The 1st 20 minutes of Olbermann were so depressing

[AlCzervik]

not his fault, it's the news on Iraq and it's all bad, 10 marines killed and sunni's and shites offing eachother.

[liveoaktx]

1. With you. But I laughed my head off at the guy who celebrated

Christmas every single day... and is divorced.

[AlCzervik]

2. yes that was amusing and badly needed. Was the news just really fing bad

or am i just in a blue mood? I'm sitting there watching and thinking holy hell this nightmare is never going to end.

[liveoaktx]

4. It was just that bad... or maybe Bush just pissed me off so badly today

going out all smiley about jobs and saying nothing about the dead and wounded... at all.

[rzemanfl]

8. There is something insane going on and I am burning out. How

the hell can this continue? Apparently all most people care about is gas prices and Christmas.

[Selatius]

3. This was bound to happen the day Saddam died

He was the glue that held that country together. The British failed to create a stable democracy in Iraq twice. They failed the first time after WW1. They failed the second time after WW2. Only under the authoritarian rule of the Ba'athist Party was Iraq stabilized enough to go for years without civil war.

Unfortunately, when the British carved lines into the sand and called it "Iraq," they, knowingly or unknowingly, threw together several different ethnic/sectarian groups that historically had nothing to do with each other, and they expected them to come together in harmony and become one nation regardless of the past bloody history between these groups?

This is why the British Empire failed twice, and now we're fighting in the same place they once did, trying to do almost exactly the same thing the Empire before us tried to do.

[AlCzervik]

5. it's tribal and america doesn't get "Tribal" they don't understand it

My bil is from Iran and he warned us in the lead up how fucked up things were going to be and why they had a Saddam to begin with.

[bklyncowgirl]

13. It'r rather like Yugoslavia. The dicatorship held it together.

Ethnic violence was put down ruthlessly.

In Iraq the Sunni's held sway over the Shiites and the Kurds through Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Except for state sanctioned violence anyone who stepped out of line would be imprisoned and tortured.

In both cases when the dictators who held these countries together by force died or fell from power, the country spun apart because only the most brutal violence held these people together.

[Erika]

6. He also said segregation is back and diverse neighborhoods

are gone. What were once lively communities with diverse factions living peacefully next to each other, have been replaced with segregated communities.

Very bad news.

[AlCzervik]

7. did you hear the "Ethnic cleansing" comment?

[Erika]

9. What was it exactly? n/t

[AlCzervik]

10. i'm not sure if the young Iraqi guy said it and they translated it or

if it was the reporter himself saying it as a commentary but it went something like this "the killing is like ethnic cleansing" or something like that. It caught my attention very quickly, it's funny when you hear a certain phrase and the immediate visceral reaction you have to it.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

12. I don't know what he's talking about

because this isn't the case in MY neighborhood and I live in the deep, deep south.

[Gloria]

11. The segment on the Katrina pets wasn't so much fun either...

Less than 15% being reunited with their families...you can guess what will happen to the rest.....