I think that anyone with a sufficient understanding of how and why the Soviet attempt to modernize Afghanistan through warfare failed should have been able to apply that understanding towards Iraq and predict the debacle in which we find ourselves today.

The problem is, people like Condi spent too much time patting themselves on the back for the failure on the Soviet Union and didn't spend enough time figuring out why it really failed.

Now 20 years later, we're in the same position as the USSR. We thought we'd be welcomed as liberators and instead we have an open bleeding wound.

Except for one key difference -- I've never read any claims that the Red Army used torture in Afghanistan. The Afghan government regularly used torture, but apparently the Soviet response was to shrink back in horror rather than embrace such methods in their own conduct of the war.

Actually, Bush is more of a "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!" kind of guy. Whereas Bush and his Religious Reich buddies are Biblical literalists, the comma folks, the United Church of Christ, argue for openess which looks beyond the Bible to how God is newly inspiring humans in society day by day.

The Religious Reich, though they love to use the name of Jesus, seem completely unaware of everything he ever said and did ("Blessed are the peacemakers, etc.").

In reality, they are ethical teleologists for whom the end (Whatever the latest version of it might be - oil? world domination? war profiteering? ushering in armageddon and the second coming? psychological overcompensation for internal cowardice?) justifies whatever means they choose to employ (dishonesty, torture, trampling on the constitution, stealing elections by vote supression and hacking electronic voting machines, etc.).

Don't be surprised if, when their cause seems in danger of being lost to truth, justice, and the American way, they decide they must destroy this planet in order to save it (after all, they have the means at their disposal). Or as in the case of the jilted dysfunctional lover, "If I can't have her, nobody can."

We're in more danger than we know, folks. Underneath it all, these people are quietly, desperately, crazy.

If impeachment proceedings don't begin soon, the GOP will loose all credibility (if that's further possible). The only election they can look forward to winning is at an HOA meeting. If the Republicans don't distance themselves from this dangerous, ignorant lunatic, they can kiss their whole party and platform goodbye.

This is an excellent time in our history for a third, Independent Party to take control. Extremes DO NOT work, no matter what side of the political fence they're on. The United States' role as a superpower is at stake and it's time for new leadership - leadership that benefits the majority of Americans, not a select, entitled minority. It's time to remove Corporate America and Big Business from the political system. It's time for complacency to take a back seat to proactivism. It's time for media manipulation to give way to truth and honor.

It's time.

can't believe this administration can be so completely dishonest. Yes, I have seen it time and again, yet still it sometimes shocks me.

Call me naive, but somehow I thought, deep down, they were not really ALWAYS telling a lie to the American people for their own warped purposes.

The conclusion I come to is that the administration must be run by sociopaths. They must deeply, truely hate people to act as they do. Harsh, I know, but they clearly don't function at a normal moral level.

I don't know if anyone noticed but there's been some interesting science released today on the Spanish flu and why it was so deadly:

http://tinyurl.com/nnuzh

"What we think is happening is that the host's inflammatory response is being highly activated by the virus, and that response is making the virus much more damaging to the host," said Dr John Kash, of the University of Washington in Seattle, who headed the research team.

"It is an overblown inflammatory response," he added in an interview, adding that it could have caused a similar immune response in humans.

In other words, our body is taking a hardline approach to the virus and this hardline approach is making the virus more lethal than it would be otherwise.

An overblown inflammatory response -- I think that is what I'd call the invasion of Iraq, the extreme interrogation and incarceration methods we're using in the War on Terror, and yes I think the War on Drugs qualifies in this category too.

Because the virus used the host's immune system against the host, it killed mostly young adults. That's the same demographic dying in Iraq and incarcerated in America.

Bush, of course, will refrain from taking any action whatsoever based on intelligence. (as will Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the trough-bound neo-piggies)

It's a shortsightedness that reflects the narrow thinking of the Judeo-Christian ideology, for example belief that the world was created only a few thousand years ago; compare with Hinduism, whose scholars were (a few thousand years ago) speculating the period of the Kalpas and the Yugas much closer to what modern scientists have deduced from empirical study.

The ostrich-inspired "God's period" logic would seem to be more longsighted, were it not for its incredible naïvté, believing along the lines of the Judeo-Christian tradition that God is far away and only talks to certain individuals, versus the Hindu tradition that God is everywhere, within us all.

There was the story of the man in the middle of the road when an elephant was charging. The man on top of the elephant said "Get out of the road! I can't stop the elephant!" and the man in the middle of the road said "God will save me, I am listening to God." The elephant trampled the man and he died. Before passing into the next life, he asked God, "Why didn't you do anything to save me?" and the reply was, "I did, but you didn't listen to God on top of the elephant!"

Will Bush ever stop believing the shallow voice of God inside his coke-addled brain (or is it VP Dick on the intercom?) and recognize that people who have spent their life studying intelligence may even be closer to the actual truth than he is?!