Flit

The clincher, if I'd needed one

"I remember going down to the basement of the White House the day we committed our troops as a last resort, looking at Tommy Franks and the generals on the ground, asking them, "Do we have the right plan with the right troop level?" And they looked me in the eye and said, "Yes, sir, Mr. President." Of course, I listen to our generals. That's what a president does. A president sets the strategy and relies upon good military people to execute that strategy."

Saletan has it right. Any serving or former soldier who supported the current U.S. president after he BLADED his military subordinates on national television like that, blaming them and them alone for the Iraq War, hasn't the self-respect God gave a goose. Anyone who did something like that to me in our military would meet me again in the parking lot, and I would expect the reverse to apply. Whether Kerry picked up on it or not, the sentiment is inexcusable from anyone in the chain of command.

We're waiting

Postulate: any blogger who hereafter mentions the Oil-for-Food program without asking that all the American profiters, names redacted by the U.S. government, really should also be named, is fundamentally unserious about fighting terrorism. We have no valid reason yet to believe the list isn't just something Ahmed Chalabi pulled out of the "people who hate me" section of his diary, but even so, fair is fair.

He hid the WMDs in a planetarium?

I agree. The intro to the Duelfer Report is the most bizarre intro to a major government report ever written. Unless you count Earl Warren's preface to the first Kennedy Commission report, where he discussed how, as part of their investigation he, Henry Ford, Arlen Specter, his Tongan legal advisor, and two Armenian stewardesses barricaded themselves into the honeymoon suite at the Palms with a trampoline, four flamingos, and thirteen litres of extract of nutmeg.

Yeah, I know. I wish it had happened that way, too.