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[Image] Ex Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino lambasted the President the other day for the poor "optics" of walking through Stonehenge by himself.
"I don't mind that the President spent 20 minutes sightseeing and knocking something off of his bucket list," the former George W. Bush spokesperson said during Friday's edition of "The Five."

"But remember this is the White House that says they're not that worried about optics?" Perino continued. "Today, to show the President of the United States standing alone amongst the rocks, by himself ... I would have asked David Cameron or somebody to walk with him. Get some staff or have some — take the pilot, whatever you have to do so you don't have to, he's standing alone. I don't think that's a good optic." I had to wonder about this on several fronts, wtf, could he be accused of kowtowing to the all important druid vote?

Is it tawdry for our leader to be consorting with pagans, no matter how long they may have been dead? Was he engaged in some sort of covert black mass? Just what is the exact problem here? Dude was finished with his NATO summit and had a chance to cross the british rocks off the things to do list.

In fact, the pictures reveal that the assertion is patently false anyway, as all available photographs show him in good company the whole trek through the stone pillars. I hope that you can sleep better now.

Of course Perino is famous for being one dim bulb. This is the woman who needed a few hints to identify the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

[Image] This is the same woman who said that women who are victims of domestic violence should make better decisions and that atheists should amscray back to their own country. Not exactly brilliant but admittedly kind of hot so we can let this overly intellectual stuff slide.

Problem in this country is that we have way too much optics and far too little substance.

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Romney is on record today saying that he would have done a better job than Hillary would and bashing Obama. Easy to say. Who will ever know? But I think a decent person would refrain from such idle speculation and exit gracefully. You lost loser, no one was buying what you were selling. See ya. Feel free to try again.

And need I remind everybody again, it was Bush and not Obama who inserted the language into the Iraq agreements that we would be out of their country by date certain. Of course the neocons want us to be fighting a permanent war in the middle east, a constant battle against the enemy named terrorism makes it quite a bit easier to suppress freedom on the domestic front.

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You know as much as I disagree with our president on civil liberties, pot and several other issues, it is easy to forget the economic morass that he pulled us out of.  I forget, why do we hate him so much? Is it because he is a muslim or a communist? I think that he has done a fairly competent job, considering he is leading a divided nation that can't stand each other, and that anything he could possibly do will be vilified by the opposition. I'm serious, all of you Obama haters, please let me know what is most irksome to you about his policies.

I think that he is a realist who got tired of the bullshit and has sort of packed it in. Disengaged. Overly clinical and dispassionate. He's human. I can make a pretty good case for or against Obamacare but the reality is that it is working for many and a huge contingent of uninsured americans are now protected.

We need to get used to this level of vitriol because whatever party is in charge, it ain't going to change. Too many talking heads with daggers poised, too much vapid instant analysis, too little scholarship and analysis, too little objective neutrality.

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Fox may have started it, but we are now left with two equally stupid armed media camps. And an increasingly intellectually lazy and stupid electorate.

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[Image] Henry Kissinger gave an interesting interview to NPR this week touting his new book World Order. He points out that Iran is a potentially far greater threat than Isis, something I agree with completely. The Persian empire is the one that is quietly getting rebuilt, right through Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

It was disheartening to see Maliki fly up north in his last act as outgoing prime minister last week and exhort his troops to kill the infidels. They don't catch on to the concept of democracy or pluralism too well in the middle east and he made matters worse, subjugating his sunni citizenry, sewing the seeds of revolt that results in factional civil war and in the strengthening of groups like the Islamic State.

Now Obama is looking for help in fighting the Sunni and is going to pretend that there is some benign neutral party in the region. Good luck on that.

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Doug Bandow of Cato Institute on Iraq and Intervention - Third time is not the charm.

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James Zogby, Arab American and Maronite christian, never met a terrorist he didn't love, has penned an article In defense of christians in which he makes a case for muslims and christians co-existing in the middle east. Let's see, who is he forgetting?

When I saw the headline I made a bet with myself how many paragraphs I would have to read before he bashed Israel and I wasn't too far off the mark. Members of what are termed the "completion" religions have a remarkably forgetful view of their own history.