So, no bet then? Just kidding.

That's Arizona just desserts, Señor Celery, if you please. No peaches or blueberries here. We barbecue whiptails instead, fight the javelinas for the nopalitos, and dream of the broad Potomac. If we were better people, we might be vouchsafed a glimpse of it one day. As it is, well....

Five Years Later Neocons Discuss Their Regrets

http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2008/03/24/tomo/

Please send that excellent post to Dan Abrams. If Chuck Todd won't listen to us, I assume he pays some attention to his colleagues. Abrams is a lawyer and never has been a journalist.

is that the MSM--as if there is ever supposed to be a unified opinion from them--should take a critical and adversarial angle towards the current establishment; whichever "side" that happens to be. It's their JOB to challenge "conventional wisdom," not support it. It's a very fundamental responsibility on their part that was lost a long time ago. The last thing media outlets on any level should be doing is assuming or taking for granted that one side has any sort of monopoly on the truth. It's not just lazy, it's highly irresponsible.

For mooser:

Salon readers ask of W.T. a kind favor?

Pull from your swim boxers some blogger goggles?

You daughter e-mailed to say W.T. smell of salami.

is it just me, or are the mccain defenders contradicting themselves? does painting him as a Serious foreign-policy expert not come, by definition, with a heightened expectation of familiarity and expertise? repeatedly, blatantly inflammatory, false information from an 'expert' should be scrutinized MORE intensely rather than laughed off. kurtz & co. seem to have it backwards.

What is missing from the media's display of hero worship is the respect for the American public one should expect from news organizations.

That "bank" that McCain is drawing on belongs to the reporters, not the public. When they decide to cash that check against the public's account they are robbing us all. Robbing us of the right to decide if McCain's "senior moment" is a repeated lapse of focus or the portents of senility.

[...]

The real issue is the media's attempts to choose our next president for us by tailoring the news.

Respect for the public? And since when has the public been worthy of hero worship? The only public worthy of hero worship is the public between Re- and -an!

Of course you have trouble understanding the banking involved. When John McCain is president he is going to stop those indigent thieves and their entitlements robbing at the bank. He has National Security in the Press bank. So what? When we elect John McCain president he will put National Security where it belongs: Under the Securities and Exchange Commission! Why do you think they call it...they call...could you please turn the camera off for a second, my al Qaeda is wrapped around my Iran and I can't breathe. Senior moment, you know. Have a jelly bean, Mr. Mayor.

And the McCain for President foundation campaign boatload think tank limited liability political action committee (FouboatthinkPAC for short) would like to know where you get off thinking the media is tailoring the news? They don't tailor it, they weave it. How else could you cut a full blown hero from whole cloth?

Thank you. I will'

And thank you for your always splendid posts.

John McCain isn't the only Arizonan who longs for a glimpse of the Potomac, or needs to be put on the Comeuppance Watch.

Then again, cease and desist is my middle name. Apologies for the sad attempt at a morning divertissement. Words do sometimes drop by without warning, you know, and force the fingers to type. I have no other excuse.

Please do focus on the other Arizonan -- the important one -- without further interruption from the one who smells like salami.

High- larious!

But, really, I'm afraid that we must prepare for a McCain presidence. He who owns the press will win.

BBC:

"The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone yesterday, for example... were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets," he said, adding that the groups that fired them were funded and trained by the Quds Force.

"All of this in complete violation of promises made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts."

Fallon retires in about 7 days or so, I think.

VALID QUESTION: "Doesn't he (McCain) know the difference between this stuff?"

MEDIA: "He's got enough of that in the bank at least, with the media, that he can get away with it."

"In the bank" -- doesn't that say it all? ALL, and I mean ALL, of this collective craziness is about creating corporate profits through the media's crafted spin of rhetoric spouted by the right wing. WE can complain all we want, but THEY control the airwaves and the politicians...

Keep up the good work, Glenn, we need your perspective on this time period to keep our sanity!

A little perspective about Senator McCain's foreign experience: McCain still maintains, as he always has, that the USA should have and could have won the war in Vietnam. This is the bedrock of his “experience”. This is what we know about that. His experience in Vietnam was 22 bombing runs over Vietnam and one unsuccessful run where he was shot down, imprisoned and tortured for 5.5 years in Hanoi. His experience in Vietnam is analogous to an Afghani fighter captured in Afghanistan and put in Guantonimo for 5.5 years. That Afghani would understand as much about the USA and its people as McCain learned in his experience about the Vietnamese. (The biggest difference in those two experiences is that McCain actually killed thousands—which may make his torture by the Vietnamese more understandable.)

If McCain had studied the history of Vietnam he would know we should never have waged that war and would never have succeeded. If he had studied the history of that nationalistic war for independence he would have realized the immoral nature of his bombing runs. The Vietnamese have been successfully beating back foreign invaders for the last 1000 years in the same way they defeated us.

My understanding of Vietnam started with my being drafted; spending 6 months in the jungle as a grunt, being wounded and then made a combat correspondent for the 1st Air Cav. When I went back to college I studied the history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War. McCain was evidently too busy building a political career to learn about the war he fought in. His unwillingness to understand the wars he is so sure we must fight is an inglorious extension of Bush's mindless belief in the Black and White of righteous wars.