The news shows actually talked about Iraq today, and the upcoming testimony of Gen. Petraeus before Congress. One of the most interesting moments of the shows that I watched occured during Stephanopoulos' show on ABC.

Katrina Van Houvel, or however you spell it, who is an editor of the "Nation" magazine, an occasional participant of the "roundtable" portion of the show, gave some very strong criticism of the war in Iraq. As she was talking, Cokie Roberts, long time ABC conservative political analyst, kept laughing, under her breath in a way but loud enough to come across the TV mics. It was unbecoming of Roberts and showed her true Republican beliefs.

But most of the commentators thought that the Dems were going to give a pass to Petraeus this time around and wait until after the election to try and do anything about Iraq. What a shame, actually, but that is the political reality. It is unlikely that the Dems could get anything done substantially on Iraq with Bush in the White House.

But the last couple weeks have showed that the so-called "surge" in Iraq, and the so-called "success" of the surge is a sham - an illusion. It is only a "success" as long as the Shiite majority aligned with Iran lays back. But that faction doesn't have the same long term interests with the U.S. aligned "government" lead by Maliki. The main point of contention is the U.S. occupation.

Of course, from what I can gather, the Mahdi army is an extension of Herzb Allah, the Lebanese based Shiite movement that proved itself recently in it's war against Israel. They are aligned with Iran, which gives them a solid base of infrastructure support. These folks have a totally different vision of the politics of the middle east than we do, and their power seems to be growing. Iran seems to have a lot of military capability, and it is sharing it with it's partners with impunity, seemingly innocuous to our national propoganda against Iran. What stupidity it would be to provoke even more confrontation in that part of the country.

On the political front, there was significant discussion about the Democratic nomination for president. This morning I heard more than one person say that they thought it was good for the Democrats to be going through this primary battle. I sort of feel the same way, but up until today, most of the pundits were saying that it was bad for the party.

Howard Dean was on a couple of the shows. His demeanor was good - he continues to say that rules will be followed, whatever they are. He did bring up, for the first time that I can remember, that perhaps the state legislators in Florida and Michigan might get involved in resolving those two state's conflicts.

But everyone is pretty much agreed that Sen. Clinton is going to stay in hoping that Obama will slip up or some events will hurt him significantly. That isn't likely to happen, but it might. Otherwise, Clinton is going to lose the nomination to Obama. I hope the Dems have the courage to actually carry through with the De-Clintoning of the party. (and by that I mean significantly reducing their "team's" influence on the party). I don't want to denigrate the Clinton's, but their influence on the nation was within a certain time period in our history, and they just need to recognize that and let us move on as a nation.