<What I saw on the news was that they are going to get us. Period. Not that we're winning anything. The only questions are when and how. There will be bombing, or something.

A vast majority of the largely leftist media dearly wishes that George W. Bush and his administration would vomit blood and die screaming. At least in a political sense, if not literally. This should be taken into account when reading or watching the news.

The last thing the left wants us to think is that we are winning, or even breaking even--not on Bush's watch, with November coming down the tracks. The attempt to stick Bush with "what did he know and when did he know it" is falling as flat as the Enron attack did. I note that there is no reference to this issue at all on the DNC site.

Our efforts in Afghanistan have not been worthless. We blew a big hole in the Al Quaeda organization in Afghanistan. Okay, so some nimrod still might strap dynamite around himself and blow up a Starbucks, or somebody might pull the Fertilizer Truck bit again, but an organized and well-financed effort like the WTC attack ($500,000 ain't chump change) is going to be a different story.

As for the rest, this ain't Viet Nam. In Viet Nam, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were pawns. They weren't the ones we were worried about. During the Cold War, every single damn brush war--Cuba, the Mideast crisis, Latin America--was just a reflection of the United States and the Soviet Union staring across the game board at each other, fingering the buttons on the REAL weapons. Without Russia backing them, and preventing us from doing anything that actually defeated anyone, North Viet Nam would have lasted three weeks at best against us.

Beginning with the Gulf War, the game started to change.

Now, when someone pulls our chain, they are going to find a lot of heavy artillery facing them. And when they turn around, they will find Russia off somewhere shooting hoops or something. Propping up little regimes is not their problem any more*. Or worse, they may find Russia also facing them with a lot of heavy artillery. There's no "big brother" any more to stand behind them while they're sticking their tongues out at us.

They can annoy us, they can even horrify us, but they can't beat us. Not unless we panic and beat ourselves.

*The real good news is that we don't have to prop up shitty little regimes on our side any more either, just to stave off a communist takeover of those countries.