Truscott IV is of the Vietnam-disillusionment generation, and as much as I respect Petraeus' role in Iraq, Truscott's critique is valid: Iraq was not a 'big war'. It may be the only war that generals of the Petraeus generation got, but it's closer to the Phillipine Insurrection than to WWII.

And Truscott's snark regarding Petraeus' sartorial efforts aside, his broader point hits the mark. We don't seem to know how to win wars.

Since WWII we've had, leaving out the various little police actions and UN support commitments of varying success: one bloody three-year stalemate pitting the demobilized remnant of our WWII force against the poorly-equipped but very experienced Chinese and their Korean proxies, one ten-year failure in Vietnam, a brisk if incomplete victory in Kuwait in which Bush 41 (whatever else you might think of him) made the brass do their jobs, and now the inconclusive decade in Iraq in which the less experienced Bush 43 was sold a penny-wise-and-pound-foolish strategy by Rumsfeld and the brass. Afghanistan, that lawfare-hobbled action somewhere between a war and a police action, is headed for a denouement less embarrassing than Vietnam only because the casualty list is so much shorter.

The generals and colonels that took our forces into combat in WWII weren't, overall, any better than those that took our forces into Iraq in 2003. The difference was that the failures were purged far more quickly.

The idea that you can sit on a failed strategy for three years, taking relatively small numbers of casualties but spending huge sums of money and achieving none of your goals, bespeaks not just poor generalship but weak civilian leadership as well. Iraq was a war of choice, not a war of necessity, and in such a situation when it costs you $2M to keep one pair of boots on the ground in-theater for a year, it's hard to see any outcome that justifies a ten-year involvement.

I wish this weren't all looking like such a gigantic conspiracy. I don't want to be a goofball conspiracy theorist.

But...

The socialist-pests banked their future on hanging a global vig on CO2. They and their rent-seeker buddies knew they could skim hundreds of billions off that eventually, they just had to sell the climate scare to get people to grab their ankles willingly.

That effort has stalled, with carbon markets collapsing everywhere; the Australian carbon tax, pushed through over near-universal opposition (and hopefully soon to lead to the demise of the ALP as a national institution, for having put themselves so cravenly in the Greens' pocket) may have been the last charge over the parapet.

So now that CO2 taxation isn't looking like the giant pot of money (and lever of control) they'd planned for, they've found themselves the next target.

This one gores (no pun intended) a few oxen that perhaps they'd have preferred to spare - watch them try to exempt public-retiree investment funds like CalPERS - but otherwise it smells like the same old bunch pushing the same old thing.

So the question is, in states with voter-ID requirements, will 10% of the Democrat vote in various urban precincts simply vanish come next election?

What's wrong here of course is that this individual was not DEPORTED AND KEPT OUT before his rap sheet got past half a page.

I'm afraid we're left to conclude that Ms Giles was the brains - or at least the judgment - behind the ACORN effort.

I still believe that had the national press quoted from a dozen random pages of 'Dreams from My Father' before the last election Obama would have gotten 35%. He would have gone down like McGovern.

Most Americans never picked up the book. All they knew about it was what Oprah told them.

You're misinterpreting what she said during her confirmation hearing.

She really said "I understand what the court majority found". Not that she agreed with it, or anything so honest as that.

The best situation would be to get multiple copies, even multiple partial copies, to allow for better verification of the accuracy and completeness of the content.

That might mean paying out multiple rewards, or multiple partial rewards.