Dr. Cole wonders why Mulla Omar is still able to threaten US and allied troops in Afghanistan. He was supposed to have been part of the package when we went after Osama.

Osama is now making personal appearances in Republican campaign commercials reminding people that 1862 days after the Shrubbery said he would get him “dead or alive”, Osama still has a thriving career in the video market.

[Update: Keith Olbermann has a special comment on the Republican TV ad.]

People might have thought that having harbored al Qaeda, Afghanistan would have been on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, but you can’t get on the list unless the US recognizes the government, and the US never gave official recognition to the Taliban government.

Okay, so the Taliban must be on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations? Not a chance. That’s for the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanese political parties, not for armed groups actively at war with US troops.

You might think that this whole War on Terror™ is FUBAR…and you would be right.

Early this morning the BBC had an interview with Dr. Sergei Khrushchev [Сергей Никитич Хрущёв] the son of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev [Никита Сергеевич Хрущёв], about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Dr. Khrushchev said that one of the main issues in his father’s mind when he made the decision to send tanks into Hungary was the Second Hungarian Army, which served with the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Khrushchev was a political officer on the Southern Front during World War II and saw the fighting around Stalingrad personally. He wasn’t prepared to show the Hungarians any more mercy than he felt they showed the Soviet Army on the Southern Front. He personally felt the Hungarians were as bad or worse than the Germans.

While Dr. Khrushchev didn’t mentioned it, having denounced Stalin at the 20^th Congress of the CPSU [КПСС] only eight months earlier, his father could not afford to look weak to the Central Committee.

Eric Alterman proves science types have a sense of humor with Bushcronium. It is funnier if you have a familiarity with particle physics, but it stands up if you just read it through.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The BBC has a nice interactive site, Timeline: Hungarian Revolution, for more details and Jams O’Donnell of Poor Mouth has a piece on the effect it had on the Communist Party in Britain.

Unfortunately, while the Hungarians were trying to get rid of their Communist government, Israel, Britain, and France went to war with Egypt over the Suez Crisis. While world attention was focused on the Middle East, Russia sent in a tank army and crushed the revolution.

American troops had to sit in place on the border and watch because the expected order to provide assistance to the Hungarians never came.