Steven Johnson draws out an important point that has to be made in the wake of the Madrid bombings and the socialist victory in the past weekend’s elections in Spain. “We’re not opposed to operations like ‘Iraqi Freedom’ because we somehow think that terrorism isn’t that big of a deal. There is no more important issue in the world today. We’re opposed because we think that pre-emptive, destabilizing attacks against nation-states in the Middle East that aren’t associated with Al Qaeda will create MORE opportunities for Al Qaeda, not less.”

doesn’t go quite as far as the newscast I just listened to on CBC. The site suggests only the following: Madrid blast investigators find detonators, Arabic tapes. On the newscast just now, however, they’ve gone further to suggest that Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the blast in Madrid today.

the the Mars landings.

In the guise of a review of the recent Frum/Perle tome, “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,” Michael Lind has done a very nice job of explicating the intellectual history of neoconservatism while simultaneously taking on David Brooks and his odd statement that neocons don’t really exist (and even if they did, to be against them is anti-semitic). The article is called, A Tragedy of Errors. He ends his piece with the following gem:

David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds–only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed–well, you can hardly blame them, can you?”