the stresses of a full-blown culture war.

* ew:

"See, Scooter Libby is simultaneously claiming that the NIE leak was part of a larger campaign, a leak he repeated at least six times. And he's claiming that his leak to Judy was a unique event, an exclusive leak.
Those claims can't both be true.
[]
Neither the NIE, nor the CIA report on Joe Wilson's trip (which was a central part of Tenet's statement and Ari's press briefings that week), were leaks uniquely targeted to Judy Miller. So if there was a unique leak on July 8, it had to be something else. And as Fitzgerald will demonstrate, the one other leak Libby shared with Judy pertains to Valerie Plame's identity."

* billmon:

"But the historical truth is that civil wars aren't made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America's traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process -- essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups -- isn't designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.

Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far -- those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It's easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It's up to the rest of us to keep them under control."

* kleiman:

"Good News: Apparently North Korea gets its long-range missiles from the same collection of scam artists who supply the U.S. with its missile defense incapability."

* soto:

"The predictable behavior by Iran and North Korea since that 2002 SOTU utterance and our invasion of the one non-nuclear member of that troika would have been better understood if this administration hadn’t blown up Brewster-Jennings through the Valerie Plame scandal, and had the administration not been perpetually bitch-slapped away from interviewing A. Q. Khan by Bush’s best buddy Pervez Musharraf."