Colin Powell is seemingly popping up out of obscurity to make a statement on a key issue and then fading away until he suddenly reappears with something else to say.

In September, he came out on the side of the three senators (Warner, Graham, McCain) who at the time (before they caved) were at odds with Bush's detainee torture bill.

Recently Powell has stated that indeed Iraq is in a civil war, and it's high time people recognize this fact.

Meanwhile, a five-page secret report, written by Col. Peter Devlin, a senior and seasoned military intelligence officer with the Marine Expeditionary Force, states that in Anbar "nearly all government institutions from the village to provincial levels have disintegrated or have been thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by Al Qaeda."

Yes, Al-Qaeda is now running the show in parts of Iraq. Just incredible. And Sadr's Mahdi army has approximately 50,000 members, making it a larger, more unified force than the official Iraqi army.

But for Bush, the important thing is to battle the war of words and labeling.

After a much-needed holiday hiatus, I'm back.

How bad does it need to get in Iraq before it's finally labeled a "civil war"? I realize this administration will always opt for taking what is real and then try its darndest to frame it in a fictional way for public consumption.

Just the day after Thanksgiving, car bombings killed over 200 people. I thought Cheney et al said the pre-Nov. 7th violence was purposefully orchestrated to influence our elections, of course implying the mayhem would subside once Election Day passed....? Hmm, go figure.

Many experts have stated that Iraq has been in a civil war (click here, here, here). However, Tony Snow disagrees, stating it's not a civil war since "it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don't have a clearly identifiable leader."

What, like our North vs. South? So if there's no General Lee, then no civil war? These guys are truly nuts.

Meanwhile, Dan Froomkin noticed that Robin Wright wrote in the Washington Post, ""In the history of U.S. foreign policy, there's been nothing like it: a panel outside government trying to bail the United States out of a prolonged and messy war."

Doesn't this "revelation" regarding the Iraq Study Group in and of itself signify Bush's war is a failure? It is indeed Daddy shoving Junior aside, looking to once again bail him out of trouble. Only this time the mess GW made is resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths not to mention the spending of hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer money.

I've written several times here before about how it should never be forgotten how we got into this war to begin with, the lies, the Downing Street memos, the WMD and "yellow cake", etc. etc.

Mark Danner has an excellent take on this:

As the war's presumed ending—constructed from carefully crafted images of triumph, of dictators' statues cast down and presidents striding forcefully across aircraft carrier decks—has flickered and vanished, receding into the just-out-of-grasp future ("a decision for the next president," the pre-election President Bush had said), the war's beginning has likewise melted away, the original rationale obscured in a darkening welter of shifting intelligence, ideological controversy, and conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all sides by the mounting dead.
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The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.

As GW continues to remain very unpopular to say the least, I continue to come across the occasional "reformed" far right-winger who has harshly condemned Bush for not being a true conservative, one more like Ronald Reagan.

Can we stop this already. I've written here before about how it's somewhat of a distortion to have Reagan stand for all things ultimately conservative. While yes, he was not exactly a moderate, but in comparison to Bush he was, and with regards to GW and conservative values, Bush is much closer to being a true conservative than Reagan ever was.

It's about a month old, but Peter Beinart wrote about this subject in TNR. Regarding this growing consensus that GW has strayed far from the ways of Reagan, Beinart writes:

Rarely has so widespread a view been so wrong. In fact, Bush is not merely conservative; he is more conservative than Ronald Reagan, the man whose ideological legacy he has supposedly betrayed....To listen to Bush's critics, you would think that discretionary, nonsecurity-related spending has exploded on his watch. But it hasn't. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has shown, when you take account of inflation and population growth, it grew a mere 2 percent between 2001 and 2006. And, as a percentage of GDP, it actually fell. What has exploded -- rising 32 percent after inflation and population growth -- is spending on defense, homeland security, and international affairs. And the people most responsible for those increases are conservatives themselves, who demanded an expansive war on terrorism.
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Compare all this with Reagan. For starters, domestic, nondefense discretionary spending was higher, on average, under the Gipper. Reagan made no effort to privatize Social Security, even though its 1983 fiscal crisis offered him a golden opportunity. Instead, he raised the retirement age and raised taxes. In fact, while Bush followed his initial 2001 tax cut with three more, Reagan followed his large 1981 cut with tax hikes in 1982, 1983, and 1984. Today, conservatives remember Reagan as an anti-government crusader. But, at the time, many called him a coward.
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Bush has now appointed two Supreme Court justices whom the Christian right adores. By contrast, Reagan stuck by his 1981 nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor even after Jerry Falwell said that every good Christian should oppose her. Viguerie himself attacked Reagan for siding with the liberal establishment, and his fears proved well-founded. Not only did O'Connor support abortion rights, but Reagan's third Supreme Court appointee, Anthony Kennedy, also voted to uphold Roe v.Wade.
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The latest [issue] is immigration, where Bush has been widely scorned for supposedly backing amnesty for illegal immigrants. Where on earth could he have gotten that idea? From Reagan, of course, who, in 1986, signed a bill granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.
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Then there is foreign policy....As National Review's Romesh Ponnuru noted in June 2003, when Bush launched the Iraq war almost everyone who considers himself a conservative did support it. In fact, Bush's foreign policy has proved more faithful to conservative principles than did Reagan's. When terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, Bush responded by invading two countries. When terrorists killed 241 American servicemen in Lebanon in October 1983, by contrast, Reagan promptly cut and ran. (The month before, when the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner, killing 269 civilians, Reagan responded just as weakly: He did nothing.) And what about evil regimes? Bush shuns them. Reagan, by contrast, sold arms for hostages with Iran. And he placed so much faith in Mikhail Gorbachev that prominent conservative intellectuals called him a dupe. "Reagan," declared [George] Will, "has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy."
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Conservatives aren't turning on Bush because his policies aren't conservative. They are turning on him because his policies, from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, have dramatically failed -- and failed policies, by definition, cannot be conservative.

And so with this past election, failed conservative policies were rejected. What voters chose was not some better form of conservatism (?) but rather a more moderate and reasonable of political ideology.

With Bush, you're staring at raw, naked conservatism in all its glory -- and the problem is many conservatives don't like to look in the mirror. Their solution? Morph history and facts to fit their Walter Mitty reality, attempting to have us believe that Reagan was a 100% pure conservative. It's simply not true.

Fox News is planning on debuting a rip-off of Comedy Central's "Daily Show." I know, I too thought Fox News was already a comedic version of the news, but alas they plan to offer a right-wing satirical program.

This venture will certainly fail. Why? Due to lack of material.

Jon Stewart actually has a fairly easy job. Those on the far right provide his writers with ample comedic nuggets from which to work, in most cases the laughs come by just showing the video tape or repeating a quote. The punch lines are not so much written by Stewart or his staff as they are simply inserted as tag-on one-liners or intro set-ups for the main features: true-to-life, idiotic items from the right.

Good luck to Fox in depending on the left to provide on a daily basis such a steady flow of moronic occurrences. The supply will be scant and thus the writers will have to work that much harder in drumming up hilarity. And anyone knows that the harder one must work to make people laugh, the more likely one will bomb.

Rummy's failures have prompted the need for revisions in an Army manual:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be leaving under a cloud of criticism over his handling of the Iraq war, but his invasion plan -- emphasizing speed over massive troop numbers -- has consistently been held up by the administration as a resounding success.

With Iraq near chaos 3 1/2 years later, a key Army manual now is being rewritten in a way that rejects the Rumsfeld doctrine and counsels against using it again.

Oh, and this item will likely come as a huge blow to the neocons:

Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors -- including Iran --— if progress is to be made in the region.

Wow, even Kissinger is advising against "stay the course" stubbornness. Telling.

Keep going John, contort your long-held positions until they're so convoluted they'll be laughably meaningless. You've gone from so-called "straight talk" to blurred vision -- unable to see the dramatic change in political direction -- all in less than a year. Those high-priced advisors on staff are apparently taking you down the road to ruin -- again.

Does anyone truly take WaPo columnist Charles Krauthammer seriously? His Friday column ("Why Iraq Is Crumbling") is so filled with holes, questionable logic, and convenient exclusions that it borders on the absurd.

With regards to what went wrong with Iraq, he states, "I have my own theories. In retrospect, I think we made several serious mistakes -- not shooting looters, not installing an Iraqi exile government right away, and not taking out Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in its infancy in 2004."

So Iraq would be much better off now if 1) we gunned down looters (because we know they're an enormous reason for so many of Iraq's troubles), 2) shoot everyone in the Mahdi Army (as if that would've put a complete and final end to any new insurgency efforts), and 3) quickly throw together an "exile" government ("exile" meaning like in Greece??).

Oh yeah, these proposed shoulda-coulda fixes would've gone a long way to solving everything.

He then states, "Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government."

That's just bullsh*t. He's of course leaving out the biggest reason for going to war at the time and is the sole reason which frightened the American public into backing the war: WMD. Remember Charles, that little item of Saddam/Iraq possessing WMD? That we needed to invade before it was too late...?? No, can't recall can you? Well, as Brendan Nyhan (along with Andrew Sullivan) point out, Krauthammer spent the better part of 2002-2003 writing about the supposed WMD in Iraq.

Ahh, but that's past history, right Charles? Best to just exclude such a small proved-wrong issue and shift the argument or debate. Good old selective memory and framing. It's what neocons and the far right do.

He then writes, "Are the Arabs intrinsically incapable of democracy, as the 'realists' imply?....The problem here is Iraq's particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Hussein's totalitarianism. What was left in its wake was a social desert, a dearth of the trust and good will and sheer human capital required for democratic governance. All that was left for the individual Iraqi to attach himself to was the mosque or clan or militia."

Let's just assume that what he says is true, then what hope was there to begin with Iraq? All of what he says did not have to be learned after the fact, with 20/20 hindsight, but that's exactly what this cheerleader for the war is doing. Now that his experiment has not worked out as desired, Krauthammer is going to characterize the Iraqi people as incapable of ever embracing democracy due to the damage inflicted by Saddam (similar to battered wife syndrome). And in effect, Krauthammer attempts to absolve himself and the neocons of any blame and instead throw all things Iraqi under the bus.

Give me a &*%$# break! Will these guys ever except any blame for any of the Iraq mess? Or will they continue to just revise the past in hopes that people forget how things were then, what was being said and written? Get ready, in due time they'll shift the blame to the Dems, criticizing them for not coming up with the right solutions to the problems that originated under the thorough ineptness of the former majority party.

Oh, and whatever happened to Colin Powell's uttered truism, "you break it, you bought it"? And does Krauthammer consider an exit strategy as one simply comprised of booting Saddam and "installing an Iraqi exile government"? If so, he simply makes the case that in fact there was no exit strategy and for that reason among many others the fault lies with them (GW, Cheney, Rumsfeld, neocons, GOP, etc.) and not the Iraqi people.

From the very wise Richard Russell:

The verdict is in. The majority of the American people by their vote have said "enough" to Bush and the neo-cons. The House went to the Democrats and as I write the Senate is in doubt. Was it Iraq, was it the economy, was it the lies, was it the sleaze, was it the incompetence? It was probably all of these. The vote has rendered President Bush a "lame duck." The nation now faces gridlock. But Iraq will continue, and the deficits will continue.

Much power has now been transferred to the Democrats. They don't deserve it. They went along passively, cowardly, and cluelessly with the Bush caravan. Their real claim to power is not courage or intelligence, their real claim to their new power is simply that they are not Bushies or neo-cons. In all, it's a sad story. But it's a story, less sad than it was a day ago.

Effectively, the reign of Bush and the neo-cons is over. Today there is one less neo-con, Rumsfeld is gone. What turned the tide? Actually, it was the belated back-stiffening of the press. The newspapers, early on, were cowed by the Bush crowd. Later, Iraq, lies, and the administration's arrogance was too much for the press. The press regained its courage. With the recovery of courage by the press, the truth emerged, and the Bush people were doomed.

Yes, not much has been written about the MSM's regained courage as reason for the election outcome. The reasons are many (Iraq, corruption, incompetence, Katrina, Foley, etc.) but the fact the media got some spine back and began to let the people know about truth, facts, and "real life" helped in a very big way.

"Ahhh, c'mon Dad!! I can do it, trust me...."

Presidential redux: the last six years were (unfortunately) Bush 43, the next two will be more of Bush 41. Yes, daddy to the rescue -- again!

How many times must George Sr. rush in to get Junior out of another mess? Only this time the screw-up is not some private business deal but rather the direction of our country.

Does this mean will see the return of "read my lips" tax hikes and "voodoo economics" sanity?

From Newsweek:

President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to just 31 percent, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll....Worst of all, most Americans are writing off the rest of Bush’s presidency; two thirds (66 percent) believe he will be unable to get much done....There’s massive support for much of the Democratic Congress’s presumed agenda. For instance, 75 percent of Americans say allowing the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors should be a “top priority”....Increasing the minimum wage comes next (68 percent) on the public’s list, followed by investigating government contracts in Iraq (60 percent).
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With just two years before the next presidential election, the Republicans have some rebuilding to do. Today 48 percent of registered voters would generally like to see a Democrat elected in ’08...compared to 28 percent who want a Republican.

If Bush decides to repel and stonewall bipartisan compromise, something he's done for the last six years, then his party will suffer the brunt of the damage come 2008. Junior may be quite childishly stubborn, but as these next two years dwindle away, look for the GOP party leaders to really make it crystal clear how the president is to act. No more Mr. Not-Nice Guy.

I'm sure the Dems will not stoop to the Republicans' level of forcing them to have meetings in basements, but wouldn't it be sweet justice to see a little bit of come-uppance?

From Steve Benen:

The way in which the Republican majority would operate the mechanics of government was truly embarrassing. It’s not that they’d mistreat the minority party; it’s that they decided that the minority party was literally irrelevant. Dems were, in the eyes of the GOP, annoying children to be ignored.

Legislation was written without Dem input; bills were passed without letting Dems read it; Dems’ bills were denied hearings and votes; Dems weren’t allowed to offer amendments to legislation; Dems weren’t even allowed to use hearing rooms. If Dems managed to win a key vote on the floor, Republicans would simply keep the vote open — literally for hours, if necessary — until enough arms could be twisted and/or lawmakers bribed. Being a congressional Democrat in recent years was frequently nothing short of humiliating.

Now, of course, Republicans are the minority party on the Hill. The question is obvious: does the Democratic majority treat the Republican minority the way they were treated?

A few days ago, Bush alluded to the fact that he considered calling off or postponing the elections due to the war.

Oh c'mon! If he cancelled the elections due to this deemed "time of war," the public would've went ballistic, finally seeing GW for what he truly wants to be: a fully-empowered ruling king.

If this "time of war" potentially jeopardized our elections -- signifying enormous sacrifice, than how does Bush square this with cutting taxes during wartime, a first in history?

Unfortunately, the Iraq Study Group won't have much to offer:

There are few, if any, good options left facing the country. Many of the ideas reportedly being considered...have either been tried or have limited chances of success, in the view of many experts on Iraq.

Just wonderful. Thanks to GW/Rummy's "stay the course" idiocy, we now have much fewer options to choose from in trying to reverse the runaway train which is Iraq.

From Dan Froomkin:

How did Karl Rove get everything so wrong? And shouldn't we take anything he says from this point forward with a big grain of salt?

Rove's divide-and-conquer political strategy, his insistence that Republican candidates embrace the war in Iraq as a campaign issue, his supremely self-assured predictions of victory -- all were proven deeply, even delusionally wrong last week.

His prediction that Republicans would retain both houses of Congress, in particular, is hardly explicable by "bad math" and Mark Foley.

Either Rove lied or he's clueless. Or both.

I would assume he lied -- just like his boss lied about Rummy staying. Pathological lying runs deep in this administration but one can't discount a good amount of cluelessness also circulating in and around the White House. Look for Daddy Bush's people to begin to change much of this....

Many conservative outlets have been saying that last Tuesday's election results really said nothing about the conservative movement, that the base was still rock solid and their "values" were intact and invigorated.

I say yes, encourage them on! Plod onward with your delusions oh clueless ones, as more Americans wake up and fewer choose to live on Walter Mitty island.

The fact is GW/Rove cost the GOP in moderate blood, with many centrist Republicans losing last Tuesday. Voters realized that to change power in Washington they had to change as many letters from "R" to "D", thus sacrificing the likes of Jim Leach and Lincoln Chafee. So be it, there was no other way.

But in effect, the existing smaller group of Republicans in power is that much more extreme to the right. Thankfully, they now have much less power and yet it will make reasonable compromise that much more difficult.

However, if the GOP wants to remain extreme heading into 2008 despite what this election meant (to most of us anyway), I say go for it!

Uh, isn't this story HUGE?! Can we expect more such suits in the near future?

Apparently Robert Gates played a substantial role in the Iran-contra mess.

Big deal, so did current Bush administration figures Hayden and Negroponte. Next up, Ollie North for a top post!

In his post-election press conference, Bush said, "I thought when all was said and done that the people would understand the importance of taxes, and the importance of security."

In other words, Bush/Rove thought they could go to the well one more time and win another squeaker by appealing to the wealthy via greed and the rest of the public via fear. Didn't work this time.

It's amazing (not) how Bush equates taxes and security. For most people in this country the tax cuts amounted to very little, and yet for all people security is the difference between life and death. Quite a difference (!). But then I suppose to GW life is all about money....

Many on the right are convincing themselves that the Dems elected are actually conservative -- not true if you look at their positions.

The country is not conservative or liberal, but rather moderate/centrist. Look at the polls, they were much against Schiavo intervention, much against Social Security tampering, much against cutting services for them, much for pro-environment laws and issues, they're for raising the minimum wage, they're for stem cell research, they're against interfering with a woman's right to choose -- the list goes on and on and which party is on the same side of those issues? It ain't GW/Rove's GOP.

It will come to be historical fact that the past few years were an aberration due to 9/11 & terror paralysis, voting for the president you have (vs. an unknown) in part based on fear and the primal need for certainty. But that's over and if heaven forbid we're ever attacked again, the public has already been through this once so any lasting such effect will be less from here on in for future presidents. Of course, I would hope that no future president ever attempts to manipulate the masses the way this one has.... But the point being with any luck we're back to normal in the USA and this brief time made fertile for extremism is now over, for good.

Uh oh, there goes the GOP base.... And assuming those Dems are really going to take every last cent from the rich in tax hikes (gads), then what does it say about the severity of the Bush blowback for the wealthy to vote in favor of getting financially screwed?!