I know I’m probably alone in this, but I have a simple solution to what the blovacracy calls the “accelerated primary season” (that is, the attempt by other, more populous and diverse states to have some actual, honest-to-God say in the Presidential primaries, rather than just leaving it all up to Iowa and New Hampshire).

Lately, a lot of states have been moving their primaries up to February and even January, in an attempt to give their states some relevance, rather than having so much influence being held by the predominantly-white, small population states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Which seems reasonable to me; as I carped in an earlier post, I got tired of living in California and having no say in picking my party’s Presidential candidate. Iowa and New Hampshire are responding to this effrontery by moving their primaries and caucuses even earlier, to the point where Iowa may end up having their caucus in December of 2007 (believe it if you can). I get the impression that Iowa would move their caucus to the first Wednesday in November the day after the election if that’s what it took to keep their “first caucus” status.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’ve got nothing against Iowa or New Hampshire. Nothing. I just think it’s absurd that these two highly-unrepresentative states have so much say over who gets to be President. We can see where this has gotten us the last several times around (Dukakis! Mondale! Bush! Kerry!), and I think it’s high time we made some changes. And given that Iowa has a law that requires they have the first caucus in the nation, there only one obvious way to do it:

Pass a law.

Yup. Time for those Congressmen and women and Senators who spend time grubbing for money for bridges to nowhere, who hide bricks of money in their fridge, who pass resolutions to rename french fries “freedom fries” and try to pass idiotic amendments to the constitution to outlaw flag burning (yeah, that’s a huge issue that keeps me up at night) to get off their duffs and tell the good folks from Iowa and New Hampshire that enough’s enough, and that it’s someone else’s turn now. I don’t care who; make it a rotation, or something. Start in Minnesota or New Mexico for all I care. But Iowa and New Hampshire have had it long enough, and someone else should have a turn.

I’m not holding my breath, though. And my Uncle John (resident of Derry) is going to kill me.

I’ve been holding this one in for a while, because I keep waiting for someone else to write about it–mainstream media (Dan Froomkin of the Post, Dan Savage of the Boston Globe; somebody), bloggers (Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan both seemed like good candidates), but no one has. Neither have I heard Keith Olbermann address it, either.

Not this issue of torture and the U.S. policy towards it. We’ve all heard and read plenty about that. No; I’m talking about the absolutely Orwellian approach to defining and talking about torture that the Bush Administration has taken. And I don’t know about y’all, but it absolutely outrages me. (And while I don’t know about anyone else, it is clear as crystal to me that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and a lot of other members of this Administration–Yoo, Gonzales, and others–are clearly guilty of war crimes.)

Let me ‘splain.

I’ve been wondering when the mainstream media (MSM) was going to call Bush and Cheney on their obvious B.S. when they stand up there and say, flat-out, “We do not torture.” Bush does it any time he is asked about it, and Cheney just did it a couple of week ago on Larry King. How on God’s green Earth can they do this when we know that the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has been using waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that were used by (for example) Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, the Gestapo, and others?

It’s simple, folks: through the assistance of spineless lawyers like John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Steven Hadley, the Administration has redefined torture to not include those actions. Torture, for these folks, only includes activities up to and including death and organ failure. Other than that, all bets are off (or as Cheney says, we went to “the dark side”). So when they say, “We don’t torture,” or “We abide by all legal obligations,” make sure to add in your mind, “and of course, we don’t consider waterboarding, stress positions, forced hypothermia, or sleep deprevation ‘torture’.”

How do we know this is true? Because any time one of these folks is asked about a specific (let’s not mince words here) torture like waterboarding, they always dodge the question. “We don’t reveal specific methods,” Cheney likes to say. This is a huge pile of hooey. They know that if they “reveal specific methods,” they will be admitting that they do torture, and won’t be able to lie in front of the American people any more. So they duck and weave and dodge, and don’t admit to the obvious, which is that they’ve redefined these horrible acts so that they don’t consider them legal torture, even though any civilized human being would.

I know that I am out there by the lights of some folks, but I truly believe that these folks are war criminals. They have approved–and continue to approve–the torture of human beings. They secretly violated the fourth Amendment to the Constitution (illegal search and seizure), and once caught, insisted that they have a right to violate it. They violated and continue to violate the FISA law. They are criminals, pure and simple, and they are getting away with it. They have broken their sacred oaths of office (“preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” remember?). And they are torturing our fellow human beings, who have been convicted of no crimes, and in most case not even accused of any crimes.

These are the people in charge of our country today. I can’t decide what boggles my mind more; that we live under the rule of such people, or that there are actually people out there (Steven Hayes of the Wall Street Journal, for example) who continue to defend their behavior. I am constantly torn between sadness and overwhelming rage.

Last night the Democratic candidates for President had a talk about their stances on gay marriage, civil unions, and related issues. It almost goes without saying–these days, anyway–that they danced around the issue, talked a lot about “civil unions,” and basically did everything they could to not say they were in favor of gay marriage while implying that they were, so as to cover all the bases without opening themselves up to “traditional values” attacks later in the campaign.

I understand their fear, but I think they’re cowardly. Of course, as they demonstrated last weekend when they caved to President Bush, Democrats are pretty consistently cowardly these days, so I shouldn’t be all that surprised.

(It almost goes without saying that this is not the kind of forum the Republicans will have any time soon. The Republicans have made a pact with their social-conservative wing to oppose things like stem cell research, abortion, gay marriage, and things of that nature, and so bloviate endlessly on those topics. Which is incredibly ironic, because almost any individual Republican–of a certain monetary class–is completely open about any social issue. If an upper-class Republican teenage daughter got pregnant, there would be an abortion. If an upper-class Republican son or daughter were gay, they would be accepted (witness Cheney’s daughter). If an upper-class Republican needed the research and treatment that can only be provided by stem cells, they would want it. And so on. But they’ve made their Faustian bargain, and so publicly they maintain their absurd hypocritical stances.)

In any event, I find this whole business to be a lot of hooey, honestly. It breaks down into two pieces:

Religion: If you are gay and want to get married in your religious tradition, that’s something you have to work out with your priest/pastor/rabbi/imam/whatever. Not an issue for the state.

State: Here’s the rub, eh? A married couple has rights that a non-married couple does not. My wife can inherit, can take responsibility for our children, our finances if I am incapacitated, and a whole host of other things. If I’m sick and in the hospital, she can visit me. We can file federal income taxes jointly. And on and on.

Some folks say let’s create a “civil partnership” law, that marriage is “sacred,” that we don’t want to “dilute” marriage by “allowing” gays to marry, that having gays marry would be a “threat” to “traditional marriage,” and other such nonsense. What a crock.

Let me take this one piece at a time:

Civil partnerships: Can you say “separate but equal?” Didn’t we try this before and have it not work? It’s just a cop-out. Either go whole-hog and let folks get legally married, or admit the truth: you don’t want gays happy and committed to each other.

Marriage is “sacred”: That’s not for the state to decide, it’s for religious leaders. Go talk to them. Otherwise, shut up.

Threat to “traditional marriage”: This is the silliest of all. First of all, there’s no such thing as “traditional marriage.” How many wives did Solomon have? Was that “traditional?” Second, how on Earth is two guys getting married a threat to my marriage? Or anyone’s marriage? If your marriage is so shaky that reading about Bruce and Steve getting hitched down at Zilker park this Sunday causes your wife to leave you, pal, your have a lot more problems than outlawing gay marriage is going to cure.

I have been around gays and lesbians my whole life. Literally. When my parents went on a second honeymoon to the Virgin Islands when I was 10, they left my siblings and I in the care of a gay man. We’ve all had gay and lesbian friends since we were children. And here’s the thing, homophobes: all three of us are married with children, and none of us have been divorced. I’ve been involved with the same women in a monogamous relationship for 14 years now. There were gay and lesbian couples at our wedding. I’ve been to gay and lesbian weddings myself. And wow, gee, my marriage is spectacularly unthreatened! Imagine!

Look: some folks find homosexuality “yucky.” I get it. You don’t like it. You don’t want to admit it out loud, so you hunt for reasons–religious, legal, what-have-you–to support your feelings of discomfort. But they’re all rationalizations. All I’m saying is, keep your yuck feelings to yourself; stop trying to legislate them and force the world to abide by your prejudices. These folks just want to get married, be happy, and have the same rights as everyone else. That’s all. They don’t want to rape your sons and daughters. They don’t want to steal your wives and husbands. They just want to settle down, live their lives, and have the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that you enjoy. Why should you let your feelings of yuck stop them? That’s just wrong.

Took a few days off with the wife–didn’t leave town, but left the kids behind with Granny and got some peace and quiet. Which included no blogging. Not that anyone noticed.

But it’s also hard to blog from a place of howling, incipient rage. I’m still so angry about the Democrat’s craven cave-in to Bush on domestic spying that I can barely think about it.

But, you know, there have been other things going on.

Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record for Major League Baseball and, like a lot of folks I suspect, I don’t have the slightest idea how to feel about that. Yeah, yeah; he’s innocent until proven guilty, I know. But anyone with half a brain knows the guy has been shooting up performance-enhancing drugs of some kind or other. I mean, your head doesn’t grow 2-3 sizes after you turn 35 for no reason, you know?

On the other hand, he’s not exactly operating in a drug-free vacuum, either. How many of the pitchers that he has been facing are shooting up? How many of the other players who are making circus catches in the field are shooting up? How is that effecting his numbers? Who the hell can say?

One thing for sure: the guy is an incredible player. Would he have broken the record without the drugs? I dunno. Probably not. But we’ll never know. Would Babe Ruth have created the record if he had had to face Negro League pitchers, sliders, and modern bullpens? Would Ted Williams have broken it if he hadn’t had his career interrupted by two wars? Who the hell knows? Textbook definition of “mixed feelings,” anyway. No wonder Obama didn’t know how to answer Keith Olbermann in the debate; I didn’t know how I’d answer.

Speaking of which, yeah, Obama looked silly saying that Canada has a President. Of course, if that’s the worst he can do, he still looks 1000 times better than the Current Occupant. And Joe Biden, for all his sniping, doesn’t have the slightest friggin’ chance of winning the nomination, so he can just fold up his smirk and go home, as far as I’m concerned.

The thing that scares me was on display over on the Republican side. I mean, it was scary enough who they chose as moderator (“Now, live on stage, boy wonder and callow youth Geoooooorge Stephanopolas!”), but that rogues gallery they have running . . . what if one of them actually, you know, wins? President Authoritarian Guiliana? President Stay-the-Course-in-Iraq McCain? Or “I don’t have any convictions whatsoever except that I really really want to be President,” Mr. Mitt Romney? (Am I the only one who thinks he looks like Herman Munster?) I understand that the Republicans are unhappy with this crew–I know I would be–but what if one them actually wins? It’s a scary thought; enough to make me run for the Klonapin at night.

Words can barely convey my disgust for how, once again, our civil liberties, the Constitutional guarantees this country was founded on, have been sold down the river under pressure from a President whose approval ratings stand at 28% so that Congress wouldn’t be accused of being “weak.”

I cannot state this too strongly: no, I don’t want to die in a terrorist attack. I don’t want my family to die in a terrorist attack. I don’t want anyone to die in a terrorist attack. But I would rather die at the hands of terrorist than to have all the principles that our country is founded on chipped away by fear-mongering, small-minded, short-sighted men and women whose goal is the unlimited expansion of executive power.

Our founding fathers fought against this kind of tyranny–against warrantless surveillance, against being held without being charged, against secret courts, against all the things Congress is handing this bunch of criminals currently running the Executive branch–and enshrined those principles in one of the best-written documents in recorded history. And now, our elected representatives are selling it all out for the chimera of “safety.” Such is the foundation that every tyranny is built upon throughout history.

Our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the principles that we are giving away to Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and McConnell. We should all be ashamed.

Dick Cheney–not the guy I would want to be giving me a character reference, given his in-the-teens favorability ratings–came out on CBS news giving his vote of confidence to “Al” Gonzales today. According to CBS news correspondent Mark Knoller, Cheney tells us “I think Al has done a good job under difficult circumstances.” And then adds, as everyone who works for the White House seems compelled to when talking about ol “Al:” “The key,” he said, is whether Gonzales has “the confidence of the president, and he clearly does.”

To which I cry “Bullshit.” Gonzales is the Attorney General of the United States, and the head of the United States Department of Justice. He took an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, and he serves us, the people of the United States. He has lied, committed perjury, and done any number of things that protect Bush, the Bush Administration, and his own precious ass. He is not doing his job, which is overseeing the Department of Justice. Rather, he is protecting George W. Bush.

Cheney is wrong, Bush is wrong, the Bush Administration is wrong, their pathetic mouthpiece Tony Snow is wrong: The key is not that Gonzales has “the confidence of the President.” The key is whether Gonzales has the confidence of the American people whom he serves, and he clearly does not. If the government was not run by a gang of–let’s face it–criminals who think that everything they do is above the law, Gonzales would have resigned months ago, after his first disastrous appearance before Congress. But because Bush and his cronies know that if Gonzales were to resign, their rampant law-breaking would come to light before they could leave office, they are hanging on to him like grim death, even though to do so means they are doing severe damage to the Department of Justice, and to Americans’ confidence in the justice system. Quite simply, they don’t care. So long as they can leave office without being impeached or sent to jail, they simply don’t care.

So in response to Dick Cheney I say: on this issue, like on so many others (e.g., the WMDs in Iraq, the insurgency being in its “last throes,” etc.), you are dead wrong. But of course, like on so many other issues, you will never admit it.

Something Andrew Sullivan said in one of his posts really struck me about the current Iraq mess, and started those ol’ neurons a’firin’:

Whatever David Petraeus says next month – and we know it’s going to be a glowing report of massive success – the reality of Iraq endures. That reality is that there is no Iraq. The “government” is paralyzed between sectarian factions none of which wants a national, political settlement any time soon.

I didn’t have any new ideas about Iraq–I’m not a brilliant international diplomat, I’m just a technical writer with a big mouth and lots of opinions who reads a lot–but I started to put some things together in my head. Consider these facts:

• Kurdistan, i.e. northern Iraq, is currently the most peaceful portion of Iraq by far. Further, the Kurds are the only ones who actually want the United States there.
• The current “head” of the “national government,” al Maliki, let slip a few weeks ago that the American military could leave any time, so far as he was concerned. He quickly recanted (presumably after a good talking-to in one of his daily video conferences with Bush), but that doesn’t change the fact that it slipped out.
• The Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting each other, no kidding, for centuries. They have been holding grudges about things that have happened hundreds of years ago. Imagine, if you can, Notherners still being mad about the Battle of the Crater and Southerners still holding a grudge about Antietam 600 years from now, and people from Atlanta wanting to shoot people from Boston about it. In Baltimore. And doing so. That’s Iraq right now. Do we really believe that these people are going to paper over their differences and form a unified democratic government in a few months? Who are we fooling?
• Despite diplomatic pressure, the Iraqi government went on vacation anyway.

So the Doug theory, for what it’s worth, is that the Iraqi “unity government” doesn’t give a damn about actually doing anything. They know that Bush is leaving office in January, 2009. They know the American people have had it with this idiotic war. They know that the next Administration, no matter who it is run by, will start to withdraw American troops.

Until that time, they are marking time. They are accumulating weapons and training. They are killing as many of the “enemy” (Shia or Sunni) as they can get away with. They are engaging in low-level ethnic cleansing. And once we’re out of the way–which is bound to happen sooner or later–Iraq will break up into Kurdistan, a Shiite state, and a Sunni state. The Shiite state may align with or be completely taken over by Iran; I have no idea. There will probably be some pretty ugly ethnic cleansing in various cities. A huge battle for Baghdad.

I could be wrong, obviously; like I say, I’m a technical writer, not a diplomat. But why on Earth should we expect tribes that have been fighting for hundreds of years to get together and create a “national government” in a country that was created by colonialists out of nothing in particular, just for our convenience? It’s insane, not to mention delusional and stupid.

I think the sooner we recognize the real situation and deal with it, the better off we’ll be. (Hey, the Kurds want us there! Isn’t one of our goals to have an ally in the Middle East? How tough is this? Duh!) But unfortunately, we’re stuck dealing with the boneheads in the Bush Administration for the next 17 months. God help us all.

I sometimes get emails or phone calls asking me to take polls, and I always struggle with the question, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” And while I have never voted for a Republican, and find it hard to imagine ever voting for one, I don’t consider myself a Democrat.

“How can this be?” you might ask. (Or you would if anyone was reading this blog!)

Well, partly it’s the excesses of what the parties “stand for.” The Democrats are not so much a party any more as a collection of special interests all at war for what they can get. Labor. Minorities. Latte-sipping left wingers. Gays and lesbians. Anti-war folks. Farmers. Not that I don’t support some of those causes (personally, I prefer mochas to lattes); but it doesn’t seem to be a party of “what unites us,” but rather a party of “What’s in it for me?” And I just can’t get behind it.

Not to mention that when they’re in charge, they seem so friggin’ incompetent. Look at them now; they’re in the majority, and they’re still the gang who can’t shoot straight. Somehow the Republicans are stopping them with filibusters, and it’s the Democrats who are being accused of obstructionism! That’s lame. I should be a part of a party that’s that lame?

Obvious proviso and caveat: all Democrats are not like that; we’re speaking in broad generalities here.

The Republicans, in my view, are even worse. They’re only a party of “What’s in it for me.” Even more, they’re spectacular hypocrites. They’re all for federalism . . . except when it serves they’re own best interests (e.g., Bush v. Gore). They’re all for “staying out of your personal life” . . . except that they want to go into your bedroom and tell you how to run your personal sex life, and tell you what you can watch on your TV (including which swear words you can and can’t hear), and tell you what books your children can and can’t read at school, and so on. They’re for a strong national defense . . . so long as they don’t actually have to be the ones to suit up and go overseas and fight.

(And even worse, in my book, all the moral stuff they try to shove down our throats, they do “for the children,” when what they’re really doing is a clear attempt to force their religious values on everyone else. But by the cynical ploy of hiding behind “the children,” they can make it seem noble.)

And finally, they come across as just plain mean. “I don’t care about what happens to other people so long as I get my tax cuts.” “I don’t care what happens to other people so long as my programs are put through congress.” “I don’t care what happens to the 12 million immigrants and their children who are already here; I just want them gone.” Etc. The level of plain old meanness behind some of the things the spokespeople for the Republicans espouse is simply staggering. I can’t be a part of a party that is so doggone mean. (Think Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and their hate-spewing brethren.)

Again, we are speaking broadly here; not all Republicans are like this, of course.

Which brings us to the completely absurd and false dichotomy between “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans.

Today’s Republicans are not “conservative” by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone who supports the huge increase in government that is the Department of Homeland Security, that is the Medicare Drug Bill, is not a conservative. Anyone who supports the trampling on the Constitution that is warrantless wiretapping and the elimination of habeas corpus is not a conservative. (What can possibly be more conservative than habeas corpus? It goes back to the Magna Carta, for crying out loud!) Anyone who supports the economic policies of this Administration, which has spent money like a drunken sailor on shore leave and run up debts that we can never replay, is definitely not a conservative. And anyone who supports the absurd theory that is the “unitary executive” is most certainly not a conservative. I have no doubt in my mind that if you got a single member of the Constitutional Convention, pulled him forward in time, and told him this theory, he would recoil in horror. They fought the Revolution to get rid of a King; the “unitary executive” gives you a king. It is a radical position, not a conservative one.

So like many Americans, there is really no party for me, I’m afraid. I support fiscal responsibility. (Supply-side economics doesn’t work. We’ve tried it in three different Presidential administrations now, and it’s been a disaster all three times. Isn’t that enough?) I support a strong national defense (but not one that’s ridiculously out of proportion to the threat that is posed by the rest of the world–how many aircraft carriers and submarines do you need to fight terrorists hiding in caves in Afghanistan?). I am socially liberal–I think gays should get married if they want, for example. (All you right-wingers bleating about gay marriage are being silly. How do gays getting married threaten your marriage? They certainly don’t threaten mine. And if gays get married, doesn’t that make society more stable? Your arguments are absurd.)

So am I conservative, or liberal? Neither. Both. It’s a false dichotomy. And the silly choice I have to make between the two parties doesn’t exactly make it easier. How about you?

In a previous post, I mentioned why I feel like I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Even so, I have always voted Democratic, mostly because I’ve felt it was the lesser of two evils. (For one thing, I have too many gay friends, and too many illegal immigrant friends, to vote with a party that demonizes both groups.)

Living in Austin Texas now, as I do, in a post-Tom Delay redistricted world, means that I am in the same position as our pre-Revolutionary War forebears: I have taxation, but no representation. My governor is Rick Perry, a Republican who is a typical party wheel, i.e. he’s for pretty much everything I’m not. Of our two Senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison is not too bad, but she’s still a Republican, and has voted with the Republican caucus on every single issue of importance to me, especially the Iraq war. And John Cornyn is, quite simply, your typical right-wing asshole.

Since the redistricting and the election following, “my” representative is Lamar Smith, which is, as Bugs Bunny would say, “A revoltin’ development.” Rep. Smith is very much a Republican in the mold of Delay, and needless to say he doesn’t “represent” me in any way whatsoever. His stance on basically every issue is the polar opposite of mine. I find it completely repugnant to be “represented” by this man, but this is the situation that I am stuck with.

It is further galling, because Rep. Smith is the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary committee, so not only is my “representative” someone who stands up in Congress on a regular basis and casts votes in exactly the opposite way I would have him do, but he also has a powerful platform on an important committee, where he espouses opinions on a matter that I find extremely important, i.e. the politically-motivated firing of the U.S. Attorneys by the Bush Administration. He has given arrogant speeches to the committee about this matter in which he, my representative, spewed the Republican party line about there being “no scandal” and “they serve at the President’s pleasure” and similar absurdities that, not to put too fine a point on it, make me livid. My Representative.

It is bad enough that the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are sticking to their absurd and transparently bogus arguments about these firings. They are intelligent men and women, and I know that some of them are just as aware as I that these firings stink to high heaven. But I cannot even say how galling it is to me that my representative, on the Judiciary Committee, is spewing this bullshit.

Hell, that’s not “taxation without representation;” that’s “taxation with negative representation and we slap you in the face, too.” Let’s just say that it makes me understand why me forebears in Boston heaved tea into the harbor, picked up flintlocks, and started taking potshots at Redcoats. I don’t own a gun, but believe me, I’m pretty tempted.

The new spokesman for the U.S. Military in Iraq is a Brigadier General (i.e., a one-star) named Kevin Bergner. As is typical with Bush Administration appointees, Bergner’s news from the front is filled with happy-happy/joy-joy talk, but even more so for him than most, as Digby points out in Salon and Dan Froomkin notes in the Washington Post.

Lots of journalists have noted that Bergner went straight from being a member of the White House’s national security staff to being the spokesman in Baghdad. But I’ve been wondering about his career trajectory, honestly. Let me ‘splain:

My Dad was a naval officer. The common wisdom in the Navy is that if you don’t make Captain by the time you hit 20 years, you should just go ahead and retire, because you’re not going to advance much more. In the Army, the equivalent is Colonel. To move from Colonel to General requires a Presidential nomination, and approval by the Senate.

So I got to wondering: how old was Colonel Bergner when he was tapped for Brigadier? And who was it who tapped him? What was his first assignment as a General?

Call me a crazy conspiracy nut, but here’s some interesting facts from the good General’s biography: he’s a graduate of Trinity College in San Antonio, Texas, Bush’s home state (and we know how much more comfortable Bush feels with friends from Texas). In May of 2003, as a full Colonel, he was assigned as the Deputy Director for Politico-Military Affairs (Middle East), J-5, The Joint Staff, in Washington, D.C. He was promoted to Brigadier General in November of 2004, in the middle of that time. He put in about a year in Iraq in 2005 as Deputy Commander of the Multi-National Force-Northwest before heading back to Washington to become the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq for the National Security Council at the White House.

So what have we? We have a Texan who was promoted to General by Bush, given his first highly-visible, political D.C. assignment by Bush, moved by to an even more visible assignment by Bush, and is now the military spokesman in Iraq. Who do you reckon his loyalty is to? The American people? Or the person who famously (and jealously) surrounds himself with loyal minions (and fires and punishes those who are disloyal), and is further responsible for his promotion and current position?

I know which answers gets my vote. How about you?