Take er easy, dude

McCain's anger: a strategy! -- Kaus. Clearly, we Americans are reaping the whirlwind. Back in your youtube clip, when McCain was a reasonable man, willing to acknowledge facts on the ground, he also had no shot at landing the nomination. We like him more the crazier he gets! His Obama=Hamas slur got him an invite to speak to the NRA, which hates him, so...
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McCain forgetting how the hostage release went is conventional wisdom. It's a little bit crazy to talk about it so fast, though! Old Man McCain seems to be taking shit for shinola here, suggesting that the 1979 hostages were released for weapons, then backtracking to explain that Carter and Christopher (not Carter and Brzeszinski?) got them released. The hostages relased for arms came later and were captured by Hezbollah or affiliated groups in Lebanon. Phew! Isn't the conventional wisdom so much easier! Also, dude, I edited that Iran-Contra wiki page a little bit. It's not a good resource. It goes like this: "These guys did bad things. Then they lied about it. Fawn Hall. Imperialism. Oliver North is a fag." for like 7 meg of text...no timeline, no clear causation.

Bringing me to a point of departure for a future screed: can we at this late date foreswear Wikipedia?
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McCain at the NRA:

This is a unique style to say the least. JB starts with a patronly/patronizing soft-pedal voice, like the old folks in the Medicare part D ads, mentions Israel, and suddenly hits the chorus, like in "Say a Little Prayer for You!", screams, stumbles, blood-pressure recedes, and he's back in premature catatonia. Clearly, the strain of being an enlightened elder and a cranky elder at once is exhausting. We here at Dark Steer wish the Senator the best of health for the coming election. Which is six months away.
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Two things this week give us hope here at Dark Steer: one is the third Democrat victory in a special election to the House this year. Two is the passage of a passel of war bills. The former augurs ill for the opposition party this November; the MS-1 district was like a R+10 PVI. There are 25 seats up in November with a R+10 PVI or lower; those are landslide numbers. The war bills' passing, however, is mindbending. Republicans in Congress have finally grown weary of stonewalling every single Congressional attempt to attach some reins to the president's wehrmacht; the plan now is clearly of the "give 'em enough rope" variety. And if a case could be made for indefinitely-funded, indefinitely-long war in Iraq, well, maybe then the Democrats' "abort the troops" policy would become an issue in November. Except one: the GOP can't even get all its members in line for something as simple as abstention; two: solid majorities have wanted the war over within a year since summer 2005.
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Recent visits to Israel by Rice and Bush bode well for my Peace-By-June prediction, right? Even the President's bizarre ranting about "appeasers" backs me up! How, you ask? The only reason to say something that far off the irrelevance chart, something that the speaker has no intention of backing up, is to flak for the opposite position ! Short: Bush's tough talk is cover for the back-channel negotiations with Syria. Paradoxathon! The harder he talks, the closer the negotiations are to peace! It's like Kissinger-Nixon's mad-bomber strategy: in theory, when a nuclear power bout to act the fool, everyone else calms down.

One more time: by the end of the first week of June, Israel will return large portions of the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a non-aggression pact. Only the President can screw this up now, by you know, asking for some extra goodies, like disarming Hezbollah, or paving the Anbar desert...

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ds