Via Mona at Jim Henley’s place, Reason‘s Michael Young spouts some nonsense about Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Damascus, observing, “Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Claudia Rosett observed that Pelosi was ‘nuts’ to visit Damascus. In the National Review, the editors thought the speaker raised ‘the white flag all over the Middle East.’ In the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes got a few good licks in. Here is my own contribution in the Daily Star, which Little Green Footballs was kind enough to link to. The comments section makes it interesting.”

The “interesting” comment thread really is interesting. The sheer number of people who believe Pelosi should be prosecuted under the Logan Act is fascinating. I wonder why they think the political impact of an unpopular president using a Dead Letter law to seek the incaraceration of a popular House Speaker over a policy dispute would be. You get the hilarious assertion that the GOP “can’t keep relying on Coulter, Hannity and Rush to get the facts out there” and needs to do more to get its message out. We learn that congressional Democrats have managed “hogtied [Bush] on every aspect of this war.” Someone analogizes Pelosi to a stripper. One refers to “the traitorous chick with the Hijab spewing lies to our enemy.” Several commenters state that Pelosi wore a burqa. Another refers to Pelosi as “the Caliphellator.” Terms like “stunning cunt” and “tw*t.” Yet another suggests Pelosi may want to “give chavez a hand job.” Then many, many more people discuss the brilliance of prosecuting Pelosi under the Logan act before someone suggests Dick Cheney should run for president. I got through 100 comments, though there are well over 600 at this point.

I worry that the heavily political discussions of the war supplemental fight have a tendency to distract from the actual strategic question of withdrawal. That, of course, has more than a little to do with the alleged strategic purpose of maintaining a large US military presence in Iraq. Initially, the objective was the establishment of democracy. Later it became preventing Iraq from slipping into a state of civil war. Then it became preventing Iraq from slipping into a “full-blown” civil war or some similar formulation. Now, we’re seeking to improve the security situation, especially in Baghdad but also elsewhere insofar as possible.

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WaPo: “President Bush used his Easter weekend radio address to suggest that while Americans are “blessed” to have so many brave, volunteer military service members, congressional Democrats are jeopardizing their safety by refusing to sign his $100 billion war funding bill.”

Obviously, Democrats aren’t refusing to sign anything. Democrats passed a bill that will fund the troops. Bush is threatening to veto this bill, thus denying the troops money, because he’s refusing to back off an open-ended, accountability-free committed to Iraq. So who’s endangering whose safety?

I went to see Shooter earlier this week, so now I know better than to criticize U.S. policy in the Horn of Africa, but you’ve got to be kidding me. Mark Mazzetti and Michael Gordon report for The New York Times: “Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.” This, of course, because “in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.”

. . . if not for those meddling Iranians and their EFPs that could only have come from Iranian factories. Or maybe they could have come from elsewhere, like over here where “troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced ‘explosively formed penetrators’ (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.” But that would mean the president sometimes says things that aren’t true!