My internet access from home has been out for two weeks now. Often, I go over to a friend's house with my laptop to use his connection. I get there in the afternoons, and one of the first things I do is go to Google News and parse the day's computer-generated headlines.

Invariably, I'll be browsing the headlines and exclaim something like, "Holy Shit!" Then my friend will ask me what's wrong, and I'll say something like, "did you hear they raided Chalabi's house!" and my friend will say, "yeah, I just read about that." Not having access to my prime news source has left me hopelessly behind the times. My alternatives are network television news (no thanks) or the New York Times (occasionally unreliable, always slow).

As a result of this handicap, my already sloth-like response to current events on this blog has slowed to a total halt. Let me explain briefly; I try not to say things here that have already been said. This requires sitting on my reactions to a (news) story until I read other people's reactions to that same story. This works well when I have a relatiovely unique insight, but not so well when I'm drawing obvious conclusions. I like to think that this is a self-enforcing mechanism which prevents me from excessive "me-too" style posts.

Unfortunately, over time, somebody will have made the point I wanted to make. Not only that, but these stories move in real time, so the longer I wait to make a pronouncement about something, the likelier it is that the story has evolved in a way that requires a whole new set of reactions.

I'm thinking about the Abu Ghraib scandal as a perfect example of this phenomenon. I really wanted to say something about it, but now it seems like everything has already been said. It's already plain that this scandal is not only damaging U.S. credibility, but that it will likely have serious repercussions for the current administration as a function of how high up we discover the scandal will obviously reach.

I wanted to write a rebuttal to those naysayers who maintained that Abu Ghraib was a minor story undeserving of so much press time. Then Sy Hersh's piece about the Copper Green project and Stephen Cambone came out and changed the texture of the story. Now, I don't have the access and resources of a journalist like Hersh, so I can only react to news, not break it. But my reaction is worth less and less the longer it takes me to compose it.