Lisa Lerer at Politico offers a useful probe into John McCain's tight relation to Phil Gramm, longtime (and well-paid) promoter of the banking deregulation that greased the skids for the housing calamity.

Which offers an opportune fulcrum for a simple question: "Senator McCain, since economics is not your strong suit, why is the senator who campaigned for the mergers that made the housing meltdown possible part of your inner circle? Why were you chairman of his 1996 presidential campaign? Why do you think further deregulation the wise path at this moment?"

Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss is raw, plausible, shocking, and otherwise piled high with aesthetic virtue, not the least of which is the way it faces squarely the impossible situation American troops are faced with in Iraq. Perhaps because the script is a collaboration between Peirce, said to be anti-war, and Mark Richard, said to be pro-war, the film puts its central character, Brandon King (Ryan Philippe) in an impossible situation. Called up for a second tour in Iraq when he was sure he was entitled to an exit pass, squad leader King faces nothing but bad choices. Will he skip out and betray his buddies? Will he go back and betray his mind? Call this an extended metaphor for the whole misbegotten war--there aren't going to be any happy endings. In every wrenching way, the war is a trap. Don't believe the critics who tell you the film is ragged and therefore flawed. All the characters have human dimension. The raggedness is the raggedness of the Odyssey. By the end, you can hardly breathe.

Granted that the NYT editorial board chiefs in their wisdom believe that the purpose of op-ed columns is to counter the editorial line and not echo it. The line is antiwar so the columns shouldn't be told-you-sos--this is the premise. But would it be too much to ask that the paper publish a single sophisticated, full-length antiwar argument by someone who was not only right when it counted but who now elaborates on past rightness to sketch a postwar foreign policy? Would it damage the public discourse to diverge from the fifth-anniversary pile-up of extenuations of the worst foreign policy move in decades, or ever? The point would be not simply to fulminate against a misbegotten war but to underscore what antiwar intellectuals understood when the chips were down and why they understood it.