A sad day because George Bush has so tarnished the reputation of this country, which was one of the prime movers behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

May the day come — and may it come soon — when America can actually celebrate this day without being a hypocrite.

Peace isn’t breaking out in Iraq. A colder, longer war is. It’s further miring the United States in the shards of the Sunni-Shiite divide. And it’s confirming once again in Arab eyes that America’s end game is control of the Middle East’s authoritarian houses of cards. If Enron was an emirate, Bush would be its principal shareholder right now, with America’s foreign policy as collateral.

The mainstream media trumpeted the assessment in a National Intelligence Estimate as a "bombshell," a "major reversal" and a "shocking development." Where have these people been? Don't they remember the serial lies used to sell the war in Iraq? "Mushroom cloud" Condi Rice told us we had to invade Iraq to avoid nuclear annihilation. Cheney declared with sober certainty that Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted nuclear weapons."

The script is predictable. Describe a doomsday scenario, scare the hell out of people and get the compliant media to serve as the echo chamber for the inflamed, lie-laced rhetoric. CNN, determined to challenge the Fox News Channel as the "We Love War" network, already had produced a piece aimed at ramping up the propaganda for war with Iran. Originally slated to air this Wednesday on "CNN Presents," the program dubbed "We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear" was billed as a "speculative documentary" (read: fiction).

The latest National Intelligence Estimate has been greeted by a mixture of relief and alarm. As I have been saying all along, Iran indeed poses no quantifiable imminent nuclear threat to us or her neighbors. It is with much alarm, however, that we see the administration continue to ratchet up the war rhetoric as if nothing has changed.

Bush was all over the place in his press conference, somehow getting to the point wherein he claimed that the NIE stating Iran had shut down its nuclear arms program four years ago actually backed up Bush’s contention that Iran was still on the warpath.

I now know why Bush stands behind podiums whilst speaking. You can’t tell if he’s whizzing down his leg or not.

Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and checked my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was looking for a comment from me about Gary Webb’s suicide on the night of Dec. 9, 2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.

After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get more details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a decent obituary on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.

Though Los Angeles had been hit hard by the “crack epidemic” and the L.A. Times had devoted front-page space to trash Webb’s contra-cocaine reporting in 1996, the newspaper never ran a story detailing the CIA inspector general’s 1998 findings, which confirmed much of what Webb had alleged – and more.

Huckabee's fundamentalist warts are showing.

Let me pose a question to myself, if I may. Will my beliefs affect me in office? Absolutely not. Let's say, for example, it's 18 months from now and I'm in the Oval Office, praying at the base of a 10-foot-high neon cross that I plan to have installed on inauguration day, and I am informed that terrorists have taken hostages or made a video saying that they are going to take hostages or do something bad, or that there was speculation that terrorists somewhere maybe someday do something bad or maybe nothing to do with terrorists at all and it's just a report from, say, Anderson Cooper, who, although I am a red-blooded American male with a wife and four children, I find, as a man, very attractive.

What would I do? What would Jesus do? What would Anderson Cooper do? I can only speak for myself and Mr. Christ when I say that I would bomb someone or something as soon as possible, not because it's violent to bomb something or someone but because my personal Jesus knows that I bomb because I love. And perhaps if I am to be faulted, it is for this very reason.