Trent Lott is a GOP Jukebox

* driftglass:

"Trent Lott is a GOP Jukebox: drop in a nickel and he’ll spit out bumper sticker slogans and sentence fragments, one after another, all day long. They don’t make any sense, and they don’t form any coherent sentences. They are just market-tested nonsense syllables that Lott firehoses out in every direction to keep Ugly Reality at bay.

* driftglass:

Fox exists to perform the ritual sliming of every Democrats and the ritual fellating of every Republicans. It is Ku Klux Kabuki by the GOPs pet teabagging “reporters” on behalf of their disgraced Party of thieves and degenerates."

* Tas is playing games.

* AP:

"One in seven of CIA's current employees joined the agency in the past year, and nearly 40 percent of its employees began working at the agency after the Sept. 11 attacks - statistics at once helpful and troubling."

* drum:

"Bottom line: If you think Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer would make good foreign policy advisors, then McCain is your man. However, if you're not insane, that prospect will scare the hell out of you. As it should."

* brent wilkes: tbtf? perhaps not.

* newsweek:

"The neocons are reeling, but they're not dead yet. A few stalwarts are digging in their wing-tips. And there's already a small backlash against the backlash. At the State Department, supposedly the bastion of realism, some officials are sounding defiant. "There are a lot of people throughout the ranks who believe in the democracy agenda," says one senior official who would only discuss policy issues anonymously. "If the result of the Baker report is that we have to make any deal necessary ... to get out of Iraq, I don't think that's going to fly." Their hopes, and the hopes of neocons everywhere, may rest on the shoulders of Elliott Abrams, the number-two official at the National Security Council—who remains in charge of promoting democracy in the Middle East, a linchpin of the neocon agenda.
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But Abrams has one powerful advantage. "Bush has enormous regard for him," says a senior administration official
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The biggest dogfight is still ahead: whether to cut a deal with regimes like Iran, North Korea and Syria. Bush's approach has been to counter threats from oppressive regimes by trying to change them. Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the punditocracy's best-known neocon, says it's hard to imagine the president turning his back on all that. "I think Bush is the last neocon in power," he says. "The truth is, it was always Bush.""