As I said, still catching up. Here are a few tidbits in the meantime:
- Matt Yglesias savages Chris Muir's cartoon talking points ("3100 schools have been renovated, 364 schools are being rehabilitated...") taken from some anonymous e-mail. Reading the shiny happy statistics ("96% of Iraqi children under the age of 5 have received polio vaccinations..."), the first thing that came to my mind was the fact that 1 in 8 Iraqis dies before the age of 5--due mainly to lack of potable water and a shattered healthcare system. That's $400 billion thrown down the rathole, and Iraqis still don't have a reliable water supply. It's worse than losing the war: we've lost the reconstruction.
- Shorter Patrick Fitzgerald: we could have nailed Cheney if Libby hadn't lied. That's Dan Froomkin's take, anyway, and he makes a damn good case for it. And that's exactly the problem with describing Libby's offenses as "an alleged crime stemming from a non-crime" (Jules Crittenden): it asserts that perjury and obstruction are crimes only if they're unsuccessful.
- Yesterday, liberal blogs were all over the confirmation that Valerie Plame was a covert agent, and conservative blogs...not so much. One exception was Patterico, who, to his credit, admitted the obvious (and acknowledged the reasonability of Fitzgerald's investigation); his commenters...not so much ("Read very closely. I believe there's a reason they used "indicates". We need the original documents this claim is based on."). Today, the wingnuts got their talking points and are in full-on pushback mode. Yes, the beauty of the blogosphere is that you get to choose your own reality.
|