The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.

This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at  Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.

Name the candidates for a Presidential nomination who are displaying a massive, achingly obvious ambition to become President, causing them to conduct carefully calculated and expensive campaigns that display their personal abilities for that office.

Hillary Clinton.
John Edwards.
Rudy Giuliani.
Michael Huckabee.
John McCain.
Barak Obama.
Bill Richards
Mitt Romney.

Name the candidates whose ambition for the job of President brings forth cries of personal hatred towards them from a lot of people.

Hillary Clinton.

Listening to Gen. David Petreaus testify before Congress is fascinating. The man is an excellent soldier, by all accounts a leader who is far above average, extremely bright and well-educated, and is clearly well-prepared and smooth in his presentation. He is probably the best single General we could have commanding in Iraq.

He is also very clearly a Republican. No surprise, that. Since Vietnam the officer corps of the Army has felt culturally more closely akin to the Republican Party. Then when Donald Rumsfeld took office as Secretary of Defense in 2001 he personally approved every promotion to flag rank in the military, assuring that only dedicated Republicans got the jobs.

It is also obvious that the War in Iraq and its' resulting disastrous occupation was desired entirely by the American Republican Party. The Republicans wanted the invasion of Iraq, they lied their way into it, and they got it. The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq is entirely a Republican war. It is an American war only because the Republican Party had to use the military that belongs to all of us.

Digby pretty much says what is really important.

...you cannot look at something like this and not wonder if the years and years of infrastructure neglect at the hands of GOP propagandists who have been starving government for decades now is finally coming back to haunt us. [Snip]

I have to wonder if any Republicans were on that bridge last night. If there were, they must have realized that sometimes we really are all in it together.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is a Republican social conservative who

... signed a no-new-taxes pledge and has been a proven leader in previous tax battles," says Gessing. "His signature achievement as governor was closing a $4.5 million budget gap during the 2004-05 cycle, without raising taxes,... (That was From "Oval Office 2008".)

Isn't that great? Pawlenty refused to raise taxes. Keep government small. I'm sure Grover Norquist is very proud of Pawlenty.

Airborne Staff Sergeant David Safstrom is on his third tour as a member of the Airborne in Iraq. It is his first time to question whether there is any value in what he is doing there.

"In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place," he said. "There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome."

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber's body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

"I thought, `What are we doing here? Why are we still here?' " said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. "We're helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us."

[This started as a comment and got too long.]

The most recent hoax from Cheney and the Bush administration is the effort to blame the Iranians for the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) weapons that are being used against the American troops in Iraq.

From the LA Times we get this report:

PRESIDENT BUSH HAS now definitively stated that bombs known as explosively formed penetrators -- EFPs, which have proved especially deadly for U.S. troops in Iraq -- are made in Iran and exported to Iraq.

Since these are such "high tech" weapons, the Bush/Cheney administration expects us to make the leap to the conclusion that this is planned and directed by the leaders in Iran.

And if we don't jump to that conclusion ourselves, Cheney is feeding that conclusion to the media.

[More below the fold]

Digby very kindly channels us to the wisdom of Pat Buchanan. I hope you find this juxtopostion of individuals as jarring as I do.

See below the fold:

[promoted by BooMan]

Our local (Fort Worth - Dallas) CBS news just announced the death of the columnist Molly Ivins. She was recently hospitalized with a recurrance of breast cancer. She was age 62.

The world in general and Texas specifically has just become a much less colorful, lively and interesting place.

Damn! I'll miss her writing. And I never got to meet her.

Iraq's a mess. The U.S. Army and Marine ground forces will take a decade and billions to rebuild so that they are again effective. Israel, the occupied territories and Lebanon are a mess. Iran  is becoming more of a problem rather than less of one. All of this is a result of the preemptive invasion of Iraq. Bush and the Republican-led Congress brought us to this. So how did we get here?

Let's first look at Digby's excellent comparison of the mistakes made in Viet Nam to those mistakes that Bush and the Republicans have made in Iraq. That comparison can then be used to see why we actually invaded Iraq and what we are doing there.

I just read two posts that make exactly the point Democrats need to take into the November election against Republicans everywhere. The first is (of course) Digby quoting Jim Webb from this mornings' interview with George Stephenapolis. When George told Jim Webb that he was part of the "I told you so chorus" Jim responded:

"Well, I think there are a lot of people who don't want to be reminded that they were warned. I think it's relevant, when you talk about how you build national strategy, and how you use the military -- to talk about how these decisions should be made. There should be some sort of accountability."[bold mine - RB]

Is that too much to ask of an administration who specifically created a so-called Preemptive War Doctrine just so they could attack a nation that was no danger to America?

This discussion starts with Larry Johnson's description of the current situation in Iraq, then moves to the Republican manipulations of that situation in order to with the November 2006 elections.

Larry Johnson points out that we have never had enough troops in Iraq to conduct Counterinsurgency actions, so that all we can do is conduct Counterterrorism attacks. Along with that our training of Iraq troops has had the effect of creating an Iraqi Shia army that the Shia's are using and will continue to use in their internal civil war with the Sunnis. There is no Iraqi army, and will be none.

"Counterterrorism" according to Larry Johnson is that set of offensive actions involving using military forces to "identify, locate, and kill or capture terrorist operatives. It is an offensive rather than defensive tactic."

Counterinsurgency below the fold.

The Guardian describes the 3rd Marine Regiment, the one with India Company who apparently committed the killings in Haditha. It's not pretty.

"The marine unit involved in the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November had suffered a "total breakdown" in discipline and had drug and alcohol problems, according to the wife of one of the battalion's staff sergeants.

The allegations in Newsweek magazine contribute to an ever more disturbing portrait of embattled marines under high stress, some on their third tour of duty after ferocious door-to-door fighting in the Sunni insurgent strongholds of Falluja and Haditha.

The wife of the unnamed staff sergeant claimed there had been a "total breakdown" in the unit's discipline after it was pulled out of Falluja in early 2005.

"There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing [violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."

The troops in Iraq have been ordered to take refresher courses on battlefield ethics, but a growing body of evidence from Haditha suggests the strain of repeated deployments in Iraq is beginning to unravel the cohesion and discipline of the combat troops."

Think about it.

That is the question asked by Deepak Chopra.

Since science has falsified much of what the Bible tells us as stories, Chopra suggests that most people have two different choices they can make.

With no privileged link to God, no Adam and Eve who could be claimed as ancestors, believers had two choices. They could discover a deeper personal spirituality or they could compartmentalize reason and faith.

The first choice, discovering a deeper personal spirituality is the route most people have taken, and the Liberal Religions have moved right along with those people. This is personal religion, however, so it does not lend itself to the growth of large homogeneous and controlling organizations.

Margaret Turnbull, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC has winnowed down her list of 17,000 stellar systems that might be inhabited to the five best possibilities. BBC has the story.

Besides being most likely to hold intelligent life, these stellar systems are also the five best choices for us to move to if our current solar system becomes uninhabitable. The key is that they are the most like the system we currently live in.

These stars were chosen because they: