Taguba and his investigators sifted and probed and assessed the blame as high as they were permitted to go. Taguba believed - no, he KNEW - that the responsibility for this outrage went much higher.

Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war's inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren't, and they aren't. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn't hold. The center does.

In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines. But Washington still kept sending money to the Taliban...

"A military strike (against Iran) would in my opinion be worse than anything else ... It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire," ElBaradei said in an interview with Al-Arabiya television.

"These soldiers were bleeding from the nose, spitting blood," said Danny Langford, an equipment technician from Texas brought to work at the Qarmat Ali Water treatment plant in 2003. "They were sick."

So we wrote it. And the people with money didn't see a way to make a profit on it so we got someone to make it in Bulgaria for a fraction of what we really needed. But we made it anyway.

Based on information from their 2006 tax returns, Ettlinger shows, line by line, the tremendous savings offered under the Bush tax cuts. He contrasts this with the even greater savings under McCain's plan...

when Cindy McCain says, "All I know is that I've always been proud of my country," take it with a grain of salt. She spent at least three years stoned out of her mind. It's impossible to know what she thought during that time.

It's not just that Russert abetted the Bush Administration in the Iraq War; much of the media shares that role. It's that he did damage in a wide range of contexts. There are two reasons for this: his tactics and his substance.

Former presidential spokesperson Scott McClellan gives tough testimony about the Plame affair and Iraq before the House Judiciary Committee.