Frank Rich shares his thoughts on McCain and his 'Stroll in the market'.

Not only was a 'Dukakis in the tank' moment for McCain, it also marks a point where the other Republican presidential hopefuls will have to pull back on the 'Stay the course' insanity...

It can’t be lost on those dwindling die-hards, particularly those on the 2008 ballot, that if defending the indefensible can reduce even a politician of Mr. McCain’s heroic stature to that of Dukakis-in-the-tank, they have nowhere to go but down. They’ll cut and run soon enough. For starters, just watch as Mr. McCain’s G.O.P. presidential rivals add more caveats to their support for the administration’s Iraq policy. Already, in a Tuesday interview on “Good Morning America,” Mitt Romney inched toward concrete “timetables and milestones” for Iraq, with the nonsensical proviso they shouldn’t be published “for the enemy.”

As if to confirm we’re in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn’t even emerge for the Washington Nationals’ ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.

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Flying the un-friendly skies of Iraq

Chris Floyd at Empire Berlesque notes that at one time "No-Fly Zones" meant American dominance of the skies of Iraq. It is a bitter Irony that now the term means areas in which American aircraft must not fly due to the high probability of loss to the Iraqis.

...now the phrase is the sad and bloodsoaked emblem of a wretched defeat, a pointless and unnecessary gutting of American power. It now denotes those areas where American aircraft are forbidden to fly, lest they be shot down by Iraqis -- the precise opposite of the No-Fly Zones of yore.

A full four years into the war, and just shy of that mark since "Mission Accomplished" was proclaimed, the occupying power has been forced to deny its own pilots access to larger and larger swathes of Iraqi airspace -- even as the use of helicopters for troop transport and supply is growing, due to the increasingly unsafe conditions on the ground. It is the Iraqis who are now imposing "No-Fly Zones" on the "world's only superpower."

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Wesley Clark - Bush had planned to rape 7 countries in 5 years.

From DownWithTyranny!

My friend David hipped me to an interview Amy Goodman did with Wes Clark at Democracy Now on Friday. It's a lot more ambitious than my 6 countries in 2 years or those tourists' I met in Agra 15 in 14 days. Turns out the Bush Regime had some well-laid out, at least to look at-- plans to attack 7 countries in 5 years. I expect that one day the transcript of Clark's interview will be entered into evidence at a War Crimes Tribunal for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et. al.

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