The way you inserted yourself into the the feud that Rosie O'Donnell chose to start over Tara Conner's alcohol intervention was disgusting.

I don't know if you've ever lost any family members to alcohol, but even if you haven't, you should have been capable of squeezing out a least a little drop of empathy for a man who lost his big brother to booze.

Oooooh you have so much empathy for the poor familes of the soldiers.

Bullshit, Joan, Your empathy is just politics. If you were really this empathic person you describe yourself as, you wouldn't have turned Tara Conner's alcohol intervention into some kind of personal political campaign against Trump.

Alcohol kills a lot of people in this country. It leaves a lot of grieving families, and sometimes people act out in their grief.

But you and Rosie weren't willing to give the tiniest drop of mercy to your grieving, acting out enemy.

You have no credibility with me as a person who feels empathy for victims of war, because you are not an empathic person -- you yourself are a warrior, and when you have a choice to make yourself -- we can see that you forget about empathy and head straight to war.

World media accurately reported the statue of Hussein being toppled for what it was -- a manufactured photo op. That square was EMPTY aside from US forces and news crews. It was anything but a popular "liberation" yet US MSM shoved it right down our throats, and here's that same fucking image on the top page of Salon.

IT WAS A MANUFACTURED EVENT. LOOK AT THE PHOTOS THAT SHOW A WIDER FIELD OF VIEW -- THE SQUARE IS **EMPTY**.

SHAME on you. SHAME on you.

I watched the photo op of Sadam's statue being toppled, and the square was not empty. There were many dozens of Iraqis there. But the event itself was empty. It was accomplished, slowly, awardly, by American soldiers, not the citizens, and people looked on fearfully. On CNN, the running commentary made it sound as momentous as D-Day. The war was being sold as what it was not--even to people watching and seeing the phoniness with their own eyes. It was a disgraceful moment for American news, with far too many more to come. The lead-up to the illegal and immoral war had been agonizingly dishonest and hyped; here was a symbol of what was to come.

It's hard to take anything you say seriously after the "About me" column that reads like a cross between MySpace and eHarmony. And people in comic book form is not flattering unless you happen to already look like Spiderman.

Please. Try. Harder.

I was not a regular Salon reader in 2003, when the war began...but I knew then that the war was a terrible idea, cooked up by the he-men oil-boys in the white-house for their own political profit, and the financial profit of their friends.

Anyone, ANYONE who was in favor of that war before it began, was either part of the fix, or so deluded that they don't deserve any credibility at all, at this point. Period.

This is why, to this day, I hold most of mainstream media, and Congress, in utter contempt, and why I wish like hell that Feingold was running for President.

Our country has been hijacked by right-wing oil-boys (if you don't believe it, look at the profits the oil industry has enjoyed since the war began..you think that's coincidence??? please), and I, frankly, despair of ever seeing our country return to saner hands in my lifetime. The oil-boys have enjoyed this initial experiment so much, I'm sure they'll want to stay more fully in the game, you know?

So, Salon, I salute you. But, you weren't the only ones who knew the score back then. Some of us average schlubs did too, benefiting from simple common-sense.

It doesn't take any special insight or brilliance to realize that wars of choice are not good for anyone, and it didn't take an International Studies major to recognize that the reasons given for invading Iraq were being all but manufactured by the US government and major media outlets.

Shortly before the war began, an excellent piece in the Atlantic Monthly examined how an invasion of Iraq could easily conflagrate into massive, violent anarchy across the entire region- and postulated that such a scenario might, in fact, be exactly what the Bush administration wanted.

The American public might not be too concerned about the intentional bloody sabotage of an entire region of the planet, but what about the effect it has had on our own military? It's hard to believe that even the chickenhawks who dominate this administration's military "strategizing" could not have foreseen the devastating effect this would have on America's military readiness. The US military has been gutted, and its withering carcass left to a throng of insurgent buzzards between the Tigris and Euphrates. All the better for private contractors and the mercenaries who will step in to fill the void, and replenish the lost equipment. More money, more money.

you were against the war from the beginning. We know. We also know that you were against Bush from the beginning and that is really what this is all about.

You should feel great that you've done your part to make the Iraq war as much of a failure as possible. I didn't really grasp the effects of a Fifth Coulumnist until I started reading Salon.

Now you are crowing that you told us so. Perhaps if Salon wasn't such a partisan shill for the left, people would have listened to you and all your great wisdom before the war.

Actually it wouldn't have made a difference because at the time you weren't any more certain that their weren't WMD there than anyone else was.

Next time you're at the beach take a long walk off a short pier.

Congratulations on your new blog, Joan. I was one of the few dozen people in the country that thought this whole business in Iraq was the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. I had friends who decided to side with Bush based on his lies about WMD and I had to wonder within myself how so many smart, educated people could get this so wrong. Then they nabbed Saddam and I thought, "Well, George Bush just got re-elected. Swell." I was happy to see Saddam go, make no mistake. But I had this queasy feeling that the worst was yet to come when the president stood on that aircraft carrier and said "Mission Accomplished!" And now, the worst has come again and again, and the worst than worst should be along anytime now. Followed swiftly by the very most awful than the worst of the worst. My God what a mess we'll have to clean up when Bush leaves! He's like that no longer cute puppy that just piddles and dumps all over everything at the party, AND YOU CAN'T GET THE OWNERS TO LEAVE AND TAKE THE MONGREL WITH THEM! And just for the record, the so-called Authorization to Use Force was something I never thought was right and I scorned Democrats (Hilary and John Kerry included) for being lapdogs and voting for it. It was opening the door to disaster. I know it then and we all see it now. I agree with you, Joan. This is one thing I desperately wanted to be wrong about. It was also one of the many things I thought Democrats in Congress should have filibustered till hell freezes over. Don't let's run down THAT list.