It's truly a blessing to have total freaking idiots as your enemy. - Rachel Maddow

...teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny little...

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

Coming up: The part of my interview with the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, where she smacks me down like a ball-peen hammer meeting a thumb. Ow. Ow. Ow.