The Red Wheelbarrow is Soaked

Holden gets ponies frequently now, but he's making me ride my newest hobby horse again.

When is a civil war a civil war? When the Powers that Be (i.e., the Beltway Pundits) finally agree to call it?'

Or when more than 70% of the American public think it already exists?

Of course, 4 out 5 of us expected this to happen soon. So this isn't exactly news.

The question is: why hasn't the Beltway heard this yet?

By the way:

Police in the past 24 hours have found the bodies of at least 87 people killed by execution-style shootings — a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal slayings, officials said Tuesday.

The dead included at least 29 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.

The bloodshed — the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shiite shrine last month — followed weekend attacks in a teeming Shiite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

The importance of definitions seems more and more pointless.