There’s more bad news for Mike Vick. A South Carolina inmate has filed a civil suit against Vick seeking “$63,000,000,000 billion dollars” in damages (yes, that would be $63,000,000,000,000,000,000) “backed by gold and silver “ to be delivered to the front gates to the Williamsburg Federal Correctional facility in South Carolina.

The facts in this dispute are complicated, but the allegations in the neatly hand-written complaint essentially boil down to the following:

1) Vick stole two white mixed pit bull dogs from the Plaintiff in Holiday, Fl.

2) Vick used the two dogs for his dogfighting operations in Richmond, Va.

3) Vick then proceeded to sell the stolen dogs on eBay and “used the proceeds to purchase missiles from the Iran government” because he needed the missiles as part of his pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda.

4) Vick stole the Plaintiff’s “identity from [the Plaintiff's] coat, and used it to open accounts at various pet stores to purchase food for the stolen dogs.

Other miscellaneous allegations include

5) Vick violated copyright law (referred to by the Plaintiff as “my copyright laws”) “by using the “Plaintiff’s copyright name on his personal football outfit and casual clothing.”

6) Vick “subjected [the Plaintiff] to microwave testing.”

7) And, finally, “Vick used drugs in school zones.”

In addition to the”$63,000,000,000 billion dollars backed by gold and silver”, the Plaintiff asks the court to issue a temporary restraining order against Vick so that Vick will “stop physically hurting my feelings and dashing my hopes.”

Z-Murder, Mr. Hitchens, I too would have and would today continue to support your “ideal war“. But we don’t live in an ideal world, we live in this world.

If I understand Murder’s post correctly, his defense of Hitchens’ views on Iraq (and indeed, Hitchens’ own justification for such views) is based on some idealized, fictionalized state of affairs that, well, doesn’t exist. To which I say, great, when that idealized world exists, let’s have it your way. Until then, let’s deal with what we have.

Just because Hitchens’ views on Iraq are right in some ideal world does not make those views right in our world. For Hitchens, the international community should have banded together and supported Iraqi regime change. And maybe he’s right: those passivist liberal nations that refused to act were wrong. But those nations exist, and it’s no surprise to anyone those nations would oppose or refrain from almost any war. Given this predictable fact, to support Iraqi regime change was to support unilateral military intervention by the U.S. That’s the real world we live in, and that’s what the Second Iraq War has been. We can argue about the wrongness of those liberal nations that opposed Iraqi regime change, but that does not make unilateral U.S military intervention in Iraq any more right.

Murder asks “Does believing the initial decision to go to war was justified thereby make me responsible for the mismanagement of the war by the Bush administration?” as if this is a difficult question to answer. But this question poses the same ideal/reality disconnect. To me, the answer is (particularly with the benefit of hindsight) obvious: yes. To borrow from Rumsfeld, you go to war with the incompetent administration you have, not with the competent, international coalition-building administration you want. Perhaps it was impossible to tell ex ante, but if you supported a war with Iraq anytime between 2000 and 2008, you supported a war on Iraq waged by the Bush administration– the exceedingly incompetent Bush administration. I did. And I acknowledge now that that was a horrible error in judgment. So, yes, my support of the war makes me responsible for the mismanagement of the war by the Bush administration.

But not quite this much:

It could have been the Coldplay song “Yellow” that upset the patron of a Wallingford neighborhood bar. Or perhaps it was the karaoke singer who belted it out….

As soon as the man on stage started singing about the stars in his best Chris Martin impersonation, the woman reportedly said: “Oh, no, not that song. I can’t stand that song!”

Witnesses said her distaste for Coldplay quickly took a violent turn, and she leaped at the would-be crooner, shouting expletives and telling him that his singing “sucked,” while expressing the same opinion of the song, according to a Seattle police report.

She pushed the man and punched him, all in an effort to stop his singing.

What has happened to “liberals”? What used to be a humanitarian, internationalist philosophy has turned into a disgusting isolationist movement that cares only about humiliating Bush. And what would be more humiliating than leaving Iraq just when we’re starting to see progress, and causing a genocide that could then be blamed on Bush and his neocon supporters. No one would blame the liberals who actually called for the hasty retreat and had hampered the war effort from its start.

Liberals used to at least pretend they cared about the Iraqi people. Now they’ve lost even that pretense. Did you catch the absurd “The Road Home” editorial in the Times? The thesis is that “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” What follows, though, is this:

Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.

Make things worse? Worse than “ethnic cleansing, even genocide”? Are you serious? Of course, this kind of tripe is easily dispatched with, as has Jules Crittendon and my friend Kevin Sullivan.

Perhaps worse, though, is a man some of you may be thinking of voting for next year (think twice). Barack Obama turns what may be written off as a slip by the Times into a general statement of isolationist principles — principles of indifference to genocide. According to the AP, he suggested that “preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there”. And continued:

Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now - where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife - which we haven’t done.

We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.

Again, this is easy to dispatch with, as have James Taranto and Jonah Goldberg. But liberals don’t read WSJ or National Review.

But they sure as hell read The New York Times. I mentioned earlier that liberals are marching lockstep towards withdrawal just as the forces are starting to see some real security progress. Though many news sources have been reporting the successes of the Petraeus surge for months, the NYT just chimed in last Monday with an editorial from two Brookings Institute scholars and frequent Bush critics. The point:

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

The Democratic response to the good news from Iraq? Denial. So much of the Democrats’ 2008 strategy is based on defeatism in Iraq, that any good news for the Iraqi people is actually seen as bad news by the Democrats. From Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas:

But let me first just say that the description of Iraq as in some way or another that it’s a place that I might take the family for a vacation—things are going so well—those kinds of comments will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country instead of saying, here’s the reality of the problem. And people, we have to come together and deal with the reality of this issue.

From Rep. Jack Murtha:

rhetoric…I don’t know what they saw, but I know this, that it’s not getting better.

Many will argue that the O’Hanlon and Pollack piece is just one editorial, and that it doesn’t prove anything about Iraq. Well sure, but it’s not alone. Here, here, here. I’ve got a dozen more.

No, these don’t prove anything either. But they do make the case for “rational optimism on Iraq”, to take Max Boot’s phrase.

You were against the Iraq war from the start? Good for you. You can revel in the Iraqi people’s suffering. You may have been right. But that doesn’t absolve you of the duty to help the people of Iraq, and leaving Iraq now, or setting a date to leave there very soon, is not going to help the people of Iraq finally achieve peace (nor us, security). As Kevin Sullivan writes in response to the “gotcha politics” of “progressive” isolationists:

So tell me, if we pat you on the back and tell you that you were right about the invasion, will you stop handicapping our foreign policy? Pretty please?

So I’ve been saying for a while that I would write up a mini-tutorial on BitTorrent, and how to get, you know, files with it. Then, I swear, right as I was about to compose said tutorial, I happened upon A beginner’s guide to BitTorrent over at LifeHacker, and it basically does what I would have done only better. He even recommends the same windows BitTorrent software I would (uTorrent) and the same search site I use (isoHunt). The only thing I’ll add is, if you are looking for music, think album (or even collected albums) not song.

If there’s interest I could maybe write something on how to use BitTorrent and RSS feeds as a poor man’s Tivo… or at least find a post about it on lifehacker and point you to it.