Harriet Miers = Bush Crony

I told you so.

Prediction: this nails her nomination coffin shut tight.

Now it gets interesting. Bush is between a rock and a hard place: he's either got to sate the extremists in his party - and thereby alienate the majority of Americans- or he's got to do a Sister Souljah/Ernst Roehm moment with the extremists in his party.

Knowing Bush, I'm betting against an Ernst Roehm moment.

Technorati Tags: Bush, cronyism, corruption

Well, yeah, of course we knew we were right...

Now that the Times has let Judy Miller be semipurged, a more honest narrative has emerged.

It features Brent Scrowcroft, ponders whether Libby will be offed, and finally says the intel was wrong.

Miller confined to a billabong?

"The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," Mr. Scowcroft
told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. "I consider Cheney a good
friend - I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know
anymore."

Mr. Cheney's focus on the threat from Iraq has put
some of his aides, especially I. Lewis Libby Jr., his chief of staff,
in the middle of an investigation by a special prosecutor into the leak
of the C.I.A. operative's name. According to lawyers in the case, Mr.
Libby remains under scrutiny this week in the investigation stemming
from his effort to rebut criticism by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former
diplomat, that the administration had twisted intelligence about Iraq's
nuclear program.

Mr. Libby has become emblematic of the broader
Iraq debate, cast by supporters as a loyal aide working diligently to
set the record straight, and by critics as someone working to smear or
undermine the credibility of a politically potent opponent.

"The
way in which the leak investigation is being pursued is becoming a
symbol of who was right and who was wrong about the war," said Ivo H.
Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked at the
National Security Council during the Clinton administration. "The
possibility of Libby being indicted, and the whole Cheney angle, is all
about proving in some sense that they were wrong and therefore that
those who opposed the war and never thought the intelligence was right
have been proven correct."

Except for this bit:

The passions surrounding the investigation and the question of why the
administration got it wrong about Iraq, other analysts agree, reflect
the troubled course of the war and the divisions over whether it was
necessary or a diversion from the effort to fight Islamic extremism.

This (the bold my emphasis) assumes that there were people - "analysts" - who actually believed that deposing a secular strong-man (a nasty nasty murderer of a man of course) and balkanizing Iraq would somehow, uh, stave off Islamic extremism. If there are such analysts, I suggest they check their mercury levels.

Finally this bit by a former (first?) Bush employee deserves comment: "If the war had gone extremely well, you wouldn't have this controversy." If the "war had gone extremely well," there wouldn't have been a war in the first place.

Fun with Flock

I've download Flock and indeed it goes down like...well, rather than putting in a naughty metaphor, let's just say it's not all that stable yet. But it is fun. The coolest thing about Flock is that it's integrated with del.icio.us, and it allows you to share bookmarks on the web.

You can see who's bookmarked your bookmarks, and see in turn what they've bookmarked.

It's like a blogosphere for the browser. It has a blogging tool integrated into the browser, and that's where crashes come in. Beware of "TopBar" for now.

But alas, it crashes. Save blogposts frequently. I was in the middle of a rather lengthy blogpost, and Boom! Flock crashed.

But get it and play with it. It's the latest heat on Internet Explorer, and that can't be all bad, can it?

Technorati Tags: Flock, bookmarks

Yes, the media lies...

As one David Fiderer says here, it looks like Tim Russert's a liar.

Means, motive and opportunity and all that

This is a test

To see if Flock posts to my blog...

The meme repeats itself....

Tom DeLay repeats the "Republicans are criminals" meme.

"I have been charged with defeating Democrats," Mr. DeLay said. "I have been charged with advancing the Republican agenda."

So the "Republican Agenda" is money-laundering to evade campaign finance laws, and violating those laws?

He said it, not me. I'm only the messenger.

David Sirota's right about the Democrats, but the Dems are working on it...

(Here.) But I think they'll do what he wants, and the Republicans will sooner or later be in the doghouse for thirty years. I just hope that happens in the next two years, not the next ten. I've got to think about the future.

This bit here by Ruy Teixeira is also intriguing. If done right, on the policy and message fronts, and if Dean does the campaign front well - and if this is done quickly- we can take back Congress in 2006, setting the stage for recovery from these awful years.

This bit from the DCCC is a good start, but it's still a bit clunky. But it does have broadband....mmmmm....broadband...

Seriously, the Repubs have seriously wounded our techno infrastructure. It's time we got it back.

(HT: Sam Rosenfeld)

OK, here's the secret decoder ring to Treasongate.

The blog formerly known as Mossback Culture seems somewhat mystified by the the metaleaks on Treasongate, so in order to set him and others straight, here's the secret decoder ring to Treasongate.

I know I shouldn't be telling you, seein' as I've taken those blood oaths and all but folks like him seem mighty mystfied by all the goings on...OK, here it goes (See here for a prime example of what I'm discussing...

Rule number 1: Leaks from unnamed administrative sources are basically discounted, unless there is corroboration elsewhere.

Rule number 2: Leaks from unnamed administrative sources specifically identified by some job function (e.g., "former Congressional staffer" = Libby) are still discounted,... BUT

Rule number 3: Despite Rules number 1 and Rules number 2 (you'll note that "source familiar with the Fitzgerald investigation" or some such thing invariably means Rove's or Libby's Lawyer- Cheney's permanently in his hidey-hole (kinda like Saddam, no? oh, the irony...) and the only folks with authority to vet the kind of crap that goes out to the media are mouthpieces like Luskin. So, de-spin it for Rove, do a bit of what the Russians used to do reading Pravda, and voila! (French...there goes the irony again!) - some trajectory in the vicinity of what's going on. Or BS.

Rule number 4: Despite all the above, there are still pretty objective sources: Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame aren'tthe ones being considered for orange jumpsuits and frog-marches. Neither is George Tenet, who started this thing.

Rule number 5: Matthew Cooper has no real grist for BS-ing here. Judith Miller has to save face...strike that...she's toast, as toasty as if there were a video of her and "Pinch" Sulzberger engaging in sexual congress at the NY Times Christmas Party.

Rule Number 6: Some players, such as Chris Matthews (a.k.a., "Tweety" in Kos because of the way he flies from one position to another as well as being a reference to his hair color), Tim Russert, Ms. Allen Greenspan, and of course Robert Novak, know more about this then they let on since it's known that they've been leaked to as well (or at least that's what Rove/Libby has let on through their leaks) and if they didn't at this stage, have some connection, you can be sure that Fitzmas would include some obstruction charges specifically related to wild goose chases involving these reporters.

Rule Number 7: There are no, nada, zilch zipppo, nothin', coming from Fitzgerald's office, despite propaganda mills' attempts to imply otherwise. Fitzgerald's no Ken Starr, and we're not talking semen stained dresses here.

Rule Number 8: This is all put together via inference and a healthy dose of skepticism. We're aware of what kind of folks we're dealing with, you know.

Irrational Exuberance in the Pony Market

What with Fitzmas around the corner...we do have to make sure we don't spend too many ponies, betting on too many indictments...

So, let's be generous with ponies, but remember, Patrick Fitzgerald can't indict every Republican elected to Federal office.

And if the above makes any sense to you, you're probably more connected to events than I am...

Tom DeLay's mugshot

It's not on the Smoking Gun yet...

6 Degrees of Patrick Fitzgerald

I didn't know the Conrad Black connection to Fitzgerald. Put Perle in there twice, add a bit of Kissinger, and it's a political Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

He sees into the ugly, greedy, oozing heart of the NeoCon kleptocracy, its mafia-like structure and the all-too-cozy overlap between the war party and the profiteers, and it pisses him off. "Shareholders in public companies have a right to expect that their monies will be managed properly by officers and directors and that the officers and directors won't steal it," he said.

Fitzgerald has also been busy indicting henchmen of the cravenly corrupt Daley administration, proving along the way that a) he is non-partisan in his pursuit and just as willing to throw a beating to crooked Democrats, and b) he is, as he was once described, Elliot Ness with a sense of humor.

Jury Duty: My personal piece of the slime...

Well, my jury duty- in this case as a juror on State v. McIntire has been completed. The defendant was charged with 4 residential burglaries; the evidence against him was, as is typical in these types of things, very thin: no evidence of him actually atthe crime scene, although there was evidence of possession of stolen property.

On 2 of the burglaries, one Seargant testified that the defendant was confessing, and agreed to take the officers on a "ride around," identifying houses that were violated. The only problem was that there was no written record of this, other than a report written several days after the fact, there was no signed confession - despite the fact that the defendant was apparently doing this after he was "Mirandized," and, there was no recorded record, because, as one Seargant Eastman of the Clark County WA sherriff's office testified, audio recordings in automobiles had "too much noise" for them to be used by the Clark County Sherriffs.

Which, in my professional opinion, was complete, total, steaming bullshit, and possibly perjury, especially since my fellow jurors were incredulous that a cop would lie under oath. Indeed, it's not like their office is totally unfamiliar with such technology. Moreover, in my experience (developing further technology originally developed by Earnest Ashkenazy, who did work on acoustic analysis for the John F. Kennedy assasination, thereby connecting me with the alleged vast conspiracy therein) it is possible to pull voice signals out of noise when the noise is at levels experienced in the cockpit of an F-15- enough noise to make your ears bleed without protection.

That this technology in the 25 years since it was first developed has made its way into the law enforcement field is illustrated here.

I have offered my services to the defense as an expert witness if they need any additional help.

Verdict: guilty on 2 counts, hung jury on 2. The prosecution, I am told, intends to retry on the other 2 counts. I am hoping there is a perjury indictment as well based on what I heard there. There is more I know about what's going on in response to this (and there is something going on), but I cannot mention it at this time.

What was odd to me was the fantastic level of denial among my fellow jurors- while I had my doubts about whether all of the police officers' testimony was tainted (there were 2 officers), I could not, reasonably, find the other officer's testimony tainted to the point where I would throw it out. But whether it is a reasonable doubt or not, it still nags me that somebody "with his career on the line" would blatantly make what to me seemed like a bald-faced lie. The other jurors believed the cop becasue "his career" was on the line; but I saw blatant arrogance.

Jury Duty...

Against what I thought were tremendous odds, I have actually been sat on a jury. I cannot, of course, talk about it at the moment, but when I am done I hope to have a fuller accounting of the matter than we've seen from Judith Miller and Bill Keller on treasongate.

Suffice it to say, I'm existentially conflicted. I hate being existentially conflicted.

Another great economics post on Kos

Read it.

The only thing missing is the bird flu pandemic effect.

A liberated Iraq post...

Richard Bennett, on the increasingly ho-hum "Mossback Culture" blog, points to a post on "Protein Wisdom," (here).

Richard notes the selective quoting there and says, "Lefty blogs have a particularly illuminating take."

As a centrist-to left of center blog, I might as well chime in here:

When George W. Bush has to resort to quoting some more probably made up stuff (see here and here; I hadn't realized that its provenance depended on the guy who allegedly helped out the death squads in Central America, Negroponte), you know the stock excuses for Iraq's invasion are getting shop-worn.

Yglesias and Marshall said their pieces on the Iraq vote.

Some more lefty blogs covered it as can be seen here.

MHO: This won't stop the violence of course; especially since democracy is the last thing the neocons want in the middle east. The article in the NYT today hints at increased escalation and duration.

And, as Atrios notes, some Democrats are being silly:

I guess I'm not sure what this means - Biden's offering up the "if it becomes a total clusterfuck we get the hell out" strategy?

I think that's the Repub strategy, too.

Freeper Logic...

With respect to my post below, on how conservatives are equating conservatism with criminality, (it's their talking point, so don't blame me; I'm only relaying what was blast-faxed) for "balance," and for your enjoyment, I humbly submit for your coinsideration this post on Free Republic.

To: Pokey78

I read somewhere else this morning that Delay's fundraising has set a new record high in the last three months. The democrats tactics continue to backfire.

3 posted on 10/15/2005 6:03:41 AM PDT by somemoreequalthanothers (All for the betterment of "the state", comrade)
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To: martin_fierro
Kristol may have nothing to fear but his headline is oh so correct. Criminalizing conservatives .. also include Christians.
4 posted on 10/15/2005 6:07:03 AM PDT by svcw
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To: Pokey78

The connect the dots exercise is fine.All too well known here at FR maybe. Question is, what is the GOP gonna do about it?
Can we also PLEASE throw up some shameless, focussed, disingenuous, victory-at-all-costs politicians in the Dem mould? ...

To: Pokey78
This is the situation: There are so many laws and regulations that everyone has probably committed a felony sometime in their life, almost all of them unknowingly.

Conservativss are held to the absolute letter of the law, even when trying their best to avoid violating any law, they sometimes fail. Now I don't think Delay has even done that.

On the other hand we have corruption by Liberals on a massive scale with stealing elections, stealing money, selling secrets to the enemy, sexual pervision, the list goes on and on. If anyone tries to hold them accountable, they are attacked in the most vicious manner by the media, and Democratic apparatus.

It really is that shocking.
9 posted on 10/15/2005 6:15:44 AM PDT by yarddog
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That last one was particularly interesting: the "everybody does it, multiple wrongs make a right" defense.

To: Pokey78
Criminalization is a reflection of a deep malady at the heart of American politics..

If criminal prosecution is seen to loom ahead for every politician who begins to act out his or her beliefs in unconstitutional government or politics, perhaps reform will be sustainable.

We don't need to pretend to have all the answers, or a solid answer even to one of these questions.
But it's a reasonable bet that when it became clear that a comprehensive strategy of criminalization has been implemented to inflict defeat on politicians who seek to govern as socialists, that true reform would soon follow.
12 posted on 10/15/2005 6:26:53 AM PDT by faireturn
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Um, they tried that in the 30s. It was a kind of insurrection against Roosevelt.

Now for a bit of denial:

To: Pokey78
You don't have to read down too far before he begins accusing this administration of classified leaks. The Plame leak being the most serious.

Kristol has truly lost his mind, but then I never thought he had much of an intellect.

More like a useful idiot for McCain.
13 posted on 10/15/2005 6:37:47 AM PDT by OldFriend (One Man With Courage Makes a Majority ~ Andrew Jackson)
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And denial-er:

To: Pokey78
"Why are conservative Republicans, who control the executive and legislative branches of government for the first time in living memory, so vulnerable to the phenomenon of criminalization?"

First of all, conservative Republicans do NOT control the legislative branch, which of course, hamstrings the President. The legislative branch is controlled by a cabal of Senate Democrats and RINO's.......and when you get right down to it, the Senate is controlled by 6 or 7 faux Republicans in the McCain, Chaffee, Snowe mold. One might also add to this the "gang of 14" which deftly seized control in the judicial appointments process, again hamstringing the President.

Second, Republican solons don't know how to fight back and they never have. They are not alley-cat fighters like the Dems have always been. This pussiness is always praised by purists as being something "noble". About as "noble" as the phoney Nobel peace prizes.

Right off the bat, the "new tone" in DC disarmed the GOP victors. It lulled them, and soon, they preferred the state of lullness to any meaningful confrontations. The GOP elected hierarchy are, for the most part, paper tigers big on talk, short on wielding the big stick.

Mr. Krystal, you know the answer to your own question as well as we, you are just too delicate, sensitive and wussy to articulate it. Perhaps you fear a more manly critique of the fighting spirit of the DC GOP might hurt sales of your magazine. If so, then you are part of the problem.

Years ago, GOP "compassionate conservatism" in DC morphed into "dispassionate conservatism".....and therein lies the rub.

Leni
28 posted on 10/15/2005 7:21:02 AM PDT by MinuteGal (Re: The Anti-War Sheehan-ites - They want to live in the garden but not tend the garden)
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Nice handle...and finally, projection and paranoia:

To: yarddog

Your post is an accurate description of American politics since at least Watergate times. To me the mystery is why Pubbies don't figure it out and naively keep kicking Lucy's football, expecting a different outcome "this time." The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that they truly don't comprehend the depth of Democrat corruption, cynicism, America-hatred and ruthlessness.

35 posted on 10/15/2005 8:06:44 AM PDT by Bernard Marx (Don't make the mistake of interpreting my Civility as Servility)
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To: Pokey78

The criminality of dissenting opinion is a central tenet of leftist strategy and rhetoric. These specific cases are merely the public tip of a very large iceberg.

Out here in the trenches, even the dimmest liberal conformist sheep know that the first reaction to criticism, dissent, or opposition should be to represent such opposition as a criminal attack on liberal rights. Last week, I spoke with a high school English teacher who was almost comically obtuse about this.
She literally could not conceive of the idea that criticizing, say, the Dixie Chicks was not a criminal attack on their rights. She had no conception of the irony of pretending that total stone silence from those with certain opinions was the only way to protect "free expression."
Two generations of Americans have now been indoctrinated to believe implicitly in these imaginary rights for liberals and leftists: the right to the forum of their choice, the right to an audience, the right to financial support, and the right to be taken seriously.

36 posted on 10/15/2005 8:17:23 AM PDT by atomic conspiracy (Islamo-terrorists: Strike force of the MSM)
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To: atomic conspiracy
I like your tag line. I also agree with what you said.

I have come to believe there is a vast left wing conspiracy in this country. I am not kidding BTW.

I have always loved conspiracy theories, they are so darned interesting but I didn't really believe in them. In the last few years I have come to to totally believe in them. The only problem I have is many who think the same thing really are nuts.

How would I join in with a bunch that I know to be mostly if not all, at least a little strange?

Maybe 20 years ago, I noticed these things seemed to be staged and pushed by real forces. I am not even saying they are all wrong.

First of all came the anarchists and atheists who were also communists. Next came the civil rights movement. Then the sexual revolution, attack on the family (along with feminism) and open immigration.

I can remember back around 1988 when I was in grad school mentioning to a friend that the next big push was going to be homosexual rights. I also said I thought they had finally overstepped. Boy was I wrong.

A few days ago on the History Channel they had a program on secret societies. Among them was "skull and bones" and the various groups such as the CFR, Trilateral Commisssion and the Bilderbergers.

Then it hit me. These groups are just what the right wing nuts called them. They really are conspiracies to take over the world.

In fact they are really conspiracies right on the face of it, hiding in plain sight. The only thing which could be argued is what they are doing.
37 posted on 10/15/2005 8:47:14 AM PDT by yarddog
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There's a lesson here: don't sound like them, but we must insist on clean government, whether Repub or Democratic.

Why the Republican Party is a Clear and Present Danger

I saw this phrase: "conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives" within the context of an alleged "criminalization of politics," from at Hunter's post on that "new meme" at Kos.

We're talking about real crimes and serious ones, too; felonies, some involving national security, and some that are, IMO, as important as national security (i.e., buying the legislative process lock, stock, and barrel is as great a threat to the functioning of our democracy as any foreign threat; indeed, with multinational corporations today with allegiance to no border, it's the same damned thing if they're calling the shots in Washington).

But, as Hunter quotes Kristol and Jeffrey Bell this is merely what happens when there are in power "conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives." (This is also the meme in the attack dog ad against non-partisan DA Ronnie Earle put up by Tom De Lay to try to tamper with the prospective jury.)

So they themselves are making the equation: conservatism is lawlessness run amok; it endangers national security, it is sleaze personified.

Hope that cleared everything up for you. It'll be great fodder for Democratic politicians the 2006 elections. The only thing I'd add is that not only is governing with criminality the style of conservatives, but also being inherently anti-democratic; it's why they attack liberals so much. They just don't seem to like folks having civil liberties, I think.

The Sunday Times: Funny; you like armageddon, I like following treasongate...

Today's New York Times - as anyone who's read the blogosphere knows by now- has "its" story on Judith Miller, treasongate, etc.


While others have extensively commented on it, what strikes me about the story is the degree of denial and delusion present at the Times and their editors. Anybody who calls this paper a "liberal" paper after reading this story is basically being dishonest.

Ms. Miller said she was proud of her journalism career, including her work on Al Qaeda, biological warfare and Islamic militancy. But she acknowledged serious flaws in her articles on Iraqi weapons.

"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," she said. "The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them - we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."

In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

No she didn't do the best job she could; from way back where I sit I could smell something out of place. If I, with only publicly available information could have my bullshit detector blinking red, why couldn't Miller's?

Well, the answer's contained in that article; rather than being skeptical, rather than endeavoring to find the facts, Ms. Miller - and by extensin the Times- were basically being sycophants to power, not speaking the truth about power, which, I submit, should be their mission.

Their objective was to cultivate powerful sources, to let them have their say, not to put the powerful sources in the context of reality.

This long article is well worth reading, because - unintentionally- over and over again this sub-text appears. There is no ethical requirement to protect a source unless you are engaged in the mission of actually, you know, finding out the truth.

And, if you think that speaking about power, but not necessarily putting power in the context of reality isn't part of the Times' game plan (and why you'd think that at this point is beyond me) all you have to do is consider their business plan. They get more money if they get more viewers of their content- just like Fox. The only difference is they start from different demographics and delivery systems.

Which brings me to their "Armageddon's Bustin' Out Everwhere" article.

Today, only about a third of evangelicals are truly dispensationalists, estimated Richard Cizik, vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, although he said he thought most evangelicals are generally pre-millennial, harboring a more pessimistic outlook on history.

But the dispensationalists remain the most vocal segment, Mr. Cizik said. Aided by books, television and the Internet, they have shaped a fascination in evangelical culture on the end of days, said Craig C. Hill, a professor of New Testament theology at Wesley Theological Seminar in Washington and the author of "In God's Time: the Bible and the Future," about biblical prophecy. Preaching on the end times is an obvious way to draw an audience, Mr. Hill said.

"It's inherently interesting," he said. "If you have a sign out for the sermon, 'Our obligation to the poor,' you won't get anybody. If you have a sign out for, 'The Internet and the Antichrist,' you'll bring them in."

And so it is with this brand of Evangelicals, which the Times has previously noted somewhere that it'd like to bring in to its demographic. They're interested in "bringing them in," in increasing market share, regardless of whether or not there's a good relationship to reality. When market share is your ultimate objective, fidelity to reality will suffer sometimes. Period.

Not unexpected, one or two bits of facts that annihilate dispensationalism are left out of the Times article; the most obvious one to me is the whole history of how Revelation got into the bible in the first place- traditionally explictly understood as an allegory, with most references explicitly to the Roman empire.

But that would ruin a narrative that brings 'em in...

Isn't there better ways to use this technology?

From Krauthammer in the Washington Post, "A Flu Hope, Or Horror?", comes this scare- you'd think that "terrists" would have more fun putting the DNA sequence for delta-9 THC into something like strawberries or something.:

While official Washington has been poring over Harriet Miers's long-ago doings on the Dallas City Council and parsing the byzantine comings and goings of the Patrick Fitzgerald grand jury, relatively unnoticed was perhaps the most momentous event of our lifetime -- what is left of it, as I shall explain. It was announced last week that U.S. scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu...

Which brings us to the second element of this story: Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested .

Now that I have your attention, consider, with appropriate trepidation, the third element of this story: What to do with this knowledge? Not only has the virus been physically re-created, but its entire genome has also now been published for the whole world, good people and very bad, to see...

On the other hand, resurrection of the virus and publication of its structure open the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys included, can now create it. Biological knowledge is far easier to acquire for Osama bin Laden and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't make this stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from commercial laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it to you on demand. Taubenberger himself admits that "the technology is available."

What Krauthammer fails to note, though is that this is MAD with a bullet: you can't control this stuff if you get it out without a vaccine; meaning that all good Muslims or Bible believers - that is those -who support the terrorists would be killed too. Everybody dead except for those with natural immunity.

Who could be, well, folks opposed to terrorism.

Try again, smartypants.

They've got to be kidding...Syria?

With the prospect of a continued quagmire in Iraq- "If they vote down this constitution we'll do the process all over again" is what soldier in the scripted photo-op said the other day- now we find out that there's border skirmishes with Poland...er...I mean... Syria?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 - A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials.

The firefight, between Army Rangers and Syrian troops along the border with Iraq, was the most serious of the conflicts with President Bashar al-Assad's forces, according to American and Syrian officials.

...

Wait, wait, here it comes...here it comes...

One of Mr. Bush's most senior aides, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that so far American military forces in Iraq had moved right up to the border to cut off the entry of insurgents, but he insisted that they had refrained from going over it.

But other officials, who say they got their information in the field or by talking to Special Operations commanders, say that as American efforts to cut off the flow of fighters have intensified, the operations have spilled over the border - sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.

Some current and former officials add that the United States military is considering plans to conduct special operations inside Syria, using small covert teams for cross-border intelligence gathering.

You know, if they don't have the testicular fortitude to come right out and own up to their own propaganda, why should we believe any "unnamed administration official?"

Now, for the gratutious Vietnam analogy...

Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow over the border and, ultimately, a place for a shadow struggle.

To reiterate: this is worse than Vietnam, far worse. As with Vietnam, there isn't a chance we can ultimately achieve our objective:regional hegemony. But unlike Vietnam, there's the entire lynchpin of the American economy riding on this. It's the greatest disaster, challenge, or opportunity that's ever faced the US.

Too bad we have a hack failed ex-oil executive in charge, who got there only by nepotism.