Lileks:

Unbelievable: NPR�s top of the hour theme is somber, downbeat, with a few disconsolate snare drums - music to lose by! Is it too much to ask of these people to play something that doesn�t sound like the music you�d use for the sinking of a [bleep]ing aircraft carrier?

The Jacksonian rabble in this country are swelling with pride. They've wanted to punch somebody out for two and a half years, and now our president is doing it for us. It feels so good.


The coalition is up to 45 nations, says Rumsfeld. NPR and the sneering left are on the run. Pelosi and Daschle look like their mothers had taken them by the ear and made them apologize for calling that nice Mr. Bush such bad names. The no-war-ever crowd are acting like the liberation of the Iraqi people is a bad thing. Their dreamworld, where troubles melt like lemondrops is "melting, me-l-l-l-lting!" It's such a miserable failure of diplomacy, but on their side, not Bush's. They will scuttle into the shadows, like Wormtongue, but they'll be back with their Elsworth Toohey-like sneers and insinuations, but the Democrat Party will not be a vehicle for their
BULLETIN: Rumsfeld challenges the comments that this attack is reminiscent of the firebombing of Dresden. It is not. Because of the precision of our weapons, there is no comparison. The narrow field of the TV cameras on the scene is misleading. It only shows the targeted areas, not the whole city of Baghdad. So, curb your enthusiasm, Brian Williams.

Now one of the Pentagon reporters suggests that this may be like the bombing of Hanoi, and that the Iraqi people will just hunker down and then come back to support their government. The difference here, though, is that the people of North Vietnam saw Ho Chi Minh as their liberator from colonialism, and the Americans as a continuation of the French. I don't think the Iraqis have that same reverence for Saddam.