-My message to my colleagues in support of the US action is this: for God's sake, stop accusing people of being un-American! I could understand such sentiments being directed at someone who's burning the flag, or one who has literally denounced their country, but come on- when you're throwing such accusations at every other person, they start to lose power after awhile. Repeat after me: opposing the war is not opposing America. Opposing Bush is not opposing America. Not everyone who's against you is an evil sodomite. We have freedom of speech, and large amounts of people seem to be exercising it. Any lover of liberty should respect at least that much.

-It was reported on Sunday that Iraq is claiming a grand total of three (3) civilian casualties as a result of last week's Shock and Awe campaign. Not sure if that's correct, but if it is, it means that so far in 2003 more civilians have been as a result of fires in American nightclubs than by the war in Iraq.

-This war's being called "Gulf War II," which I think is a misnomer: Desert Storm was called "The Gulf War" because it was over Kuwait, whose entire eastern coast borders the Persian Gulf. Iraq, on the other hand, barely touches the Gulf at all. A better name might be "The Tigres/Euphrates War." Not only more accurate, but it gives the operation a certain much-needed biblical gravitas.

-In Manhattan for about 20 minutes on Saturday, I stumbled into the big antiwar march as it ambled through Herald Square. Now I have no doubt that the vast majority of those who oppose this war are honorable people who have good reasons for feeling the way they feel. But that's not what I saw on Saturday. It was more an anti-Bush rally than an anti-war one, and the people there seemed to have nothing less than a visceral, pathological hatred of George W. Bush that goes away beyond politics, a loathing that makes the right-wing revulsion of Bill Clinton look like a lovefest by comparison. I even saw Bush-as-Hitler signs, an eerie reminder of the "Rabin Hitler" era of Israeli politics (in 1995, the far right wing in Israel was so angry at Rabin over the peace process that they held rallies in which they held up posters of Rabin in a Nazi uniform and chanted "Rabin Hitler (Rabin is Hitler)" Rabin was of course assassinated by a fanatic in November of '95; this whole thing was chronicled in the somewhat shoddy 1997 documentary "The Road to Rabin Square," directed by Michael Karbin and nicknamed "The Rabin Hitler Movie.")