I wondered how long before the Democrats noticed that Barack Obama was a moderate centrist? 26 days.

Both Barack Obama (D-Ill) and Ken Salazar (D-Co) had excellent opportunities this week to strike a blow for America. They appear, instead, to have limited themselves to a narrow view of their roles. At a crucial time, both failed to stand up and be counted -- one sparklingly, and the other bumbling. The lone black member of the current senate could not bring himself to vote against Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State. Obama, who took only a minute to take apart Condi Rice's high rhetoric conflating tyranny and terror, stopped short of ascribing mendacity, and even if he thought doing so was discourteous, there was no compulsion to end up voting for her confirmation anyway. This was sad enough. But any allegation that he let Ms. Rice's color influence him is probably untrue. For he exploded this canard, stopping at the perimeter of political risk, or as Clinton famously called it, "maintaining viability within the system". We didn't, after all, see Obama stand with Barbara Boxer to challenge the Ohio vote and a decry an election where thousands of black people were effectively denied the vote.

Dumbest comment since Michael Moore:

Given that the resistance is a war of symbology as much as anything, a war for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi populace - you have to wonder if indeed there is any meaningful level of resistance anymore when the level of violence displayed across all of Iraq at a crucial juncture for mindshare amounts to so little. It's hard to take the resistance seriously after this when most of the violence they warned the populace about turned out to be bluffing on a grand scale.

The insurgents are not trying to win hearts and minds. They are trying to create such a level of violence against ordinary Iraqis that anything including a theocratic dictatorship would be preferable.

To be fair, he continues:

My thought is that perhaps the much lower than expected levels of violence point to how greatly the resistance does, in fact, rely on outside support to continue. With the influx of willing marytrs from outside the country to stop the spread of democracy in the east shut off for the last few days, we have a clearer picture now of how much real Iraqi resistance there is (of at least the violent sort). Or, perhaps a lot of the resistance has opted to take the peaceful route and support the elections as a path to change. I don't think it's just that a lot of the resistance forgot to get the flu shot and were feeling a bit too sniffly to blow themselves up today.

When around 60% of the populace willing to mark themselves with an indelible stain to proclaim which side of the violent aspect of resistance they are on, I think that speaks volumes about where the majority is really headed. Perhaps as you say it was only to vote in people against the U.S., but even if so it would not matter as it has still been done peacefully instead of through further bloodshed. As others have said, the people of Iraq have indeed given violence the finger regardless of how they feel about the US.

How about that, an admission that the "insurgents" are outside terrorists.

I really shouldn't take shots at the Democratic Underground. Enough people post that you can find almost any opinion as long as it is anti-Bush. Still, many in the Left have a romantic view of the terrorists in Iraq as being some kind of anti-occupation resistance that wants nothing but good things for Iraqis. To some extent, they fall for the fallacy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. These people are not the patriots that this poster and Michael Moore need them to be. They are violent killers.