A few political links:

A Veterans’ Day Message to Karl Rove: Take Your Terror Scares and Shove Them Up Your Ass! Do we dare hope the era of constant fear-mongering is over?

And, while I really do hope the Democrats act in a spirit of bipartisanship, it really does seem way past Time For A Big Ol’ Cup of ‘Shut The F*** Up.’

I’m glad to find I’m not the only one whose first reaction to Bush’s speech over the weekend was, “What, we’re supposed to be proud the administration didn’t use the war as an excuse to interrupt the democratic process?”

For that matter, I’ve always found it amazing how much the Iraqi elections have been trumpeted as some sort of triumph of democracy. Basically, everyone trotted out and voted for their own ethnic group (yay for us!)—in the case of the Shia, they were basically told by their leading cleric that they were going to hell if they didn’t vote. This is not an election as we in the West understand it, and it is not all that surprising that the Iraqi government is not functioning in a particularly democratic way. But we’ll leave that discussion for another time.