Extremely slow blogging.... But here are a few quickies -

Chrenkoff -

Senator Edward Kennedy didn't have anything to say on 19 March, the second anniversary of the start of the liberation of Iraq. In fact, he kept quiet until two days later, only to talk about President Bush's judicial appointments.

Senator Kennedy didn't have anything to say on 9 April, the second anniversary of the liberation of Baghdad and the end of Saddam's regime. In fact, he kept quiet until the following day, when he spoke on the occasion of receiving a community award.

On 26 April, Senator Kennedy finally chose to mark an anniversary:

"The sad anniversary of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal is now upon us. It's an appropriate time to reflect on how well we've responded as a nation."

If you're only talking point about perhaps the largest foreign policy process of the last 20 yrs is to still be talking about Abu Ghraib, you don't deserve to win an election.

George Will -

 Iraq's insurgents are degenerate Hobbesians -- Hobbes' subtlety reduced to the ruthless cunning of one idea: By promiscuously dispensing death, thereby creating the chaos of a Hobbesian state of nature, the insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to provide the primary social good -- freedom from fear of violent death.

To create chaos, the insurgents are applying -- again, unwittingly -- another borrowed insight, this one from an American thinker who died last year. Daniel Boorstin, historian and librarian of Congress, understood the special strength of small numbers -- indeed, the veto power of a sufficiently ruthless minority -- given society's dependence on "flow technology."

Through most of human history, Boorstin wrote, "in order to do damage to other people, it was necessary for you to set things in motion -- to throw a rock or wield a club." But in modern societies, where "the economy and the technology are in motion," you do damage by stopping things -- oil deliveries, electricity distribution, garbage collection, water purification, etc.

WWII Japan / Germany get at least an iota of respect from me because it takes skills and a coherent philosophy to actually build aircraft carriers, dive bombers, and tanks. Islamo-fundies have no coherence and, in fact use that incoherence as a weapon. Coupled with an Western press class that takes "motion" as a given fact of nature, they end up punching far above their weight class.