Matthew Yglesias (March 25, 2008) - "Bush's War" (Foreign Policy)

How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him?

That's always the solution with the anti-war left: more violence.

Posted by Al | March 25, 2008 2:30 PM

...and Al's solution is to concoct an enemy called "The Left" out of stereotypes, straw men, outliers, extreme cases, bogeymen, and other cherrypicked ingredients.

Posted by tinisoli | March 25, 2008 2:35 PM

Maybe there was no stopping the madness.

I can't help thinking that some countries, like some people, have to hit bottom before they can comprehend that they have a problem. Would you really have believed the depths to which this country could descend if we hadn't so descended? Sinclair Lewis's warnings to the contrary, would any of us really have accepted that it could happen here, until it actually happened here?

Perhaps for you, or me, or anyone reading this the answer to those questions is "yes." But for most of our fellow citizens, that is clearly not the case. The question before us now is, will our friends and neighbors recognize the depths to which we have sunk, the damage that has been done, the fact that it very much has happened here?

We have arrived, I think, at the moment Benjamin Franklin predicted. We are very close to our last chance to keep our republic.

Posted by Roddy McCorley | March 25, 2008 2:37 PM

Richard Perle is like an evil Forrest Gump. According to Richard Rhodes's Arsenals of Folly, Perle essentially (and deliberately) torpedoed the efforts by Reagan and Gorbachev to negotiate complete nuclear disarmament at the Reykjavik Summit in October of 1986.

Both leaders had agreed in principle to the idea -- the only sticking point was that Gorbachev insisted that he could only get the Soviet military on board if the US put the brakes on Star Wars research, while Reagan wouldn't sacrifice what he saw as the technological salvation that he was going to deliver to Mankind. Gorbachev insisted that the US should agree to do testing only in laboratory conditions (i.e., not in space), as was already allowed under the ABM Treaty, for 10 years.

The US side called a caucus. Reagan asked Perle if the US could continue to develop Star Wars with that limitation. Perle, pulling the answer out of his evil, hateful ass, said, "No." Reagan refused the sleeves-off-his-vest deal (ZOMG! No deployment of Star Wars until after 1996!!!), and the chance to essentially end the Cold War once and for all was lost.

That's not technically a war crime, but I'd bet a lot of what he's done WRT Iraq is. Can we please, please send him to the Hague? Please?

Posted by Pesto | March 25, 2008 2:42 PM

What I can't figure out is why people like Perle are still treated as if they're experts of some sort. You'd think their body of work would preclude the moniker of "expert" from applying.

Posted by Kurzbein | March 25, 2008 2:45 PM

I was a little shocked at how good "Bush's War" was. I mean, Frontline is normally very good, but it was so much better than the normal crap you get on CNN (forget Fox). There wasn't any of the weasel presentation of "some war critics say," as if it's just a bunch of dudes in tie-dye complaining by the side of the road.

I'm a bit distressed though that not enough people watched it. Want to hide an important news documentary? Put it on PBS and make it available for free! No one will see it there!

Posted by Francisco The Man | March 25, 2008 2:45 PM

Colin Powell came off as really tragic in the documentary. The blindside by the French ambassador at the UN got used against Powell mercilessly.

Also: The CIA hates Dick Cheney. And who can blame them?

Posted by Trevor J | March 25, 2008 2:46 PM

Matt,

Your last statement cuts right to the heart of the matter. "Maybe there was no stopping the madness." Didn't it almost seem inevitable that we would go to war? Doesn't the Downing Street Memo show that Bush would have done whatever to get Saddam, including falsifying evidence? It seems that false intelligence and bad intelligence trumped up are only seperated by a matter of degree. Truly there was no stopping the madness. And isn't it maddening that there are still so many that are happy about the war?

Posted by freddiemac | March 25, 2008 2:50 PM

And isn't it maddening that there are still so many that are happy about the war?

Happy and unaccountable. That's what gets me the most. Bush will ride off into the sunset, off to the ranch and the presidential library (irony of all ironies) and maybe even the job he really always wanted: commissioner of Major League Baseball.

Posted by tinisoli | March 25, 2008 2:54 PM

Maybe there was no stopping the madness.

Well, maybe not. But I think this lets Powell and Tennant and other high-ranking types off too easy. I couldn't make myself watch the Perle and Yoo segments (had to cut away to horrible reality TV or get up and leave the room). I was struck by the defense of Tennant offered up by Armitage, but also to some extent by the Frontline narrative. I don't doubt that Tennant tried to counter Rumsfeld's crazy egomania, but in the end it seems to me that he (along with Powell) cared too much about his career and too little about the right thing to do. And if people are (rightly) critical of Dem senators who voted to authorize the invasion, then they need to be forty times more critical of the people in the administration who enabled the madness. Not to mention the media . . .

Posted by mary | March 25, 2008 2:57 PM

I think the episode that aired last night portrayed Powell as the guy that wasn't too enthusiastic about the war. He could have quite (sic) and said "holy shit! the government's being run by crazy people, don't let these psychos invade Iraq!" was exactly Powell's dilemma. At least if you're to believe Frontline.

I think Frontline did a good job. They had to talk to guys like Perle; the Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world already think PBS is liberal (notice to them: not-for-profit reporting tends to deal in facts; just because facts are in direct contrast to your views does not make them liberal!). Even after talking to Perle, it's apparent that Yoo is a opportunistic, ethically-bankrupt, ass-kissing tool, that Rumsfeld is a sociopath, that Cheney is a maniac, and that PNAC was in control and that the American public should have been aware they were electing a team, a total package, not just a former frat-boy.

Posted by socctty | March 25, 2008 3:03 PM

MY writes: It was, to me, physically difficult to watch. ... How could you listen to [Richard Perle] when you ought to be punching him?

Completely agreed.

Trevor J writes: Colin Powell came off as really tragic in the documentary.

That was my initial thought. My follow-up thought was that if I have to hear one more time about how Colin Powell was secretly "furious" about something I was going to punch the television.

Attention, Colin Powell: leaking to reporters years after the fact about how secretly upset you were before we invaded Iraq does not make you look like a better person. It makes you look like a really, really terrible person, because you could have done something, and what you did was nothing at all.

Bitterly ironic point: There was something in the narration about how Colin Powell was upset by the French action at the UN to stop the war on January 20, 2003, because it was Martin Luther King Day. Yes, it's completely inappropriate to wreck MLK Day with a bunch of yammering about avoiding violence.

Posted by alkali | March 25, 2008 3:04 PM

Tenet and Powell seem to suffer from a social-class-inferiority complex whereby they believe that by standing up to support their employer, they're doing some kind of duty that will be rewarded in kind. In the end, Bush just views them as "the help," and neither of them had enough social-class-confidence to believe that they could make it on their own if they stood up for themselves rather than trying to be a "loyal servant" to a white house full of people who were on the wrong side.

Posted by Tyro | March 25, 2008 3:09 PM

I think all the sentiment above is basically right, especially the Sinclair Lewis reference.

The way it appears to me, all political expediency weaseling aside (the AUMF vote), what you basically had was a bunch of generally competent (and in some cases exceedingly competent) well intentioned people repeatedly saying, "They wouldn't do that. That's insane." All the while they were doing it, one step further into the rabbit hole each time, lower the bar for insanity and making it harder and harder to put a stop to it.

Lots of people thought they were rational actors. Lots of people were exceedingly wrong.

I think only a concerted effort by multiple big names working in concert could have put the brakes on. Tenent caved, Blair bet the farm, Powell though only staying would help. Each separately. Together they might have succeeded in stopping it.

One thing that I was surprised was left out (at least in Part 1) is the mention of inspectors being booted so the war could start.

Posted by Pat | March 25, 2008 3:10 PM

alkali - Oh man, great point. I never considered that (MLK, nonviolence).

What was Powell supposed to do? Or the CENTCOM Adm that just stepped down? Frontline proposed the (shitty) excuse that he maybe just didn't have enough time to go over the intelligence thoroughly before the UN sell-job, so he asked Tenet's opinion, who used to be a good guy but was now just so dispirited by Rumsfeld and Cheney's insistence that he folded, thereby ruining Powell's rep and our military and economy.

It does seem as if there isn't much accountability for Powell. Not that Cheney's standing trial any time soon.

Posted by socctty | March 25, 2008 3:18 PM

It was indeed disturbing. I would like the list of Senators and congresspeople who actually read the October 2002 NIE on Iraq before voting on the subject. I would also be very interested if Hillary Clinton read this before voting yes on the subject.

After all, this was not like pulling out a new TV and starting it up without reading instructions. If you could not bother to sit in the classified room and read the NIE on an issue such as war, you dont deserve an ounce of respect as a leader and should not even be able to hold any public office above county level. And if you did read it, at least you have that, but serious questions about your judgement should be raised too.

After all, I only had the benefit of Colin Powells speach to the UN, and I distinctly remember thinking that I support this only because there must be a lot more and deeper information they can't reveal to us because of security reasons. After all, Colin Powell would not mislead fellow Americans like that, he WAS one of the honorable men. Well the Colin Powell strategy worked perfectly, obviously if there were as many suckers out there as me (I would not have been able to be suckered like that by anyone else). But these Senators and congresspeople had absolutely no reason to be suckered, they had the full report at their disposal (as I shockingly learned last night).

Posted by Tom | March 25, 2008 3:23 PM

I think only a concerted effort by multiple big names working in concert could have put the brakes on. Tenent caved, Blair bet the farm, Powell though only staying would help. Each separately. Together they might have succeeded in stopping it.

I think this is a pretty good summation. The incredible pace of the allegations once the PR machine got going almost assuredly made things hard to stop.

Really, the Senate wouldn't have been as wrapped up in the 1,000 different things going on that Powell and Tenent almost assuredly were wrapped up in. Don't get me wrong - they dropped the ball big time - but the Senate still should have READ THE DAMN NIE REPORT.

Posted by socctty | March 25, 2008 3:28 PM

How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him?

That's always the solution with the anti-war left: more violence.

A 4peat of wowzers.

1) Yglesias specifically doesn't advocate violence. Only delineates the provocation.

2) The poster himself supports the Iraq War with its sum of violence having no foreseeable upper limit. (Is there any war he doesn't support?)

3) Perle deserves mockery, scorn, and probably a jail sentence, and the poster declines the opportunity.

4) Indiscriminate use of "the anti-war left".

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | March 25, 2008 3:33 PM

RE: the decline of newspapers post.

The documentary nicely captured the beginning the The New York Times death spiral; the day they ran the aluminum tubes story.

Posted by Mike | March 25, 2008 3:37 PM

Well the Colin Powell strategy worked perfectly, obviously if there were as many suckers out there as me (I would not have been able to be suckered like that by anyone else).

This was something I think Frontline did well to make note of. Really, why was the Secretary of State selling a WAR? No matter who it was or what other jobs he's held in the past? It should have either been the SECDEF, the UN Ambassador, VPOTUS or POTUS. Most Americans wouldn't know to take note of that - I didn't, but I was only 18, so that's my excuse. I remember that being a huge selling point with my parents as well. The fact that they chose Powell, despite the fact that his job as Sec of State (a diplomatic job) was in some respects direct contrast to war-making, shows that they knew what they were doing was wrong or atleast not convincing enough on it's own merits.

Posted by socctty | March 25, 2008 3:39 PM

We can all tut-tut at these evil, shoulder-shrugging bureaucratic war criminals for their failure or refusal to stop this horrific war before it actually started. They aired some objections, or argued over the intelligence behind the scenes, but when it was clear that the war was going on anyway, they decided not to mess things up by going public. So they're on the hook.

But we're hanging there on the same hook with them. I marched, as did millions of others. We gave to MoveOn or wherever, and maybe called a congresscritter or two. But then it was clear that the war was going to happen anyway. What did we do? Did millions of us march on the Capitol and try to occupy the halls of Congress? Did we bum-rush the NYT to force them to own up to their lies? Did we all refuse to pay taxes in order to starve the Pentagon? A few people took dramatic action to stop the war. But most of us tried to some extent, then saw that we'd lost and, at some level, accepted that.

We're a lot less guilty than these scumbags and quislings. But I know I haven't done everything I could have done to stop the war, or to end it now. Which means that, at some level, I'm willing to have it go on.

The question isn't what we'd prefer. It's what we're willing to do and to sacrifice to make reality match our preferences. Powell et al weren't willing to undermine the structures of authority in DC in order to prevent the war. I don't know why, even in retrospect, that should shock anyone.

Posted by Pesto | March 25, 2008 3:41 PM

I thought it was really impressive. Very well done.

Posted by Freddie | March 25, 2008 3:41 PM

I thought it was really impressive. Very well done.

Posted by Freddie | March 25, 2008 3:43 PM

My design for the G.W. Bush Presidential Library: Room after room of shelf after shelf of nothing but copies of My Pet Goat.

Posted by roac | March 25, 2008 3:47 PM

I thought Colin Powell came off as a someone who never understood the dedication to bureaucratic games that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. Powell would request some high-profile meeting with the president, flood him with a bunch of sound arguments, then go back to Foggy Bottom happy that all was now right with the world. While Powell and Armitage celebrated over martinis, Cheney and Rumsfeld would chip away at everything Powell had said. To them, a step was nothing because they had already gotten the president to take a hundred steps forward.

Posted by hermit greg | March 25, 2008 3:56 PM

"Attention, Colin Powell: leaking to reporters years after the fact about how secretly upset you were before we invaded Iraq does not make you look like a better person. It makes you look like a really, really terrible person, because you could have done something, and what you did was nothing at all"

It's much worse than that; he agreed to make the UN presentation of the intelligence against Iraq, thereby lending his - at the time - considerable credibility to the case *for* the war. And that intelligence case was a load of bunk. Heck, I and many others could tell at the time that it was a load of bunk: satellite footage of a bunker and a truck, and then Powell saying "according to our experts this is a super-double-secret-special kind of chemical weapons truck"; then you had tape of cellphone conversations in Arabic, and a translation that was roughly "hey, be sure to clean up the bunker before you turn in". It was nothing; it was *obviously* nothing; and nobody outside the US gave a damn about it. But inside the US, what counted was having heroic, moderate, respected ex-general Powell saying it.

He did it. He agreed to do it. He could have refused. He could have resigned. Instead he took an action which made war more likely. That's more than nothing.

So basically Powell never lifted a finger to stop the rush to war. All he did was a) warn Bush that it would be "you broke it, you own it", b) try to get the UN Security Council to approve it, and c) try to write a decent plan for postwar Iraq. But he accepted the choice of war and did quite a bit to make it happen. Contemptible.

Posted by Richard Cownie | March 25, 2008 4:10 PM

For some reason, Colin Powell doesn't make my blood pressure shoot up the way, say, seeing Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice on my teevee does. But analytically, I despise Powell. At least fools like Wolfowitz believed the crap they peddled. What's Powell's excuse?

Yes, the Frontline thing does make Powell out as a tragic figure, and I guess to the extent he was genuinely duped by his own administration, that's a fair enough characterization. But if he had resigned, and if he had given a speech explaining specifically why he had resigned, there is a chance the war could have been avoided. The war was likely unstoppable, but if any single person (aside from Bush) could have stopped the war, it was Powell. And yet he did nothing.

Powell supposedly rejected resigning because he wanted to continue the influence the administration. What a sad joke. What influence? The odious Bill Kristol was able to point out on Frontline that while Powell could claim small bureaucratic victories here and there, Powell never understood that he was always doing the bidding of the pro-war Rumsfelds and Cheneys and neoconservatives. Powell is not as smart as people think he is. He got played. And he, more than any single person, sold the Iraq war to the American public, and the world.

I despise him. To this day (as far as I am aware), Powell has never explicitly said the antiwar and anti-administration stuff that has been attributed to him. He was a good soldier for Bush then, and he continues to be one today. Yeah, he's supposedly endorsed his close advisers who have spoken up, but that's still not Powell talking. He could still make a big media storm if he would pipe up already.

Posted by Jim E. | March 25, 2008 4:12 PM

I agree with Pesto. The pro-war contingent is despicable but we're all implicated.

Posted by Jumbo | March 25, 2008 4:18 PM

No consequences

Just having folks who disagree with a criminal policy resign does not, by itself, have the slightest negative impact on the forward progress of that criminal policy. In fact, by removing dissenters, it probably speeds the criminality along.

Resignation could only make the perpetrators stop and consider the consequences of going forward with a criminal, stupid, or criminally stupid, policy, if there actually were consequences. The resignation only serves as a reminder, a credible opinion, backed up by the acceptance of job loss by the person making the protest, that the policy in question is criminal, and a warning that continuing down the road of that policy could have legal consequences. But there were no consequences to Watergate, or Iran-Contra, so of course resignations by administration officials couldn't serve as any sort of warning.

If you want resignations to regain any practical force, you have to make sure that this time there are consequences.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | March 25, 2008 4:34 PM

No consequences

Just having folks who disagree with a criminal policy resign does not, by itself, have the slightest negative impact on the forward progress of that criminal policy. In fact, by removing dissenters, it probably speeds the criminality along.

Resignation could only make the perpetrators stop and consider the consequences of going forward with a criminal, stupid, or criminally stupid, policy, if there actually were consequences. The resignation only serves as a reminder, a credible opinion, backed up by the acceptance of job loss by the person making the protest, that the policy in question is criminal, and a warning that continuing down the road of that policy could have legal consequences. But there were no consequences to Watergate, or Iran-Contra, so of course resignations by administration officials couldn't serve as any sort of warning.

If you want resignations to regain any practical force, you have to make sure that this time there are consequences.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | March 25, 2008 4:39 PM

Pesto and Jumbo,

Speak for yourselves. Im not sure what your day job is, but I have several little childen to feed and work an aweful lot to do it.

It does not seem to be asking an aweful lot of the government to make responsible decisions about going to war at the leaat and to not use every angle in its arsenal to create a case for war that would not otherwise clearly exist, without me skipping MY responsibilities to my children and marching on the capital to prevent it. Any one of these highly paid clowns could have just done the job they owed to the American people (including both you and I).

Posted by Tom | March 25, 2008 4:40 PM

Tom,

I have a job too, and kids to feed. And, in case I didn't make it clear above, I certainly am not holding myself up as a paragon of activist virtue. I have done some things to prevent and then end the war along with millions of others. But empirically, what we've done has been insufficient. What else are we willing to do?

As to whether we should expect the government to make "responsible decisions about going to war" -- whether we should in the abstract be able to do this is one question. Whether I actually expect the American government that exists in reality to do so -- I don't.

And all that is beside the point now. Who doesn't realize now what the government is capable of, even eager to do? We can prefer to end the war, or get universal health care, or restore habeas corpus, or deal with global warming, all we want. But if we vote and march and write and blog, and none of it happens, and then we say, "Well, we tried..." then we didn't want any of those things enough to make them happen -- or were too afraid of the consequences (either of trying or of succeeding) to give it a shot.

Posted by Pesto | March 25, 2008 4:57 PM

I stopped watching after 40 minutes or so. Perle and Yoo were too much for me.

My son said "the reporting is so one sided," thereby encapsulating the current problem we have, which is the old problem - no one believes that these men were/are as mad as hatters, even AFTER all they've done.

I told him, it's not the reporting, it's the facts that are one sided. I think he still believes there is another side to be told.

Jake

Posted by Jakebnto | March 25, 2008 5:14 PM

When they gave him the first draft of his UN presentation, Powell said, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit." Then he formed a review team that included George Tenet and Condoleeza Rice to prepare the speech. So what we saw was after they'd cleaned up the draft.

Posted by croatoan | March 25, 2008 5:18 PM

I have always assumed, I think, that if Powell had run for the presidency and won, and been President on 9/11, that we would not have gone to war in Iraq. But it makes you wonder, when you see how he got rolled consistently, and how little fight he seems to exhibit in support of his "principles", if even with the powers and prestige of the presidency he would have been able or willing to resist the urgings of others to go to Baghdad.

Posted by gbh | March 25, 2008 5:19 PM

He could have quite and said "holy shit! the government's being run by crazy people, don't let these psychos invade Iraq!"

You know as well as I do that some well-meaning (but obviously wrong) wingnut would diagnosed him with BDS and gave him a tinfoil hat to wear and some freedom fries to suck on.

Posted by Herb | March 25, 2008 6:02 PM

The idea of seriously sitting down to interview Richard Perle about Iraq -- your interviewer here, your cameraman there, etc. -- is, to me, vaguely repulsive. How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him? I dunno. Do I want to watch him talk on my television? Or John Yoo? Even in the context of a documentary that makes it clear that they're repulsive sociopaths? Not really. - Matt

Hehe. You're starting to sound like me, but so eloquent. Don't waste time criticizing crazy Republican arguments. The American right is too extreme to be worth criticizing. Spend time finding the best arguments, which get closest to the truth; and use your analytical skills to make them even better. Arguing is good, but learning is even better.

Posted by Gary Sugar | March 25, 2008 9:04 PM

It was pretty difficult to watch. The most damning part of the documentary to me was realizing that our "intelligence" had been extracted by a man who had been tortured for weeks... way to construct a foreign policy.

Posted by Natascha | March 25, 2008 11:05 PM

Forgive me for being cynical enough to think that Rove/Cheney/Bush used Powell's credibility to sell the war they wanted, and accomplished the twofer of torching his future potential as a presidential candidate. I know a few black people who see this angle. As for the war itself, I think it's just the flimflam smoke screen they needed so noone would pay attention while they bent Lady Liberty over and had their way with her. Rumsfeld too. He certainly has the eyes of a successful rapist.

Posted by jay Dwight | March 25, 2008 11:07 PM

Forgive me for being cynical enough to think that Rove/Cheney/Bush used Powell's credibility to sell the war they wanted, and accomplished the twofer of torching his future potential as a presidential candidate. I know a few black people who see this angle. As for the war itself, I think it's just the flimflam smoke screen they needed so noone would pay attention while they bent Lady Liberty over and had their way with her. Rumsfeld too. He certainly has the eyes of a successful rapist. And Paul Krugman wrote early on that Bush was a radical, not a conservative. He's just gamed the system totally, while everyone else has played by the rules.

Posted by jay Dwight | March 25, 2008 11:08 PM

Roddy: "Would you really have believed the depths to which this country could descend if we hadn't so descended?"

You haven't seen anything yet.

BTW, folks, Colin Powell tried to cover up the My Lai massacre. So you know he never had any honor.

From Wikipedia:

"Six months later, Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, wrote a letter to General Creighton Abrams, the new overall commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, accusing the Americal Division (and other entire units of the U.S. military) of routine and pervasive brutality against Vietnamese civilians. The letter was detailed and its contents echoed complaints received from other soldiers.

Colin Powell, then a 31-year-old Army Major, was charged with investigating the letter, which did not specifically reference My Lai (Glen had limited knowledge of the events there). In his report Powell wrote: "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." Powell's handling of the assignment was later characterized by some observers as "whitewashing" the atrocities of My Lai.[23] In May 2004, Powell, then United States Secretary of State, told CNN's Larry King, "I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored."[2]"

It was no surprise to me that he lied at the UN - and he knew he was lying. He just hoped the lies weren't so bad that he'd suffer for having to tell them.

Fuck him.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 26, 2008 2:56 AM

I found watching it generally blood-pressure raising and I was shouting at the TV a few times.

Of course every time a Bush clip was show I had to change the channel because I just cannot abide the sound of his voice and the utter lameness of anything that comes out of his mouth.

Posted by ET | March 26, 2008 8:28 AM

How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him? I dunno.

Actually, I encourage spitting at a select cadre of unelected warmongers in the streets, throwing dogshit and buckets of piss, etc.

I emphasise 'unelected' here: the worst warmongering filth of Congress, and even the damnable Cheney, received votes. No-one voted for John Yoo or Bill Kristol or Richard Perle or Michael Ledeen or others of that mob.

The most fascinating bit for me was that short collage of clips from the period just before the invasion, where the jingoism of the American broadcast media was just scary to behold.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | March 26, 2008 8:53 AM

Also, my pitch for the fall 2008 lineup, Let's Kidnap And Waterboard Those Warmongering Bastards, is looking for an ideal subject for its pilot.

Yoo seems like a great choice to grab off the street, strip to boxers, ship to Kazakhstan in the belly of a cargo plane and then get the sharp end of some executive authority.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | March 26, 2008 9:03 AM

Great conversation about the Frontline show. Not to be too random here, but did anyone else notice that every time Frontline showed a scene of D.C. (as in buildings, The Mall, etc.), there was always a police siren blaring in the background. I lived in D.C. for awhile and I don't remember always hearing police sirens. Just wondering if they added that for more of a spooky, espionage type of an impact...

Posted by Nicky Six | March 27, 2008 2:38 PM

"Bush's War"

Comments (45)

Search

Books by Matthew Yglesias

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Weekly Archives

Categories