nobody seems to resign in the US

* josh:

"We've got little more than two weeks left before the big day. But the news cycle the campaign feeds on has seemed a bit aimless over the last week. In fact it's started to feed on itself. And by that I mean that the major campaign issue has been how badly the campaign is going for the Republicans. But that type of inverted news cycle tends to feed on itself and like a bubble, burst.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so much intensity and no news to chew on is exactly that.

I get the sense that this campaign, even with so little time left, has one more big jolt left in it."

* billmon:

"McCain, on the other hand, really does seem to have drunk more than his fair share of the Kool-Aid. He not an especially bright guy, and he's deep under the spell of the neocons, who have made the myth of American exceptionalism -- and the missionary impulses it generates -- a key part of their ideology of permanent revolution.

Combine that with the fact that McCain is in many ways even more instinctively hawkish than Shrub, and it's easy to see how a McCain presidency could take U.S. foreign policy quite a bit deeper into the jaws of hell, to the point where the Cheney administration could look downright sane by comparison.

And yet I still run into liberals who think McCain is different (meaning better) than the usual run of right-wing hardliners -- because he's such a "straight shooter," or because of his largely futile, if not entirely symbolic, protests against torture.

That's one of the reasons why I tend to regard McCain as the most dangerous man in America -- even more so than Cheney and Rumsfeld. Not because he isn't a "straight shooter" (he's certainly devious enough about advancing his personal political ambitions) but because when it comes to the cult of self-righteous American power, I think he's the straightest shooter in the bunch -- literally."

* larisa:

"Holy cow. I knew Giraldi wrote about the NIE, but wow, I did not know he knew about the Forrest/Hoekstra trip.

And even more interesting, I did not know MEK was being used as part of the intel laundry. So I have to say, that a). why are Giraldi and I the only two covering this strange turn of events and b). this worries me that MEK is acting directly on US orders, which if we consider my previous work on this, would suggest we are very much involved in some very illegal activities abroad.

Thanks for posting this. Wow!"

she can thank scott.

* chris at amblog:

"Can you believe it? People actually resign in the UK instead of towing the line and humiliating themselves. Wow, what a concept. It's always amazed me that nobody seems to resign in the US no matter what the circumstances and regardless of how many lies they are asked to promote. Looks like a few lessons to be learned from our friends in London."