It’s ironical and sad that Power who has championed the horrors of war and genocide in her two books A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World was apparently fired for political and media ineptness at a time when her counsel is so needed. When we don’t humanize war, we get more war, suffering and death.

We need a new kind of advisor like Power for our politicians and not the Serious kind that have brought us all this devistation. Obama sought her counsel on Darfur and other serious matters and she tried to learn how to function in the Beltway insanity. Maybe she is better off leaving the madness before it infects her integrity, but Obama and our country will not be better off because she became a political casualty.

I thought that the internets were influencing the mainstream media. Mostly negatively, since the internet can be used to make any ridiculous assertion seem worth considering.

However, as to why Joe Lunchables doesn't sit down and read the New York Times on line or a Baghdadi blog, I often ask myself that same question. My personal feeling is that people want quick, biteable and entertaining news--they like the stuff that pops up on their Yahoo or AOL home page--kidnappings, murders, dumb criminals. If those same people go to a real news website, they are going to encounter an entire world of policy and countries, terms, histories and people they don't know exist. And I assume that's a turn off for the person using the internets as an entertainment device. Or you could just ask my sister--she doesn't even know how to find her email home page.

Some time I would like to read a news story that begins with "a Republican operative called me this morning and suggested I write this story." Or the reporter names the operative and describes the process of thinking it over and digging up some information independently. OK, don't name the operative but at least do the work. I think that's called the whole truth.

..did you have to put a 6:33 YT of Bush on? It's the longest I've forced myself to listen to that mendacious, whiny, smug little sh*t since 2002. Yeesh.

Or put it this way, only journalists are defending the leak -- the problem I would say is that Glen Greenwald identifies too much with Ms. Peev and not enough with Ms. Power. More introspection, less projection.

Why would I identify with Ms. Peev? I'm not a reporter.

The really really revealing set of words Ms. Power used is "we fucked up" at the very beginning of the quoted remarks. To be blunt there is no way that someone giving an interview that they understood was for verbatim quotation would have opened with the profanity in question -- or any profanity at all. The phrase illustrates that she though she was speaking to a reporter in a manner that was not a for the record interview -- one way or another.

Peev said the interview was on the record. Power issued a statement and did not contradict that in any way.

Yet here you are, claiming the assumption was that the interview was off the record. But you don't have a single fact to support that claim. You're just making it up.

If Power thought the whole thing was off the record, then why did she specify that she wanted that one comment to be off the record? If the whole thing were off the record, that comment already would have been and she wouldn't have had to request it.

Do you actually think it's an effective way to argue to just make up facts that have no support anywhere, and are contradicted by all available evidence?

Personally, if asked by someone "should I talk to Glenn Greenwald?" I would now have to say "are you fucking joking!" All very sad ...

I'm not interested in talking to anyone who with rules that they can force me to censor things they say if they end up embarrassed by their remarks. That's called being a propagandist.

You area lovable joker? I am almost about to invest in a laptop. If electricity goes out during a thunder shower, the gleaming bright laptop window screen can be my glowing 'friend' in the outdoor crap-pot-hole?

If a squishy is performed,

a outdoor pot-house will have laptop light.

I've seen the first Spring bunny do a hop hop.

After a flop-drop, a yellow ducky in a bath tub seems right. I tease...

The CEO's and Wall Street crew swig vodka inside the W.H. and wiggle at a indoor flusher.

Peepers in the outdoor bogs are peeping crazily. Thumper is a bushy-tail rabbit with a wiggle cute nose.

I best hush.

I'm nice if I give an apology?

I have a pimple on my nose.

I'm not bebop, but maybe I can help. What bothers you about Bolton is probably best expressed by the ironical German quip:

Einbildung ist auch eine Bildung. (Vanity is also a [form of] education.)

It's a play on the fact that the word for self-love and the word for education share the same root in German (from bilden, to form or to frame.) Most English lovers of literature are familiar with it in the word Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel.

But enough pedantry.... What makes Bolton so insufferable is that he's confused egotism with erudition. Nothing, in my opinion, can turn an intelligent man into a boor and a bully more quickly than deciding at some point in his adolescence that he needn't take into account what anyone else thinks in forming his opinions.

Do I get an "A?" ;-)

I agree about the dry lemon. The new lemon seems not to be McCain ironically, enough, but Clinton. The name Clinton has replaced that of Bush, and there is still much juice in that rind. The names have been changed--the Democrat good guy is Obama now, but the bad guy is also a Democrat, Clinton. In any case that hole is rapidly running dry for me; I'll save my outrage for when I'm outraged. I can't do it every evening at 5:01 pm.