"I ain't goin' out there without my posse!"

A 'recommended read' at Attytood

More proof "the surge is working": Right-wingers claim even the CIA is afraid to go outside without trigger-happy Blackwater

There's been a lot going on this week -- so much that I haven't been able to comment on maybe the biggest story of all, and that is the uproar surrounding the U.S. security firm Blackwater USA and its alleged shooting up of civilians in Baghdad. It's the biggest story because Iraqis are so angry over this, it may be the final tipping point in their relationship with their self-proclaimed liberators.

The bizarre logic here escapes me. The surge is working so well that our own CIA agents -- trained for months at "The Farm" in Virginia to learn how to kill a man with a ballpoint pen, and that sort of thing -- are now afraid to walk out the front door without a bevy of allegedly trigger-happy men toting machine guns and firing indiscriminantly?

My God, what was it like in Baghdad before the awesome power of the surge?

And from Cursor:

"If Blackwater and other private contractors are shut out of Iraq, Democrats in Congress and Iranian intelligence operatives may have stumbled on a way to end the Iraq War."

Hmmmm....

Go peruse the 'Tood.