To put this as delicately as I can: Every non-idiot on the planet knew that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Having publicly argued otherwise should disqualify you from ever voicing any opinion on any topic ever again. Nevertheless, we as a nation went ahead with this war, and once you've made that decision, your only option is victory. Moral seriousness in this context means admitting the monstrous truth that we could continue to lose 1,000 soldiers a year for another 100 years, and that the logic of the original intervention demands we pay that price happily and continue to pay it until we get the results we want.

Or we admit defeat and leave immediately, without blowing any more gas about benchmarks or timetables.

Ironically, arguing for victory has become even more toxic than arguing for defeat. If you believe in finding a consensus way forward in Iraq, you believe in victory. If you believe there is no consensus way forward, you believe in defeat. Either position can be argued with honor, but there is no honor among the liberal hawks. They want to keep believing that talk alone can constitute a way around that reality. And in that, they speak for the electorate to a greater degree than most of us would care to admit.

I spent the last week coming to terms with the fact that not a single candidate running for President is worthy of the job. Not in the Democratic Party, or the GOP. And no worthy third party candidates have emerged yet either.

So here I am. Fools to the left of me, clowns to the right. Stuck in the middle without a candidate to vote for.

During last week's historic gay debate, Hillary Clinton dredged up the old states rights argument when justifying her opposition to gay marriage. Apparently she thinks that the second class citizenship of gays and lesbians is a matter for the states to decide.

By drawing upon the language of states rights, Hillary embraces the tradition of John Calhoun and the defenders of slavery along with Strom Thurmond and the segregationists. Throughout our nation's history, every time national public opinion turns against oppression, opponents of progress use states rights to present themselves as defenders of liberty in the face of federal power.

While the atlantist media is reporting more than 3 000 GI’s killed in Iraq and many civilian victims of inter-confessional violences, it looks away from the daily slaughter of civilians by US patrols conducting their search operations for suspects. Professor Michael Schwartz estimates that their number reached 10,000 a month in the first 3 years of occupation.

That wasn’t the worst of it, because the death rate was increasing precipitously, and during the first half of 2006 the monthly rate was approximately 30,000 per month, a rate that no doubt has increased further during the ferocious fighting associated with the current American surge.

Sometimes I'm amazed at how much I know about the financial markets and the economy. I don't understand any of it, but I know a lot of stuff, thanks to my friend and mentor, Richard Walrath, who's been to the market more than once. He says when George Bush brags that the economy is booming, he's probably right. The economy is exploding with a big boom, and Walrath says now we are engaged in a great battle to see how long this country can endure.

The truth is that Karl Rove came to this White House with a cloud over his head. Rove's appearances on the national political stage have for more than three decades been clouded by scandal. His tenure in this Bush administration was clouded by scandal. And the aftermath of that tenure will be clouded by scandal.

Jackie and Dunlap bid a fond farewell to Karl Rove.