I don't think anyone was being 'mental' about it. I think I started this off by saying it bothered me (saw it on the news) when the crowd booed Bush at a baseball game, and explained the difference in my mind between the man and the office. Others said they would boo the man.

Paul Dirks expressed what I feel about it, perfectly, in his comment.

To put a slightly different spin on it: it would also bother me to see a former president of the United States in the dock at the Hague. It would be a shameful articulation of what had been done to the office, and our country. That does not mean I wouldn't argue for it, write op-eds in favor of it, or deliver the indictment personally, in the interests of justice.

Thanks for the article and link. I think you or someone posted it the other day (I've been busy since last Thursday and caught up in a blur, so I'm nto sure who did what when ...); I still have it up in my browser, but your post reminded me to actually read the rest of it.

I get the idea that I've somehow presented myself, in spite of saying the opposite, as pro-Pentagon or pro-big ticket military spending. I hope you understand that's not the case.

WRT the Berrigan piece, I'm a bit more hopeful about what it will take to pull the plug on many of these functions. It's happened before, even where the eliminated thing was allegedly indispensable, irreplaceable, absolutely vital to our national security so that (as Glenn says) the enemy doesn't come to Slaughter Us All. There are alternatives to most of these functions (e.g. humanitarian functions back to USAID, diplomatic/proconsul functions back to State, etc. )that have been bureaucratically finagled into the Pentagon hydra, including 'just stop doing it altogether'.

The hardest thing to weed out will be the 'budget-busting' part, especially where it involves waste. The agreed on estimate is that somewhere around a third of the acquisitions budget is wasted; everyone knows it, no one knows how to fix it. Beyond the waste, things are complicated and entangled; it's crazy that it's sometimes easier to completely replace an aircraft before its EOL than to maintain or upgrade it, but that's the kind of thing that budget hatcheteers face. The $900 hammers are just the low hanging fruit, and don't much affect the overall picture.

And I don't think I saw anyone saying that there was anything wrong with booing the president, including me, which is why I said no one is being 'mental'.

I probably wouldn't boo anyone at a game, but that's because that's not how I behave, not because of the individual, or the office, involved.

What I said was, when I saw it, it bothered me. It was in the sense of, this is the president of the united states on the mound, an office I was brought up to respect, the crowd is booing him, and this is what it's come to (as a result of the actions of his administration).

It's got nothing to do with defending him, person, office, whatever, or arguing that they shouldn't be booed at because of the office, their age, the color of their hair, how they look in a codpiece, or anything else.

Get it?

Now that's thinking outside the box!

That made me think of the episode of West Wing where Barltett says he's going to break the strike between proxy-UPS and the truckers by nationalizing the company and its entire industry and drafting all the truckers into the armed forces if they don't agree by midnight. Might be a bluff, but the lawyers say he can do it ...

But then, if the Dems won't even move to impeach Bush, there's not much chance of them conjuring up the cojones to roll the dice on disbanding the armed forces, is there?