They screamed and hollered when he kicked Arafat out of Lincoln Center, went balistic when he attacked the art museum, had a cow when he humiliated the Saudi prince by returning the $10M check, etc.

He has proven steel in his spine.

You are right, Savage is a lot like Olbermann in approach if not politics.

Huckabee is not far right. In fact the far right says he is liberal. I do not know where you get this from. If you don’t support him, fine, I am not a big Huckabee fan myself, but the far right does not like him. He is a Christian, and he gets supports from the same sort of people Bush does in many ways, but on policy the right says he is too much of a populist when it comes to economics and too much of a liberal when it comes to foreign policy.

Cultural shock jock pandering to a specific audience.

I cannot stand the guy obviously.

More here from Reuters

While who killed her is practically irrelevant at this point, it does speak to the tidal wave of corruption & authoritarianism the world over. Elections in South Africa and Kenya are marred by riots. Pakistan is in flames. Russia is in relapse, or reversion to mean, you choose. The Balkans are walking a knifes edge again. Lebanon is similarly ablaze. The radicals control the territories. China rejects HK elections for another decade. Latin America has turned hard left. For all the talk of democracy, seems like the it is authoriitarianism thathas the wind at its back.

How can we be anything but grateful for the work done in Iraq by the honorable general. His pragmatism is enlightened and really a throwback to the old school realists, no? Frankly it is a full fledged rejection of the neo Wilsonianism that motivated policy heretofore. Perhaps the person of the year should be replace with the idea of the year: “that America may not like you, but it is always open for business.” You can here the former US / UN reprehensive applauding.

The discussion of Afghanistan is a bit perplexing. You applaud the Iraq strategy of tough tradeoffs and then say in effect Afghanistan has learned the lesson and is hoping to forestall a similar fate. But isn’t the success in Iraq almost exclusivily the domanin of uneasy cooperation with the tribes. Kind of a take what the defense gives you approach – quintessentially American. So why is it so shocking that the ultimate pragmatists, the Afghans, would not follow a similar strategy? Religion meets human nature and the latter prevails. The Taliban are after all an indigenous Afghan movement.

Gates was there during the cold war and has an equally pragmatic view, one suspect. He realizes that the steam roller doesn’t work and will not work in part because the US doesn’t have and will not muster the political will to inflict the level of pain likely necessary to subjugate/inspire change. plus its relative power is in decline. These are difficult challeneges. In the meantime then it rests on making the difficult tradeoffs/bargains, as unpalatable as it is to the ideologues on both sides. The biggest knock on the CIA was that it doesn’t get its hands dirty enough; now it is the prevailing strategy.

It is almost certainly sheer fantasy to think this movement disappears and democracy suddenly blooms. At least that myth is back in the ash heap – exhale. Therefore, the Iraq strategy of finding commonality and exploiting it is about finding a modern day version of the DMZ. The only problem as our cold war commitments and Korea show (ed) is extrication. Recoilbecomes an issue too. One only has to look to the first foray into Afghan to get a sense of the high costs of accommodations. Ralph Peters has it precisely right when he says that much of what we face is intractable hatred and the best we can hope for is periods of peace interuppted by violence. Sounds about right.

At the moment it looks like the commonality strategy is the lowest coast alternative. But we should not be doing victory dances about Iraq, big improvement that it is, without acknowledging that the strategy that is temporizing the violence rests on uneasy accommodations that logic dictates will eventually invert as costs run up against benefits. This is one you can take to the bank.

Remember that interview when Katie Curic asked the sniper what he felt when he shot a terrorist and he said a little recoil? We should be asking ourselves the same quiestion and aliging out intel./military for the consequences, while not taking our eye off the new mercantilists – who present the far bigger challenge to the US calling card: economics.

If he does jump in we could end up with Hillary, Rudy and Mike splitting the NY vote in ways that a lot of people would not be able to reliably predict the outcome.