Well, according to Michael Moore — following on the heels of such foreign policy and engineering luminaries as Rosie O’Donnell, Charlie Sheen, and Howard Dean — it might have been. And at the very least, additional (read: non-Republican-tainted) inquiries need be conducted to get to the bottom of this troubling mystery. Of course, in Moore’s defense (and in his favor), an administration that so pointedly ignores a national health care

In a particularly strained bit of analogizing, Andrew Sullivan compares the preconditions for democracy in Iraq with the current crisis in Gaza in order to argue that the neocon agenda is trapped by its own internal inconsistencies — and that the best way forward is for the US to leave Iraq: [The unrealistic conviction that they could ever “impose” democracy on Iraq] is surely the self-contradiction at the heart of

Jeralyn Merritt, on the Nifong disbarment: Guilt sells in America, Innocence doesn’t. The Duke case is an exception in that for once the media and the public are focusing on innocence and wrongful prosecutions. We need to apply what we’ve learned from the Duke/Nifong case and make sure there is an Innocence Commission in every state. Jeralyn is largely correct; but what we shouldn’t forget is that there were those

In the comments to this post, Topsecretk9 shares an excerpt from a 1992 Atlantic Monthly piece, “Tales From the Bazaar: As individuals, few American diplomats have been as anonymous as the members of the group known as Arabists,” in which the trajectory of the term “Arabist” itself is discussed, and in which the venerable Joseph Wilson makes a notable appearance. I’ll share several excerpts that I found particularly interesting: In