The most interesting came from liberals who have spoken with him and heard his private pitch. What he tells wealthy liberals is that he loathes Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. He thinks terrorism has to be fought as a police operation. He believes the Iraq war was not just a misjudgment but a cynical political semi-coup.

I was wowed by Clinton in 1991 for similar reasons. It took six weeks of him in office for me to realize my mistake. (Oh and by the way, the gay issue has nothing to do with my semi-open mind about Clark. I don't trust Clark to do anything substantive for gay equality, just enough to keep the money coming in and a supplicant interest group at his disposal. That was Clinton's mojo. And Clark has said nothing to separate himself from that kind of politics.)

Let us turn to a recent, underpublicized report from the U.S. National Democratic Institute, which sent an assessment mission to Iraq this summer (www.ndi.org). NDI's chairman is Madeleine Albright and its advisory committee includes Richard ('miserable failure') Gephardt.
The report's first sentence: 'NDI's overwhelming finding--in the north, south, Baghdad and among secular, religious, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish groups in both urban and rural areas--is a grateful welcoming of the demise of Saddam's regime and a sense that this is a pivotal moment in Iraq's history.'

Al-Qaeda is accusing Kuwait of 'conspiring against the Mujahideen (holy fighters) in Iraq by recruiting persons to infiltrate the Mujahideen groups and hurt them from within.'

'....The United States has formed a joint intelligence committee with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to strike against Mujahideen in Iraq by spying on them or by implanting electronic chips at Mujahideen locations to facilitate accurate hits against them....'

McClellan's big ego won him the nickname "The Young Napoleon." After he was relieved of duty, he decided to run for president. In 1864, he was the Democrat nominee against Abraham Lincoln. Gen. Clark also does not suffer from low self-esteem. Newsweek reports that when his entreaties to Bush presidential adviser Karl Rove went unanswered, Gen. Clark decided to become both a Democrat and a presidential aspirant.

Three days after the attacks, he counseled this response: 'It's fundamentally a police effort against individuals. It's not a military effort directed against factories and airfields. You may still need to use military force, but you have to use it in a very precise way.'

It seems to me that this gets to a very important issue in the debate. Is our fight against terrorism a "police operation" or a war?

Saudi Arabia Proposes Military Training For Jobless Youth
Sep 24
Saudi Arabia's government will implement a program to absorb the country's unemployed youth into the military, national guard, and security branches of the Interior Ministry. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah ordered a committee chaired by Defense Minister Prince Sultan to prepare a proposal for establishing military training for unemployed youths, Arab News reports Sept. 24. Saudi Arabia's official unemployment rate is 10 percent but unofficial estimates place the figure as much as twice that. The timeframe for the training has not been released.

"I've known Wes for a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I'm not going to say whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. I'll just say Wes won't get my vote."

I've been reading the excellent inside account of the Blair government's attempt to forge this middle way in the winter and early spring of this year. It's revealing - not only about the good intentions of Blair but about the treachery and intransigence of Paris. The question for Clark and Kerry is therefore: where do you disagree with Blair? If Blair came to the conclusion that there was no way that the French were prepared to sign on to serious enforcement of 1441, why does Clark think otherwise? Is he simply saying that he would have had superior diplomatic skills and talked Chirac around? Superior to Blair's and Powell's? I think history will judge that there was no way on earth that France would ever have acceded to serious enforcement of 1441 by Western arms, under any circumstances. If that's true, would Clark and Kerry have acceded to Paris and called the war off? If so, they should say so. But it would have been a huge blow to American credibility, deterrence and the war on terror. And since they favored the process whereby the French were given a veto, what exactly did the Bush administration do wrong? I wish I knew. I suspect these people are playing cheap rhetorical games in the midst of a dark and dangerous conflict. That alone casts doubt on their fitness to be president.

See that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the !United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag stands for freedom. You know it always will.
Custody Mr. Officer. Stand him down.

So what was the flaw?

Specifically the flaw was that you can get at the central vote-counting database through Microsoft Access. They have the security disabled. And when you get in that way, you are able to overwrite the audit log, which is supposed to log the transactions, and this [audit log] is one of the key things they cite as a security measure when they sell the system.

Fineman's evidence is the say-so of Colorado's Republican Governor Bill Owens and one of his appointees, Marc Holtzman.

'I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls,' they say Clark told him.

Clark told Fineman he had just been kidding around. But Owens and Holtzman assured Fineman that Clark was dead serious.

How Loopy is Clark? The answer, I fear, is that he's Ross Perot without the emotional stability.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American 'imperial-Zionism' during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, 'imperial-Zionism' was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers.

Although we "keep voicing fears that democracy won't work in Iraq, that's not what they're saying in the Middle East." There's a real terror there among the despots "that democracy in Iraq will work." Here, Mr. Lewis rests his case, as if to ask, Is there anything more to be said?