the entire ordeal which most people have no clue about, have been mercilessly dissected and assigned meanings by others whose interests are not in making sure those assignments are in any way 'true', but instead, that they 'play', could be anything other than perfect, insightful, reflective of a true representation of complex reality.

But then, truth is irrelevant. It's only how well we assemble the facts that serve our purposes, and how loudly we can scream at and insult the other side of ... our side. That's what really matters.

The last eight years will leave a long shadow, indeed.

What, I'm dead to you? You didn't see my comment and link to the very same fershlugginger Mclellan thing upthread? The one snoid was responding to?

Oy! Now, you're giving me hives for real!

She *has* answered it. Repeatedly. Maybe you could go back and read her posts a little more carefully. I know I got the answer.

Or maybe you'd like to waterboard her first.

Hunter's quote about the generals has some truth to it, but like all the effective hand-waving techniques used by the administration, it puts that grain of truth in service to a big dodge.

At the root of this is the usual appeal to false dichotomy:

+ Re-paint the story as a simplistic opposition of two parts (either the Generals are burly he-men with minds of their own, or they are weak sycophants who simply salute and say yessir-nosir-three-bagsful),

+ Point to the truth in your favored explanation (I can show you that some of these generals are not sycophants ... hell, some of them even said Rumsfeld didn't put enough troops in Iraq!)

+ Emphasize the thinness of the re-painted version of the explanation you are trying to defeat, and supplement with non-sequiturs as necessary.

In the real world, power doesn't work this way, but we don't stop to think about that because the reality is subtle and ambiguous, we don't have the facts or context (which good reporting would help provide) to resolve the uncertainty and we've been presented instead with a simple and straightforward binary choice with a conclusion that is obvious or which does not strain us too much.

Some are convinced by this, others are deterred. I've lost count of how many concrete instances of this very tactic I've seen in the last eight years.