The Moose does not agree with the ruling. As the Moose has made clear, he is a Hamiltonian who is differential to Presidential power during wartime.

Excuse me, Mr. Wittman. Is illiteracy a common trait of Hamiltonians, or are you an exception?

Maybe I'm out on a limb here, but I just don't assign much weight to the opinions of people who clearly should have studied harder in sixth grade. Does that make me one of those "elitists" Moosie is always so resentful of?

In an upcoming issue of the Nation.   Here's the review in advance via Tom Englehardt.

The American Political Tradition
    By Andrew J. Bacevich
    TomDispatch.com 

    When it comes to foreign policy, the fundamental divide in American politics today is not between left and right but between those who subscribe to the myth of the "American Century" and those who do not. Peter Beinart is a true believer. In his eyes America's purpose today remains precisely what it has always been: to confront and destroy the enemies of freedom at home and abroad. In The Good Fight, he summons liberals to recover their crusading spirit and to "put anti-totalitarianism at the center of their hopes for a better country and a better world." Liberalism must become once again what it was in its heyday: "a fighting faith."... 

The Good Fight began life as an essay that appeared in The New Republic when Beinart edited that magazine. According to press reports, he received a handsome $600,000 advance to expand his essay into a book. The result can only be called a major disappointment: The Good Fight is insipid, pretentious and poorly written. At points it verges on incoherence. As history, it is meretricious. As policy prescription, it is wrongheaded. Beinart has perpetrated his fraud twice over.

Bacevich proceeds with a history lesson who may not know a great deal about history but who amply compensates in other ways.

“I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.” – Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)

Finally someone has said it: it is essential to the future of democracy to recognize that the vast majority of Americans can't be trusted to think straight, because they are so whacko they believe the world is run by magic fairies in the sky. That IS what Barack means here, isn't it?

Oh.

Another one in the dustbin, then. Who's left?

I have to confess I wonder why anyone cares what Nora Ephron thinks about anything, but then I'd have to wonder who cares what I have to say about anything.

How many millionaires or billionaires do you know of who actually give back? In a shameful example of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Ephron lambasts Buffet today over at HuffPo for not giving away his billions sooner.

I really have nothing to respond to this with but slack-jawed amazement. Nothing is good enough for some people. I'm sure we will be hearing shortly how Ephron plans to give away the bulk of her personal fortune.

This is one thing the right hates about us. And you know what? They are correct to do so.

There's a worrisome secret we all know about communicating on the Internet. We just won't admit it, even to ourselves.

Online communication between humans simply doesn't work.

Hear me out here. How many of you have had the experience of having an online "enemy" of some sort who turned out to be totally different when you met him in person? That you actually began communicating with and even liked?

"Flame wars" are now a part of the culture. Early on in the history of the Web, an apartment complex was wired with what amounted to a complex-wide message board. In no time things degenerated to the point where the police were being called to settle disputes.

Online communication has the highest noise level, in communications terms, of any medium short of CB radio, or so it seems. Having an intelligent conversation is always a case of getting around the off-topic content. It has always been that way, back to the early days of the Usenet newsgroups.

I am really glad we have the Internet. I love the power it gives us all. But we really need to recognize this very basic boulder in the middle of our electronic highway: the Internet is the equivalent of the poor Babel fish (apologies to Douglas Adams). Paraphrasing Adams, by removing all roadblocks to communications the poor Internet has been responsible for more and louder misunderstandings than anything else in the history of the Universe.

One need look no further than the brushfire between The New Republic and DailyKos to see the communications problems. Heaven forbid these people should all sit down in a room and talk.

The medium's very immediacy is its menace. People can go from a flash of anger to adrenaline in their bloodstream to typing fingers to some flaming message board comment so fast, they don't have time to think it through. Everything is a first draft.

What do we do about it? Not a clue. But we need to always keep it in mind, and we ought to recognize that we have created - out of thin air - a brand-new and very significant source of misunderstanding between us all.