Mo' Better Blues

      Filter out a bit of her typical thump-thump-thwacking, and Maureen of the Dowdy makes a few salient points in her piece for the Times this morning on the Iraqi (interim) Prime Minister's visit to the United States.   Mr Allawi's wagon is as hitched to the Bush bandwagon as Nick Lachey's career is to his wife's inexplicably-endearing idiocy.   I don't envy Mr Allawi, his position largely untenable; but we make a grave mistake if we think even for a moment that he speaks for the people of Iraq, he the second-choice after Mr Chalabi proved to be laden with too much questionable (and Tehranian) baggage.   Without over-speculating, let's simply admit that there was a reason Mr Allawi was appointed to his current position, as he so aptly demonstrated this week. He evidently knows what to say to that inescapable question,"Who's Ya Daddy?"   (This blog has with some sense of deference edited out the word "b*tch" that normally concludes that question, as well as the word that rhymes with "brother-tucking" that regularly pops up in the middle.   Who says courtesy and respect are dead?)