You know, I wouldn't have expected it, but a study shows that there may be much more basic differences between "liberal" and "conservative" brains:

The LA Times has the story:

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information....  The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Cancer is a difficult and terrifying experience for just about everyone (save perhaps  the Dalai Lama).  So my most heart-felt wishes for a full recovery go out to Tony Snow.  Snow, a cancer survivor who had his colon removed in 2005, has learned that his cancer has recurred and may have spread to his liver.

We all must come to terms with our own mortality, a sometimes wrenching process of soul searching.  Consequently, out of respect for Mr. Snow and his family, the following are not jokes that I will be telling at cocktail parties:

Over the past years, it has become painfully clear that we simply cannot rely on social norms to control the Bush administration.  Ideas such as "limits on executive power" have been replaced by a "l'Etat? C'est moi" attitude that makes any excess possible, including expecting us to spend the next two years with an Attorney General with no credibility, reputation, or dignity.  We cannot expect Bush to fire Mr. Gonzales.  We cannot expect Mr. Gonzales to resign.  These are the acts of people who have understood and internalized the idea that there are limits to their conduct.  What we can do is have Gonzales disbarred.
Alberto Gonzales is admitted to practice (as I understand it) in Texas, and Texas, being a great state committed to the welfare of its citizens (as I understand it), has adopted rules of professional conduct for its attorneys.  

In Part 1, I discussed why, for better or worse, our involvement in Iraq is very much like our involvement in Vietnam regarding how we got in.  Now we must understand why the military is failing to secure Iraq in the same way they were unable to secure Vietnam.  In both cases, the military has been asked to become the local "thought police" -- a job that they are not trained for and cannot be trained for.

Whether or not it is actually valuable, there has for some time now been an intense debate about whether the United States' involvement in Iraq is or is not properly equated to our involvement in Vietnam.  This is probably due in equal parts to (i) our basic assumption that similar situations lead to similar outcomes, (ii) our basic assumption that we can learn from past situations to possibly affect future outcomes, and (iii) Americans' subtle obsession with a military conflict that the world insists on putting in our "loss column."  

For better or worse (viz., whether we can use this information to change the outcome in Iraq), our involvement in Iraq is very much like our involvement in Vietnam in the two most important ways:  (1) The President basicly misunderstood the nature of our perceived enemy and (2) the military has been asked to become the "thought police."