(updated below)
I doubt I will be able to post today, so I will take the opportunity to recommend some excellent commentary from others:
(1) One of the things the blogosphere does best is take conventional wisdom, dissect it, research it mercilessly and then determine if it is true. Jonathan Schwarz shows how that is done with regard to conventional beliefs concerning the events prior to our invasion in Iraq.
(2) Harper's Scott Horton has a great essay on historical moral debates over torture (and Barbara O'Brien discusses some of the recent revelations concerning our treatment of Jose Padilla).
(3) Pach at FDL points out the right's most recent campaign, led by Newt Gingrich, to declare yet another "War" on yet another Enemy. That is the fuel that sustains their movement.
(4) Blue Texan reminds us how central gender insecurities, and especially masculinity insecurities, are to the right-wing movement.
(5) Both Cernig and Will Bunch analyze the obviously ominous signs behind the latest provocation towards Iran. Their strategy clearly is, and for quite some time has been, to eliminate the need for a debate in Congress by shifting the emphasis from Iran's nuclear program to its "acts of war" against the U.S. in Iraq, and thereby argue that any attack against Iran is simply part of the already existing AUFM for the Iraq mission.
Bush long ago declared Iran evil. The still most powerful elements of the Bush faction clearly are eager for an attack on Iran. Bush has nothing to lose. Other than outright mutiny from the U.S. military, it is impossible to see who would stop him if he decided to do that. I have long been baffled by the prevailing refusal to believe that this is going to happen -- a refusal grounded far more in hope than in reality.
UPDATE: In his speech yesterday declaring a War on Illegal Immigration/Illegal Immigrants, Newt Gingrich said this:
There is a war here at home that is just as important as the war against terrorism overseas. . . . There is a war here at home, and it is even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is really saying something, in light of Gingrich's Proclamation of War last year, in which he declared about the War on Terrorism:
We're in the early stages of what I would describe as the third World War . . . . If you take all the countries I just listed that you've been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you have to say to yourself: this is, in fact, World War III.
This must be quite a War on Immigration we have on our hands, since -- according to Gingrich yesterday -- it is "as important as" and "even more deadly than" World War III.
I wonder if, in this new War, the one on Illegal Immigrants, we are allowed to "take off the table" the option of tactical nuclear weapons, or would that violate the Foreign Policy Community's Holy Law of Strategic Ambiguity?
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