++ Dick and Liz Cheney attacked President Obama for not caring about terrorism today in the Wall Street Journal. Bless her heart, Jennifer Rubin let the cat out of the bag at the end of her column saying that the father and daughter team was shilling for their new front group Alliance for a Strong America. Their op-ed read like Dinesh D'Souza.
++The GOP hellbent on saving their last monument wants Ahmed Abu Khattala sent to Gitmo. The DOJ says No way, Jose.
++The GOP wonders why getting Abu Khattala so long. The Daily Beast has an article about why the Delta Force took its time. They were rehearsing at Fort Bragg on a fortification like the man's home and planned the operation for a year. The go-ahead was held up until the FBI and the DOJ felt they had gathering sufficient evidence to try Khattala in a court of law.
++The Center for American Progress wants the Obama Administration to bomb Iraq as a counter-terrorism measure. General Petraeus doesn't like the idea because that would make us a Shiite Air Force. But remember his surge troops are the ones now fighting Baghdad.
++Anne Marie Slaughter, who used to be a member of the Obama Administration, writes an op-ed in today's New York Times advocating American actions in both Syria and Iraq and believes that such actions are in line with the UN General Charter and if we can't get approval then we should act and get approval later. This is the problem "humanitarian interventionists" have. They run up against the same problems as the neo-cons.
++Andrew Sullivan finds more about the Iraqi neo-cons hawks he doesn't like. His article in The Dish on the neo-Straussian strains of Wolfowitz and Billy Kristol is worth reading.
++Rand Paul doesn't quite know what to say because he thinks President Obama needs congressional approval to take any actions. Senators Graham and Ayotte do not.
++None of this matters because Sweeney Todd declared the Obama Presidency dead today on Morning Joe. He later told Matt Drudge that he really never became distant from the President.
++President Obama's foreign policy approval fell to 41% but like anything Obama polls show that the majority of Americans support his ideas on Iraq over Senator McCain's.
++Rachel Maddow did an excellent segment last night on the loony-tune Iraqi war boosters coming back in the media and how the right ignored the one piece of news about Benghazi that they should have cheered about--the capture of Abu Khattala. Instead Drudge has a story about meat and chicken prices going up.
++Dana Millbank and Politico got into a pissing war over Dana's excellent op-ed on the Heritage Foundation's bizarre Benghazi program which had all the conspiracy crowd there.
++Libya said today that the operation to capture Abu Khattala violated their sovereignty.
++David Ignatius calls for a peace conference to re-draw the map of the Middle East. Basically, the Sykes-Picot agreement is defunct.
++With the architects of the Iraq war back in the news,I wish reporters would ask them about their own actions. For example, how did Wolfowitz so grossly underestimate the cost of the war--$86 billion to $2-4 Trillion. That's not just a rounding error. Or Paul Bremmer--why did he dissolve the Iraq army and aren't they the ones fighting Baghdad now? Or General Petraeus--aren't the members of the Sunni Awakening allies of ISIS now? Or Dick Cheney--Didn't our invasion bring in Al Qaeda to fight in Iraq when it had never been there before? Instead,reporters might dance around issues of the Status of Force Agreements and who sign the withdrawal agreements but the rest of the issues remain buried.
++The only one that I saw really get beat up was John Bolton and that was on Fox News and it was by libertarians who didn't know what they were talking about.
++At least John Bolton went back to how bad Saddam Hussein was. But there is a big question: When the United States was threatening war and wanted Saddam to go, why did we not take him up on his offer?--He would go as long as he could keep $1billion. In retrospect, that was a great deal.
++The summer is turning into another BP summer. Remember the oil spill in the Gulf and the whole summer news converge about whether Obama was doing enough. This Iraq situation feels the same way. Getting Bergdahl back--bad. Capturing Abu Khattala--bad. Iraq conflict--really bad.
++Remember shutting down the government over Obamacare? Well now, the Republicans in the Senate want to shut down the government in September over the debt ceiling because of the new EPA carbon emissions regulations. So crash the world economy because regulations will take place in a year. Good move. At least a new Depression will cut greenhouse gases, since the factories will shut down.
++Since Willard Romney was so clairvoyant on a number of issues. Willard said we just a tad away from losing the gains in freedom we earned over all the years of fighting. Whose "we" white man since no Romney has ever fought for the country. Since Willard is the man, the GOP are now counting him as a Presidential candidate again. Time to get Steve Benen out of mothballs at the Rachel Maddow Show and back on the Romney beat.
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