Don Rumsfeld visited our neck of the woods the other day and left this bit of wisdom behind:

"Any moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."

As Ana Marie Cox notes:

In other words, if you have to ask whether we should torture terrorists, the terrorists have already won.

It' amazing how far we have fallen down the moral ladder. Might makes right, don't question your leaders or else you are the enemy. Rumsfeld would have been a perfect fit as the Defense Minsiter under Joe Stalin.

When the going gets tough, the Bushes call on James Baker:

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in--or, perhaps, to get the hell out of--Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train."

Read the whole piece. It's a very good look at what might be Bush's best chance out of the Iraq mess.

Did you hear about the 24 Iraqis who plotted to blow up a bunch of airplanes flying across the Atlantic Ocean?

Oh, that’s right. They weren’t Iraqis. They were Pakistanis.
Did you hear that Osama bin Laden is hiding in Iraq?

Whoa, check that. That would be Pakistan.

And did you know that Iraq has nuclear bombs and sold that technology to Iran and North Korea?

Oops, I meant Pakistan, not Iraq.

And how about Iraq supporting Islamic terrorism against its democratic neighbors?

Oh, that would be Pakistan, again.

And now there is a new warning that al Qaeda may attack Americans in India. And where would these attackers be coming from?

Again, Pakistan.

And so the central front on the war on terror is Pakistan, right?

No, that would be Iraq.

Why do I get the feeling that Abbott and Costello are running this war?

Read the rest at nevadaappeal.com.