"Both [Bush's] Iraq intervention and Obama's health-care 'reform' were responses to a status quo that was widely understood to be unsatisfactory."

"We would argue that the former replaced a horrific regime with a better, albeit still flawed, one, whereas the latter appears on its way to replacing a flawed regime with a horrific one."

But it's difficult to dispute that both efforts suffered from severe misjudgments in execution, or that both were entered into amid a cocky overconfidence that led to gross overestimates of the benefits and underestimates of the costs.

Shock and awe/big fucking deal.

Protest kissing in Iraq — on the charred plinth of a vandalized sculpture of a man and woman kissing.

Kamaran Najm posted a photo on Facebook and...

"The first three hours it was mainly media outlets calling me. I had no idea that this was the first public kiss in Azadi park," he said.

Although the couple were protesting at the vandalism, which included an attack on the grave of famed Kurdish romantic poet Sherko Bekas, not everyone got the picture. Kurdistan's two major Islamic groups spoke out in condemnation, believing they had set out to offend Islamic sensibilities. "Everyone should be against the kiss. It's an effort to disorient Kurdish Muslim youths," Muhammad Hakim, of the Kurdistan Islamic Group, was quoted as saying by Kurdish online news site Bas News.

Everyone should be against the kiss.

The authorities seem to agree, with local media reporting that the regional prosecutor was pursuing a lawsuit against Najm for "behaving or performing an act out of the accepted social and cultural norms".

The news that Najm could be charged has led to copycat pictures on Facebook, but he says he has not had time to pay much attention to them. "I've been told couples in and outside Kurdistan have been taking pictures of themselves kissing and putting it on Facebook. I am told it is about 10 or 11 couples now," Najm said.

10 or 11... keep it up. You can build a new social and cultural norm. I suppose, legally, it's the "accepted social and cultural norm" at the time of the behavior that's allegedly "out of the accepted social and cultural norms."

"America wants to help the extremists to control Syria, but they are wrong because we will defend our sect."

"They will commit a big mistake if they think it will be easy to strike Syria and change everything. We all have faith that God is on our side, and we will show them that the Shiites in all the world are able to fight their proxies from Al Qaeda and Nusra and the hated Free Syrian Army."

A quote that reflects what the NYT says is the view of the Shiite majority in Iraq.

"The word 'slam-dunk' should be retired from the American national security issues."

Said John Kerry on "Meet the Press" today, when David Gregory asked him: "This is a sarin gas attack, perpetrated by the Assad regime, this is a slam-dunk case that he did it?"

The term "slam-dunk" figured large in the run-up to the Iraq War. Hence the resistance. It should connote certainty, but the meaning got flipped. To use it now is to seem to say: How do we know you're not conning us? And I'm going to assume David Gregory meant the insinuation, because everyone's been making the comparison to the selling of the Iraq War.

What should you be paying attention to right now?

"Errol Morris' documentary 'The Unknown Known,' a look at former Secretary of Defense and Iraq war architect Donald Rumsfeld will also hit the festival trifecta."

The director famously profiled another polarizing defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in his 2003 film 'The Fog of War'; that movie brought Morris and Michael Williams the Oscar for best documentary. The Rumsfeld film's U.S. release date has not been finalized.

I love Morris, and "Fog of War" was great. I look forward to seeing how Rumsfeld handles the intense Interrotron interrogation. By the way, I see that Rumsfeld is criticizing Obama's approach to war in Syria.

And here's McCain urging Obama along (via Real Clear Politics).

But don't get distracted. Pay attention to something that's truly alarming: Sandra Bullock in SPACE!

Highlights from "Meet the Press."

Here are the things that jumped out as I watched "Meet the Press." this morning.

1. At the end of a discussion of the Boston bombing, David Gregory asks "[W]hat are you really focused on that you’d like the intelligence community and the FBI to answer?"

REP. PETER KING: I think it’s important to know are there other people involved in this threat? Are there others that are still out there?... Are there family members or people in-- in the community? That’s very important to find out. Also, what did cause them to radicalize? Was it done here? Was it done overseas? Was it done over the internet? What caused that to happen? How can we stop it in the future? Also ask why the FBI is not cooperating more with the law enforcement? Why they did not give vital evidence to the NYPD about another possible attack.

GREGORY: This is that you think a failure that needs to be learned from?

REP. KING: Absolutely. Absolute failure.

2. Chuck Todd, talking about Obama's routine at the Washington Correspondents Dinner:

...I wonder how many people realized at the end when he did his-- you know, there’s always this part at the end where they get serious for a minute, and it’s usually the part where president say, you know, I think the press has a good job to do and I understand what they have to do. He didn’t say that. He wasn’t very complimentary of the press. You know, we all can do better. He was-- it did seem-- I thought his pot shots joke wise and then the serious stuff about the internet, the rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff. He hates it. Okay. He hates this part of the media. He really thinks that the sort of the buzzification, this isn’t just about BuzzFeed or Politico, and all the stuff, but he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it. And I think he was just trying to make that clear last night.

3. Gregory asks Tony Blair about his "now infamous meeting in the Azores" with George Bush, "at a very delicate time for [Blair] politically back home." Referring to the Iraq invasion, did Bush tell Blair: "back out if you need to, don’t do this, don’t stand by me when you have to go back and address parliament if it’s going to cost you your leadership"? Blair says:

He did say that. I mean, he-- he made it clear that, you know, he understood the-- the huge political difficulties I had and that-- that I shouldn’t, as it were, put my own premiership on the line. It was more important in-- in a way, to him, I think, that I stayed. But my attitude was that, you know, there are lots of things in politics where-- where you-- you’ll compromise and you’ll maybe back off exactly what you think you should do and, you know, these are often the run of the mill everyday types of issues. When it comes to issues of war and peace and-- and life and death, I think your-- your-- I came to the conclusion your proper obligation to your own country is to do what you think is right....

GREGORY: In this library, the president has decided not to separate Iraq-- out Iraq. Iraq is presented as part and parcel of the war on terrorism, which is how he saw it. But won’t history judge that as a false impression that this was a war of choice that became a misadventure in the eyes of so many?

MR. BLAIR: I think, you know, the controversy around that, I mean, around how you categorize it, will remain. But what I found was that, you see, removing Saddam happened within a matter of weeks. You then spent the next, you know, eight-- nine years in a different type of battle and that was a battle against precisely the forces that are trying to destabilize the Middle East today al Qaeda on the one side, Iran on the other side, and this toxic cocktail, if you like, of religion, politics, ethnicity, tribalism. So, I mean, I never said the two things were linked in that direct sense, 9/11 and Iraq, I think the difficulties we ended up encountering in Iraq were difficulties that arose from precisely this-- this force of terror unleashed by religious extremism and I think that’s the, you know, frankly, what we still face today...

4. I thought "toxic cocktail... of religion, politics, ethnicity, tribalism" was a very helpful phrase to those of us who shrink from criticizing anything that contains an element of religion (other than America's majority religion). Blair also used the phrase "an ideology based on a perversion of religion" and equated it to the violent political ideologies that are not religious and that we don't hesitate to criticize:

[There] are various groups, Islamist groups, that I’m afraid don’t have the same concept of democracy or freedom that we do....  I'm afraid, that this-- this ideology is being pumped around websites, is being encouraged by people in many different parts of the world and it’s-- and it’s there and it’s very hard for us to deal with. The first obligation of a government is to try and protect its people, but then you’ve got to-- you’ve got to cast out this ideology. I mean, I think this is very similar to the fight we faced in the 20th century against first of all fascism and then revolutionary communism. You know, it’s an ideology. It’s not got one command and control center, it's not a-- you know, you’re not talking about a country, but you are talking about an ideology based on a perversion of religion... which has an enormous force. If you don’t deal with this issue, this long-term question, this ideology based on-- on a perversion of the religion of Islam, you are going to end up fighting this for a long time.

5. And here's a nice tribute to Bush from Blair:

And President Obama actually put his finger on it when he said it’s impossible to know George Bush and not like him. So, you know, often people say to me back home, they say, come on, you didn’t like him really, did you? And I say, you can totally disagree with him but as a human being he is a someone of immense character and genuine integrity. So, you know, you can say-- people have different views about decisions, but there’s a very few people who-- who don’t like him and respect him as a person.

At the Bush Library...

"... a butterfly ballot from Palm Beach County, Fla., a replica of Mr. Bush’s Oval Office, the bullhorn he used at ground zero and a gnarled steel girder from the World Trade Center demolished on Sept. 11, 2001...."

Mr. Bush’s museum does not ignore controversies like the  weapons of mass destruction that were never found in Iraq, but it does not dwell on them either. In the Iraq display, it says flatly, “No stockpiles of W.M.D. were found.” But then it adds, “Post-invasion inspections confirmed that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to resume production of W.M.D.”...

“The museum itself is the Bushes’ personal statement about what they think was important,” said Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Foundation, who oversaw the construction. “We fully anticipate that some people will try to poke holes or some people will debate. That’s fine. That’s part of history.”

McCain "pressed Hagel on whether he stood by his opposition to the decision to surge U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007."

"Hagel, who once called the surge the 'most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam' resisted McCain’s repeated attempts to solicit a 'yes' or 'no' answer."

"I’m not going to give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I’ll defer that to the judgment of history... I did question the surge. I always ask the question: Is this going to be worth the sacrifice? We lost almost 1,200 Americans and thousands of wounded. Was it required? Was it necessary? I’m not sure. I’m not that certain that it was required."

"Unlike so many of the lemmings and partisans of Washington DC, Hagel actually called out the catastrophe of the Iraq War as it happened."

"The neocons cannot forgive him for exposing what they wrought on the nation and the world. For good measure, he has a Purple Heart and has served in combat. Not easy to say about most of the Iraq War armchair warriors and war criminals."

ADDED: That link goes to Andrew Sullivan (discussing Peter Beinart), but if you want your choice of links to uproar over Hagel, there are plenty at Memeorandum.

"President Barack Obama and Psy shared the stage in Washington on Sunday but didn’t dance 'Gangnam Style' together."

"Obama has said he thinks he can do 'Gangnam Style' — Psy’s signature dance — but hasn’t proven it yet."

The 2 mega pop stars just shook hands, and nothing (apparently) was said about that inconvenient lyric of his that goes:

Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully