Perspective: It's useful to keep things in perspective, which is I guess is why someone (somewhat to my surprise) called me a centrist -- I am on the lookout for b.s. on both sides. Not just b.s., but exaggeration, overstressing, and so forth. For instance, Tim Noah at Slate had a couple pieces on President Clinton's bombing of an alleged chemical plant in Sudan, which is being used in the whole Clarke debate. Good effort, but I'm more interested in the response to the overall story, on the Slate fray and elsewhere. I say this in part because we often can't really be sure about such issues in which we don't have all the facts.

The implication is that questions and/or changing opinions on the facts make him look bad. Or perhaps, showing Bush might not have been totally off the wall saves the day for his team. Well, yes, if you are looking at this as some black and white affair in which if we catch Clarke in a misstep or whatever his (apparently unsubstantiated) whole case will collapse like some house of cards. [And vice versa in the case of President Bush -- apparently, for him, a little bit goes a long way.] The whole point, in my view, is that the lead up to the war as well as the war against terror and so forth is a complex nuanced (ah that word) affair that we carefully have to look at as a whole with various shades of grey.

And, a key problem with the current administration is their tendency to refuse to view it as such. If they did, suggestions from Clarke that they made some mistakes wouldn't be taken in such a horrified matter. On the subject of perspective, I add some of my own in response to IMHO an overcritical (but thought provoking) response to "liberal rhetoric" on abortion here. Note as well the "Bill" guy who responded (angry soul!) ... one of his responses calls to mind my rejoinder to someone I know when she wails about how the poor and/or blacks get so many breaks -- so you want to change places with them, do ya?

Meanwhile, Michael Copps (D, sigh) over at the FCC continues to fight the First Amendment, this time worrying that soap operas are too racy. West Wing, after having another episode in which they solved yet another of our country's problems (appointing two elite justices to the Supreme Court, a liberal and conservative), went the documentary route. It was an interesting gimmick episode, but the series still is going downhill. Meanwhile, the afternoon host on Air America on first glance seems too kneejerk liberal. Marty Kaplan (7PM) Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder (8-11PM) were pretty good tonight, the former especially relatively calm and collective.

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Update: An interesting discussion on the World Court ruling that was discussed yesterday can be found here. It is a good balanced view on the issues. One particular troubling note: "In a previous case, the Supreme Court refused to use the Vienna Convention to suspend a state execution because, among other things, the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) (a federal statute) prevented defendants from raising treaty violations in their habeas proceedings." As the discussion implies, if certain individuals don't want national or perhaps state sovereignty threatened, perhaps recognizing treaties are the "land of the land" is one way of doing so.