Realy good site!

Tim you are a liberal who’s foreign policy views I respect!!

I like your realpolitik analysis despite the fact that it may ruffle some anti-imperial feathers.

And an added note: Good riddance to Uday and Qusay!!

Well deserved praise should go to the young men (and perhaps women?) who put their lives on the line today in order to take those two monsters out.

Especially my thoughts are with the young soldier who took a round in the chest (and thankfully lived) in order to help rid the world of Uday and Qusay Hussein.

This young man is a hero by any standard and deserves praise for his courage.

Phil Murray

As a liberal who supports the war in Iraq, I find the liberal focus on the WOMD question a little unnerving. I don’t know of any thinking liberal who, going into the war actually believed that the real reason we were going in was to because Saddam had WOMD and was threatening to use them. There were a lot better and more subtle reasons why it was a good idea to get rid of Saddam Hussein. First, he supported suicide bombers in Isreal. Second, we was a horrible dictator that we couldn’t ever have normal relations with, and if September 11 taught us one thing, it is that we need to over the long term, build a footing in the Arab world. We could never do it in Saudi Arabia because of the monarchy and other strong religious forces. Syria has too many legimimate gripes against Isreal to do it there. Egyptian government is our friend, but is totalitarian and corrupt. Baghdad has been the center of the Moslem intellectual world for a very long time, and if we can bring about a democracy in Iraq it will be the greatest long-term security we can build. I acknowledge that always a certain group will radicalize against change, but if you look at the poll taken a couple days ago, a majority of the citizens want the US to stay and rebuild the country. Iraq was a gamble and it may be a great failure but I respect George Bush a lot for taking the chance on a great success rather than fail conservatively.

Tim Burns

Christopher,

If you think that the war against Saddam and his regime was “unnecessary,” then you keep your head where the sun never shines!

At first I held that the U.S. military should be allowed twelve years to account for Iraq’s WMDs, same as the UN got. Now I feel the pressing nature of the issue, and am only willing now to grant them one tenth as much time, dated from the end of the active combat phase. So, let’s see what we’ve found a year from now. Fair enough?

And if U. S. intelligence turne out to have been wrong, you still have to prove that they were lying, if you want me to believe they were lying.

And no fair moving the goalposts. The antis said that Iraq had no connection with terrorism. We found terrorists and terror training grounds in Iraq, which prompted the hasty insistence that they had nothing specifically to do with Al Qaeda. Do not back and fill, please. No one on any side of the issue should be afraid of the truth. The antis can always, if they are proved wrong on the WMD, simply go back to their 9/11 stance, and just say that oh well America deserves whatever the terrorists dish out anway.

And it is not an altogether bad thing for the terrorists and the euroweenies to have to think twice before they cross us again, n’est pas?

You can’t skip over the Jayson Blair debacle without acknowledging the Affirmative Action problem. Doctrinaire liberals like Howell Raines take a moralistic stance, then become virtual caricatures of its worst excesses. Jayson Blair would have been uncovered and out the door a LOT sooner if he’d been white. The filtering that white liberal guilt generates in those situations has become laughable. Fairness and genuinely equal treatment should be common sense by now. Raines lost his integrity in full view of his newsroom and the general public.

What are you doing here, Chris?

Go back to WBUR and take over the dis-Connection again. The Connection used to be the NY Times of talk shows, now it’s an earnest College paper: all earnestness and no wisdom and no sense of irony.

I used to love criticizing you, but then there was something worth criticizing. Dick Tracy isn’t even worth criticizing. All he deserves is what he’s getting: a turned off radio. Is it any wonder WBUR needs to schedule extra fundraisers. They don’t know it but they need you. And I need an intelligent lefty I can criticize.

“The real nightmare for the Times is the plain fact that one-way print-based corporate journalism cannot prevail in a rough-and-ready information game against the interactive, almost-free, global, democratic and instant Internet. For hungry hounds of news and for “the rising generation,” in the late Times saint James Reston’s phrase, the Times will never again be “the paper of record,” as we used to call it, or the first draft of history.”

Well, I’m not so sure about this. I first encountered a species of this kind of thought in 1991, when I was working at a local book publishing house (David Godine) as a co-op job during college. Everyone there seemed to think that the novel and publishing was dead despite the fact that more books were sold now than at any point in history, and there are more literate people now than at any point in history. Why so glum, chum?

In terms of the Internet and the blogosphere, look at exactly how “news” is covered — the starting point is almost always a news article, frequently from the NYT or CNN or the BBC. Most news and politics blogs (and talk radio shows) are *commentary,* not reporting. That’s because individual bloggers simply don’t have the resources to go out and cover a war. They gotta keep their day jobs. If the war happens to be in their backyard, what they’ll be telling you about is how it looks in their basement and what kinds of canned goods they’ve got.

In short, new forms of media don’t generally collapse or overtake old forms of media — TV did not kill radio, radio did not kill newspapers. The Internet will not kill any of the above. The only thing that may change is the physical format the above media types may come at you in — LPs, transistor radios, morphing into MP3 players and satellite data transmissions. But it’s still radio, TV, “the newspaper.” And in many cases, the physical format remains unchanged for decades and even centuries because no better solution presents itself. The best example of this phenomenon is the book. The display resolution of paper is excellent, its durability relative to cost is superior to everything else including digital media (which isn’t forever! I print out my kid’s baby photos, because I don’t think anyone will be able to read the file format I use now when he’s in college).

New media do *change* previous media, and I think you’re on to something with focusing on the op-ed page, because that’s the part of the newspaper that is most “under threat” from the blogosphere. Although TV didn’t kill radio, it did take over the role of storytelling from it — dramas etc. moved from radio to TV. The blogosphere may take over the opinion-manufacture-and-distribution-biz from newspapers. But they’re unlikely to take over “news.” Money matters in that biz, and bloggers don’t have any

Good mornig
I

“James… …it would appear that Saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction”

That statment is so ludicrous that it makes me not respect your intellectual capacaties. Perhaps Left politics have become an orthodox religion for you– rather than a dynamic self questioning process????!!

Further, the large mass of Americans in the political middle won’t respect such wishful naivete (’Saddam had no weapons of Mass destruction in the recent past’) AND WILL VOTE THE LEFT OUT OF POWER FOR A LONG TIME TO COME OVER SUCH DELUDED NONSENSE!!

COSTING US ALL in the following areas:

1) The environment.

2) Health care.

3) Education.

4) Gay rights.

Ect, ect, ect.

STOP THE FUCKING CHILDISH NONSENSE THAT SADDAM HAD NO WMDS!!!!

IT MAKES LIBERALS LOOK LIKE IDIOTS TO THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS AND HURTS ALL OF THE ABOVE LISTED CAUSES.

OUT WITH MINDLESS LIBERAL FUNDAMENTALISM!!

IN WITH PRAGMATIC, REALITY BASED LIBERALISM, PLEASE, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!

James