Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

A girl stands in front of her Baghdad home, destroyed in U.S. raid.

I could hear the tears she was trying to stifle on my end of the phone. I had nothing to say but we will meet someday, not so sure of course, but I had to say something. My friend is one of those people, to whom the idea of leaving has always been out of the question. Despite the fact that her life was miraculously spared while giving birth to her firstborn under the hardest of times and the fact that she’s been on the receiving end of nonstop sectarian remarks at her workplace and the fact that her husband managed to escape detention, she was so resolved to live the rest of her life in Iraq. The last straw was the attempt on her dad’s life, only then she realized this is no longer home and it was about time to leave.

-- CHIKITITA

Contractors who have worked in Iraq are returning home with the same kinds of combat-related mental health problems that afflict United States military personnel, according to contractors, industry officials and mental health experts.

But, they say, the private workers are largely left on their own to find care, and their problems often go ignored or are inadequately treated.

-- JAMES RISEN

U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.

A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards' base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.

-- GLENN KESSLER

This exercise in justification by faith posits a visionary President with the courage to ignore temporary bad news. By this light, Bush's habit of declaring A to be B—for example, claiming that the surge reflects the public's desire for a change in war policy, or interpreting increased violence in Iraq as a token of the enemy’s frustration with American success—becomes a sign of clarity and resolve, not delusional thinking. When everything is turning to ashes, take the long view. Last December, Senator Richard Durbin, of Illinois, described a meeting at the White House in which Bush discussed Harry S. Truman and the foreign policy of the early Cold War—initially unpopular, ultimately vindicated by history. According to Durbin, Bush implied that he will be similarly remembered.

-- GEORGE PACKER

The percentage of Republican age 55 and older grew from 28 percent in 1997 to 41 percent now, while the number of 18- to 37-year-olds dropped from 25 percent to 17 percent.

-- JON PONDER

We enveloped our President in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected—indeed those who did not believe he had been elected—willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

-- KEITH OLBERMANN

I understand the impulse to treat politics as a bloodsport, but even those who prefer that mode should really limit their attacks to the combatants. Today's story about the arrest of Al Gore III provides a case in point . . .

I know that some bloggers are having fun with this, and I don't mean to be too critical of my friends, but it's at the same level as the attacks on Jenna and Barbara Bush. We may dislike Al Gore's policies and sanctimony, but that shouldn't apply to his son. His misfortunes tell us nothing about his father's policy or sanctimony, and as an adult, Al III answers for himself. Attacking Gore through his son amounts to a cheap shot.

-- ED MORRISSEY

For someone who lived through and reported on the Watergate years, [John] Dean's resurrection is a little hard to take. It’s like listening to sermons from a whore.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Does it bother anyone that--at a time when Pakistan's Interior Ministry is raising concerns about the Taliban taking over significant chunks of Pakistan, the father of Pakistan's nuke program is on the loose?

. . . It just seems to me that the conjunction of these two events--Al Qaeda's state ally taking over Pakistan at the same time as Pakistan's chief nuclear proliferator goes free--that would raise the concerns of the same people who brought us to war against Iraq because of Saddam's phantom nukes and phantom ties to Al Qaeda.

But apparently Dick Cheney (and the non-experts he's got in charge of our Pakistan policy) has it all under control, and we don't have to worry about countries that could give Al Qaeda nukes anymore. Gosh, that's a relief.

-- EMPTYWHEEL

Radio Voice of Shariat has been launched again by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. Locals and authorities have accepted that they started broadcasting in the southern provinces. Radio Voice of Shariat has been heard in the provinces of Paktia, Paktika and Khost.

-- AFGHAN LORD

It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations, the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have had such a successful Supreme Court term. Society’s have-nots were not the only losers. The basic ideals of American justice lost as well.

-- THE NEW YORK TIMES

David Broder. The man is an icon. He's becoming a new kind of icon. An icon representing all that is wrong with the culture inside the Beltway. David Broder surveys the current political and cultural landscape within the country and pronounces that is it THE PEOPLE that are out of touch.

-- BOOMAN

Probably the most obvious thing about America is the most overlooked: That it aspires to be the most free nation on earth (and in its early years was) does not contradict the fact that is also is most concerned with its morality and its virtues -- with the principles that make a patriot as well as a good citizen. The Europeans think we're prudes or Nazis or both. Yet the two tendencies depend on each other: A free people has to be vigilant of its virtues; slaves never do.

-- CALLIMACHUS

Photograph by Wissam Al-Okaili/AFP-Getty