The Bright Side Of Life

Prime Minister Tony Blair announced this week nearly one quarter of the British forces deployed in Iraq will be leaving by May, and promised even more would be decommissioned from the war-torn former nation by the end of the year.

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The Man In The Mirror

The Baker-Hamilton Commission, more popularly known, perhaps, as the Iraq Study Group, released Wednesday its report on what outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously called “our adventure in Iraq.” At present, others might call it a civil war, a quagmire, a complex situation, or any number of other, less charitable things, but the commission’s statement for the record (available in 160 softbound pages for $6.57 at Amazon) called it “grave and deteriorating,” near-chaos, something on the precipice of “humanitarian catastrophe.”

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Dancing In The Dark

Amid the increasing dishabille of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no whiff from the Bush administration of a comprehensible strategy for dealing with the brouhaha fermenting of North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear brinkmanship (not to mention India’s or Pakistan’s), our newly minted Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California’s 8th district (San Francisco), is about to introduce viewers at home, and those paying attention abroad, to a new perspective on the threats we face in the world today.

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A Game Of Inches

The U.S. Senate came within one vote Monday of embroiling the entire nation in a pointless debate over the symbolism and sanctity of the American flag. By the count of 66 – 34, a constitutional amendment vesting Congress with the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States failed to gain the two thirds majority required for passage and submission to the states for ratification.

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It Ain’t Over ‘Till It’s Over

On the 3rd Anniversary of the United States’ commencement of hostilities in Iraq, the government’s top three executives, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked a watching world today to suspend belief in reality and accept the notion that War is Peace.

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