Via ThinkProgress via War and Piece via The New Yorker:

… Within the confines of the policy board, Adelman became blunt about his disenchantment with the Pentagon’s management of the war. At the board’s meeting this summer, Adelman said, he argued that the American military needed a new strategy.

Artwork Courtesy of Michael Reukauf

“I suggested that we were losing the war,” Adelman said. “What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, ‘What’s the alternative? Because what we’re doing now is just losing.’ ”

Adelman said that Rumsfeld didn’t take to the message well. “He was in deep denial—deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can’t lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, ‘Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.’ He got upset and cut me off. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went right on with it.”

Listen, I’m no stranger to denial. While I might protest and ridicule, I can handle a little denial when we’re talking about things like baseball, evolution, or drinking problems, or sexual orientation.

In none of these cases did the denial result in the death and dismemberment of thousands upon thousands of people.

No, this is NOT ok. And, if this doesn’t constitute a war crime, then we might as well not have an International War Crimes Tribunal.

As a way of supporting my call for caution about Democrats and big money, I can’t think of anyone better to link to than watchdog David Sirota, who rightly pays VERY close attention to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

In a recent blog post, he refers to the DLC as a “corporate front group”, and he links to an article on the subject that he wrote back in September, entitled Big Money vs. Grassroots: The Fight For the Heart of the Democratic Party.

From the latter:

To be sure, a change in congressional leadership would slow the advance of President George W. Bush’s dangerous agenda. And as the Associated Press has reported, the specific Democratic lawmakers in line to take over key committees are among the administration’s biggest critics, and among the most ideologically progressive in Congress.

But beyond this, there are troubling signs that the party isn’t serious about reforming America’s money-dominated politics….

The arrogance is stunning. Here you have a national political party righteously hammering its opponents’ “culture of corruption.” Here you have a national party standing at the threshold of an Internet revolution that has shown itself more than capable of democratizing political fundraising by taking in huge sums of money, in small contributions, all without the usual expectation of cronyish legislative favors. And yet here is that same national party bragging to reporters that it is focused on doing everything it can to milk the corporate teat as effectively as Republicans.

Let’s face it, very little in life is black and white, cut and dry, Republican and Democrat.

TPMmuckraker is earning their impartiality credentials, whether devout Democrats like it or not, with recent posts on Harry Reid and John Murtha, mixed in with the far more voluminous GOP muck they’ve been raking for some time.

It’s important to not ignore the fact that, though GOP corruption has far exceeded Democrat misdeeds during the past 6 years, big money lobbyists worked both sides of the aisle, and there will be more embarrassments from Democrats to come.

Update: Dick Morris (via Whiskey Bar via C&L), hints that inevitable Democrat-led investigations will focus on financial scandals, and I can’t help thinking of a verse from Bob Dylan’s Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues:

Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn’t imagine doin’ anything else,
So now I’m sittin’ home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out anything . . . hmm, great God!

A lot of folks are all excited about the revelations in a new book - Tempting Faith: An Inside Story Of Political Seduction - by David Kuo, the former second-in-command of President Bush’s Office on Faith-Based Initiatives. (TruthProgress, Crooks & Liars, Keith Olbermann, Kevin Drum, 60 Minutes)

It seems that the courting by the Republican Party of the religious right had nothing to do with the Republicans’ commitment to the religious right, and everything to do with their desire for votes.

What a shocker.

:eyes-rolling:
:sarcasm-dripping:
:vomit-spewing:

Just don’t expect the religious right to simply jump ship and vote Democrat come November.

See, the Republicans have discovered the supreme effectiveness of their 2-step response to challenges:

1. Deny/Lie

2. Blame/Attack

You can apply this formula to everything the GOP has done, from the “War on Terror” to Katrina, to Abramoff, to Foley, add mouthpieces like Tony Snow, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge, to repeat the day’s deny/lie+blame/attack talking points over and over and over again, and the end result is an electorate that simply doesn’t know any better.

The truth has been kidnapped in this country and I want it back!

Here’s a case where the headline cheapens what is otherwise a very cool story.

The first bionic woman celebrates with a steak

I had three knee-jerk reactions:

1. Now THAT’s a party!
2. Lindsay Wagner eat your heart out.
3. Here’s definitive proof that when humans become full robots we’ll probably still eat meat.

Then I read the article and I felt guilty for making fun of an amputee…

…I blame the headline.

“It’s unacceptable to think there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

–George W. Bush, September 15, 2006

The conservative numbers from over a year ago:

Nearly 25,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003, a report says.

The dossier, based on media reports, says US-led forces were responsible for more than a third of the deaths…

Almost a fifth of the 24,865 deaths were women or children and nearly half of all the civilian deaths were reported in the capital Baghdad.

–BBC, July 19, 2005

Less conservative numbers from October 2004:

One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion.

The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations.

–Washington Post, October 29, 2004

And, finally, from a respected source that provides detailed information on their methodology, numbers that fall in the middle and are likely more accurate, as well as more current:

–IraqBodyCount.org, September 15, 2006

From ThinkProgress:

This afternoon at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush said he would “make every effort to achieve a lasting peace” in the Middle East. He got started right away. Here are some photos from the Oval Office immediately after the event:

Shame on Washington State, Shame on the U.S., Massachusetts gets a pass

A simply despicable ruling in my home state today:

State court upholds ban on gay marriage

So far, only Massachusetts recognizes same-sex unions

OLYMPIA — The state Supreme Court upheld a ban on gay marriage today, saying lawmakers have the power to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples.

The 5-4 decision leaves Massachusetts as the only state to grant full marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples, and is the latest in a series of significant court rulings in recent weeks to fall in favor of gay marriage opponents.

It also avoids possible widespread challenges of other state’s gay marriage restrictions, since Washington — unlike Massachusetts — carries no residency restrictions on its marriage licenses.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I refuse to take sides in the ongoing and escalating Arab-Persian/Israeli conflict.

An excerpt:

I have friends on both sides of this conflict, those who blame it all on Israel, those who blame it all on the Arabs, but I’m not interested in taking sides. I’m all done with the deadly childish “but, they started it” bullshit. I just want them to stop hating and killing each other.

As with the age-old, polarized debate in the poultry world, I say, “Who cares?! They’re both here to stay and it really doesn’t matter.”

I just want it over with.

That said, one thing that is abundantly clear, the conflict is heating up to a degree that may exceed record temperatures. But, as long as the U.S. does stupid things like kill thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis in the name of a War on Terror, as long as the Shiites and Sunnis continue to slaughter one another, as long as Iran calls for wiping Israel off the map and sponsors Hezbollah, as long as Hezbollah launches rockets into Israel and kidnaps Israeli soldiers in hopes of gaining the release of prisoners in Israeli custody, as long as Palestinians blow themselves to bits taking Israeli civilians with them, as long as Israel brutally maintains their occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, as long as Israel reacts by blowing up power plants, bulldozing houses and farms, etc….well the cycle of violence, the blinding eye-for-an-eye just keeps rolling along, taking precious life with it.

Oh, some of my fellow Jews, God bless them, will rush to say that the Israeli and U.S. actions are not causing the hatred, only exposing it, but then they lose all credibility when they send me emails linking to stuff like this letter to the editor in response to an editorial by Jimmy Carter, with the subject line of their email reading, “Peanut-farming asshole”.

Sure, I read stuff that gets me concerned about rising anti-Semitism, particularly when it comes from the political left, like the comments to this post at AlterNet. I just simply don’t see the difference between the hatred coming from either side. Even if the person leaving the comment at AlterNet qualifies his remarks by saying he’s anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic, the vitriol is still totally out in the open and, again, no different, in my mind, from the vitriol coming from the other side.

With every violent reaction to violence, whether physical or verbal, hatred is fed.

Truthdig’s post is focused on the first 2/3 of the clip, wherein Stewart rightly slams CNN for pussyfooting around, for melodramatic effect, one of the most serious topics they could ever cover: war. But, watch what happens at around the 2-minute mark:

Jon Stewart on Middle East...War

Just.Plain.Brilliant.

FOX Newscaster: In the Impact segment tonight: How the violence in the Middle East is affecting us here in the United States.

Stewart: Yes. All this carnage in a region we, perhaps, helped destabilize. How’s it affecting us? Is there a place where we could quantify how we feel about the devastation being wrought? Perhaps in our hearts? Or minds? Or…

ABC Newscaster: We’re gonna feel this tension, in the near term, here at home, at the pump.

CNN Newscaster: Some say it won’t take long for the ripple effects of the Mid East conflicts to be felt at gas pumps.

FOX Newscaster: I think that most Americans are going to feel that at the pump.

Stewart: Yes. We will feel it, but only at the pump.

For, what is the human heart? A pump.

A nailed-it-right-on-the-head commentary on one of the things SO deeply disturbing about the U.S., and why the whole notion that we have any right to militarily force other nations into being more like us is, putting it lightly, absurd.