just so you know, i do make a superhuman effort to restrain my ranting and raving about the bush administration on this page. because i know that listening to (reading) other people ranting endlessly gets boring real quick. but i did enjoy the following, taken from howard kurtz's column today in the washington post

And on the CIA leak, New Republic Editor Peter Beinart admits that "it's fun to read the conservative press in the days immediately following a damning revelation about the Bush administration. The assumptions--the White House did nothing wrong, its critics are disreputable partisans--are there from the outset. But the arguments themselves--why the White House is blameless and its critics lack all credibility--are still in flux. The result is a flurry of justifications: some plausible, some contradictory, some laughable. . . .

"The first conservative response is that the leaks couldn't have been part of an orchestrated White House smear campaign because they served no political purpose. To Wilson, however, the purpose was clear. . . . The second response is that revealing Plame's name was no big deal because she wasn't actually a spy. . . .

"The right's absurd responses to the Plame affair point to a larger absurdity, a kind of elephant in the room of conservative commentary about the Bush administration and Iraq. . . . George F. Will has written that, if there were no WMD, the war was a mistake--a mistake that implicates virtually every prominent conservative in Washington."

america's voting public, take note. unless there is some 11th hour miracle and a big ol' stash o' wmd is found (unlikely, given that all 550ish sites identified by the bush administration before the war as probable sites of wmd have been investigated and found to be nuthin'), the war was a mistake. let me rephrase: george "the fucker" bush started a war, killing hundreds of americans and who knows how many iraqis, putting this country into extreme long-term debt, and making enemies of dozens of countries (not only arab countries), for NO REASON. that is an astonishingly irresponsible way to run a country. i really don't know why he had his heart set on invading iraq (oil? avenge bush sr? likes to play with guns? has a small penis and something to prove?), but i think he'd be getting off easy if he just doesn't get re-elected. i think we should impeach his ass. kick his lying ass out of office in the most definitive way possible. (here, i want to write "...make a mockery of him and all agree never to allow a bush to serve in office again, given their track record so far," but that sounds pettily partisan. and while a not insignificant part of me is pettily partisan about bush--he brings out all my anger and incredulousness, like i think he does for many reasonable people, and if that includes you, then vote for dean or SOMEBODY, PLEASE--an equal or larger part of me honestly and rationally thinks that his policies are bad for americans, bad for the planet, and bad for the rest of the world, and that another 4 years of bush as president will cause irreparable harm.)