"Idiots!"

I don't agree. We could leave Iraq tomorrow if we wanted to. I doubt the place would be more screwed up afterward. Chaos is chaos.

How many dead Americans was Saddam Hussein worth? Not very many.

Saddam is dead. There are no WMDs. It's over. We won. Let's go home.

Dan, from your tone I figured you were joking. But my satire radar overloaded and broke shortly after 9/11 and has never recovered, so I have to doublecheck all satire now, to make sure it's not real and I just don't want to believe it.

James MacDonald @ 6 -- that's what gets me the most. There is no solution. Either Iraq collapses with our soldiers, Marines, pilots, and sailors there getting killed -- or it collapses without them. Either way a whole lot of innocent Iraqis die. Neither one is acceptable at all. But what can we do?

Like Jim, I object to this use of language as untruth. We could withdraw from Iraq tomorrow and have everyone out in a month.

We always have choice. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise.

Either way a whole lot of innocent Iraqis are dying, at the rate of about 100 per day. There aren't even any bad choices here, they're all just about unspeakable.

What you mean we, Kimosabe? We who object to what our rather stale overlords have been doing don't get to control much of anything until January, 2009, if we're lucky.

If anyone ever accuses ol' Shotgun Cheney of being a closeminded-chickenhawk, backseat-overlord, executive-power-mongering,American-dictatorship-bolster neocon, well, good ol' supporters of ka-Chunk (that's the sound of a shotgun being cocked) Cheney can just point to this dazzling video of him being all open minded and stuff.

Also, pre-Halliburton (he joined them in '95).

So Cheney was still speaking from a reality-based viewpoint, rather than the post-1994 mindset where the idea of a "permanent Republican majority" (AKA absolute power) could start to dance in his head, along with the sugarplum fairies.

Newt Gingrich has a LOT to answer for.

(Also, I have no idea where that superfluous capitalization in "Macdonald" came from. And after I was the one who got all uppity on the flamer-bingo thread about misspelling people's names.)

Honestly, his mind may have functioned better before his major health problems came up.

Because there is a popular delusion that business/corporate types are grownups. They're not. They seem to be very high-maintenance in terms of requiring adult supervision of their own. I don't know what they teach in MBA school, but it would porbably scare the living bejeezus out of me.

Look at the corporate ethos these days: short-term gains over long-term investment, use once (if at all) and then trash. Are these the actions of grownups? And yet the Bush Administration was touted as the apotheosis of corporate values. Should have seen that one coming.

Sigh.

If mayonnaise is involved in any of this, I don't want to know how.

Meisjes! Meisjes! Meisjes!

(Well, that'd be in keeping with McCain's bruised wood.)