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A transcript of yesterday’s remarkably contentious CNN interview is up here (and some video here and here). I admit, I was most amused by the verbal sniping between Blitzer and Cheney over Blitzer’s fame relative to that of certain major terrorists (if only it was Wolf they had to catch!). But, as many have pointed out (including here, …

Yesterday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote–in which only one Republican, Chuck Hagel, voted in favor of a nonbinding resolution denouncing President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq–has Democratic leaders rethinking their strategy for bringing the resolution to the floor. If the Foreign Relations vote is any sign of …

There’s a personal story about the two on that score: Webb despised Kerry for his anti-war activities after Vietnam. It took the Iraq war to bring about an unlikely rapprochement. I ran into Webb during the height of the Swift Boat controversy in 2004, and asked him what he thought about it as a Vietnam vet himself. (At the time, it had …

Jim Webb and John Kerry, two Vietnam war heroes, passed each other on the up and down escalators in the past 24 hours–and there is a link between Webb’s rise and Kerry’s fall, and it has everything to do with social class. One of the reason’s why Webb’s speech worked so well last night–why it seemed so fresh–was the marriage of a …

Our colleague Elaine Shannon, who covers the State Department, passed on this intel about Condi Rice’s Sunday obsession:

There’s no world crisis big enough to stop Condi Rice, rabid football fan, from watching the playoffs. With her favorite team, the Cleveland Browns, failing to make the post-season, Rice was pulling for the Colts and

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Though disappointingly metaphorical. From the rather testy interview on CNN:

Q We heard the President mention Osama bin Laden last night in his State of the Union address. Why can’t you find this guy?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, obviously, he’s well hidden. We’ve been looking for him for some time. I think the fact is he’s gone

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Kerry’s decision not to run in 2008 is a disappointment only to his consultants and to Republicans, and perhaps to people like me, who appreciated his dogged ability to provide ever-replenishing examples of the three or four jokes we liked to tell about him. While he made it hard not to be lazy, he also made, ahem, an enormous …

My colleague Jay is easy to mock, it is in fact one of his most endearing characteristics, but I can’t find much to poke fun at in his mash note to Jim Webb. Webb’s message was an articulate, passionate brief against the war — if only the latest — and it’s nice to see the Dems present a rebuttal that’s elegant as well as earnest. To …

Jim Webb, whose awkwardness on the stump was well known during his Senate campaign, just delivered the most compelling response and rebuttal to a State of the Union address I’ve seen in the past 15 years. He nailed it — conveyed his personal knowledge about military service, that people serve without regard to political ideology or …

Over at the Racing Form, we’ve been keeping track of how ’08 hopefuls are doing in the bookselling department. Though Barack Obama is in the top ten currently with both a paperback and hardcover, this cycle’s race has an unprecedented number of best-selling authors — and would even if only Hillary were running (she’s written six). But …

Ezra Klein has mea culpaed his previous posting about the Bush health care proposal. If he’s right, mea too. What Bush seems to be proposing is nothing more than a back door tax cut–surprise–for people who buy inexpensive health insurance and therefore a Health Savings Account empowerment act. (In other words, if you buy a $2000 HSA, …

This, about my earlier Iraq post, from a very well informed reader

The conflict described in the Times is a much more of a civil war and therefore the mission to stop it is much more about peacekeeping (or actually peacemaking) and the Congo Crisis would be a good historic model.

There is of course a Sunni-lead insurgency going on at

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Amazingly, some Swampland readers seem to think my earlier post about President Bush’s State of the Union address was too sympathetic to Bush, which proves nothing but that the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land. My point was that Bush is looking to the past, including to Bill Clinton in 95 and 98, for models on …