Toy Soldier Genocide

Many thanks to Jeremy for stepping up to the plate. I'll try to have something more substantial to say sometime in the near future, but for now, nothing expresses what I'm feeling more aptly than Atrios's pitch-perfect characterization of the war party's contortionism in attempting to dismiss the plain facts that the US has lost the war in Iraq and that the middle East is unevenly but steadily spiralling out of control:

Every time they worry they're going to lose their little game of risk, they dream of dropping a basketball on the board to end the game.

Meanwhile, perhaps even more of a wonderful surprise than the NYT's endorsement of Ned Lamont in his primary campaign against Martin Peretz and Lee Siegel Lee Siegel Lee Siegel (just ask them), is Fareed Zakaria pulling off the kid gloves in describing Donald Rumsfeld's lack of fitness for his position:

He seems literally in a parallel universe and slightly deranged. If you listen to what he said last week about Iraq, he’s living in a different world, not a different country.

Back in the actual world, the US government has no foreign policy whatsoever; the Bush administration does maintain a public relations policy in the form of foreign policy pronouncements, but now that the two goals (bolstering the administration's image and reaching a not-civil war resolution of the Iraq crisis) have become irreconcilably opposed, we face the prospect of two and a half more years of government by incompetent dullards who are determined to let the world go to hell for the sake of their own pride. Over to Glenn Reynolds for why this is Bill Keller's fault.