Incorrectnotright,

Practice what you preach. You give the Inquisitor grief for misspelling "foreign" as "foriegn", which appears to be a simple transposition typo, but then you spelled "getting" as "geting", which appears to be an omission typo. In case you hadn't thought it through, your typos detract from your argument as much as the Inquisitor's do from his.

I do agree, however, that Inquisitor's original post was of devoid of any cogency, and hence was only a still-born thought of an online onanist -- and it wasn't a very good wank at that.

But to both of you, I say: make use of the built-in spell checking feature, you dingle berries -- with the caveat that certain words, e.g. "onanist" or "wank", are not in Slate's spell-checking dictionary. It works like this: if the word is underlined in red, then check the spelling.

And as far as the surge goes, it has seemed to have had some military success, although that is largely due to the completion of ethnic cleansing in Iraq and the short-term buying-off of the Sunni insurgents -- talk about appeasment! (and another word not in Slate's spell-check dictionary). It has not resulted in the political goals set for it, i.e. the Iraqi government getting its act together and a real rapprochement between the Sunni and Shia. And I figure a lot of that appeasement money will go towards more arms expenditures by the insurgents down the road...

If Fred Kaplan and John McCain were in a geography bee, Kaplan would clean McCain's clock. McCain has demonstrated over and over again that he is a doddering old fool who doesn't know shit from Shia.