Instahoglets August 16th 2008

By Cernig

A little linkfest for the weekend of some of the big bloggy names.

- Big Tent Democrat writes about why the hawks of both parties want to ignore Georgia's part in the South Ossetia crisis (like shooting first) - it's all about using NATO to "shape the behavior of Russia" as Wes Clark puts it, which is why Poland sees the new missile defense deal as "crossing the Rubicon". Excellent big-picture stuff.

- Meanwhile, it appears that the old Cold warrior, Clark, has no place at Obama's table.

- Sully: "How Pernicious Is Rick Warren?" I have to agree with Sullivan's opener - "It's perhaps the most depressing fact of this campaign so far that the first major encounter between McCain and Obama will be presided over by a mega-pastor and in a church." The blinding hypocrisy of Warren saying America has to defend all the defenseless of the world by Divine mandate, but it's ok to invade Iraq in a ginned-up pretext, is just one of the many reasons its so depressing.

- John Cole says "Welcome to the police state, bitches" ... “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

- Alex Knapp at OTB has a newsflash! It has been established that Barack Obama is not the antichrist. (But both he and McCain will pretend to be the antichrist if it helps get out the satanist vote for them!)

-Matt Y notes Bolton's mancrush on Putin's hawkish ways, even as the Walrus wrongly decries Russia being better at weilding the stick than the US is (wrong in the sense that Russia isn't any better at it after all.)

- Kevin Drum notes a CNAS report that says the Iraqi government has approved only 600 awakening members for integration into the Iraqi Army.

...."Maliki has no interest in integrating these guys — none," Kahl said. "He thinks they're thugs; he thinks they're hooligans. . . . In fact, there's some evidence that he's trying to pick fights with them, hoping that they will start a fight that he can then turn around and finish them."

- Polibogger: McCain is contemplating a one term pledge. Which only serves to point out that "McCain is too old to serve eight years, but might just avoid total senility if he served four."

- and just to round off, the wonderful skippy watches peggy noo do her bigoted impression of dr.seuss.