I can't help but feel that we keep asking the wrong question over and over:

"Are we winning in Iraq?"

Shouldn't the real question be, "Are any of our actions making America safer from a suicide bomber or terror cell?"

Republican politicans (as well as neocon cheerleaders) seem uniquely obsessed with Iraq --- and basically indifferent to the practical day-to-day security of America.

Instead of constantly talking about Iraq, we should instead be asking:

"Have we made our borders more secure so Pakistani terror cells can't just walk in as easily as thousands of Mexicans do every year?"

"Have we beefed up security in our shipping so that trucks and ships can't just bring cargo (like ebola and nuclear bombs) into the US?"

"Has the threat of a terrorists blowing up a crowded shopping mall gone down in the last seven years?"

These are the serious security questions we should be asking. Who freaking cares about Iraq anymore?

Well, when Jerry Falwell called Ellen DeGeneres "Ellen Degenerate," *that* was immature schoolyard stuff. But when someone in a position of tremendous power, which he threatens to use in a dubious manner, has a name that's an unavoidably close rhyme to a phrase all too suggestive of what he's about to do, I can't take objection to someone pointing out the coincidence. I have often wished that the Democrats in congress had a tenth of MoveOn's cojones.

When will someone begin to compare Petraeus to William Westmoreland?

Didn't Westy explain to Congress that we needed to stay the course after Tet?

I'm on record as someone who wasn't crazy about the schoolyard play on Petraeus' name ...

"Schoolyard" name-calling in politics is as old as Adams calling Washington a tyrant or Jefferson calling Adams a pig. Bloodless politeness and restraint is historically anomalous and a bad tactic in public discourse, especially if you are (as liberals are in America) already on the defensive.

Besides, the shoe fits. What's the problem?

General Petraeus started taking marching orders from the Mayberry Machiavellis before he even took the Iraq assignment. He has been exploiting everyone's deference to "one who wears the uniform" despite his metamorphosis into a politician for an equally long time. I'm sure that he was a great general before, but now he is a Republican hack who does not merit such deference any longer. He is just another good man who has been corrupted by the Mayberry Machiavellis.

I'm frankly sick of the sanctity that clothes the military in this discourse. I would have used a much less silly play on words myself, and got down to the business of calling the guy an apologist for murder. The untouchable military trope is taking us down a path known well to fascist dictators everywhere...and democrats are providing the gas.

Those liberals who aren't comfortable with the MoveOn ad language are too damn comfortable already.

A few more years of Republican malfeasance should change that.

I'm sure that if MoveOn would have run a New York Times ad in 2003, with a juvenile name like "Colin Bowel" it sure would have received the same reaction as today's "Gen. Betrayus."

It's time for the Left to grow up. Name calling is not effective. It just alienates the very people the progressives are trying to reach out to: The American middle. The swing voters.

You can convince these voters with facts and logic. You can't make them go to the polls in November of '08 on the basis of making fun of somebody's name. You can win them over by acting more rational and sober than the best Republican voice in the race.

I'm hoping that Ann Coulter, Michael Wiener Savage, Hugh Hewett, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Rielly and the rest of them go into full roar as the election nears. They are the Republican's worst enemy.

I'm sure there are agent provocateurs in the ranks of the progressive movement, paid by the RNC and other Right Wing organizations, who want to start damning the military.

It is a sure way, guaranteed, that Democrats will lose the 2008 presidential election. The Republicans do it every time. Look at those dirty hippies, tearing down our men and women in uniform again!

Middle America, red state America, the people the progressives must count on for votes, will not join you in your hatred of the men and women who went to war. You know, let's say you're right. Everybody in the military are a bunch of killers and goons and stooges for the Corporate Fascist regime in Washington.

But that kind of talk doesn't win their hearts and minds, it only hardens them against the Left, which they already view as a bunch of snot-nosed Anti-American agitators.

There isn't just a lot at stake in this coming presidential race, there is everything at stake. There is at least another four, and very likely another eight years of America going down the tubes with a fascist Republican in the White House.

We can't afford this. There is no more time for the argument, "let the Republicans have another four/eight years and things will get so bad, America will vote a Democrat into office."

This election is for control of America! Who will get it?

This is not the time for another Green Party hissy fit, or a Gay Marriage Rights hissy fit, or an Anti-military hissy fit. This is the time for all progressives to defer their single-issue pet interest, and get behind the single-minded interest of all progressives and that's to get those sons-of-bitches out of the White House and out of power.

Because if we don't get the power back in '08, this whole country is going to be fucked up beyond repair.

Pull together.

Other than say MacArthur, Nimitz, Ike, Omar Bradley, Schwartzkopf and Curtis LeMay I can't think of any senior military leaders who were considered hands-off by the press.

Last night, Chris Matthews got Pat Buchanan to admit that five years from now he expects to see Moqtada al-Sadr in charge in Iraq. Joan, I hope you'll ask him why, in that case, American soldiers need to go on dying just to protect the manly-man reputation of Bush the Lesser Still in a war Buchanan himself concedes we will have conclusively lost by 2012.