Again? When has he ever NOT been in that mode? He has an occasional article that doesn't fit his standard template. For example, his recent pained objection to being called anti-Semitic, which can't be true ... some of his best childhood friends were Jewish!

But then the very next day he's back to tell us in somber tones about the doom and gloom for America/Israel/Obama that he recently saw in the scorch marks on a tortilla.

But the message is simply discarded. The "blog owner" never sees it. The lame idea was probably that a message with lots of links is likely to be spam or something along those lines.

What would you be willing to give up to see that result? It wouldn't be just some abstract trial separated from political realities. It would be a trial with a raging political battle on all sides of it. Any chance of bipartisan efforts on anything would evaporate. As much as so many people dislike Bush, people have a lot of other things on their minds right now and the number who would give up things they need right now to see Bush behind bars probably isn't all that large. A lot of people who are unhappy with Bush probably view him as having "done his best" or whatever, so negative sentiment might go further than just the wingnuts. So in addition to giving up any chance of bipartisan support for anything at all, public sentiment might go negative.

So health care reform might be one of those things that gets lost in an intense political battle that puts Bush behind bars.

Economic reform would be caught up in bitter, deadlocked political fighting. Markets don't react well to that sort of thing, not when the economy is in such trouble. So maybe retirement accounts continue to fizzle and unemployment goes up, which makes difficulty in getting health care reform through Congress extra painful.

With all of this going on, how effective could Obama and his team be at dealing with the middle east, etc? They'd still get some things done, but with greater difficulty.

Those are the sorts of things that might have to be given up. And with the current supreme court, is it even clear that a trial would have the desired effect? A possible outcome might be all of the consequences of bitter political deadlock, and 5-4 Supreme Court rulings on executive privilege, etc., etc., etc., that keep Bush/Cheney free.

Would it be worth it?

There wasn't enough support in Congress or among the general public to impeach Bush and Cheney. There won't be public or congressional support for any kind of legal proceedings against Bush and Cheney and Rummy and the others who authorized and pushed the use of torture.

Those who actually carried out the orders are guilty of serious crimes, no question about it. But what sense would it make to punish the ones who carried out the orders while letting the ones who gave the orders go free? The person who poured the water down a prisoner's nose and throat goes to prison, and the people who initiated and authorized the torture go on book tours?

The underlying problem is that too many people were convinced that they needed to celebrate torture, or at least look the other way, because they were told that if they didn't they'd be attacked by terrorists. So you have the likes of Rush Limbaugh making fun of what was happening in Abu Ghraib and you have wingnut freepers celebrating torture, but also a lot of other non-wingnuts scared enough to look the other way.

That attitude is not going to reverse itself overnight. The next attack, whenever that happens, may be enough to convince people, at least on some gut level, that they were safer when Bush was starting preemptive wars and locking people up without trial and torturing prisoners and getting wiretaps without enough evidence to justify a warrant and so on and so on. I hope not, but it's easier to imagine that than to imagine that the public would reject the cowardly right-wing insistence on sacrificing liberty for a false sense of security, and find the bravery to reclaim those things that Bush/Cheney trashed.

It's true that some very bad things are done in the name of the "war on drugs".

But what kind of twisted thinking gets you (and Seaton) to the conclusion that this particular bad thing is "what America is"? I guess Seaton's world view is more expansive than this because to him, apparently, "what America is" includes not just the worst aspects of the "war on drugs" but also the worst aspects of Bush's war, and I'm guessing a lot of other atrocious stuff as well.

And I guess if you take that twisted view of "what America is" then to find people who understand America better than Americans you would of course look to the people who have suffered worst under American oppression of various sorts, to the extent that their view of "what America is" consists entirely of those atrocities.

So that's the message here. People who are seething with anger at American atrocities and who see America solely in terms of those atrocities are, in Seaton's view, the ones who best understand "what America is". Because they're the ones who have a view of America that agrees with Seaton's view of America.

And let's not forget that this was an attempt to defend (or more accurately, deflect attention from) your insight that Americans were hoping that Obama himself single-handedly would be the solution to all our problems. An insight contradicted by polls and common sense, not to mention numerous posts on this very site that are only a click or two away.

And through twists and turns you end up here: with the absurd claim that "any inhabitant of Baghdad is an expert on Americans".

You drop the claim that everyone other than Americans experiences America "first hand", but I have to wonder why. Would one more absurdity have been just too much? One more bald assertion would be one straw too many? Personally I think you could have pulled it off without any loss of credibility.

But what I love most is the stream of free association about the "war on drugs," ethanol production, the second amendment, and the dire threat of the whole Southwest under martial law, and then just as you're getting wound up and nobody would expect you to bring it back to the original inane point ... you do. And you bring it back to the original inane point very, very quickly by omitting any attempt at a logical connection or transition, instead immediately jumping to an assertion that Mexicans know Americans better than Americans know Americans. Rounded out by yet another non-sequitur and a repetition of the claim that Americans don't know America and "what it is".

For another thing, you wouldn't know how to back up an argument if your internet connection depended on it. Making an assertion doesn't do it. Making the assertion every day, day in and day out, doesn't do it. Putting the assertion in a quote box doesn't do it. Slapping a photoshopped picture on it doesn't do it. Using a lame metaphor doesn't do it. Tossing a bunch of "great quotes" around doesn't do it.

Start from the definition of "first hand." Think about the difference of interacting with people in real life, and getting your impressions via blog posts and so on. Even if you didn't cherry-pick the ones that fit your fantasies, and even if you doubled the forty hours you say you surf the web every week, you still wouldn't be experiencing any of it "first hand."

Here's Seaton in a nutshell: he thinks that repeating an assertion is the same as making an argument to support the assertion.

Even a nutty assertion like "the whole world experiences the USA first hand" in support of his ability to believe his own sweeping generalizations about what Americans are thinking, even when those generalizations don't fit the polling data and don't fit what people here tell him about their own beliefs.

The polling data alone would tell him that most Americans aren't optimistic about anyone solving the economic crisis. And it would be hard to find anyone at all who thinks that Obama will solve it single-handedly. Even just a casual perusal of this web site would show him ardent Obama expressing concerns about how Obama is approaching the problem, and about whether the problem is too big for any attempted solution to turn things around any time soon, and so on.

But he knows better. He experiences the USA "first hand" by sitting thousands of miles away with his nose stuck in a web browser forty hours a week.

But it works even less well because you demonstrate just the opposite over and over again. You repeatedly make sweeping generalizations that don't even come close to being accurate.

It would be difficult enough to get an accurate picture from reading stuff on the web, even for someone who spends the forty hours a week you say you spend with your nose stuck in a browser. Extremely difficult to get anything approximating an accurate impression that way, given the inherent filtering and selection that influences what will bubble up on web sites.

But it wouldn't be difficult at all to get a more accurate picture than you have. What makes it so clear that you're not making a good faith effort to get an accurate picture is that your sweeping generalizations don't even match up with what is posted on this very site which you allegedly read. It's like a freeper showing up here and trying to talk like a progressive, but having in mind only the sort of one-dimensional stereotype of liberals that one might get from reading freeper-type web sites.

So I'll revise my advice.

First, get a clearer picture of what you know, and what you don't know. Cherry-picking stuff from the web that fits your preconceptions isn't a path to knowledge. (And in any case, you seem to put more work into finding photoshopped pictures and trying to find "clever" metaphors than to actually constructing arguments that do anything but reword and repeat the same assertions over and over without adding any substantial support.)

Then write what you know. Write about Spain, Spanish food, Spanish politics, Spanish language. Tell us what the Spanish papers say about Obama. Tell us about housing prices in Spain. About the Spanish education system. About Spanish television.

Write something you know first-hand.

And also consider spending a lot less than forty hours a week with your nose stuck in a browser. It's not doing you any good.

Do you even know (in real life) one single person who is in this large population of people you've cooked up in your imagination, a population of people who are thinking that Obama is the solution to all their problems, that he's some kind of messiah, etc? You seem to be extrapolating from blog entries and such that are cherry-picked to support the view you've become attached to.

The cherry-picking is obvious because everything that doesn't fit your view, all the disagreements over whether Obama is doing sensible things with the bailout proposals and with his cabinet selections and so on and so on and so on, none of that dents the reality you've created in your imagination. You're sitting there thousands of miles away with your nose buried in a browser hour after hour after hour, searching for photoshopped pictures and random snippets of text that will help you grind your axes. Why?

How about writing instead about something you know something about, something you know first-hand? Tell us about Spanish politics. Write a column on Spanish food, restaurants, wines, whatever. Post a "Spanish word of the day" blog. Those are presumably things you actually know something about. You'd be a lot better at it.

Then why are so many of us (myself included) angry at Obama's decision to forgive Lieberman? Maybe because we are focusing on petty issues, the same petty issues that we have been trained to focus on over the past 16 divisive years?
The leader sets the tone.

Tonnyb is explaining that he/she is angry at the decision, and here looks at the question of whether that anger is justified. He/she concludes that it may be the result of focusing on petty issues, and maybe Obama is setting a new (and better) tone by forgiving Lieberman.

I have a similar reaction. I was very disappointed. Basically, I wanted revenge. Forgiving what Lieberman did is hard to stomach for that reason. But also because it's hard to believe Lieberman will "do the right thing" with that committee.

On the other hand as Ben says, Obama has earned my respect. And when I step back to think about this a little more clearly, I'm glad Obama isn't going to waste time on political grudges. And I'm glad he's not afraid to keep his enemies close. Whatever cooperation he gets from Lieberman would be more than what he'd get if Lieberman were booted from the committee and switched to the Republican caucus.

So back to your point. You note that tonnyb talks about both sides of this. But you say "Tonnyb wants us to believe he is upset". Well, yes. Do you have any reason at all not to take him at his word on that? You say "Can you sense the anger? I can not." And you seem to base this on tonnyb's last line: "The leader sets the tone." As if deferring to Obama's judgment, and being angry at the same time, makes no sense to you.

Maybe that's what you mean at the beginning when you say: "It's fine to support Obama 100% of the time, or almost all the time if he happens to share your views always or almost always."

But why such a narrow view? It's fine to support Obama on decisions he makes that you disagree with. It's fine to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't mean blanket approval of what he does, no matter what it is. I just mean a willingness to look at the fact that he's proven that he's very good at making level-headed decisions. He's very good at seeing what people can do and putting people where they'll do a lot of good. He's not afraid to have people he disagrees with close to him. (And all of these factors are magnified when you put them up against Bush's style of leadership.)

So I'm willing to give Obama a lot of slack and give him a chance to set the strategy, to set the tone, to make difficult decisions wisely. And I'm willing to do this in spite of not agreeing with him anything close to 100% of the time.

I don't see anything in tonnyb's comments to justify your remark that "Blog entries by the likes of Tonnyb should carry an expiration date". Why the scorn? You don't make a case that tonnyb is simply following Obama blindly, 100% of the time, as you seem to be implying. You end up suggesting that he's not being honest when he says he's still upset, and you don't have a good reason for doubting him.

As I see it, tonnyb is showing a willingness to admit that perhaps his gut reaction is not the best reaction. And although it's still upsetting to see someone like Lieberman stab Obama in the back and get away with it unrepentant and unpunished, tonnyb is willing to look at why his reaction is what it is.

Those are all good things, not bad things. There are bad kinds of flip-flopping, but you don't make a case that this is the bad sort. Just the opposite, really.

To me that makes no sense at all. First, give her some credit for not being malicious. Politically ambitious, sure, but that's not the same thing at all. Second, are we supposed to imagine that she would run a rogue department secretly to undermine Obama's agenda? I think Obama would notice that pretty quickly. Or is the idea that defiantly promoting her own rogue agenda and undermining Obama is somehow going to help her own political ambitions within the party? It really just makes no sense, even if you can't bring yourself to trust Hillary.

If she's the SoS, I'm sure she'll have her own input, but I'm also sure she'll be working within the framework of Obama's own vision.

JEP07's comments about Obama's skill at picking people and getting great work out of them are right on the mark too.

Finally, on this one particular point about Hillary supporting the war: she made that vote at a time when it would have seemed politically expedient to do so. I wouldn't read too much into it. And if she leans in a hawkish direction, why shouldn't Obama be getting hawkish input on decisions he has to make? He doesn't have to agree with everyone he works with.

But like nearly everyone I know who opposed her in the primaries, it wasn't "Hillary Hatred" in spite of what some people said, and it would be stupid to hold a grudge now about things she said in the primaries. I'd be happy to see her stay in the Senate and become majority leader, or be appointed to the Supreme Court, or be in Obama's cabinet, or be Secretary General of the United Nations, etc. She'd be better than some of those than others, but it would be a pretty idiotic Democrat who didn't want to see her considerable skills and connections put to good use.

Like jsfox I'm curious about what you expected. You posted something that was very pro-Hillary the other day, and it hit the number one spot! I didn't see any anti-Hillary flak posted on it at all. There are some idiotic pundits with axes to grind (who reads Dowd anyway? and why?) but as I think someone said over on that thread, it's got to be some kind of personal vendetta thing with Dowd. It makes no sense otherwise.

Hillary will do some good things for the country, and Bill will also. I don't know where or what that will be, but it will happen and Obama is clearly willing to help make it happen. And if it's in a prominent role that makes wingnut heads explode, all the better.

What does having the "spine" to tackle big (but ultimately failed) projects show about executive management skills?

What do 18 million primary votes show about executive management skills? Starting from scratch and getting 18 million primary votes would be amazing. Starting with huge name recognition, starting with a lot of superdels committed to her even before the primaries began, starting with deep ties within the Democratic party, starting with the support of a popular former President, starting with all of that and ending up losing to a freshman Senator with "Hussein" for a middle name? What does that show? It was hers to lose, and she somehow managed to lose it. (Not to take away from Obama's skill at managing his campaign, fundraising, etc. But thinking back on it all, I'm still floored by the fact that Hillary didn't walk away with a victory, considering the huge advantages she had going into the primary season.)

I think she has a lot of things going for her that would make her a good choice for SOS. The ones you mentioned, the "spine" and being well liked and respected around the world, would be at the top of the list. Her history of executive management doesn't go in the plus column, but hopefully she's learned to pick better advisors.

DS is fully capable of writing things that are well-written and well-reasoned too. But he has an anti-Obama axe to grind. And grinding that axe is such an obsession that a post like this one that isn't grinding that axe is highly unusual for him. (But I don't know about the last two that had comments disabled.)

What happens when you grind the same axe every day, day after day, day after day, day after day? What's left doesn't even look like an axe any more, but more like bludgeon: dull and pointless.

But he hates it when people point that out. On the other hand, other than changing the picture and slapping on a new metaphor, he's got very little to add to his near-daily vomitus of "Obama sucks and his presidency is doomed and we're all doomed because Obama sucks".

He'll disable comments again. He lasted two posts that way this time. I'll bet he can't go ten posts in a row this next time.

Intended as a compliment, in the hope of encouraging more articles like this one.