Is anyone surprised that the Iraq War turned out the way that it did for the Iraqis? (We knew the Republicans would Fuck up the war; what we couldn’t imagine was the grand scale on which they were able to fuck up the peace. Now we know. It’s like Katrina. Except a lot worse.)

Government small enough to drown in a bathtub? Check.

Ownership society, meaning that if you’ve got a gun, you own whatever you’ve got or can take? Check.

WaPo:

In a Land Without Order, Punishment Is Power
A year or so ago, just one poster adorned Sheik Adnan Aidani’s wall. It was a portrait of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s faded but still preeminent cleric, whose stern visage glared down on visitors to the tribal sheik’s house along a forest of date palms in the southern Iraqi countryside. Today, there are perhaps a dozen posters with new faces. The names blur, but together they represent the power, beyond appeal, of men with guns.

Aidani smiled, a little sheepishly, as he surveyed the posters. Gifts, he called them, the kind you don’t return.

“Everyone’s on his own,” he explained. “These days, life is like a jungle. A rabbit doesn’t survive in a jungle. Only a lion does.”

“Everyone’s on his own.” There you go. Republican social engineering at its sociopathic finest.

And did you notice what happened to social relations?  Read more 

As we’ve been saying. Now the Dems are saying it, in a close race in Ohio. New York Times:

[Mary Jo] Kilroy is using the Foley scandal to try to systematically undercut Ms. [Deborah] Pryce [R-Friend (Beard?) of Mark] with a big component of the Republican base here, Christian conservatives, when Republicans already worried that those voters would stay home on Election Day. “Deborah Pryce’s friend Mark Foley is caught using his position to take advantage of 16-year-old pages,” an announcer says in advertisements the Kilroy campaign has placed on Christian radio stations.

Is it working?  Read more 

Finally, somebody picks up on this. ABC:

[This] should be the key bit of learning from this entire tawdry affair. The principals involved — Foley and Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., the speaker of the House — offer some key lessons about abuse of power and the unwillingness of leaders to deal with that abuse.

Interestingly, the author, Bob Rosner, puts the story in the context of workplace harassment:  Read more