Pre-holiday ramblings

Regarding Alito, can there be any doubt that this man is a liar of the first order? When he justified his less than candid answers (read, lies) when he was being considered for the Apellate Court as being akin to a job interview where the interviewee provides answers that he thinks the questioners want to hear, can anyone seriously believe any answers he may give to any questions this time around? While he is more than qualified by education, his judicial philosophy seems more apt for a totalitarian regime rather than the Supreme Court of The United States. Placing this man on the SCOTUS, the watchdog of our liberty, would be like having the proverbial fox guarding the chicken coop. No to Alito.

Does anyone besides yours truly get the feeling that the coming days in Iraq could well bring a Tet style offensive by the insurgency? The admission that the opposition to our presence is less an insurgency and more a resistance is quite telling. Just as the French did not learn from their experience in Indochina when they were faced with resistance in Algeria and it seems that we have not learned from our experience in South Vietnam, repeating the same tired canards that were used then, today in Iraq. It is not the matter of 'staying the course' when staying the course means driving off a cliff. Our volunteer army, to borrow from Rep. Murtha, is damn near broken and a universal draft is a dog that won't hunt. As good as our military is, and it is very good, one of the great strengths was the aura of invincibility that took shape after the mismatches in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait. The most powerful military in the world has been revealed, after the relatively easy (and unjustified) invasion of Iraq, as seemingly very vulnerable to an irregular but determined resistance. That loss of the sense of invulnerability promises to bring us much grief in the future.

Does anyone else get the impression that the republican comments regarding the Fitzgerald investigation are solidly in the 'whistling past the graveyard" category? When all is said and done, the indictments and trials will happen in the months before the elections next year and that can hardly be a comforting thought for republicans. Given the albatross that Preznit YellowStripe represents for republicans, the trials arising from Plamegate as well as those from DeLay and Abramoff cannot be providing them with much solace.