Earlier this week, a clandestine cadre of controlling conservative Christian captains (bunch of right-wing religious nut jobs is what I'm getting at) threatened to run from the GOP like ducks f

A. Pretty good. He emphasized that progress was being made in Iraq. The same way he talked about the progress being made in Iraq when he testified in the same room back in 2004. He might be using the same script.

Q. What's the difference between then and now?
A. Back then, Baghdad still had electricity and water and the wheel.

Q. Did General Petraeus speak about what the future holds for our Iraqi involvement?
A. He acknowledged the road ahead would be difficult. He also allowed that fire engines are often red.

Does anybody know what happened to the center? I remember hearing about it in the old days, but it seems to have disappeared like a wisp of mist in a solar wind. All anybody talks about is the left and the right. We're so polarized these days, I'm surprised our compasses still work. They should be stuck on due daft. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan speaking about the Democratic Party: I didn't leave the center, the center left me. And you can blame Uncle Ron for triggering the seismic shift that shoved the center to the right.

For instance:

Who can tell what motivates the President these days? Maybe the commutation of Scooter Libby is meant to demonstrate his latent in-chargity. That he's relevant, dammit! That not only can he be the decider, but he also has the skills to be the commuter as well. With an approval rating lower than a drunk IRS agent wearing pinstripes behind the Red Sox dugout at Fenway, he probably wouldn't mind commuting himself, to and from the comfort of Crawford, Texas, four or seven days a week. Could become the First Telecommuting Chief Executive. "I'm looking forward to Friday, that's ‘No Pants Day.'" Bet Laura and the twins would prefer that. Dick too, just to clear the decks for some of the trickier bits.

Proving his pertinence required George Bush to set a convicted partisan felon free as the proverbial bird. Though the identity of what kind of bird that phrase is intended to signify has been shrouded by the mists of time; it is safe to say, it sure ain't no jailbird, because due to Dubyah's opportune intervention, Cheney's former chief of staff served less time than a spitballing junior-high study-hall miscreant sent to honors detention in the cafeteria.