I played scrabble with my wife last night. She thinks she won since at the end of it she scored more points than I did. Little did she know we were really playing 3 different games of scrabble (or was it 12? Which works out best for me?). She deluded herself in to thinking she won without realizing that, even though there were still tiles left, I had decided that every half hour would mark the end of a game. Foolish of her. Oh and I made that decision after the game was over so that, having won two of the three half hour periods, I was victorious. Weeee!

Of course (!!!!!!!) you can always slice things up to make things look better (time, area, duration, population all come to mind as ways to demarcate conflicts). The problem is that a) You have to give a reason for cutting things up that way other than that it makes you look good (which Hitchens doesn't) and b) You have to acknowledge that there are also ways to cut things up to make it look worse (Again, not done).

A few articles ago I said that Hitchens was becomming like a creationist, grasping for scraps of evidence to justify his implausible concluions while ignoring all else.

I think he's finally there.

Please fire this hack and give his job to someone without blinders on.

When a supposed political pundit divides the Iraq situation up into three 'wars,' and ignores the entire central conflict between the U.S. and all of the insurgent groups who want us out, he's basically announcing his own cluelessness.

I notice that he's spending less time now trying to justify this as part of some kind of world-wide 'war on terror,' probably because it's pretty clear that Iraq (and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan) is making the conflict with terrorists WORSE, not better.

He's really lost about all of the respect I once had for him. He can sling a few clever phrases together and try to get by with superciliousness, but intellectually he's just about bankrupt.

Sad, really...