Soon Salon will have our Twitter streams alongside our blogs; until then, I thought I'd try this blogging short cut. If you hate it, let me know. But don't be too cruel: I'm on vacation! Give a girl a break!

I just want to say one extra thing: It's got to be great to be Dede Scozzafaza today. She gives me hope that moderate Republicans will either come to their senses and take their party back, or more likely, become Democrats.

Just because I love you all, I'll take five extra minutes and put my Twitter stream in chronological order. Oh, and follow me in real time @joanwalsh.

Couldn't do Hardball tonight because I'm on vacation, but I'll watch election results with...Anne Lamott! Who's jealous? We'll Tweet.. I don't think Anne Lamott does Twitter but...she will tonight! If you can't tune in, here's what we're going to say: If the GOP sweeps, it's meaningless; if Dems do well, it's realignment, baby! RT @TonyFratto: I didn't make @marcambinder's election night Twitter list, so I'll tweet Ugly Betty updates/Tweeting Sadie's bowel movements Eugene Robinson: Lieberman is the Senator from Aetna; nice! Awww, @maddow wants to talk to lying Dick Armey about "adult discipline;" I'd say adult diapers are more relevant (OK, that was a cheap shot. Sorry. I'm on vacation.) I promised to Tweet with Anne Lamott, but our dogs are going wild. Plus, nothing good to Tweet about Anne Lamott and I think @harrislacewell looks beautiful and is super smart on this difficult night with @maddow @harrislacewell, I know you're right, but NY23 is pretty sweet. Another loss for Sarah Palin. I didn't expect it.about 14 hours ago from web Annie just left, I didn't succeed in getting her on Twitter, but we both felt like NY23 was the big story tonight. Pollyannas? Doug Hoffman concedes, and pledges to work with Bill Owens to help the district...once he finds it Pat Buchanan, on Hardball rerun, keeps insisting Crist will have a problem on gay issues in FL. What is he referring to?

See you Monday -- unless there's really big news, like Sarah Palin quits whatever she's currently doing, again.

Good for Scozzafava. The loyal Republican assemblywoman was rewarded by conservative carpetbaggers like the jobless Sarah Palin, who found her moderate, pro-choice, Rockefeller Republican views distasteful, with a well-funded campaign against her. Seeing her funding dry up and her support wither, Scozzafava faced reality and withdrew from the race -- but quickly endorsed Democrat Owens. Here's part of her statement:

In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first.

Hoffman remains the favorite, but this very interesting piece in today's Albany Times-Union, written before Scozzafava endorsed Owens, offered a few reasons not to write off the Democrat. For one thing, Army Secretary John McHugh, who held the seat, was a moderate like Scozzafava; for another, the district voted for Obama. Scozzafava is just one more Republican woman who's seen her party reject her; Palin and her right-wing friends seem determined to make sure the GOP is small enough to hold its 2012 convention in the Wasilla Sports Complex.

On that note, I'm taking a few days off, and won't blog again until next week -- although an Owens upset might change my mind. Happy November!

He had a lot to complain about, and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has had enough. In Friday's Washington Post he called Obama a whiner:

Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad -- everything but swine flu.

Wow, I look at that list and I think those are all things we should all blame Bush for, except swine flu. But what Krauthammer is really trying to do is elaborate on the Dick Cheney slur from last week: That Obama is "dithering" on Afghanistan, and he's "afraid" to make a decision.

Again, coming from the neocon Iraq war boosters who countenanced the abandonment of the Afghan war to fight a pointless war in Iraq, the criticism is galling. And the idea that the president may have been "dithering" when he went to visit the war dead at Dover Air Force Base this week is offensive. Obama knows what he has to do this week, and it's a good thing he took the time to let the mortal implications of his decisions sink in.

Even worse than Krauthammer's column today, though, was David Brooks in the New York Times. Partly it's because Brooks likes to pretend to be open-minded and reasonable, while spouting neocon talking points, and occasionally liberals get pulled in by him. But today was trademark lazy ideological Brooks. As Glenn Greenwald notes, unbelievably he bragged about "doing what journalists are supposed to do" -- which he defined as talking to a handful of anonymous pro-war sources, who uniformly criticized Obama's inaction to date on McCrystal's troop request.

That's some brave shit. Not quite David Rohde brave, but hey, he made the calls! If it was unanimous, that means he didn't call retired Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from a civilian post in Afghanistan this week because he said we can't win, and our presense is only fueling the insurgency. Hoh told the Washington Post's Karen de Young he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes "there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," adding: "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."

That question of toughness, macho, manhood, always comes up when we discuss what it would mean for Obama to get realistic about his two wars and get really serious about winding them down. David Brooks' worst Obama slur in his Friday column was the quietly outrageous, ad hominem, Peggy Noonan-ish revelation that his unanimous pro-war sources don't question Obama's smarts or understanding: "Their first concerns are about Obama the man." Oooooh. And here's how Brooks defines manhood: "tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion."

Brooks might protest that he meant "man" as a stand-in for "person," but it's hard to imagine him writing that sentence about President Hillary Clinton and saying, "Their first concerns are about Clinton the woman." Man equals warrior, and like Maureen Dowd before him, another Times columnist seems to be questioning Obama's manhood.

And yet I'm going to give Krauthammer one point: We're awfully close to a deadline for a big Obama decision on Afghanistan, especially since the president took one crack at the Bush-Cheney mess with a "comprehensive" new policy last March. Sure, after seven years of GOP neglect, it's a lot to expect an Obama plan to turn things around in seven months. Still, he committed himself to a new path in Afghanistan; so far there's little to show for it; his top commander in the country is publicly demanding more troops; it's time for him to lead. I am personally hoping he leads us out of the war, so I'm a little more patient than neocons who just want him to jump on McChrystal's recommendations. But even I have limits to my patience.

Next year we'll have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were. Increasingly, we know we're propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Hamid Karzai's brother is on the CIA's payroll. Today talks between Karzai and presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah broke down, and while it's going to be hard to trust next week's runoff election, it's looming as crucial. I don't think Obama can or should be expected to launch a brand-new strategy with so much uncertainty this week, but I'm hoping he's listening to the folks preaching counterterrorism, and not McChrystal's version of counterinsurgency, which seems a blueprint for a Soviet-style quagmire and defeat. Most important, I hope he's not listening to Krauthammer or Brooks, because despite their translating Cheney's dithering slur into other big words, they'll never applaud decisiveness unless it endorses their war-without-end world view.

I had a nagging question about whether I should write about the book again, though, and it wasn't laziness; it's that most everything I found remarkable in the second half of the book closely matched my first two blog posts. But that's a story in itself. "The Clinton Tapes" makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media -- from the New York Times' lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free "opinion" journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn't shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever -- and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000.

But I did find a nugget from the second half of the book that perfectly captures the whole poisonous, deluded, clubby Beltway mentality of the mainstream media circa 2000. It stars the late Tim Russert.

Branch recounts being the lone Clinton defender on one of the last "Meet the Press" shows of Clinton's term, when all the other guests were still obsessed with the president's sex life. It was bad enough on camera, but during commercial breaks Russert and his friends gossiped about alleged new Clinton girlfriends and sang the 2000 one-hit wonder "Who let the dogs out?" tapping their pencil along to the woof-woof chorus. (I don't believe in hell, but I think Russert spent some time in a way station in Purgatory being grilled on his poor political judgment during the Clinton-Gore years, before being welcomed to heaven by a God more forgiving than the Beltway mediocrities who sat in judgment on Clinton.)

It's always seemed to me no accident that the mainstream media began to lose its market share, its revenues and its respect in those years, when they slighted an embattled president's worthy if controversial initiatives on Middle East peace, Bosnia, welfare reform, making work pay and building a U.S. social democracy, in favor of gossip about his character, his marriage, his taste in women and even the distinguishing characteristics of the presidential penis.

Against this historical backdrop of childish media snickering, the sharp, accomplished Branch comes off as a naif and even a rube in some of his stories, consistently flummoxed by the enmity among Washington media players, some of them his friends, as they savaged Clinton beyond proportion. He writes, bewildered, about a spate of vicious headlines at the end of 1996: The Times' Abe Rosenthal accused the Clintons of "giving militant Islam its first beachhead in Bosnia," while Maureen Dowd dubbed Clinton the trivia-obsessed "President Pothole" and the "Limbo President," sinking ever lower. For good measure she added: "We pretty much know the Clintons did something wrong in Whitewater," when in fact, 12 years later, we know no such thing. Wen Ho Lee at least got an apology from the Times; the Clintons are still waiting. (Clark Hoyt, is it too late to take that factual error up with Dowd?)

But it wasn't just the Times: Branch also lays out Washington Post embarrassments; an Op-Ed by Andrew Sullivan headlined "The Clintons: Not a Flicker of Moral Life"; a declaration by liberal book critic Jonathan Yardley -- a friend and neighbor of Branch's -- that he wouldn't vote for Clinton in 1996 because he was a "buffoon" with a monstrous fault "at the core of his being ... He is a man who does not believe in anything." One of my favorite sections of the book features Hillary Clinton sitting in her kitchen explaining why, no, thank you, she is never going to invite the vicious Sally Quinn into her house -- and why should she, given Quinn's multiple treacherous, class-based takedowns of the Clintons as neighbors, leaders, parents, Americans? (The scenes Branch catches of Hillary in the kitchen -- not baking cookies, but having a glass of wine, helping Chelsea with homework and savaging their enemies with intelligence are among my favorite in this book.) You find yourself wishing and hoping Branch could find some Washington pooh-bahs who'd realize they'd been played by the Republicans. Nope. None at all.

A few other things are painful. The Clinton-Gore fight much referenced in coverage of the book is hard to read; on some level, they were both right. I've had this argument with liberal anti-Clinton friends, reporters and pollsters, who say Gore was perceptibly politically hurt by anti-Clinton animus among independents. On the other hand, my gut always told me he'd lose if he couldn't run on the Clinton-Gore economic resurgence. I still think Gore could have found a lot of ways, humorous or angry, to distance himself from the president's mistakes -- and Clinton expected him to, and didn't care if he did. But choosing Joe Lieberman and running like an anti-Clinton change candidate was a huge error.

Clinton also had George W. Bush's number from the beginning -- that the snarly scion was mean, arrogant, incurious, devoted to budget-busting tax cuts and greater state secrecy. Clinton fumed at the way the GOP, abetted by the media, worked the refs when it came to "dirty politics" all throughout the 2000 campaign. If Gore or his surrogates brought up, say, Dick Cheney's überconservative past, or Bush's inexperience in foreign affairs, they'd be trashed as practicing "old politics" and "politics as usual" and the typical partisan gridlock that Bush was committed (falsely) to transcending. So genuine policy differences and scandalous omissions and commissions in both Republicans' backgrounds went mostly unexamined, because at the Republicans' behest, the media decided that to focus on such issues was just backward-looking and gauche and so … 1998.

It's painful to read those last months in 2000, as the Supreme Court makes Bush president, to Clinton's anger but not surprise, and Clinton cleans out his bookshelves. I do think Branch is a little easy on the self-pitying president when it comes to some of the pardons, including Marc Rich. But he reminds us how many anti-Clinton lies the media swallowed whole, in a great final orgy of anti-Clintonism, especially the vandal scandal that wasn't (Salon debunked it quickly).

I enjoyed the book, even though I think it got bogged down in its commitment to chronology, and depicting what Clinton talked about and thought was important. I'd have loved to read a book Branch organized by the topics he thought were most important, chronologically or not. We dip into too many topics -- Bosnia, Russia, terror, the economy, Clinton's relationships with global leaders, sometimes for no more than a sentence. It captures the sweep of what a president faces, but it was also, sometimes, tedious.

But I appreciated Branch's honestly about his friendship with Clinton, his struggles to balance being an uncritical sounding board with a friend wanting to give advice (and a political junkie wanting to influence history!). I found his explanation of his different roles endearing; others may find it distracting.

I really liked him for staying close to his original point: Clinton was a man Branch was cynical about, an old friend turned politician whom Branch came to like more upon reacquaintance, a political operator who turned out to have more passion and integrity than many journalists or authors or activists or others who believe they've stayed "clean." As someone who's criticized Bill Clinton often but who always comes back to a position of (even grudging) respect, I found integrity in Branch's full-throated defense of Clinton; it's so rare and maybe long overdue. I still think the book will need the next Taylor Branch to pore over it like a historian, not a partisan or a friend, and help us get more clarity on this talented, ambitious, well-meaning, flawed, persecuted, paranoid merely mortal man. The most compelling story Branch captures is the way the media let us down. 

Where do I begin? How does a man who spent much of his vice presidency hiding in a secret bunker get off accusing the president of being "afraid"? How does a guy who got five deferments from service in Vietnam, because he famously had "other priorities," call someone else a coward? (Still, Chickenhawk Cheney had no problem sending other people's children off to die in needless wars.) How does a guy who dropped the ball on the Afghan war, letting Osama bin Laden escape and the Taliban retrench, blame someone else for "dithering" on Afghanistan?

Now, as Obama is forced to dig out of another Bush-Cheney mess he inherited, and the former veep is savaging him again? The irony is that it's true that Obama approved a troop increase that had been requested during the Bush-Cheney administration, but as press secretary Robert Gibbs notes, that's because it "sat on desks in this White House, including the vice-president's, for more than eight months."

It's great to watch people step up to smack Cheney down. Retired Gen. Paul Eaton blasted back today, and I couldn't say it any better:

"The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11. "The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy 'experts' have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. … "No human endeavor can be as profound as sending a nation's youth to war. I am very happy to see serious men and women working hard to get it right."

Former GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander defended Obama too:

"I think President Obama is entitled to take sufficient time to decide what our long-term role ought to be in Afghanistan. Then I think he should come to Congress and say to the American people what that plan is and see if he can persuade us and all of the American people of the rightness of it because he needs to have support all the way through to the end of that mission, so I want him to take the time to get it right."

Maybe the tide is turning on Cheney, and even responsible Republicans are starting to realize he is one of the most unpopular figures in American history, whose administration will be remembered for its unwon wars and economic collapse. I think Cheney should take a break from speechifying, maybe spend more time at home with his family, frightening his grandchildren.

I’m sure the snub is causing Rusty to relive childhood traumas, and I feel a little sorry for him. It must be awful to be kicked to the curb by guys who used to admire you, and the deep pockets you brought to their bid. And Limbaugh sure got angry that his bid ran into choppy water. “This is not about the NFL, it's not about the St. Louis Rams, it's not about me. This is about the ongoing effort by the left in this country, wherever you find them, in the media, the Democrat Party, or wherever, to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative."

Limbaugh’s self-pity and paranoia is on red-alert again. The idea that prominent conservatives aren’t part of the American mainstream is ridiculous. But more important: Let’s be clear who’s denying Rush his chance to own an NFL team: the other rich guys who are trying to buy the team, who dropped him from their group at the first sign of trouble. It’s true Indianapolis  Colts owner Jim Irsay speculated that Rush’s team would have a hard time getting the required support of three-quarters of team owners, and that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell commented, “Divisive comments are not what the N.F.L. is all about,” but the Limbaugh group didn’t mount much of an effort to buy the team.

It’s certainly possible their bid would ultimately have been rejected. When he became an ESPN football commentator, Limbaugh thought it was a good idea to take a gratuitous racial slap at Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, arguing that he “hasn’t been that good from the get-go,” but “the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.” And while Limbaugh this week insists he’s "colorblind" and "treat[s] everyone equally," Media Matters assembled a list of two dozen other racially questionable Limbaugh remarks, from comparing the NFL to “a game between the Bloods and the Crips” to insisting Democrats won’t brook criticism of President Obama, “the little black man-child.” Of course, my favorite was when he said he was expected to “bend over, grab the ankles” for Obama because he’s black, since that let us explore Limbaugh’s strange anal obsession, which rivals (and sometimes overlaps with) his racial obsession. If NFL owners decided they didn’t want the baggage someone like Limbaugh carries, or the invidious garbage he peddles to gin up his ratings, they’d be within their rights.

But the funniest aspect of the collapse of Limbaugh’s bid is the reaction on the right. At “Big Hollywood,” John Ziegler was inconsolable. “Even in these times when the once unthinkable is becoming increasingly unremarkable, the current controversy over whether Rush Limbaugh is potentially worthy to be an NFL owner crosses over from the simply outrageous to the utterly infuriating. I strongly believe that it also represents a seminal moment in our cultural history as well as the sad state of free speech in this country.” Whoa! Like a lot of challenged thinkers, Ziegler seems to think Rush’s right to free speech also guarantees he’ll face no consequences for that speech. “I’m getting a lot of ‘boycott the NFL’ emails,” huffed the National Review’s Kathryn Lopez on Twitter this a.m. I’m sure the NFL is atwitter about that right now.

And a Red State diarist went so far over the top, I thought it was satire, but t-square has been on the site for four years and is easily moved to hysteria. In a blog post titled “Tonight … We are all Rush Limbaugh,” t-square told us … well, you just have to read a little:

Earlier this evening, as most of you now know, one of our own, Rush Hudson Limbaugh, while taking withering fire, crashed and burned. Tonight, Rush is no longer ‘just’ a radio personality. Tonight, Rush is no longer ‘just’ a NFL owner denied Tonight, Rush is us. And we are him. Tonight Rush became the metaphor for all of us… every man woman and child in this great nation of ours. The enemy of this great nation, the enemy of you and me, Rush’s enemy … those on the left, inside and outside of this nation abhor success … and when faced with it will destroy it … by any and all means possible.

It went on and on like that and ended with the famous anti-Nazism parable attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the communists …” I'm serious.

Let’s ignore the fact that if anyone ever "came for the communists," it would be Rush and the red-staters. The paranoia and self-pity would be funny, except it’s fueling an opposition to Obama that seems increasingly unhinged. Even as he denies it, Limbaugh is making himself the face of the Republican opposition, and today that face is puffy and tear-streaked and red with self-pitying rage. I can't wait to hear what he says on his show today. 

A few hours of reflection, and reading what the committee said about the award, and I could see its point and purpose. In recent years the Nobel Peace Prize has more often honored promise and encouraged progress than it marked concrete, permanent achievements in the realm of world peace. So the prize went to President Carter's ultimately unsuccessful 1978 Middle East peace drive; and to the same still uncompleted effort by Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in her jail cell, but the point was to support democracy in Burma (and 18 years later, she is still under house arrest).Thinking about the Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant "Peace Mothers" who won the award in 1976,  years before real peace accords, I suddenly saw Obama's win as strangely humble, and personal: One man trying to reverse the bloody tide of recent American history.

Obama's prize is a measure of how far the Bush administration pushed the United States, and the world, away from peace. So far away that Obama's small but fervent efforts in the opposite direction -- new diplomacy on Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia and North Korea; slow but steady withdrawal from Iraq and now a painful reappraisal of the increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan; a pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons; new initiatives to the Muslim world -- could win him this prize. But let's take that measure. Let's take in what that said about the way our country had become a source of aggression, belligerence and hostility, and never peace, in the last eight years. And in the midst of all of our partisan squabbling about health care and cap and trade and everything else -- and even as we acknowledge disappointment with Obama on state secrets, torture, Iraq and Afghanistan -- this should be a moment to reflect.

Of course all of Obama's encouraging moves are merely pledges and initiatives and discussions and promises. We are right to press for more. But they are pledges and initiatives and discussions and all kinds of slow but necessary efforts that weren't taking place at all for eight years under the Bush-Cheney regime.  So about mid-day on Friday I abandoned my head-shaking, and instead held my head high. I was impressed by Obama's own humble speech, in which he said flatly he didn't "deserve" the award, by the standards most of us hold for this crucial prize:

"Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations. "To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace. "But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build -- a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action -- a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century."

The right-wing's idiocy about Obama's Nobel win is no longer even interesting. So Rush Limbaugh sides with the Taliban now. Good. Both Glenn Beck and Mark Halperin suggested Obama should decline the award; now we know where Halperin stands, that's good too. The country will move on without them. I loved what French President Nicholas Sarkozy (not always an Obama fan) said about why the U.S. president really got the Nobel Peace Prize: "The award marks America's return to the heart of the people of the world." That deserves a prize.

I talked about this on "The Ed Show" today. Ed Schultz was vexed about a seemingly paradoxical Quinnipiac poll, showing only 29 percent of voters think the GOP is negotiating in good faith on healthcare, but 57 percent want the healthcare reform bill to be "bipartisan" nonetheless. I think the poll just says people are tired of gridlock and inaction, and they think bipartisanship is the way through it. Of course, that's because the media can't come out and say, unequivocally, that Republicans are refusing to cooperate with President Obama and the Democrats in any way. Witness, for example, the idiotic media equivocation over whether Obama wanted to establish "death panels," where the coverage was lame "some say" and "Obama supporters disagree" about a simple matter of fact.  There was a lot of heavy media breathing about Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee compromise, which was supposed to be the bill that brought along his GOP brethren; after months of debate and GOP amendments, of course no Republicans support Baucus' sorry bill.

But even Baucus now supports the opt-out option. My favorite argument for the opt-out comes from Paul Krugman, who grudgingly wrote Thursday that he could maybe go along with it,  because it would have the virtue of forcing red state Democrats and Republicans to tell their constituents they were putting insurance companies first, if they pushed to opt out.  As Alex Koppelman noted tonight, many red state Republicans might well go along with the public option and "forget" to opt out, much the way they railed against Obama's stimulus plan and then accepted the money it brought to their states.

The Charlie Rangel footnote: OK, I think Rangel is in trouble. He's done a lot of good for the poor, but he's obviously done some good for himself, too. Still, the GOP effort to remove him as House Ways and Means chairman on Wednesday was a partisan show trial. I went on CNN to argue this tonight, and found myself down 3-1 against CNN's Campbell Brown, Time's Mark Halperin and the Daily Beast's silly centrist John Avlon. Halperin even played the race card, and said if Rangel wasn't black (and a Democrat) the media would be calling for his head. I guess once the Congressional Black Caucus weighed in (Rangel was a founder) Halperin's claim couldn't be far behind, but pundits please: Congress positively stinks when it comes to policing its own, and when you look at how long Tom DeLay and all the Abramoff-tainted Republicans took to face reality, the clock has barely started ticking on Rangel. DeLay took months after he was frickin' indicted to resign.

For more on this, please read Joe Conason's terrific column about the media's double standard for Democrats, right now. Because if I write more about it, my head will explode before I go back to finishing Taylor Branch's "The Clinton Tapes," which tells the whole pathetic story.

Of course, Harvey Weinstein alone gave $28,500 to the Democratic Party last year (although not to Obama directly; he backed Hillary Clinton. So the feminist Clinton is also tied to Polanski!). Vogel then finds six Polanski defenders who contributed another $14,500. Yes, that adds up to $44,000, not $34,000, and I can’t figure out the logic behind the discrepancy.

I don’t defend Roman Polanski; Kate Harding’s brave Salon piece trashing the Polanski defenders was credited by the Wall Street Journal with turning the entire debate around last week. But if I didn’t have a real job, I could find far more Obama supporters who think Polanski should face the consequences of raping a minor in about a half hour. What were Vogel and his editors thinking?

Meanwhile, we’re planning to do Salon awards for the Most Bogus Stories of 2009, and right now Vogel’s is high on my list. What would you nominate? Leave your ideas in comments.

There was one comparable strategy for Afghanistan, Engel admitted -- but that would be to ally with the Taliban. That's the kind of surreal logic -- a successful war in Afghanistan might involve making peace with our enemies -- that Afghanistan inspires, poppies or not.

Eight years into a war that never achieved its main goals -- killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida leaders behind the 9/11 attacks, or eradicating the Taliban government that let the terror group base itself there -- President Obama is casting about for a new strategy. The only thing I know for sure is sending more troops will be a disaster. The goal has to be a gradual drawdown of the U.S. troops who are there now, because there is really no set of Afghan forces that any surge of soldiers -- Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants at least 40,000 -- could prop up. The former Northern Alliance is now mostly in government, although split between backers of apparently fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai and his opponent Abdullah Abdullah. The Taliban now controls almost 80 percent of the country, and the number of al-Qaida fighters is said to be under 100.

So if Al-Qaida is effectively gone, and Osama bin Laden is almost certainly gone, what are we doing there -- other than creating a homegrown insurgency and more support for the Taliban? Our options are either propping up an undemocratically chosen leader, backing his rival or looking for other Afghans to empower -- and there's almost nobody else but the Taliban. Afghanistan is far worse off than Iraq. It has effectively no army, few civil institutions. How many more American and Afghan lives is it worth to prove what we know with some certainty already: We are going to wind up leaving Afghanistan in the hands of men we have spent time trying to kill.

Make no mistake: I despise the Taliban for its blinkered views on modern life, especially its misogyny. No withdrawal of troops can begin without planning to protect, or transplant, our Democratic allies there, including the brave women leaders that have emerged. But George W. Bush gave up on his faux-goal of liberating Afghanistan's women a long time ago. This has become a war not to evict our enemies from Afghanistan, but to destroy a government we suspect someday might again let our enemies set up camp there. Defined that way, it's a preventive war, a pre-emptive war; it's continuing the Bush Doctrine that Sarah Palin couldn't define and that Barack Obama promised to overturn.

President Obama needs the strength to say no to McChrystal. Let's hope he finds it.