The Dish

"The levers of power are not connected to anything," he said, adding: "We have placed all of our energies in creating the center, and the center cannot accomplish anything," – CIA director Michael Hayden on the political vacuum at the center of the region of the Middle East called Iraq. But this is the most interesting part of the Woodward piece to me:

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

They’re still lying to us, aren’t they?

(Photo: David Furst/Getty.)

We have a winner. San Diego’s planned sky-scraper is positively flaccid compared with the "Green Bird" tower design proposed for London. No, I’m not making this up. More photos and discussion here. I’m not sure whether it is actually going to be built; but it’s a real design.

The leading gay money group did ask all the leading Republicans to attend a debate on gay issues:

The Foundation’s first ground rule was that we needed to get confirmations from at least two of the top three candidates on either side before we’d proceed with any forum. On the GOP side, Mitt Romney said no – and we never heard back from Rudy Giuliani or John McCain. That’s right: no response. Furthermore, not a single one of the Republican presidential candidates thought it was important for them to return HRC’s questionnaire. Without any responses from any of the top three Republicans, there would obviously be no GOP debate.

HRC should not be immune from criticism of its partisanship. Their decision to all but merge with the Democrats is unfortunate – but they’re not the ones fundamentally at fault here. The Republican party establishment really does exhibit contempt for gay voters. I know of no other group that doesn’t even merit a response or an issue on which so many Republicans have so little to say and staggering levels of ignorance, as was revealed in the South Carolina debate.

The firefighters fight back:

Absent some caveats, we agree again:

You speak of my party wanting to "choose defeat," while yours wants "victory." Is that stark opposition truly our only choice? Or has your party painted itself into a rhetorical corner with its polarized talk of victory and defeat? Isn’t it possible that you have created a nightmare of words from which we cannot wake up? I don’t regard the prudent preservation of American lives and treasure as a "defeat" but rather as a sensible acknowledgment of the reality principle. Not all of our desires, hopes, and ideals can come to pass. That is the human condition.

You say that if we don’t stay and win in Iraq, we’ll be back there in 10 years. I think you might well be correct. The Iraq chaos, which we instrumentally helped foment, will probably spread and destabilize the entire Middle East — a momentum that has already begun. By removing that despicable autocrat, Saddam Hussein, we conveniently did Iran’s work. There’s no stopping the jockeying of power now — Iran eyeing Iraq’s Shiite territories; Turkey ready to smash the independence movement among Kurds (who have been playing the United States for a fool).

But next time around, we will hopefully have the support of other powers in the region, such as Saudi Arabia (a corruption-riddled regime with strong Bush ties), which can’t afford the implosion of Iraq. Meanwhile, the massacre of our hapless soldiers, along with the waste of billions of our tax dollars, must stop. There is no clear way to define "victory" in this folly — which tried to jump-start Western democracy in a country with none of our long traditions of civil law or free speech.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when writers didn’t use computers. Here’s a flashback to 1982 in the Atlantic, wherein Jim Fallows describes his first computer-writing experience:

I skip past the day during which I thought the computer didn’t work at all (missing fuse) and the week or two it took me to understand all the moves The Electric Pencil could make. From that point on, I knew there was a heaven.

What was so exciting? Merely the elimination of all drudgery, except for the fundamental drudgery of figuring out what to say, from the business of writing. The process works this way.

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen. For six months, I found it awkward to compose first drafts on the computer. Now I can hardly do it any other way. It is faster to type this way than with a normal typewriter, because you don’t need to stop at the end of the line for a carriage return (the computer automatically "wraps" the words onto the next line when you reach the right-hand margin), and you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line. It is also more satisfying to the soul, because each maimed and misconceived passage can be made to vanish instantly, by the word or by the paragraph, leaving a pristine green field on which to make the next attempt.

It isn’t raining for Bush. It’s pouring.

The man has now officially lost two wars, almost every ally, and the moral high ground. Meanwhile, we are consigned to this leadership for another year and a half, in which the US military’s operational strength is worn to the bone in one last attempt to prove a fantasy reality. There is obviously some satisfaction at watching this man finally forced to observe the consequences of his own actions. But you could see this day coming for the past three years at least, and it should give no Westerner any pleasure to see it arrive.

We still have deadly, vicious, religious enemies. The military is tied down in a no-win Muslim civil war. Our cities are still dangerously vulnerable to another attack. And, thanks to this president, I’m not even sure the country can unite again as it united the first time, however briefly. This may turn out to be the Dunkirk of this war. We await a sober, serious, unifying leader. So does the free world.

Here’s what’s been wrong with the Bush administration from Day One:

Is it not incumbent on the Wall Street Journal when featuring one Kimberly Kagan’s review of the "surge" to inform its readers that one Kimberly Kagan was on the think-tank team that constructed the idea of said "surge"?