Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

The Pink Stinger looks like a tampon, but look out! More here.

This, I am convinced, is how future generations will remember George W. Bush: as the president who abandoned our traditional concepts of justice and human rights, choosing instead a program of state-sponsored kidnapping, arbitrary detention and abusive interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding."

We will remember him for the Iraq war, of course. But I hope and believe we will give at least as much weight to his erosion of our nation's fundamental values and basic character.

-- EUGENE ROBINSON

Sometimes you just want to grab one of the Bushites by the shoulders, shake them and ask, "do you even know what planet you're on?"

The latest to make me want to just bang my head repeatedly against my desk is Condi. Last Friday she asked an AP reporter to consider how much worse off we were before the Bush administration came to "help us."

"Six years ago . . . it wasn't a very nice world. Iraq was a mess, Iran was defying the world, North Korea was defying the world, Israel and the Palestinians had given up on peace. That was the world. A worse world? I think so."

Can anyone find anything in this quote that does not certify Ms. Rice for immediate looney bin residency?

-- LaPOPESSA

Madeleine Albright just walked right in to one of my pet peeves, calling for the United States to adhere to a moderate (i.e., neither isolationist nor imperial) foreign policy, and then sets it up with the old "consider Harry Truman." Frankly, I think people should consider spending less time considering Harry Truman.

If there's some very specific thing Truman did that you want to do again, that's great, but overwhelmingly the only point Truman-invokers are making is that they want a foreign policy that's not too hot and also not too cold. This is nice, of course, and Goldilocks agrees, but it's really not an especially deep point or one that carries a ton of analytic bite.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

The Puritans are back and who more worthy to lead them than Cotton Mather and John Hathorne (now known as James Dobson and Bill O’Reilly) successful witch hunters of the 17th century whose successes were hanged and in one case, pressed to death.

-- CHRISTOPHER R. BRAUCHLI

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspapers or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you’re all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year olds about whether you’re right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you’ve been there, you don’t know a god damn thing about it. If you haven’t been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

-- AN ANGRY SOLDIER

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S.'s Pakistan policy can be summed up in two words: Pervez Musharraf. But within the U.S. intelligence community, and in Pakistan, there's a growing belief that the U.S.-friendly military dictator's days are drawing to a close -- and possibly within the next few months. It may be time for the U.S. to face what it's long feared in the nuclear state: the prospect of chaos, rising Islamism or anti-Americanism that follows Musharraf.

-- SPENCER ACKERMAN

Flush from another record-breaking Afghan opium crop in 2006, heroin dealers seem to have devised a new concoction expressly for the youth market, Cheese.

The combination includes 2%-8% of black tar heroin mixed with diphenhydramine, the antihistamine (and drowse-inducer) in Benedryl and Tylenol PM. CNN is running with the story today, noting that 17 teens have died from the double-downer-whammy since 2005 in the Dallas area.

Cheese reportedly retails for $2 a hit (one-tenth of a gram) or $10 a gram. Doesn't this look like a fire sale among inexperienced heroin dealers? I don't imagine that real junkies could tolerate a 2% level of drug in their cut, so it looks like adult dealers are offloading product to high school kids to play with, who are selling it for next to nothing.

-- SHAMANIC

Retired General Charles Wald just came out, strongly, against bombing the sun.

Whew.

-- EZRA KLEIN

Police blame a woman named Butts for stealing toilet paper from a central Iowa courthouse, and while they’re chuckling, the theft charge could put her in prison.

"She’s facing potentially three years of incarceration for three rolls of toilet paper [because she has prior theft convictions]," Chief Lon Walker said, stifling a laugh. . . . "See, I can’t say it with a straight face."

-- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS