The Astute Blogger wonders why the liberals and the media just can’t seem to get excited about burned and defiled churches in France the same way that they get excited when a mosque is defiled.

Michael Barone writes on the different recollections of Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus and what that says about the CIA.

But you could see this as a sort of partisan dispute. Woodward’s reporting on George W. Bush, as is evident in his books, is seen by many critics as pro-Bush. In my view, he has taken Bush at face value, describing how the president makes decisions and taking Bush’s own words seriously. Which is, in my view, the way it should be. Pincus’s reporting, on the other hand, has relied heavily on critics of the Bush policies, including, it appears, sources in the CIA. It is obvious that cadres in the CIA—the folks around Valerie Plame who sent Joseph Wilson on his mission to Niger, the folks who authorized the publication of Michael Scheuer’s “anonymous” book—have been trying to discredit and undermine support for Bush’s policy of liberating Iraq. I suspect that Pincus takes the same view, though he could argue that his reporting was justified regardless of his own views: He was just reporting what others, with some knowledge of what they were talking about, were saying. I don’t want to say that Woodward is pro-Bush and Pincus anti-Bush. But I can see how readers who don’t know these men as well as I do would so conclude.

James Lileks lets loose on the Hugh Hewitt show on all the second-guessers in Congress.

I’ve had it with a lot of them. And if this wasn’t serious, I’d be sitting back laughing. But it’s not something to laugh about. What we have here is every single cliche that the left has been hammering into a sheet of tin since the beginning, made true. 1. Quagmire. We actually have a quagmire now, except it’s a political quagmire of will. 2. We have the brual Afghan winter, except it’s manifesting itself here as a brain freeze in the Senate, which appears to be a collection of the most obsequious, boozebags, clucksers and well-oiled weather vanes that we’ve ever seen leading this country. You can even throw in a plastic turkey, because that’s pretty much what they’ve shown themselves to be. What is astonishing about this is that the people who are responsible, and who have their hands on the lever of power, have chosen this moment in history to reveal themselves as being incapable of understanding A) what happened, B) what is happening now, and C) what will happen if they continue on their course of action. In other words, they misunderstand the past, the present, and the future. It’s astonishing.

HH: Let’s talk about each of those. What have they forgotten?

JL: Well first of all, this preposterous argument that we’ve been going on for the last God knows how long about Iraq and al Qaeda and 9/11, and that whole context, has been completely forgotten. If you read the papers and you listen to Harry Reid bleating about the fact that the president had the audacity to strike back at what the people saying…the entire Democratic Party seems to believe that the nation of Iraq was formed out of whole cloth and imagination in 2003, for the sole purpose of having an invasion, so we could go over there and fail. That seems to be it. They’ve forgotten entirely what their party and everything in the media who had access to a newspaper knew about Iraq in the 90’s. All right? So to completely obliterate that context is not only an act of astonishing stupidity, it is dangerous. It’s stands up in the context of saying it completely ignores what we went through in the 90’s, and what we were facing after 9/11. There’s a piece that Powerline linked to today. It’s an interview with an Iraqi arms inspector, and I think in Front Page Mag. And it’s just…gruesome detail about what was going on, and the way that they were shifting their stuff around, and what we knew about their capabilities. And to have that argument at this point is just stunning.

Can George Galloway get any more vile?

Captain Ed takes on Congressman Murtha’s anti-war speech yesterday and his chickenhawk accusations against Dick Cheney.

Hugh Hewitt has twelve words that the GOP in Congress should memorize. Don’t hold your breath, Hugh.

Mudville Gazette looks more closely at the statistics on the number of soldiers wounded in Iraq.

Tom Maguire has some speculation about who might have leaked to Bob Woodward. His eyes are turning to the State Department.

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