It had circle jerk potential.

Your parenthetical reference to Afghanistan is wrong. They are talking about Iraq. And your suggestion that Obama rolled over for buttface O'reily is way off the mark. Obama held his ground and was consistently true to his theme and policies.

USA! USA!

I admired Obama's strength here. I think it was smart of him to say "Here's where we agree on Iran" and then "Here's where we disagree." I would have lost patience and punched that douche.
And I appreciate that he made it a point to say that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have perverted the face of Islam. Not that the conservatives will really listen to that, but it's an important message to reiterate.

I bought my wife a 2 yr subscription to U.S.Weekly magazine last Christmas as a stocking stuffer. I thought she would get a kick out of the deprecating articles about the Hollywood celebrities.

NO LONGER! Cancel our subscription!

After seeing the slanderous, malicious, attack-driven “cover story” entitled, “Babies, Lies & Scandal” meant to publicly embarrass Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin of the great State of Alaska, U.S. Weekly can take its communist drivel and peddle it to some unsuspecting victim elsewhere. To be honest, we all know that U.S. Weekly is far from the caliber of legitimate journalism.

However, since it has a readership in the millions, U.S.Weekly, is clearly trying to flex its Beverly Hills political muscle. U.S.Weekly should stick to what it knows best, like what Madonna has to say about saving the world and how noble she is by adopting children from third world countries. We all know how much better the USA would be with Madonna at the helm; after all she is best friends with another Hollywood liberal political force, Oprah Winfrey. To add to this phenomenal development, Madonna and Oprah, clearly are grounded and certainly connect with minimum wagers in this country, after all we all know that they don’t make much money and live in modest housing to remain relatable to the public. Madonna loves America so much that she spends most of her time in England. Oprah loves America so much that she launched her own magazine called, “O” and graces its covers every month so that all of us unfortunate working folks can be inspired by her grace and ability give away merchandise on her self-aggrandizing show.

The Republican Party has never been popular with the Hollywood set, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. However, the public knows that you, Ms. Min and Ms. Wenner, are just employees of the New York Times which publishes U.S.Weekly. We aren’t fooled and we aren’t stupid. Both of you are openly and unequivocally Pro-Obama. You have doted and fawned over he and his wife with a child like naiveté. Your Pro-Obama coverage is a shining example of your liberal and leftist leanings. You are the sycophants that are repeating the pattern of Thomas Feyer, the NYT editor that raves about Obama and refused to print future President John McCain’s Op-Ed because our next President, John McCain did not agree with Feyer’s liberal rants.

Attacking Governor/Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin was the wrong thing to do. Not only have you energized the conservative political base in this country because of it, but you have galvanized those that truly love America and defend it for a living as I do. For your feeble attempts at a political insurgency against McCain/Palin, you will most definitely be rewarded!

With a decisive McCain/Palin win!

Michni Point, Pakistan's last outpost at the western end of the barren, winding Khyber Pass, stands sentinel over Torkham Gate, the deceptively orderly border crossing into Afghanistan. Frontier Scouts in gray shalwar kameezes (traditional tunics and loose pants) and black berets patrol the lonely station commanded by a major of the legendary Khyber Rifles, the militia force that has been guarding the border with Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, first for British India and then for Pakistan. This spot, perhaps more than any other, has witnessed the traverse of the world's great armies on campaigns of conquest to and from South and Central Asia. All eventually ran into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribals.

Alexander the Great sent his supply trains through the Khyber, then skirted northward with his army to the Konar Valley on his campaign in 327 bc. There he ran into fierce resistance and, struck by an Afghan archer's arrow, barely made it to the Indus River with his life. Genghis Khan and the great Mughal emperors began passing through the Khyber a millennium later and ultimately established the greatest of empires — but only after reaching painful accommodations with the Afghans. From Michni Point, a trained eye can still see the ruins of the Mughal signal towers used to relay complex torch-light messages 1,500 miles from Calcutta to Bukhara in less than an hour.

In the nineteenth century the Khyber became the fulcrum of the Great Game, the contest between the United Kingdom and Russia for control of Central Asia and India. The first Afghan War (1839-42) began when British commanders sent a huge army of British and Indian troops into Afghanistan to secure it against Russian incursions, replacing the ruling emir with a British protege. Facing Afghan opposition, by January 1842 the British were forced to withdraw from Kabul with a column of 16,500 soldiers and civilians, heading east to the garrison at Jalalabad, 110 miles away. Only a single survivor of that group ever made it to Jalalabad safely, though the British forces did recover some prisoners many months later.

According to the late Louis Dupree, the premier historian of Afghanistan, four factors contributed to the British disaster: the occupation of Afghan territory by foreign troops, the placing of an unpopular emir on the throne, the harsh acts of the British-supported Afghans against their local enemies, and the reduction of the subsidies paid to the tribal chiefs by British political agents. The British would repeat these mistakes in the second Afghan War (1878-81), as would the Soviets a century later; the United States would be wise to consider them today.

In the aftermath of the second British misadventure in Afghanistan, Rudyard Kipling penned his immortal lines on the role of the local women in tidying up the battlefields:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Jest roll to your rifle an' blow out your brains

An' …

There is a lake near Webster, Massachusetts called Chargoggaggoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug. Translated from the original Nipmuck, it lays down this thoughtful code for keeping the peace: "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fishes in the middle."

Halfway around the globe, there is a place called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, seven so-called tribal "agencies" along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan where about six million of the most independent humans on the planet live on 27,000 square kilometers of rugged and inhospitable terrain.

They are the Pashtuns, and they have lived on their lands without interruption or major migration for about 20,000 years. They know their neighborhood very well, and their men have been armed to the teeth since the first bow was strung. Their ancient code involves a commitment to hospitality, revenge and the honor of the tribe. They are invariably described as your "best friend or worst enemy." The Pashtuns' sense of territoriality bears some resemblance to the Nipmuck tribe of Massachusetts; when outsiders venture into the middle of their lands on fishing expeditions or to exert authority, very bad things happen.

In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great fell afoul of Pashtun tribesmen in today's Malakand Agency, where he took an arrow in the leg and almost lost his life. Two millennia later the founder of the Mogul empire, Babur, described the tribesmen of the area now known as Waziristan as unmanageable; his main complaint seemed to center on his inability to get them to pay their taxes by handing over their sheep, let alone stop to attacking his armies. A couple of hundred years later, in the middle of the 19th century, the British experienced disaster after disaster as they tried to bring the same Pashtun tribes to heel, particularly in the agencies of North and South Waziristan. In 1893, after half a century of jockeying for position with Imperial Russia in the "Great Game," the British administrator of the northwest of Queen Victoria's Indian Empire, Sir Mortimer Durand, demarcated the border between India–now Pakistan–and Afghanistan. The Durand line, as it is still known to foreigners–the Pashtuns call it "zero line" and completely ignore it–separated the tribes on both sides of the line into 26 agencies, each with its own laws and tribal councils. It was this area that became the buffer between the British and Russian Empires, an agreed-upon "middle of the lake." The tribes were then left mostly to themselves for about 80 years.

The Soviet adventure in Afghanistan began on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1979, and took a decade to cycle through, ending in exactly the same fashion as all the other foreign enterprises in that land–with failure. It was in the territories to the west of zero line, in the lands of the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, and the Ahmadzais, that the Soviets repeatedly failed in their attempts to establish their authority. They took some of their heaviest casualties not many kilometers to the west of South Waziristan and Wana Fort where the current drama now seems to be winding down after two confused weeks.

This time it is the Pakistani Army and its local levies, the paramilitary Frontier Corps, who have ventured into South Waziristan. To the west of zero line, American forces lie in wait for the quarry to be driven into their gun sights. The Pakistani operation has been described as an attempt to route an enemy alternately depicted as Islamic militants, foreign terrorists, or "high value" Al Qaeda fighters. Early in the operation it was suggested that Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was cornered near Wana Fort. Now the word in Pakistan is that Tahir Yaldashev, leader of the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, "may" have been there at the time of the Pakistani assault, but later escaped, possibly wounded.

As the CIA officer overseeing the final years of the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, I served as a 20th century American version of the British East India Company political agent and quartermaster to these same Waziri Ahmadzai tribesmen as they stymied all Soviet efforts to "exert a little authority." Their leader then was Jalaluddin Haqqani, a man of uncommon personal courage, and a deeply nuanced understanding of guerilla tactics. Though his current whereabouts are unknown–some say he died of wounds from a U.S. air attack–Haqqani has transitioned from America's best friend during the anti-Soviet war to its worst enemy in the current undertaking in Afghanistan. He is at the top of the list of America's most wanted, and it is his spirit and the Pashtun code of honor that continue to drive the Ahmadzai tribesmen against whom both the Pakistani Army and American forces are lined up.

It will be a tough and unrewarding slog. Like most of the great confrontations launched by outsiders in Waziristan over the last 2,000 years, this one will probably end in ambiguity. There have already been claims of "mission accomplished" by the Pakistani army and the Frontier Corps–after all, they lost up to 60 dead–but there will likely be nothing concrete to point to, aside from claims of having destroyed a militant sanctuary. The much ballyhooed "high value targets" we and our Pakistani allies expected to kill or capture will probably remain unknown and unresolved, and the American Operation "Mountain Storm" across zero line in Afghanistan will probably wind down with an equal lack of clarity. Already there seems to be a sense of relief that everyone will quietly go back to fishing on their sides of the lake.

That's the way it's always been in those rugged hills.

Milt Bearden was CIA chief in Pakistan from 1986 until the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. He is the co-author with James Risen of "The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB."

DON'T fall for Palin's hockey mom spirit. You need to look beyond the hype. In a Slate article it was shown she approved to bridge to nowhere but when Congress killed it she still got the SAME AMOUNT of money for "other" projects. She wants to ban books in the library. She believes women/girls victims of rape or incest should be forced to have their baby. She says she is frugal, yet she had 198 million in earmarks, which is the highest per capita in the country. She believes in climate change but doubts humans activities in it. And best of all she votes for abstinence only education. Wonder if her and Bristol are reaccessing that one! PLEASE do your homework before you vote! She gave a great speech and I was enthused. But once I started digging…the woman turns my stomach.