The Money Primary

"The people you joined up with have had the very agenda you abetted since at least the days of Nixon, and unless we rid our public life of them, they'll be back again. You were an insider. Start talking about what you know. Grab your knife and start the stabbing. That's how you can restore some balance."

Actually, Dowd is a former Democrat, so I don't think you can blame him for Tricky Dick.

Bill Kristol says the stakes in Washington are even higher than Bush may grasp:

"Surely President Bush must realize that the Democratic Congress is not merely struggling with him over policy, or jousting for political advantage. The Democrats in Congress are trying to destroy his presidency. They are trying to cripple his ability to govern for the rest of his term. And they are not far from succeeding. Will Bush fight back?"

And the Republican Congress, which impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair, wasn't trying to destroy him?

"This does not mean defending everything his administration has done indiscriminately, of course. It may be, for example, that Attorney General Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General McNulty should go. Then get rid of them now. Appoint strong conservatives to replace them. And insist on their prompt confirmation . . .

"Here's a small but revealing example of the current situation. Last week, the White House withdrew the nomination of St. Louis businessman and philanthropist Sam Fox to be ambassador to Belgium after John Kerry threw a fit about Fox's having given money in 2004 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Kerry tried to insist that Fox apologize for his donation. Fox, a man of stature and dignity, refused to pretend to be contrite. Kerry bludgeoned Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats into opposing Fox--which was not so easy, as Fox had wide and bipartisan support in Missouri and beyond. But the White House did nothing, and Democrats fell into line behind Kerry."

Kos is unhappy with Obama, based on this news account:

" If President Bush vetoes an Iraq war spending bill as promised, Congress quickly will provide the money without the withdrawal timeline the White House objects to because no lawmaker 'wants to play chicken with our troops,' Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday.

"What a ridiculous thing to say. Not only is it bad policy, not only is it bad politics, it's also a terrible negotiating approach . . . Obama just surrendered to Bush."

This post by Salon Editor Joan Walsh is an important one. It follows the decision by blogger Kathy Sierra to temporarily suspend her site because of sexually explicit venom and death threats. "I do not want to be part of a culture--the Blogosphere--where this is considered acceptable," Sierra writes. Here's Walsh:

"Is there really any doubt that women writing on the Web are subject to more abuse than men, simply because they're women? Really? I've been following the Kathy Sierra blog storm, thinking I had nothing new to say, but the continued insistence that Sierra, and those who defend her, are somehow overreacting, or charging sexism where none exists, makes it hard for a mouthy woman to stay silent.

"I say this as a mouthy woman who has tried for a long time to pretend otherwise: that Web misogyny isn't especially rampant -- but even if it is, it has no effect on me, or any other strong, sane woman doing her job. But I wasn't being honest. My own reactions and those of others to the Sierra mess served to wrestle the truth out of me, and it wasn't what I hoped . . .

"And on and on it goes: Is Sierra another woman silenced by vicious online sexism, or just a wuss? Were the threats of violence real? Or is she the real bully, organizing a 'lynch mob' to win her blogosphere battle?

"I avoided writing about the mess for a day or two because I had mixed feelings about it. Ever since Salon automated its letters, it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men -- sometimes nakedly sexist, sometimes less obviously so; sometimes sexually and/or personally degrading. But I've never admitted the toll our letters can sometimes take on women writers at Salon, myself included, because admitting it would be giving misogynist losers -- and these are the posters I'm talking about -- power . . .

"Once I joined Salon I started receiving the creepiest personal e-mails about my work. Anything I wrote that vaguely defended President Clinton or criticized his attackers, in particular, would get me a torrent of badly spelled e-mail, often from Free Republic readers and posters. There were themes: A significant subset tended to depict me in a Monica Lewinsky role, often graphically . . .

"There were plenty of insults, and most of them had to do with us as women -- as mothers, as sexual objects, as writers, as professional women in the world. To boil it down, we're wrinkly old hags . . . we're narcissists and bad mothers, and worst of all, for writers, we're really bad writers, and terribly stupid. But mostly we're just bad women. Bad, bad women. And did I mention ugly and wrinkly?"