The People Who Interpret the Constitution

Michael Kinsley begins his latest essay with a shocking line:

If there is anything scarier than a president who thinks he is above the law, it is a president who thinks that journalists aren't.

But that isn't his position. Rather, it's one he attributes to the Boston Globe and the New York Times in their zeal to apply a different rule to the President than to themselves.

It truly is as if journalism considers being elected as prima facie proof of dishonesty and untrustworthiness. Through it all there's an implied corollary: Our lawyers are better than those who advise the president. They talk about Bush as if he just insisted on ignoring the law, without getting any legal advice. On what basis do they imply this? Why, because it makes it so much easier to call him a criminal.

Why should the Constitution allow the government to prosecute the provider of stolen government information but not the knowing recipient or to prosecute all other recipients of such information (like two lobbyists currently under investigation) but not journalists?

Maybe journalists sincerely believe they are entitled to such constitutional special treatment. Maybe they are even right about this, and the courts are wrong. But who wants to live in a society where every citizen and government official feels free to act according to his or her own personal interpretation of the Constitution, even after the Supreme Court has specifically said that this interpretation is wrong? President Bush would top my list of people I don't want wandering through the text and getting fancy ideas. But why should he stay out of the "I say what's constitutional around here" game if his tormentors in the press are playing it?

Good questions all.

Congress behaving badly

Maybe she should change her name to McKennedy.

Porter Goss is out at CIA

His resignation was announced today. Frank Gaffney and Jed Babbin, on Hugh Hewitt's show, indicated that he didn't want to leave. Others have said that he was just acknowledging that the job had diminished and the power shifted to the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.

I located this piece by David Ignatius from last October presaging this, and Hot Air and Glenn Reynolds both have pretty good roundups.

Glenn Reynolds

Pro legalizing drugs, pro guns, anti-pork, and generally devoid of hysteria, what's not to like? He may not have the highest site meter, but he's not pandering to the irrational Bush haters. As Spencer Tracy said of Katherine Hepburn: "There's not much meat on her, but what there is is cherce." Glenn's readership is cherce, if I do say so.

Kennedy didn't crash. His car did.

Is there something odd about this headline? Is he denying that he was driving? Did the car crash by itself?

His promise that he will fully cooperate with the authorities is amazing in its disingenuosness, having been made after a breath test would no longer yield any evidence. If he was drunk, would he admit it? Come on.

Now he's claiming he was impaired by prescription drugs. I'd like to know where he had been until 2:00 a.m., what the drugs were and when he took them and what he was doing out driving around in the middle of the night.

I can hear him at AA: "My name is Patrick, and I'm a Kennedy."

Update: He had been at a bar called The Hawk and the Dove drinking. According to The Smoking Gun, the cops thought he was impaired because he was unsteady on his feet, his speech was slightly slurred and his eyes were "red and watery." He says that he had taken Ambien and Phenergan.

I take Ambien, but I don't drink. I sort my meds into AM and PM bottles. Last year I took the wrong pills when I woke up an went to work, and bumped into another car at a stop sign. I didn't see any damage, but the other driver called the cops and they came to my office and field tested me. I had mistakenly taken an Ambien in the a.m. and I could definitely see the impairment in my balance, coordinaton and ability to follow instructions. I wondered if this was what it was like to be drunk. Since then, I don't put Ambien in with any other pills. I've had two incidents where it affected my awareness the day following its use, including memory loss. I don't know how alcohol would add to these effects, but I can't imagine that it would be good. Anybody who drinks after taking Ambien and then drives is defintitely a danger to other drivers and pedestrians.

The Backsliding Hemisphere

Jim Pinkerton warns about the South and Central American states moving back toward communism. Hugh Hewitt had Frank Gaffney and Jed Babbin on, talking about the same concern. This looks to become an major issue, but not much of a vote getter for either side.

15 points is not enough!

I was tempted to comment on Eric Boehlert's book, but the title was so absurd I didn't think I could stand reading it, let alone paying for it.

Fortunately, there are people paid to do such things and better equipped, as well. Stephen Spruiell is one of those.

If I were a reporter being called a lapdog after everything I could do sort of making stuff up to help the Democrats and sabotage Bush and got called a lapdog for my efforts, I'd be getting pretty sick of being taken for granted by Democrats. Fortunately, for the Dems, none of these people has much of a grasp on objective reality.

Culture of Corruption update

A Democrat taking bribes? Maybe this and the Mollohan case, are why we haven't heard that phrase from Pelosi and Reid lately. Actually, corruption is rife wherever power is concentrated, which is why conservatives oppose big government.

Irony

is Geroge Will criticizing other people for being condescending. Isn't this the same guy who complained that Harriet Myers wasn't one of the leading lights of jurisprudence and therefore shouldn't be on the Supreme Court?

Of course, he is writing about John Kenneth Galbraith who passed away recently, who seemed to think he was as wise as he was tall, so his point is well taken. Nevertheless, one has to wonder how he can write so straight-faced about intellectuals who disparage average Americans.

Patrick Kennedy, Congressman in apparent DUI

Heard this on Michael Medved's show.

Colbert on toast.

Richard Cohen critiques Stephen Colbert's flop at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, making an important point. Mere rudeness is not wit or comedy.

Insult comedy isn't new. Don Rickles made it famous, apparently mistaking embarrassed laughter for amusement. Nowadays, the insults are more subtle, as with Colbert's stories on The Daily Show, interviewing odd people and laughing at them later, when they're not there to defend themselves, with a hip young audience in New York. It comes across like going to a mental hospital or a home for the retarded and laughing at the inmates.

I've noticed that our national sense of humor has become less witty and more silly. Apparently the younger generations think it's hilarious to see a can of Diet Pepsi "performing" as an action movie star, or a Pepsi machine as a football player. I don't get it. There are little touches that show that the writers notice some cliches about pro sports, but the overall effect is Napoleon Dynamite, not clever--just stupid. They don't seem to understand what's funny, i.e. the recognition of ourselves and our foibles. Comedy generally plays off something that is true, even if the actual presentation could never happen. Gary Larson's cartoons are usually absurdities, such as a dog on trial in a courtroom of cats, or cows ringing the farmer's doorbell as a prank. It's not the same when it's a can of Pepsi.

I especially liked this in Cohen's column:

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country. His defenders--and they are all over the blogosphere--will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences--maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or--if you're at work--take away your office.

But in this country, anyone can insult the president of the United States. Colbert just did it, and he will not suffer any consequence at all. He knew that going in.

James Taranto adds:

This, it seems to us, explains several conceits of the Angry Left:

* The notion that criticism--whether of the Dixie Chicks or of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer--amounts to censorship.

* Claims by Democratic politicians that Republicans are "questioning" their "patriotism."

* Fears of incipient fascism.

What these have in common, aside from being totally fantastical, is that they all reinforce the image of the Angry Leftist as courageous dissenter. In truth, this country is so tolerant, indeed downright indulgent, of this sort of "dissent" that it affords no opportunity to be courageous.

Speak "truth to power" in America, and power will pat you on the head and say, "What an adorable little girl." Some on the Angry Left could actually have the courage to stand up if they were faced with real consequences--but they are unlikely ever to get that chance. America's almost boundless tolerance thus reduces them to the level of petulant children. No wonder they're so angry.

This guy's a general?

Lt. General William E. Odom (retired, of course), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor at Yale University, and director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 988, pens an article headed "Cut and Run? You bet!"

Perhaps the most offensive part of it is his assertion:

A rapid reversal of our present course in Iraq would improve U.S. credibility around the world. The same argument was made against withdrawal from Vietnam. It was proved wrong then and it would be proved wrong today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the world’s opinion of the United States has plummeted, with the largest short-term drop in American history.

This is a deeply dishonest argument. The point is credibility, mere popularity or respect. Those are largely determined by media coverage. Credibility means that when you give your word, people can rely on it. Our loss of credibility is what lead bin Laden to believe that we're a paper tiger. It got us 9/11. For a supposed intellectual to miss that is shameful and stupid.

Zarqawi's Blooper Reel

They've found the outtakes from his recent video.

Commie Bishops

Church and State in China. What would Constantine do?

Surprise!

Valerie Plame is seeking a book deal. That'll keep the pot boiling for a while.

Definitely The Drama Queen

Jack Shafer on the media vs. Bush:

Let's charge Bush with contempt of press and damn his secret ways, but do his offenses committed really constitute a war on the Fourth Estate? Or is the press using its stage to play the drama queen?

When you make yourself the enemy, how can you blame someone for treating you like one? --especially when you're as thick as Eric Alterman.

In a Groove

I've been listening to Morph the Cat over and over this p.m. It's as languid and bittersweet* as Nightfly and Kamakiriad weren't, but that's perfect these days. My favorite track is "What I Do," but "The Night Belongs to Mona" is growing on me. His arrangements are lush and smooth as a fog rolling in. It'll be in elevators and shops in due time, like other Steely Dan and Fagan songs of the past, giving me an inward smile as I rehearse the lyrics.

*Yes, I know where I've heard that phrase before.

You can't sell what nobody wants.

David Ignatius writes about John McCain that he "won't sell his soul," presumably to be president.

I hate to break it to him, but he donated it to the Democrats when he helped found the Gang of 14, and nobody, certainly no real Republican, really wants it now. He's shown himself to be arrogant and a prima donna, and he doesn't seem to understand how politics is really played. Bush certainly has shied away from the down and dirty of Washington politics, and the press and Democrats have mauled him. I hate to think what kind of a president McCain would make. He sees himself as Teddy Roosevelt, but he'd probably alienate everybody in both parties in his Inauguration address. I'm not too worried about him getting the nomination. Giuliani before McCain.

Cole-slaughter

Reading about the Hitchens-Cole match, which should have been stopped before it started, I was reminded of a woman I know who went to college after her kids were grown and got an undergraduate degree in business. All of sudden she started acting like she was the only person who'd ever been to college, and now an expert on everything. Cole reminds me of her. He might be accomplished in his arcane little niche, but it seems that every time I hear about him, he's criticizing someone on linguistic grounds, and really hair-splitting ones at that. He must be a barrel of fun at a cocktail party.

I think we owe Timothy McVeigh an apology.

Will Collier expresses what a lot of us feel about the Moussaoui verdict. Hugh Hewitt on the air made the point that this result is what we should expect if we adopt the Democrats' view about giving terrorists at Gitmo full due process.

The defendant didn't actually board one of the planes to help fly it into a building, but he conspired with others to bring it about. That makes him guilty of the murder of 3000 of our fellow citizens and others.

I've thought about arguments for and against the death penalty. I can see how it isn't a an effective deterrent and how it is applied inconsistently and the rest, but what I can't get around is the fact that courts claim to do and are supposed to do is render justice. Justice is not a just an intellectual pursuit. It's also an emotion. As C. S. Lewis noted, we all have a sense of fairness, of what's right and wrong. We feel that. Little children feel it. It's in the cry of King Lear over his dead daughter, "Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life and thou none."

And I believe that most people feel, as I do, that Moussaoui got off easy and that it wasn't fair to the people whom he conspired to kill. That isn't justice, but it's generally what our courts produce these days, in their effort to show other sophisticates that we aren't motivated by vengeance.

Whether Moussaoui preaches Islam or changes and becomes a gentle soul, he was part of a crime much worse than many who murdered far fewer people.

A Master Manipulator

Sami Al-Arian meets a judge who sees right through him, Judge James Moody:

Your only connection to orphans and widows is that you create them.

Dr Al-Arian, as usual, you speak eloquently,. . . I find it interesting that here in public in front of everyone you praised this country . . . but that's just evidence of how you operate.. . . You are a master manipulator.

Apparently, Al-Arian has fooled a number of liberals with his shtick, presumably on the theory that anybody who hates America can't really be too bad.

Ahamdinajad: Osama with a real economy to draw on.

Christopher Hitchesn explains why Ahmadinejad's rhetoric must be taken more seriously than the near ritual calling for "Death to the Zionist entity."

We assumed once that Osama bin Laden was just rehashing typical Arab b.s., and even after he truck-bombed the WTC, killed our Rangers in Mogadishu, bombed the Khobar Towers, the Cole and two of our African embassies, we still ignored him as if he were just some crank.

Despite the Left's insistence that the way to deal with these people is more negotiations while they perfect their nukes, I think I'd rather not repeat that mistake with this creep.

Hitchens also handily dispatches the mewling nitpicking of Juan Cole whose main MO is to flaunt his own knowledge of Asian languages by quibbling over the accuracy of translations using English idioms which have no literal counterpart in those languages. For example, Cole thinks he's defending Ahmadinejad when he writes that he "never uttered the phrase "Israel should be wiped off the map." Of course, no Arab maps depict Israel in the first place, but does that make any difference?

Maybe it's brain damage

Bill Keller responds to a Wall Street Journal editorial, and shows himself either a fool or a liar:

As regards the journalists, the editorial is animated by a couple of assumptions. One is that when journalists write things politicians don't like, the motivation is sure to be political. The other is that when presidents declare that secrecy is in the national interest, reporters should take that at face value. I don't believe either of those things is true, and I find it hard to believe that you do, either.

This amounts to saying that, while other people must obey the law, but journalists don't have to. They will be the judge of which secrets protect national security and which don't, thank you.

We've seen recently how evenhandedly they make the decision. Valerie Plame's employment is a more important secret than wiretapping Al Qaeda? Give me a break!

I think the most annoying thing about this piece is the repetition of the same old platitudes about they just give us the information and let us decide. That crack that "The other is that when presidents declare that secrecy is in the national interest, reporters should take that at face value," shows the real presumption, that only journalists are legitimate judges of what should and shouldn't be revealed. I think that a few need to be prosecuted to restore the balance.

I emailed the following to Hugh Hewitt after his show today which was mostly about Keller's letter. He suggested I post it here. So I will:

I don't think this man or any of those he supervises have ever thought about what their own assumptions are. The whole thing is a bunch of platitudes strung together:

The role of journalism on our side of the news/opinion divide, at least as we aspire to perform it, is not to be advocates for or against any president or any party or any cause. It is not to tell our readers what we think or what they should think, but to provide information and analysis that enables them to make up their own minds. We are sometimes too credulous, sometimes too cynical--in other words, we are human--but I think we get the balance right most of the time, and when we don't we feel an obligation to correct it.

In other words he doesn't read his own paper, just blithely assuming that's how it is run.

I've heard this baloney from these people since I started listening to the news, and it's getting more absurd every day. The worst results from Watergate was not any actual harm caused by Nixon. The system worked as it should, and as the facts came out the Republicans abandoned him. The real harm was done when the Times bravely published the Pentagon Papers, and assumed from their court victory that nobody is a
higher judge of what should be kept secret than the New York Times. To me, the Pentagon Papers case held that there could be no prior restraint, but the press takes the risk that it might be wrong to publish and be hammered for it. The problem with that is that the Pentagon Papers shouldn't have been classified in the first place. The NSA wiretaps were important to national security, but the Times seemed to forget that the President has lawyers who check this stuff. They have fallen into the trap that nearly everybody on the left has in thinking that Bush just charges ahead without checking his authority.

My dad, before he died, had a series of strokes. One of them affected his visual cortex in such a way that he could only see things in the left of his field of view. When he ate his meals, they had to let him clean the left part of his plate and then turn it around so that he could see the rest of his dinner. He couldn't just move his head to see as you would if one eye was covered.

I think of that every time I read or hear the kind of drivel coming from the press. It may not be brain damage, but it sure resembles it.

About the Marches

75 years of liberals and activists of all sorts has led us to the point where people who aren't supposed to even be in this country are claiming rights on the basis that they're used to not having laws enforced. You can't have a sovereign state if it can't even define its own borders. And you can't have much of a democracy with non-citizens thinking that they have a right to vote, which, if it hasn't happened yet, will surely follow from the belief that people have a right to immigrate here illegally.

And, as John Podhoretz points out, the majority of citizens and legal residents get turned off by the chutzpah of these people who think they have us over a barrel. We are still enough of a Jacksonian democracy that this sort of challenge makes people angry, and politicians still listen to angry voters.

Swing voters gravitate toward the middle, avoiding whichever party seems the most extreme, either ideologically or emotionally. The media and the Dems are doing their best to paint Conservatives with the "extreme" label, but people aren't stupid, and they don't buy this "all immigrants are equal, legal or not" argument.

Truth vs. Thrift

James Taranto notes the Democratic candidate for Colorado Governor who "isn't 'pro-life' and he isn't 'pro-choice,'" and seems confused by that. This is what comes from becoming too accustomed to euphemisms. If he were both pro-abortion and anti-abortion the contradiction would be obvious, but favoring life and choice is only a paradox in the newspeak of politics.

There is no containment when one wall is the U.N.

This item put me in mind of those street mimes who pretend to be inside an invisible box. Get ready for Mullahs in white-face and black leotards.

How does this fit together?

Valerie Plame was working on Iran's efforts to obtain nukes when her identity was mentioned in the media. And?

And the sources allege that when Mrs. Wilson's cover was blown [loaded phrase, that.], the administration's ability to track Iran's nuclear ambitions was damaged as well.

Huh? Aren't these the same people who think publishing the existence of the NSA wiretaps was necessary for our civil liberties? Where's the rest of the story here? How does having her job at the CIA made known prevent her from continuing to function? Was she doing missions in Teheran and Kabul, or just analyzing information? And why is she now Mrs. Wilson, instead of Valerie Plame? If the rest of media hadn't made such a big deal about Novak's article and given so much prominence to her and her screwball husband, would anybody today know that name? I sure wouldn't. I don't recall that Novak printed her photo with his column.

Joe Wilson's claim is that the investigation necessitated the withdrawal of her security clearance, but I thought they did that when you were caught leaking, not when you were identified as an employee. I know who Don Rumsfeld is. Does that mean he can't get a security clearance?

And why the ALL CAPS?

The ACLU totalitarian?

It certainly resembles Oceania in at least one respect.

I checked the URL

Yes, this really is from the NYTimes:

During the Shiite festival of Ashura this year, marked by 10 days of pilgrimage to Najaf and Karbala, some half a million pilgrims walked and drove through the province without reports of a single insurgent attack. Of the 81 civil reconstruction projects undertaken in Babil outside the Death Triangle in the last year — most related to water and electricity — not one has been attacked by Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias, according to the executive officer of the American troops here, the First Squadron of the 10th Cavalry. He told me that his troops had experienced only eight cases of hostile contact, and not a single casualty, since arriving in December. (They are vacating the base now and will not be replaced.)

Is someone at the paper getting the message, or is this just a fluke? It would be pretty cool if this signaled a new revolutionary editorial policy.

We should be celebrating.

Good news from Iraq. Could it be that liberals hate this war because it is demonstrating how inept their handling of Vietnam was?

Who can forget the frustration from people like Charie Rangel when his old arguments about sending our young people off to die didn't work when they are all volunteers?

This could still go wrong, as many other democracies have foundered on military coups or the election of people without democratic loyalties, but every nation should have its chance.

And while we're congratulating the Iraqis let's not forget the heroes the media refuses to acknowledge.

Alternative logic.

We need more analysis like this. I've had the feeling for a long time that those touting alternative energy don't really know what it would take or how much it would cost. Certainly windmills to generate power isn't proving as popular with the wilderness wing of the environmental movement as they thought it would be.

I don't think most people really understand the size of our energy needs and use, nor do they think about reliability. Every alternative has to compete in the market with oil, and the countries producing it have a lot of room to lower their prices, if they decide that some other alternative is a threat. I understand that's why oil companies are reluctant to rush into oil shale.

I saw a program in which it was pointed out that $20 of price per barrel of oil is due to speculation, i.e. the uncertainty that our sources will continue to ship the amounts we're used to. Nigeria, Venezuela and various Arab nations aren't exactly stable and friendly to U.S. interests.

Very little attention seems to be trained on the NIMBY problem with building new refineries and drilling new wells, and nobody seems to have the cojones to talk straight to the public, because the media doesn't want to hear it.

Most of the short term solutions won't do anything to solve the problems of supply. How feasible is it for Americans to dump their automobiles and switch to hydrogen or ethanol? Those who can afford to will buy new hybrid vehicles, but how does it take to turn over our national fleet? Buses and corporate fleets can switch to fuels like alcohol and natural gas because they can establish their own pumps and storage facilities.

We already are feeling the pain of shifting power generation to natural gas when winter comes. If everybody started using home electricity to recharge electiric vehicles, we're bound to find out that there are lots of complications.

We need more information about everything, and our media are generally a failure in this regard. Popular Mechanics can't do it alone.

I expect royalties.

An absurdist comic happening in New York today.

Coming next: tee shirts reading Ahmadinejad, Kill me first!, Hug a Shahid for Peace!, Choose Death!, Take me with you to the Garden of Allah!

Dear Republicans,

This is in response to your weekly junk mail asking me to contribute to your Congressional and Senatorial election funds.

Take it out of my gasoline crisis check. If you aren't willing to do more than pander and posture for the polls, in the face of the bald-faced demagoguery of the Democrats, you might as well let them win and do their damnedest against Bush.

Good news

Strategypage:

From the moment the United States and al Qaeda began fighting in Afghanistan, the terrorists were looking for a chance to re-create images similar to those of American troops being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 or Walter Cronkite calling the Vietnam War a stalemate in 1968. It was hoped that such a moment would cause a dramatic drop in support for the war among the American people and force the United States out of Iraq. It did not happen.

It's also a defeat for the media elite.

Now, Iran seems willing to try to succeed where al Qaeda failed. Bin Laden was dismissed as crazy and a mere pest. I think that Ahmadinejad, et al. will be taken more seriously.

Sheesh!

Read item 4. What's next, Cosmological Warming?

I thought these people knew what powers the Sun.

In keeping with my Turn and Fight Theme

There are still some people with spines. Too bad they're in Australia. Every jerk who thinks his rights outweigh those of everyone else who wants to walk, shop, work, picnic and enjoy public spaces without being accosted, embarrassed, offended, sworn at, berated, belittled or interfered with should be put in fear of his safety once in awhile, if only just to make him understand that policemen aren't pigs.

Remember who inspired Love Story?

No? How about, who invented the internet?

Here's another suspiciously fortuitous crossing of Al Gore's youth with Destiny:

When I was an undergraduate I was privileged to sign up for a course offered by the first person to measure CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. He was a visionary, and he saw that the postwar economic boom powered by coal and oil was beginning to radically change the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere—and he knew atmospheric chemistry, and he knew what it would do to outgoing infrared radiation.

Or is that barnyard smell just left over from Al's farm chores?

I wonder if this science class he took was the one he got a D in or the C+.

Maybe he was there at the creation of the global warming theory, but what is there in his background to qualify him as a climatologist? I don't expect Eleanor Clift to factcheck him, but I'd like somebody to.

Who's Pernicious?

Matt Yglesias may be smart, but he's not honest. He practically announces that he's glad gas prices have gone up so that the Democrats can demagogue it this fall.

Old Tiger Butt

George Schulz is worried about the discord and lack of resolve in the country.

So am I. Iraq has really been an easy war, as such things go. If we have to disarm Iran, it will require much more of us than watching the news. I wonder if we have the national will to stand up to Ahmadinejad. He may be just a blowhard, but Iran's record of support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah isn't comforting.

Yet the media and politicians on both sides of the aisle are fretting over things that pale next to the threat Iran now poses. The Republicans in Congress seem to lack all conviction, while the press and Democrats are full of passionate intensity over petty jealousies and willing to do anything but lead through the difficulties we face. I have tried to find the evil, lying, incompetent George Bush that the press villifies constantly, but all I find is a humble, religious man who knows what he wants to do, even if he has a hard time explaining it and defending it. Throughout his presidency, I've seen his sincere belief in Jesus' sermon on the mount, and his efforts to live by it. He has never said or done anything I could see to justify the vicious slurs on his character and intelligence that have been so orchestrated and repeated so often that people have come to believe them rather than the facts.

The innuendo in practically every news item on the broadcast channels and big national dailies has created an atmosphere of undeserved hostility and despair. Gerald Ford and George Schulz have come to the President's defense, but they are from a different era. We seem to be plagued with generals who can't wait to be retired so they can spit acid at Don Rumsfeld, and politicians who couldn't care less about the harm they do to the nation if they can only get or hold on to power.

I believe that future historians will review this decade and marvel at what morons we've become. I can only hope that we have special ops teams in Iran right now, and that we won't see it reported on the front pages of the NYtimes tomorrow.