Hm. So here’s John McCain saying that, no no no, we shouldn’t read anything at all into his little gaffe about Iran arming Teh Most Nefarious Terrorists of Ever, al Qaeda:
Asked if it’s “a fair question” to wonder if it was more than “simply a slip of a tongue,” McCain replied that “to think that […]

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You’ve got to be kidding me:
It’s the government’s idea of a really bad day: Washington’s Metro trains shut down. Seaport computers in New York go dark. Bloggers reveal locations of railcars with hazardous materials. Airport control towers are disrupted in Philadelphia and Chicago. Overseas, a mysterious liquid is found on London’s subway.
Those incidents were among […]

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Kevin Drum has an interesting post yesterday, responding to a piece by Matt Yglesias on how Obama is being all wishy-washy in refuting Hillary’s militarism. Unfortunately, Drum takes the usual liberal, hand-wringing, “O my gosh Republicans are going to be big meanies who say librulz want Osama bin Laden to strangle children in their beds!” And […]

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No no, this could never be a bad idea, because we’d only use a nuclear first-strike to make sure that bad guys don’t get nukes, see, or when “immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings.”:
The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the […]

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Pertinent to this discussion, Sullivan asks today:
To put it more bluntly: It seems to me that those who are making a fine distinction between “torture” and even waterboarding - and allowing waterboarding - have no logical basis for objecting to what we saw in many of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. Or rather their only […]

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Wonks only, below the break.

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Hahahahahaha.
I don’t think these Iraqis understand. Purple fingers are nice and everything, but when it comes to permanent bases, they don’t really have much of a choice.

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It’s really difficult to fit this much gee-whiz cluelessness into a single piece. But Jonah Goldberg, firing wildly on all cylinders, gets the job done.
First, we get the straight-faced denial that the United States is an empire. Then we get the acknolwedgement that, well, sure we have lots off military bases in other countries. (Chalmers […]

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Will wonders never cease?
Brody: Some Republicans like Giuliani and others said that some Democratic candidates refuse to talk about a global war on terror and Islamic terrorists. Do you believe there is a global war on terror?
Biden: Sure there is, but with these guys, he knows so little about foreign policy he confuses terrorists cells […]

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I’ve been making this argument for years. Glenn Greenwald boils it down:
We continuously hear about how grave a problem is the Iranian nuclear program. It never seems to occur to the likes of Tom Friedman that — just as one might be motivated to buy a gun if one’s neighborhood were infested with roving crime […]

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The New Era’s letter to the editor page, always sort of a sewer of authoritarian thinking, seems to have really taken a plunge off the deep end of late. There’s a real hum-dinger today, written by an East Lampeter woman who’s somehow under the impression, after essentially seven years of Republican rule, that America is […]

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Steve Clemons:
Don’t blame Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for all of the problems in Pakistan.
The fact is that governance in a region that is ambivalent about America, Europe and the West in general is becoming more complicated everywhere in the Middle East and South Asia. And it is America’s failure in Iraq, its unwillingness to deliver […]

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So there’s a report of a nuclear power plant in Arizona where a contract worker has been detained with an explosive device in his truck and OMG what it it’s terrorism and maybe he’s an Arab and WTF here we go again oh please sweet Jeebus is it TERRORISM? HUH?!?!? IS IT AL QAEDA???

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Lovely.
The lead-in to the story was an incident in which U.S. forces, responding to a single rocket launched at their base which missed the base entirely and caused no casualties, rained mortar fire down on a nearby village where two men with AK-47’s allegedly fled after the failed rocket attack. After about an hour of […]

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Your share for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: $8,000.

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Hey, did you know it’s Islamofascist Awareness Week - courtesy of Crazy Davy Horowitz?
Do you think any of the kids on our local college campuses will chase Muslim students through the commons, shrieking about the Caliphate?
Update: And really, how surprised are we to find that Rick Santorum is playing a major role in this? We […]

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Does the Leader not see the irony in announcing, in effect, that we are thinking about attacking Iran yet it is Iran which constitutes a “dangerous threat to world peace?”
Apparently not. This is becoming the Great Thing That Must Not Be Spoken: That the United States reserves the right to attack virtually any nation at […]

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Wait, I thought our great and glorious crusade against the Islamofascists was actually World War IV?
The Decider warns that if Iran gets the bomb, it’ll be World War III. This, on the heels of Vladimir Putin’s warning about attacking Iran, and his maneuvering to try and make sure the “stans” surrounding Iran don’t host any […]

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Al Gore wins (or co-wins) the Nobel Peace Prize and somehow, Drudge isn’t making fun of him. That’ll last, like, five minutes or so.
The release from the Nobel committee, linked on Drudge, is interesting:
Indications of changes in the earth’s future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in […]

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Not that one, but in light of the newest torture revelations, Sullivan uses the other one:
Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture  permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the […]

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