Interesting that the unskewed polls guy ends up on the middle. Perhaps because, whatever the flaws in his unskewing he started with actual polls.

Any hypothesis that is based on stodgy Europeans playing by the rules while plucky Colonials don't is pretty suspect from the get go. 1776 was just a few short years after the Seven Years War/French & Indian War. That one featured plenty of fighting against irregulars in North America, a hussar raid around Prussian armies that captured Berlin, a surprise attack on neutral Saxony, and an official English policy of raiding random French towns they couldn't hold just long enough to burn them down. Tactically speaking, European armies stood in lines and fired in volleys because it was effective. So did the Continental Army, once it got organized.

Are you self aware enough to realize that the sentence "There is no conspiracy theory here" is followed by six paragraphs of quality conspiracy theorizing? Please take note of one key tell, where you suggest that "the decision NOT to act was taken at the highest level." In fact the decision to act was made in sending in a team form Tripoli to evacuate US people from Benghazi, with the attack now apparently over. Not a crazy decision and probably not even a wrong one. Also you both should look up what strawman actually means. The only major mistake I see was having the Ambassador and Sean Smith stay in what seems to have usually been an empty consulate building as all the the activity in Benghazi was pursued out of the CIA annex. But that is what made sense to the Ambassador and his security detail at the time.

Right. That's why nobody cares about this "stand down" nonsense. And nobody is prattling on about when you'd lase a target or what AC130s were available.

Doens't all this conspiracy mongering depend on a erroneous impression that there was some kind of all night long fire-fight in Benghazi? It's been pretty clear that there was a quick attack on the consulate building from which all Americans except for the-overcome-by-smoke Ambassador Stevens were extricated within an hour and a half. All the Americans being the five Diplomatic Security people and the six person response team that had arrived from the Annex and the body of Sean Smith. They took fire in leaving and back at the annex but things were calm enough at the annex that the eight person team arriving form Tripoli at 4AMish thought they might prefer to go to the hospital to collect Ambassador Steven's body first. They didn't end up doing that but went with a contingent of friendly Libyan milita to the annex and started to move people out to the airport at which point a mortar opened up and hit the annex roof with 2 or 3 rounds, one of which killed Doherty and Woods. At that point the mortar team and other unfriendlies were chased off or killed by return fire and our Libyan militia friends. That attack lasted minutes before the mortar was silenced and the attackers dead or fled. Having a mortar round fall on your head is bad luck, it is not evidence of a conspiracy. It may be that information has been sparse because the US preferred not to let the world know that of thirty odd diplomatic personnel in Benghazi the vast majority were CIA or security. But Darrell Issa put paid to that plan. And if anyone with actual knowledge is talking to Fox News about this, which I doubt, that person is demonstrating remarkable disregard for operational security himself.

Eisenhower wasn't all bad but he did give us the Cuban Embargo, Vietnam, the Shah of Iran and therefore the aytollahs, 30-odd years of civil war in Guatemala, and Richard Nixon. I guess the counterbalance would be that he got rid of Batista, the mafia, and United Fruit. Maybe that's not enough, but it is something.

You're right I am conflating those categories. But that is to make the rest of the world comparison less lopsided. We have l0 Nimitz class carriers plus the Enterprise, which we're replacing with the next generation Gerald Ford. The rest of the world has only 3 that are comparable. Kuznetsov, Charles de Gaulle, and now the Liaoning (AKA exVaryag). In 1916 we were a second rate naval power well behind the UK and Germany, and what counted was numbers of all big gun battleships and battlecruisers. That is not the case today. We may or may not need 13 more ships, but to suggest that todays Navy doesn't severely outclass any potential enemy or combination of enemies is just silly.

The US has 20 aircraft carriers and the support ships to supply and protect them. The entire rest of the world combined has 12. Is "we have fewer ships than in 1916" a useful way to describe our current capabilities or the world balance of naval power? Are we more or less able to project power around the world than we were in 1916? Is this a stupid attack line from Romney that deserved the slap down it got?

In what way is invading Iraq and failing to win the war there for years and years different from "spending"? Who is saying "solely"? If you don't actually think that wars are free, stop pretending that you do. It's not that the cost of Iraq created the deficit, rather Iraq is a great example of something on which deficit peacocks don't mind spending a ton of money they don't have, deficit or not.

As has been astutely pointed out, spending more than you take in causes deficits. The question then must be: did the Iraq war cost money? If yes, was any tax increase designed to raise commensurate revenue instituted? The unavoidable answers Yes and No lead directly to bigger deficits.

That's one option. Jordan lost the war but it won the peace treaty when it got Israel to take both the West Bank and the Palestinians in it.

Palestinian Schmalestinian. Israel's choices are constrained by having stupidly built settlements all over the occupied territories without having figured out what they wanted to do with all the Arabs that live there. Continuing to build them demonstrates a lack of seriousness about a two state solution. Settlements and settlers actively make Israel less safe. Anyway, what is wrong with Palestinian definitions, if not for Palestinian definitions there wouldn't be this infernal instability. A pose? If somebody comes in crying about muslims getting the bomb, and I ask how Iranian muslims having the bomb is worse than the Taliban backing, Kashmiri terrorist backing, Pakistani muslims having the bomb, and the response is "it just is", then one of us is engaging in unreflective posturing. But it ain't me.

Well, since the settlements are the single most destabilizing element in the Israeli security equation, and since "Muslims" already have nukes in Pakistan, yes. Yes I do. Isn't the UK our most reliable ally?

I think you mean 7 years. Also you seem to have the direction of the excrement flow backwards in you Israel point.

Well shit fire, if we can't use the word victory, why the hell are our troops fighting? Why indeed? And if we can't define victory than what are our troops fighting for? Identify the enemy?!? Our former enemies are the ones in the government of Iraq right now. How about Karzai? Is victory securing the government of a corrupt leader, whose brother is a drug lord, and who might just want to join the Taliban himself?

And do you think that if Saddam had used gas at that time, George H W Bush and Colin Powell would in fact have nuked Iraq? After going to the trouble to build their massive international coalition in the first place? There is no point in a bluff everyone knows is a bluff.

So the big connection is that he didn't give money to Al Qaeda?

I believe that is the "It's coming right for us!" rule.

It reminds me of the Thaipusan festival. Or those cheek piercings they do in Thailand and Malaysia. Much like Christmas trees, this looks like a folk tradition with the patina of Christianity.

Was there ever a credible threat to use nukes in response to a chemical or Biological attack? Can you think of any realistic scenario that would see the US nuking any place because of some anthrax in some envelopes? If a country attacks the US regardless of how, we've got plenty of options for destroying them other than nukes. If an non-state actor attacks us, who are we going to nuke? I guess we could always nuke Baghdad, they were the default target the last time somebody totally unrelated to them attacked us.

You can think of the terrorists as Warriors if you want to. Me, I'm happy to call them criminals.

My friends, Bush doens't need any help from Obama when it comes to diminishing his authority.

You are going to immediately quit f**king about in IraqEven with tommahwks blowing things up in their back yards, why would they obey such a dictate when you have ignoramuses like Ledeen and VDH screeching that as soon as Iraq is in order it's On To Tehran? What kind of *sshat announces that he's going to take out Iran and Syria once Iraq is passified and then whines that Iran and Syria aren't helping pacify Iraq?