CROSS-POSTED AT BIG ORANGE - I apologize for not stripping any "Big Orange dialect" out first but I get paid by the hour and this is my lunch hour.

I have an "unsexy" but useful way for Democratic-friendly volunteer attorneys and others to contribute to efforts to hold Team Bush accountable.

In Mario Puzo's novel and Academy Award winning film The Godfather, the Corleone crime family used Tom Hagen as its counselor or consigliere.  While Hagen was pretty competent as consigliere for ordinary day-to-day business, his skills were insufficient to match the deviousness of hard-core inter-family warfare.  During his tenure as consigliere, he failed to perceive a devious plot against Sonny, the acting head of the family, never conceiving that the Sonny's brother-in-law Carlo could have taken money from a rival family to batter Sonny's sister as a means of luring an enraged Sonny out from his bunker to his death in a assassination trap at a toll booth.  Years later, Sonny's surviving brother Michael as the new head of the family reluctantly told Tom Hagen that Tom was "not a wartime consigliere," and locked him out of future war strategy sessions.

This is my first diary here at MyDD; I apologize in advance for the stylistic and formatting goofs to which you may be subjected.

Last week, in another context, I brought up the issue of veterans of the Vietnam War being spat upon by Vietnam-era anti-war activists.  Several other readers commented that that commonly-held belief did not reflect reality.

So I went looking for the reality, and here's what I found.