They've looked at a map.

Mannion walks through exactly why these next 500 days will probably even more disastrous than the last 500 days.

Oh, and I happened to be flipping through to MSNBC last night just as Olbermann's Special Comment began. Intense, to say the least. The only thing more frustrating than what Olbermann is talking about, though, is the fact that everybody can say whatever they want...it's going to happen anyway, and the same people who folded five years ago are going to fold again. Wouldn't want to appear weak or unpatriotic, blah blah blah...

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Randomness...

• From the ??? Department: US Authorities will know the sexual habits of Brits flying to the US now. I’m sure that’s just infinitely useful for homeland security purposes.


• From the What Are Those 25% Thinking? Department: Dubya’s approval rating hits record low. Meanwhile, Americans blame Republicans for just about everything. Okay, not everything...just war, global warming, prejudice, poverty, corruption, and crime.


• From the We’re All A-holes From Vermont Department: The best reason yet why a Hillary candidacy scares the crap out of me? All that grassroots progress in 2006? Eradicated.


• From the In Case You Missed It Department: Olbermann’s Special Comment from last Thursday. I don’t want Hillary to win the Dem nomination, but I don’t want her to be unfairly targeted by an extra-politicized Pentagon either.

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I Don’t Usually Post about Olbermann’s Special Comments...

...because you can find all you need about them on bigger blogs...but WOW was last night’s Comment vicious...again via C&L...

On the 11th of December, 1941, at 8 o'clock in the morning, two of Hitler's diplomats walked up to the State Department — your office, Secretary Rice — and ninety minutes later they were handing a declaration of war to the Chief of the Department's European Division. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor four days earlier and the Germans simply piled on.

Your predecessors, Dr. Rice, didn't spend a year making up phony evidence and mistaking German balloon-inflating trucks for mobile germ warfare labs.

They didn't pretend the world was ending because a tin-pot tyrant couldn't hand over the chemical weapons, it turned out he'd destroyed a decade earlier.

The Germans walked up to the front door of our State Department and said "we're at war."

It was in all the papers!

And when that war ended, more than three horrible years later, our troops, and the Russians, were in Berlin. And we stayed, as an occupying force, well in the 1950's.

As an occupying force, Madam Secretary!

If you want to compare what we did to Hitler and in Germany, to what we did to Saddam and in Iraq, I'm afraid you're going to have to buy the whole analogy.

We were an occupying force in Germany, Dr. Rice, and by your logic, we're now an occupying force in Iraq.

And if that's the way you see it, you damn well better come out and tell the American people so. (Save your breath telling it to the Iraqis — most of them already buy that part of the comparison).

"It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown." We already have a subjectively false comparison between Hitler and Saddam.

We already have a historically false comparison between Germany and Iraq.

We already have blissful ignorance by our Secretary of State about how this country got into the war against Hitler.

But then there's this part about changing "the resolution" about Iraq, that it would be as ridiculous in the Secretary's eyes, as saying that after Hitler was defeated, we needed to go back to Congress to "deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown."

Oh, good grief, Secretary Rice, that's exactly what we did do!

We went back to Congress to deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after Hitler was overthrown!

It was called the Marshall Plan.

Marshall!

General George Catlett Marshall!

Secretary of State!

The job you have now!

But that wasn’t the only fantastic gutting of a neoconservative shill that took place yesterday. There was also this Greenwald piece, in which Glenn has the audacity to compare a recent Joementum op-ed to words Joementum wrote in the same paper 15 months ago.

Just compare these two statements:

Joe Lieberman, today: "previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias."

Joe Lieberman, 2005: "The administration's recent use of the banner 'clear, hold, and build' accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week."

How can Joe Lieberman claim today that we previously lacked sufficient troop strength to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared, when he insisted a year ago that we were holding neighborhoods -- he saw it himself -- and that we were therefore on the verge of success?

On what conceivable basis is Joe Lieberman accorded even the most minimal respect or credibility? He is obviously a person who will say anything at any time in order to defend this war, and, now that everything he said in the past is revealed to be completely false, he does not have even an iota of integrity or honesty to admit any of that. Instead, he stands up and pretends that he never said any of those things -- he actually pretends that he knew all along that our military strategy was wrong -- and simply makes the same promises and commitments as he has been making all along with a sense of entitlement that he has credibility on these matters and should be listened to.

I have to take the satisfying moments when I find them because if I go CNN.com, I find out how Democrats are “flailing” and the public is “stewing” because, get this, not all Democrats agree to the same solution for the most complex of problems. After years of lockstep, groupthink Republican talking points, apparently any disagreement is considered damaging to a political party. I’ll admit that I’m not all that happy with what some Dems are thinking, and I’m not anywhere close to 100% optimistic that they’ll reach a satisfying conclusion, but...God forbid it takes some honest-to-god discussion and deliberation to figure out the best way to go about something as harmless as a war that has destroyed all of America’s credibility.

But I digress.

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