while a Congressman, Abraham Lincoln said this of President James K Polk: "I more than suspect already that he is deeply concious of being in the wrong; that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him; that originally having some strong motive...to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory...he plunged into it and has swept on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation...he now finds himself he knows not where...His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease...He is a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man. God grant the may be able to show there is not somethng about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity."

Why all this talk about this "trial"? It ain't going to happen. Since he won't be up for reelecton, Bush will have no worries about a backlash when he pardons Libby (and Rove?). Thge last thing Bush wants is a public where the Unholy Trinity of Bush-Cheyny-Rumsfeld have to testrify about Iraq and their assassination squads designed to demonize all critics.

The only way the trial will come about is if the press doggedly and perpetually harasses Bush with "Are you going to pardon Libby and Rove?" But based on the record I would not count on the meek press to have the guts to do that.

The thing that intrigues me--what is Libby going to do with all that money the rich GOPers will contribute to his legal defense fund?

No matter what the Democrats do--and they aren't likely to put up much of a fight--Scalito will be sitting on the Supreme Court within a matter of weeks unless God strikes him dead.

Doesn't this constitute a Republican victory that will render all their recent losses irrelevant? Clearly they think so.

Mr. Blumenthal, please--tell us it ain't so!

The liberal silence on this has been deafening.

Blumenthal alludes to Lenin and I'm reminded that that brand of governance lasted 72 years. Democrats have to get out the truth

about the administration so as to capture one of the two chambers in '06 and once again have a voice. Will Meredith

LinearBob, doesn't your evidence that George W. Bush is a neocon work equally well as evidence that the PNAC group is really in control, while frat-boy Bush is simply a figurehead?

I have no doubt that G.W. Bush is a hard-hearted, small-minded person. There's no way he could behave as he did during and after Katrina if he were otherwise. But I really don't see any evidence that the man subscribes to any philosophy more complicated than "help yourself, help your friends, and screw everyone else."

I could not help but wonder if when alluding to Lenin this "mobocracy"

called Republican governance might continue unabated. Which in the case of Lenin and his ilk lasted for 72 years. Will Americans get any smarter

by 2006 and turn the house and/or the senate so that people of conscience can once again have a voice?

Dear Salon:

Mr. Blumenthal might lead us to believe George W. is a prisoner or a puppet of the Neocons. I disagree. I think he is one of them.

I suggest re-reading a Neocon document produced by the Project for a New American Century, their manifesto titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" -- PNAC's plans for the United States military in a "unipolar" world. This PNAC document can be found in several places on the web, but I recommend the following URL:

http://www.pnac.info/

Follow the link at the top of the left hand column of marginal notes. That link leads to a "backup" copy of the PNAC manifesto document, preserved in this web site, should the PNAC folks ever decide to take the original down from their web site.

Check out what the PNAC folks said about the huge defense buildup they advocate, and put those words next to the words of Mr. Bush. Do you remember what Mr. Bush has said about a space based missile defense system? And what about his desire to put "defensive" weapons into space? What happened to the treaty defining space as a nuclear weapons free zone? I think Mr. Blumenthal has given George W. Bush a pass when Mr. Bush has done nothing to deserve a pass. Mr. Bush may not be very articulate, but even that is debatable. Mr. Bush has been quite articulate in his words on certain subjects, and missile defense is one such area. Mr. Bush's missile defense system is Ronald Regan's and (PNAC's) "Missile Shield" brought back from the dead, renamed, and fed huge amounts of our tax money. In "Rebuilding America's Defenses", the PNAC Neocons describe what they believe is the case for the United States exerting "Full Spectrum (military) Dominance" in space. So what is Mr. Bush's missile defense system designed to do?

The last time I looked, a ballistic missile flies along a "Great Circle" path from the point where it was launched until it reaches it's destination. Such a missile flight has a well known trajectory, and given enough flight time, our radars and computers can calculate fairly accurately both where the missile was launched, and where it will come down. If the missile has multiple warheads, they can be tracked as they separate from the launch vehicle. Of course there will probably be some decoys mixed in with real warheads, but one fact has still has not been refuted; we will know with some accuracy who launched them. And we probably will launch a retaliatory strike, after we have determined that the missile coming our way truly is a first strike.

Please consider some of our own technological history. Do you recall how large our first uranium bombs were? Do you think there is any nation able to launch warheads that heavy without first testing missiles with a sufficient amount of lifting power to "throw" such heavy warheads? Now think about our first hydrogen bomb. As I recall, our first hydrogen bomb was the size of a house sitting an atoll in the Pacific. Do you think there is much likelihood of a thermonuclear warhead coming our way on a missile without there having been a great deal of missile and bomb testing by some nation first?

Now consider a cargo container loaded with a crude fission weapon. That container could be transferred from one freighter to another several times, circling the world two or three times before it arrives in one of our harbors, together with hundreds of similar looking containers arriving here every day. Such a device could be designed to be detonated by remote control, just like some of the Improvised Explosive Devices being used against our soldiers in Iraq.

Given these two scenarios, why would Mr. Bush support a missile defense system over an incoming container inspection system? I think only a "True Believer" from the Neocon Right would put so much of our Defense budget into defending us from an almost non-existent nuclear missile threat, while leaving our ports wide open for an attack with a crude container bomb. And now for an even more interesting question; how would we know who sent that container bomb to us? Unfortunately, that question does not lead to the United States "Full Spectrum Dominance" in space as Mr. Bush and the PNAC Neocons advocate, and that is precisely why I think Mr. Bush is not a prisoner of the Neocons, he is one of them.