Steve was always the one who'd get the rest of us out of jail. He had a knack for slipping away just before the police closed in, to find the lawyers, round up bail, or whatever else it took. Must have sprung me a couple dozen times.

Just before the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, I'd gone out to pick up one of our folks stranded hitchiking in a massive thunderstorm 30 miles out. I got lost, and in attempting a 3 point turn, got my van stuck in a yard in Raytown. The homeowner came out, naturally upset that my spinning wheels were chewing up his lawn. By this time I'd blown the radiator and flattened a tire, he called the cops, and I was hauled downtown on a damage to property charge.

Raytown was national headquarters for the Minutemen, not directly related to the anti-immigration zealots of today, but in their rabid anti-communism a similar social set, and this was reflected in their localpllitical establishment. The Raytown cops had such a bad reputation that the Kansas City Police Chief had not included them in his callup of suburban departments for Convention duty.

He's getting quite creative, this coy former vice president of ours. When asked if he's running for president in 2008, Al Gore devises every possible answer to throw his questioners off the trail: "I have no intention of running." "I have no plans to be a candidate for president again." "I don't expect to run." "I can't imagine any circumstances in which I would become a candidate again." "Politics is behind me." Every answer, that is, except the one that has any meaning: "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve." That was the unequivocal answer famously given by Civil War-era general William Tecumseh Sherman when asked about his presidential aspirations upon retiring from the Army in 1884. Sherman, unlike Gore, left no doubt of his "intention."

"I haven't made a so-called Sherman statement, because it just seems unnecessary, kind of odd to do that....but that's not an effort to hold the door open. It's more the internal shifting of gears," said Gore in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

The grass roots are just that--roots. The thought is often lost on those at the top of the political food chain. Without roots, the top topples. The grass roots are not impressed with the way that John Kerry conceeded in the face of overwhelming upset at fact and suspicions of foul play, fraud and supression. Some of the 'roots' are disillusioned to the point of jumping ship to Green territory. Some are just not going to choose any alternative. Some secretly wish Al Gore would reconsider and enter.

What the top seldom realizes as they create the campaign blueprints that they expect everyone like sheep to line up and follow, providing the competitive footwork and fund with every agressive email solicitation, is that the grass roots on the last campaign, staked not only their credibility, but took considerable abuse for doing so in backing Kerry. Many of them worked volunteer for many long months at considerable personal sacrifice and negative personal cash flow because they believed it that important to stop the agenda of this Administration.

Have you ever heard someone try to argue that the Iraq War was a mistake but that now the proper course is to continue the mistake a bit longer or to carefully end it in a long and complicated way that could take months or years?  Have you ever wondered how such a position, if examined in detail, could possibly make any sense?

Wonder no more.  Such a position, in various forms, actually makes no sense.  In fact, such a position requires a stunning degree of illogic.

There's an important book at http://www.endthewartour.org called "Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal" by Anthony Arnove.  The book has a Foreword and an Afterword by Howard Zinn, who in 1967 published "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal."  Arnove's book is important because it refutes all the major claims against immediate withdrawal.

Arnove begins with some historical background, and then lays out an overwhelming case for the following points.  I'll list them here, but you'll need to read the book (it's only 100 pages) for the arguments:

I’ve been thinking about Tariq Aziz a lot since the New York Times printed a front-page story on the former Iraqi deputy prime minister in late May. A color photograph showed him decked out in what the article described as “an open-necked hospital gown, with a patient’s plastic identification tag on his wrist.” He looked gaunt.

The last time I saw Aziz, at a Baghdad meeting two months before the U.S.-led invasion began, he was still portly in one of his well-tailored business suits. If Aziz was worried, he didn’t show it.

Now, he’s playing a part that U.S. media seem to relish. The Times headline said “Hussein’s Former Envoy Gushes With Adulation on Witness Stand,” but to sum up the coverage it might have just as aptly declared: “How the Mighty Have Fallen.”

The Times reported that Aziz defended Saddam Hussein in his May 24 testimony -- after he was not able to cut a deal with Baghdad’s current legal powers-that-be. “At an earlier stage of the trial, American officials said Mr. Aziz had offered to testify against Mr. Hussein on the condition that he be released early, a proposition the Iraqi court and