You're still the soul of brevity, saying in two short paragraphs what I needed eight to say. I should be thanking you.

I thought the Right would be all over me for that post, because of their regrettable tendency to confuse understanding with sympathy. I just figure knowledge is power, and ignorance hurts. We can't solve a problem we don't try to understand.

Wouldn't it be tragic if it turned out that there was actually some solution to this whole problem that doesn't involve killing people in wholesale lots and pouring billions into ratholes like Iraq and we could have all lived happily ever after...and we didn't find it because we simply didn't look?

I consider Bush's declaration of war without end to be an admission of failure. He can't think of a way out of the trap. The thing about "Anybody But Bush" is that it at least promises to give somebody else a shot at it.

This just popped into my head: The problem with Bush and his advisors is that they're looking at a map and trying to move the pieces of their power around on the board till they form a solution. They're playing "Risk". But the problem isn't on the map; it's a problem of people and economics and the international system and it's everywhere around us. A world that produces terrorists is a world that's broken. Saying that the problem is terrorism (in a vacuum) reverses cause and effect and distracts us from identifying exactly what's wrong.

(Will that be enough to provoke the Right to jump me?)