Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. . . . Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them — or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy.

-- LEE IACOCCA

The U.S. repression of Sunnis has allowed Shiites and Kurds to avoid compromise. The Sunnis in Parliament have demanded that the excesses of de-Baathification be reversed (thousands of Sunnis have been fired from jobs just because they belonged to the Baath Party). They have been rebuffed. Sunnis rejected the formation of a Shiite super-province in the south. Shiites nevertheless pushed it through Parliament. The Kurdish leadership has also dismissed Sunni objections to their plans to annex the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which has a significant Arab population.

The key to preventing an intensified civil war is U.S. withdrawal from the equation so as to force the parties to an accommodation. Therefore, the United States should announce its intention to withdraw its military forces from Iraq, which will bring Sunnis to the negotiating table and put pressure on Kurds and Shiites to seek a compromise with them.

-- JUAN COLE

Today, John McCain did the full Cheney. In his speech at the Virginia Military Institute in which he laid out his extensive support for the war in Iraq, the Arizona senator matched the vice president's scorn for his political opponents. McCain said Democrats who oppose the president's plans for Iraq are not just wrong on the facts but are seeking "advantage in the next election" and "the temporary favor of the latest public opinion poll." . . .

What's new here is obviously not McCain's unhedged support for the war. He's talked about that at length. What makes this speech different is the full-force, no-caveats attack on his opponents. It went beyond attacking policy inconsistencies—such as the fact that Democrats voted to confirm Gen. David Petraeus as Iraqi commander but against his plan for action—or raising questions about how opponents of the war would deal with the chaos following an American withdrawal. It repeatedly questioned not just their views but their motives.

-- JOHN DICKERSON

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda - which is very different from simply being people of faith - is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It's also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state." And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.

-- PAUL KRUGMAN

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years. . . . The leading culprit appears to be President Bush's enormously influential political adviser Karl Rove, who reportedly used his Republican National Committee-provided Blackberry and e-mail accounts for most of his electronic communication.

-- DAN FROOMKIN

Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats".

. . . Email makes it easy for stupid people to send stupid emails to public figures. If they can't handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work.

-- MARKOS

Well, that's it then. Tony Blair finally revealed for who he truly is -- a white, middle class Little Englander who has never struggled for a damn thing in his entire life and is entirely convinced that only people from his exact demographic should be allowed to lead the great unwashed into a bright future where the underclass will worship at the altar of Little Englandness.

-- CERNIG

Shaped like a female condom and worn internally, its hollow interior is lined with 25 razor-sharp teeth, which fasten on to an attacker's penis if he attempts penetration.

-- DANGER ROOM

Ron Geren, an actor in Los Angeles, commutes to auditions and jobs throughout Southern California in a sleek black Mazda MX-5 Miata convertible. But for a recent date with a woman, he rented a Cadillac Escalade because he was so used to friends saying his Miata is "gay." . . .

Meghan Daum, an op-ed contributor to The Los Angeles Times, wrote about a promising first date with a man that never led to a second one because, she later learned, the guy saw that she drove a Subaru Outback station wagon and concluded she must be a lesbian.

And when Joe LaMuraglia, the founder of Gaywheels.com, an informational site modeled on the likes of Autoweb.com, told his partner he wanted to buy a Mini Cooper convertible, the boyfriend joked that he would not be seen in it because the couple "would look like such a gay cliché."

-- ALEX WILLIAMS

Cartoon by Tom Toles/Enterprise Press Syndicate