eod, americans can't think that well anymore. we take the 1% fringe issues and spend 90% of our time and resources blowing it out of proportion and making it helluva' lot worse. why is a few thousand al qaeda fanatics taking 1 trillion dollars and occupying a country that didn't have any al qaeda to begin with? in the big scheme of things, is india, china, russia less important than those few thousand? if not, why are we spending 50 times more resources on the former and not dealing with the latter group of surging upcomers that are outcompeting, outthinking, and outmanuevering us? how does it make sense that we have more band members in the military than folks in the state dept's diplomatic corp?

hitchens spent the whole article with a running thesaurus focused on a narrow issue, missing the forest from the trees. the proper framing of the question is, what makes invading iraq worth the 4,000 dead soldiers, MILLIONS of dead iraqis, and 1 trillion dollars of red ink? if democracy in mideast, how does that payback the dear cost we've paid or is it on faith that we assume all will be well? and if so, what makes us different from a theocratic government that is beholden to a few dogmatic ideological bunch of [frat boys] extremists that keep yapping 1% bubble fringe talk (fear, be scared, terror is everywhere baloney when actual evidence show that it's just the same ol' nutjobs as was before 9/11, now treble in number because we've been so gullible) that have no connection to the larger reality of the big-time costs we've had to endure and our children will continue to pay for?

y'all right wingers should think more and stop dicking around. enough already.