The troops have to be fighting and dying in order for them to pretend to be more patriotic than other people. Change course? Truces? Scalebacks? Withdraw? Diplomacy? Redeployments? Hell no.

It's as if the soldiers blood is fuel for their little game.

The news has come out about Tillman finally. What a wonderful military we have,cold blooded killers that follow the party line of the neocons to the degree that they kill a guy that is their own brother in arms. Wow, what a wonderful country we have become.

Does anyone really think Limbaugh or Coulter has a selfless and honest love of the troops.

It's total bullshit.

I am more patriotic and moral than you are.

For God's sake, Glenn -- just be glad that the perjury discussion has finally begun in earnest.

Since when has "the right case" ever mattered with the Bush administration? "The right case" has been making itself for the last five years in full public view. That the Bush team is committing serious felonies -- including Gonzales's perjury miniseries -- doesn't seem to resonate with anyone who isn't already paying close attention. On the other hand, a Republican congressman writes some dirty emails to a male page, and suddenly the whole country has "had it up to here with the Republicans."

For whatever reason, the mainstream media seems to have found something in this perjury allegation that it likes. It's being treated as a real story all over the place -- look, for instance, at the banner headline on Washingtonpost.com. Maybe it's because uninformed, politically indifferent people (including reporters) know what "perjury" is, and know that it's serious, but don't have any idea what "obstruction of justice" or "Hatch Act violation" mean, or what the "Presidential Records Act" is (and don't have any interest in learning these things, just as the establishment media doesn't have any interest in educating them).

I'm excited about this perjury development, not because it's the "right case," but because it seems to represent a meaningful step towards the impeachment of Gonzales. I hope you'll revisit your take on this in a few weeks -- and that you won't sniff too loudly at the story in the meantime.

As I read the alternating coverage today on the murder of Pat Tillman and the deliberate confusion Gonzales has created over TSP/"Project X," it occured to me that maybe we're not talking about two different subjects here.

What if Project X (or the unspoken aspect of TSP - whatever) is the actual murder of administration poster boys-turned-hugely-embarassing-critics like Pat Tillman?

What if the murder of Tillman and others is the extreme atrocity even Double-High RWA John Ashcroft couldn't stomach?

Isn't that far more likely than Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and the entire top staff of DOJ threatening to quit over some technical glitches that were easily smoothed over in the course of two or three weeks?

I just can't get out of my head the image of a totalitarian freak like John Ashcroft encountering something so horrible it would literally raise him off his deathbed to defy the president Ashcroft fervently believed was annointed by God Almighty himself.

Tweaks just don't cut it. Premeditated, cold-blooded murder does.

Glenn says:

I would simply add that right-wing troop-exploiters always reserve their most hateful, vicious and deeply personal attacks for soldiers and veterans who deviate from their political church

These people truly frighten me.

I wonder if the country hasn't shifted sufficiently to make total disengagement from Iraq thinkable and Clinton seem a captive of past presumptions about American power and how it should be wielded

When the founder were designing our Country, they did have a bit of distrust in the common man so they designed the 2 House legislature with the Senate more removed from the shifting winds of puplic opinion. They however were careful to place war-making powers in the body closest to direct accountability to the people.

Recent history suggests that theirs was a wise design and that we have done our heritage a disservice by falling away from the need to formally declare war.

The one thing I'm sure the founders didn't forsee would be that "the press" would not only show disdain for the "common man" but open and unapologetic contempt. This is indeed a remarkable turn of events.

"Not the right case?"

For God's sake, Glenn -- just be glad that the perjury discussion has finally begun in earnest.

The point is that this is not a strong case of perjury (there are much stronger ones). No prosecutor is likely to pursue an indictment over this, and I could easily see even an objective source (such as Marty Lederman or A.L. or me) finding that this does not seem to be "perjury," per se, but rather Gonzales using a very specific definition of "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (and repeatedly indicating that he's doing so).

That will not be helpful. To the contrary, it will hand them a victory and make it seem like the other accusations -- including the genuinely strong "perjury" accusatinos -- are weak.

I realize he wasn't laying down his grand view of the future, but he did enunciate all-or-nothing, black-white options concerning the United States' role in the world: if we get out of the Middle East, then we're perhaps heading toward a new Isolationism. What's wrong with just being a Good Neighbor in the world? About not spending our children's educations and everyone's health care on aircraft carriers and stealthy strike jets? Isn't that an option?

They are defending Limbaugh's right to doctor shop and have his maid score some dope for him in a Denny's parking lot. They are defending O'Reilly's right to sexually harass and pay off the victim to hush up. They are defending Coulter's right to say McVeigh should have bombed the New York Times.

And anything he writes should be read as such.

. . . for being shocked by anything Howard Kurtz writes but didn't he even outhack himself in today's column about the New Republic matter

Four days ago he writes a column pushing the right wing talking point that Scott Thomas wasn't a soldier, instead just a creation of some New Republic staffer.

Now, today, when it is known that Thomas is indeed a soldier serving in Iraq, Kurtz suddenly switches to the new right wing talking point; i.e., that it was the accuracy of the content in the diaries that was always doubted.

Wouldn't a real journalist somehow work into today's column this sudden talking point shift by his primary sources? And wouldn't the fact that they were so wrong the first time in their complaints about Thomas cause the journalist to think seriously about given them another ten inches of column space on the topic?