Afghanistan

So while we're talking about creepy Republicans, I thought I'd share this nugget from our own Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist. On Monday, Frist said this about the Afghan war:

Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn't sound like it can be won. It sounds to me ... that the Taliban is everywhere.

He said this during a one day tour of Afghanistan which saw his helicopter pelted by stones thrown by children, and also had a suicide bomber blow up next to a NATO convoy in Kabul.

His solution to this problem? Simple!

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished we'll be successful."

I wasn't looking for it. I was undertaking no study on coverage of American foreign policy in domestic vs. international mainstream publications. But there it was taking up the upper-left-hand corner of Newsweek's site: a small thumbnail of each edition of the magazine--Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States.

The covers of each edition NOT distributed in the United States were identical. The photo: a striking close-up of an Afghan fighter with a rocket launcher propped on his shoulder. The headline: LOSING AFGHANISTAN. "Losing"
was in particularly large type.

The photos lined up in a vertical row: