Media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic are running lots of pieces on the question of Iraqi WMDs. From The Guardian: Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims. From MSNBC: Pressure mounting on Bush and Blair as weapons hunters find no unconventional arms. From the New York Times: Powell defends information he used to justify Iraq war. From the Washington Post: Tenet defends Iraq intelligence. And from Reuters: US insiders say Iraqi intel deliberately skewed.

Meanwhile, the story containing the “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.” quotation from Colin Powell has now made it to US News and World Report’s website. See the following interesting article: Just how good was America’s intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass terror? So the folks at Islam Online and AFP were telling the truth about USNWR saying that, and Craig will need to come up with another explanation for why the rabid leftwing media hasn’t made more of the story so far.

So, here I am biding my time until December, when ROTK appears, or at least until November, when the extended-edition TTT DVD appears. In the meantime, though, my fanboy juices were set flowing by the following: Rings grabs four MTV Movie Awards.

Yeah, they’re not the real awards; just the silly MTV variety. But I’ll take ‘em.

While Bush has fun playing president in Europe, Tony Blair is coming in for some grown-up-sized criticism regarding the WMD thing. I found the following analysis in The Scotsman interesting: Blair: Dossier will prove we were right to have Iraq war.

Legal handbook for photographers includes a downloadable PDF for field use. Thanks to kottke.org.

Dave Lindorff, writing in Counterpunch, argues that even if Bush isn’t defeated at the polls next year, a Democratic majority in congress could lead to high-profile fun of the impeachment variety: It was the lying, right?

If you took just about every political rant I’ve posted on this site in the past year and tied it together in one article, you’d have… a really long article. Only you don’t have to, because Robert Parry already has: America’s matrix.

Nice rant from Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos about Donald Rumsfeld: Secretary of everything.

Andrew Sullivan gives what strikes me as being just about the strongest possible case one could make in defense of having waged war on Iraq absent actual evidence of Iraqi WMDs: So where are they? Basically, he argues that they still could show up, and even if they don’t, it doesn’t matter, because Saddam was a Very Bad Man and he would have eventually gotten around to making them and giving them to terraists.

A helpful reader forwarded the following link, in which someone named Daniel Borchers goes on at length about just how vile Ann Coulter is. And man, when you gather it all togther like that, is she ever. Anyway: Jayson Blair & Ann Coulter — Separated at Birth.

For those who may have watched the movie on FX yesterday on the real-life bank robbery and police shootout with those two heavily-armed, body armor-wearing guys in North Hollywood a few years ago, here is an article on the riveting story’s feeble reenactment to a TV movie. Interesting how often an isolated yet compelling episode of real life becomes listless and full of inaccuracies once scriptwriters and producers get ahold of it and feel the need to add more “drama”.

Here’s a really wacky story about a really wacky guy and the really wacky girl he was dating for a while, and the really wacky judge who issued an order telling the first he couldn’t write things, even true things, about the second on his web site. From the New York Times: Internet battle raises questions about the First Amendment.

To fullly appreciate the wackiness, you’ll need to read the pre-restrained version of the party of the first part’s web site. Which, conveniently, you can do using Google’s cache (at least for the moment): The Miss Vermont Story. You’ll probably also want to check out Miss Vermont’s web page: http://www.katyjohnson.com/.

A couple of observations: First, the judge obviously went way too far in restraining the ex-boyfriend’s speech. I guess it’s like business-method patents: if something takes place on the Internet, the technically challenged assume it is something completely new, not subject to the old rules. But it is subject to the old rules; speech is still speech, and telling someone he can’t tell the truth about his life and his experiences is bogus.

Second, Katy Johnson and Tucker Max were made for each other. Both of them are using the Web as a forum for promoting their weird, twisted versions of how they’d like others to see them (and to promote books they’ve written based on that twisted reality). For Katy, it’s about her chastity, and sobriety, and her blonde, wholesome, chirpy goodness. For Tucker, it’s a chance to strut proudly on a stage of his own imagining, where everyone is agog at his incredible powers to seduce, to charm, to bedazzle with amusing anecdotes, to treat women as vessels for his seed, and to get really drunk and throw up on himself.

The reality comes through best when the outside observer can compare each of their accounts with the other. Which, sadly, the judge has said she’s not going to allow.

Thanks to Danthar for the links.

Paul Krugman raises the level of concern in his personal Homeland Security Alert system, citing the way that the systematic and brazen distortion of the facts by the Bush administration has reached a level “never before seen in US history”: Standard operating procedure.

In a somewhat-thematically-related piece, Steve Perry writes about how the real terror-alert system is a heads-I-win,-tails-you-lose proposition for Karl Rove’s (re-)election schemes: Who’s your daddy?

You’ll all recall the day when a US tank fired a shell into the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad, killing two European journalists. Now the relatives of one of them have asked a Spanish judge to extradite three members of the US armed forces to Spain, where they face war-crimes charges. The Village Voice has a nice piece on it: They shoot journos, don’t they?

The Voice takes a predictably pro-journalist stance (”In a moral universe, there is no excuse for killing journalists under any circumstances,” for example). But the really interesting part of the story comes toward the end, where it talks about AP reporter Chris Tomlinson, an embed who supposedly overheard a US officer freaking out on the radio after the shell was fired: “Who just shot the Palestinian [sic] Hotel? Did you just fucking shoot the Palestinian Hotel?” It’s interesting, see, because it tends to support a different interpretation than the heavily-spun version of the event the military has been selling.

Bigtime thanks to readers Glen and/or Pilar for the link.

Media Research Center gives this new NBC report on Private Lynch’s rescue. They provide some information to dispute some of the earlier BBC/ABC accusations such as the use of blanks and just how recently the Iraqi military was present at the hospital. Interesting to hear, since I still find it hard to swallow that a military force would be sent into any battle zone with only blanks.

However, in fairness to the conspiracy-types out there, it should be noted that NBC also still plans on developing a movie on the rescue of Lynch. Could their News Department be stretching their journalistic integrity to save their Entertainment Department’s future big ratings blockbuster? Hmmmm……..

Aaron passed this story on to me, with the comment, “Holy fucking crap. Sharon might actually be serious about this.” “This,” in this case, is the whole roadmap thing, including recent statements by Sharon that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an “occupation” that needs to be ended. Which is sort of like Bush using a press conference to push for US energy independence achieved through tough new fuel-efficiency standards and a special tax on gas-guzzling SUVs.

My own take is that the extent of Sharon’s reversal, and the timing of these statements, are pretty suspicious. I’m inclined to view it as political payback to Bush for the overthrow of Saddam, with a lot of surprising talk now, but an eventual reversion to the Sharon we know.

Anyway, here’s the story: Sharon mystifies, scares supporters.

After looking more like a fratboy at a kegger than a sober statesman in most of the images to come out of the European stops on his current trip, Bush apparently got serious upon arriving in the Middle East. He reportedly met with five Arab leaders with only translaters (and no handlers!) present, and was so caught up in this whole “leader of the free world” thing (or is it religious fervor?) that he persisted in speaking his own words even when Egyptian TV cameras were rolling (though apparently that was an accident). Anyway, interesting stuff. From the NYT: On camera but unaware, Bush displays his fervor.

Paul Wolfowitz, the visibly-vibrating-with-barely-contained-excitement nerve center of the neocon cabal currently running the country, has been making some very odd statements lately. First there was his recent admission in Vanity Fair that the WMD justification for going to war was chosen for “bureaucratic reasons.” That news cycle is barely dead, and he’s back in the headlines for having announced to an Asian security summit that the reason we went to war with Iraq, rather than with North Korea, is that the former is “swimming” with oil. From The Guardian: Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.

Another nice piece on the whole WMD thing, by the way (which, given the title, I can’t resist) is the following from Mother Jones: Liar, liar.

She lied to the SEC. She lied to the FBI. And this isn’t about her hiding her secret recipe for chicken tartar. The question remains on whether or not she is going to go to jail for misleading investigators over a paltry $229,000.00. But at least its going to be entertaining to watch her squirm in the courtroom!

Hey, maybe we can talk jbc into giving us a daily update on her wardrobe throughout the trial.

We live in a time of lies, surrounded by cynicism and examples of our own powerlessness, writes Paul Loeb at WorkingForChange. But we can’t lose perspective. Reclaiming hope: The peace movement after the war.

In a similar vein, Jim Wallis wants to pass on some wisdom he received via a voicemail message from his 4-year-old son, Luke: Don’t be afraid.

I found these pieces this morning, and wanted to rush out and put them on the site, but I needed to come up with an appropriate topic first. So there you go. Peace.

The problem I have these days isn’t finding articles that talk about high-profile lying; it’s wading through the vast sea of such articles to find the most interesting ones. Anyway, here are a couple from today’s crop at The Smirking Chimp that deal with Bush: First up, from David Corn in The Nation: Where’s the outrage? And from Marie Cocco in Newsday: Bush presents US with no-fault presidency.

What would baseball be anymore, it seems, without some controversy or scandal? This article provides a good set up of Sammy Sosa’s troubles, with some pro and con opinions. But is a corked bat really all that helpful? Some researchers seem to have some scientific doubts about it. I found two columnists who have starkly different takes on the player and the controversy. One, from Chicago , and the other, Skip Bayless, who seems to be taking some cheap shots at Sosa by piling on some other accusations that may be unfair to tag directly on him. What’s the matter Skip, did Sammy turn down an interview request one time?

For myself, I am willing to give Sammy the benefit of the doubt. Although he has never impressed me as being the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and he tends to play the media and the baseball public with his “I love baseball and everybody” image, I don’t think he would knowingly risk his icon status with the baseball public with such an unnecessary gamble. He seems to value and respect his standing back in the Dominican Republic and takes that role model image there personally.

Can a player make an unthinking and careless mistake and grab the wrong bat from the bat rack? I’d think so. Sosa has broken many bats during his career without a similar incident. And all his other bats, have checked out clean. And based on Sammy’s eager-to-please persona, I don’t doubt he brings out a corked bat during batting practice to try to give the pre-game fans a thrill.

Then again, that same persona could tempt him to use any advantage, real or psychological, to get an extra edge and maintain that Slammin’ Sammy image.

Only he may know for sure.

Big news day for lying yesterday.

As pointed out by Craig in the comments on the Is Wolfowitz Serious? item, the Guardian has acknowledged that they misrepresented Wolfowitz’s statement about Iraq “swimming” in a sea of oil: Corrections and clarifications. So Onan’s immediate questioning of the spin being applied to the remarks, and Craig’s swift assertion that the interpretation was bogus, are both vindicated.

I don’t think there’s any way to sugar-coat what they did at the paper. It wasn’t an innocent mistake. It was a gleeful pouncing on a suggestive turn of phrase, in full knowledge that the spin being applied to it was misleading. It demonstrates that the Guardian’s partisanship interferes with their ability to truly inform their readers. I have a long memory about those sorts of violations.

Meanwhile, quite the hubbub on this side of the Atlantic regarding the resignation of New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and his top deputy, in large part over the Jayson Blair debacle. From CNN: Analysis of New York Times resignations.

Both these stories are interesting to me on a meta-level. Note how both the Guardian and the Times are actually acknowledging their own lies, and taking responsibility for having misled people. That doesn’t excuse what they did. But it does mean there’s some higher standard that they’re aware of, and are willing to acknowledge that they haven’t met.

Compare this, say, with what currently passes for political leadership in this country. Can you imagine Bush or Clinton simply coming out and admitting to the lies that virtually everyone knows they told, and actually taking an appropriate degree of responsibility for what they’d done?

Yeah, neither can I.

Here’s an interesting one. From the BBC comes the staid AP version of the story: Doubting Danish priest suspended. Thorkild Grosboel, a Lutheran priest, has given an interview in which he said, “there is no heavenly God” (among other brow-raising statements).

For a slightly more-fun version of the story, see Christianity Today: Danish pastor suspended after denying God, eternal life, and resurrection.

William Rivers Pitt of Truthout has a nice summing up of the WMD thing, and the price he believes Bush should be required to pay: We used to impeach liars.

It’s no secret that I’m basically with Pitt on this one. I don’t think the WMD evidence was ever credible, so I don’t see anything particularly shocking in the non-results coming out of the post-war WMD hunt.

If you bought the WMD evidence initially, you’re in a more difficult position. You can continue to believe Bush, and argue, like that guy debating the smooth-moon theory with Galileo, that Iraq is covered with vast stockpiles of invisible chemical and biological weapons (with a few invisible nukes thrown in for good measure, if you’re a bigtime Believer).

Or you could argue that, like you, Bush and Co. were the victims of a major “intelligence failure.” It wasn’t their (or your) fault you were mistaken; it’s those darn mid-level managers who fed you unreliable data. We’ll call this the Challenger-disaster approach.

Or I suppose you could just face the reality that the emperor has no clothes. But unlike the fairy tale, the emperor in this story will never acknowledge his nakedness. He’ll continue to strut and pose as if he’s fully dressed, and a significant fraction of the townsfolk will, by virtue of their having long ago given up any pretense of objectivity, continue to nod approvingly and dismiss the criticisms of their opponents.

Dick Morris isn’t buying Hillary Clinton’s timeline for what she knew and when she knew it. From the National Review Online: Hillary’s fable: The lie she’s sticking with.

Robin Cook, who resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet over the decision to go to war, makes some interesting observations in this op-ed piece from the LA Times: Shoulder to shoulder and stabbed in the back (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for the login).

Basically, he points to the widening gap between Blair on the one hand, and the Bush administration on the other. Unlike Bush, who used a shell game of ever-morphing justifications for the war, Blair focused squarely on WMDs. Now, Blair is forced to maintain with increasing stridency that the WMDs will be found, while Bush is gradually moving to a position of “Well, we had to pick something to base the war on, and that seemed like the thing everyone could agree with,” or “Yeah, maybe the weapons aren’t there. But they were there once, and Saddam would have made more eventually, so it really doesn’t matter.”

Granted, Bush himself isn’t saying those things yet. But that’s clearly the direction the administration is headed, based on recent comments from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Writing in WeeklyDig, Brandon Keim complains about an RNC campaign to plant faux “letters to the editor” in publications across the country: Insincerely yours. I remember this issue coming up in the last election; apparently it works well enough that we can expect lots more of the same.

Can’t throw a rock in the air without hitting an opinion piece on the significance of missing Iraqi WMDs. Here are two particularly interesting ones.

First, from Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos: Why the snipe hunt matters. I really like Gilliard (in case you hadn’t noticed). He has his opinions, sure, which you may or may not agree with, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with them. He just lays out what he thinks, and backs it up with his reasons for thinking so, and leaves it up to you to agree or not.

Second is this piece that really got me, from John Dean: Missing weapons of mass destruction: Is lying about the reason for war an impeachable offense? Dean answers in the affirmative, and his argument seems pretty solid, at least to me, though there are a few factors that would tend to lessen his credibility. For one, he apparently takes the original Guardian story about Wolfowitz’s “swimming in oil” comment at face value. Second, well, he’s John Dean. Is there anybody in the world willing to trust John Dean?

As I wrote the first time I saw someone mentioning impeachment in the context of the fraudulent war justification, I think impeachment talk is an energy-suck without much (any?) potential payoff, except maybe that it helps hammer home the message that what Bush has done is far, far worse than anything Clinton did with Monica. If that pisses you off enough for you to want to punish him, fine; punish him by making sure he ends up a one-termer, just like his dad.

Anyway, enjoy.

Sure, you can waste your money on those cheesy videos of promiscuous co-eds, but to see the REAL partiers you need to follow the antics of today’s college coaches! Their summer tour of the human vices such as alcohol (Larry Eustachy) and sex (Mike Price) has moved on to gambling with the recently announced troubles of Rick Neuheisel. The soon-to-be-late University of Washington football coach is sweating out his college administration’s impending decision on his future after admitting that he bet $5,000 in a NCAA basketball pool. I’ve included a national story and a local one which illustrates Coach Rick’s casual attitude toward ethics and established rules of the NCAA, and his stale act of feigned surprise that he did something wrong. This has been Rick’s MO during his tainted tenure with several college football programs now, so maybe all the Athletic Directors out there will finally wake up to his scam and not hire him to infect another school with his low-bar integrity.

With leaders like this coaching trio shaping the character of so many young athletes, it shouldn’t be surprising to see many of them merely following the example that they’re shown.

Here are a couple of really scary Steve Gilliard pieces at Daily Kos: No end in sight and Iraq Sunni cleric calls for jihad. He predicts Iraq will be in a full-fledged civil war before September.

We are facing a total collapse of our Iraq policy not within years or months, but weeks. If the pace of combat increases and we have to hunt down guerrillas through every village, and deal with platoon and company-sized ambushes, we will be fighting to hang on.

I think this could get very Vietnam-esque. Would we stay, and pay that terrible price, or leave, and watch Iraq fall to one anti-US faction or another?

The person elected president in 2004, whoever he or she is, is going to need to have a plan for dealing with this. And it seems increasingly possible to me that that person is going to be a Democrat.

Keith Burgess-Jackson shows off his philosophy skillz in Bush’s critics meet the logic police. His main point is that Bush’s having lied about why he was going to war is not relevant to an analysis of whether the war was justified.

Either there is a justification for the war (objectively speaking) or there is not. If there is, then it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush. If there isn’t, then it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush. Either way, it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush.

There’s an interesting game he’s playing here. Yes, it’s true that the question of whether or not Bush lied about his motivations is orthogonal to the question of whether or not the war was justified.

We can construct a matrix of possibilities:

If you ask any given person whether the war was justified, and whether they think Bush lied about his motivations for waging it, you can map which of the four sectors that person falls into, in terms of which sector they believe accurately describes reality: Sector I (Bush didn’t lie, war was justified), II (lied/justified), III (didn’t lie/not justified), or IV (lied/not justified). War supporters would land in sectors I or II; opponents would get III or IV.

Any one of the four sectors is a legitimate contender at the outset. What Burgess-Jackson is arguing is that the mere fact that Bush was known to have lied wouldn’t mean that everyone automatically had to move to sector IV; there could still be a safe haven for war supporters in sector II.

Which is true enough. But it kind of misses the point. The articles claiming Bush has been dishonest aren’t only about the horizontal dimension of the graph (didn’t lie/lied). They’re also about the vertical dimension of the graph (justified/not justified). See, Bush’s stated motives have basically been a laundry list of every conceivable justification for going to war. If a bunch of those justifications turn out not to be grounded in reality, then yeah, it will mean Bush was probably lying, and the partisan folks at the New York Times or the Guardian are going to make hay with that. But it will also weigh heavily in any rational determination about whether the war was justified. Not because Bush was lying per se, but because of what it was he was lying about (namely, the evidence he supposedly used in making his own decision about whether the war was justified).

It’s significant, too, that there are war supporters who aren’t even seriously considering whether the war was justified. They’re simply taking Bush’s word for it when he says that it was. In a sense, such people are guilty of the same logical fallacy Burgess-Jackson accuses the liberal media of: conflating the question of Bush’s honesty with that of the war’s justification, albeit in the opposite direction. (I believe Bush is telling the truth; therefore, the war is justified.)

I suspect Burgess-Jackson of intentionally obscuring these points. Still, it’s an interesting argument that he makes. Thanks to those clever partisans at The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web page for the link.

Here’s a fun link, courtesy of Aaron/Hiro: Girls teach teen cyber gab to FBI agents. Update: And now, thanks to the wonders of ymatt, a new topic icon! Woo!

Just to add to the train wreck of journalistic integrity that has occurred as a result of Wolfowitz’s comments recently, I’ve discovered that another media player has decided to one-up Guardian by simply ADDING quotes to what he said!! This interesting blogger reveals Pravda’s take on Wolfowitz’s comments. Also included is some additional explanation (or backpedaling/damage control) by Guardian on their error regarding this story.

Despite a BS in political science from a major university (earned 20 years ago, though), I’d never heard of Leo Strauss until his name started being brought up by critics of the neocons in the Bush administration, reputed to be Straussians all. I still don’t know much about Strauss, but the following pair of pieces, found on some random righty blog I’ve since misplaced, argue that letting Bush’s critics color my perceptions of the man might not be the best idea.

Anyway, some of the things said here about Strauss sounded interesting. Proceed at your own risk: From the NYT, an op/ed piece by Struass’s daughter: The Real Leo Strauss. And from the Jerusalem Post’s Bret Stephens: Hands up, Straussians!

Actually a fairly boring article in the classic gee-whiz mode, but I can’t resist linking to it. From CNN: New research aims to catch liars in the act.

Today’s New York Times contains the following editorial: Was the intelligence cooked?

Righty bloggers have no doubt already swung into action, linking the “idiocy” of the editorial to the same muddled thinking that gave us Jayson Blair and the Raines resignation. But I wish they could forget the messenger for a minute, and concentrate on the message. It’s important. It’s also clear, unambiguous, and untainted by elliptical distortion.

Maybe it was just reading those accounts of Leo Strauss’s appeal for an actual questioning dialog, one that seeks to illuminate the truth, rather than the kind of partisan sophistry I’ve been wading through lately, but I’m getting tired of people whose claims of certainty increase rather than diminish when the evidence supporting their position starts eroding.

More detail comes from the Times’ Week in Review piece by Steven R. Weisman: Truth is the first casualty. Is credibility second?

Update: The Washington Post takes a similar, if more restrained, position in its own lead editorial today: Hunting Iraq’s weapons.

Here’s a provocative piece from Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos: Is Bush lying? Interestingly, and, I think, insightfully, Gilliard thinks the answer is no. In Gilliard’s attempts to make sense of Bush’s actions with respect to Iraqi WMDs, he comes to the conclusion that rather than being a liar, it is far more likely that Bush (and Rumsfeld) have simply been played for marks by adept conman Ahmad Chalabi.

Robert Kagan has a column in the Washington Post that makes fun of the notion that Bush lied about Iraqi WMDs: A plot to deceive? It’s clever, and entertaining, but I think it’s basically an example of the straw man fallacy. Those claiming Bush lied are not arguing that Saddam never had any weapons of mass destruction. They’re saying that Bush misrepresented ambiguous evidence as being much more certain than it actually was, in order to build support for an immediate invasion, as opposed to the slower approach represented by things like sanctions and continued UN weapons inspections. Which, as far as I can see, is a legitimate criticism. True, it’s not as bad as if Bush had invented the idea of an imminent Iraqi WMD threat out of thin air, but it’s still dishonest, and needs to be looked at carefully by anyone being asked to believe what Bush says in the future.

Dipping back into some of the militarily-informed commentary I was feeding on steadily during the Iraq war proper, I came across several links to this piece, by Phillip Carter writing in the Washington Monthly: Faux Pax Americana. Basically argues that yeah, Rumsfeld’s small, agile, high-tech invasion force can indeed defeat an enemy on the cheap. But it can’t necessarily hold the resulting conquered territory afterward.

On the shelf of nearly every Army officer, you’ll find a book by retired Col. T.R. Fehrenbach on the Korean conflict titled This Kind of War. At the end of World War II, confronted by the military revolution brought on by the atomic bomb, America cut its military from a wartime high of 16 million down to a few hundred thousand. Bombs and airplanes–not soldiers–would now protect America’s shores and cities. After fighting as a grunt in Korea, Fehrenbach thought otherwise. Transformation was great for the Air Force and Navy, but for the Army and Marine Corps, the essential nature of warfare remained unchanged.

“You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life,” wrote Fehrenbach. “But if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.” It’s time Don Rumsfeld brushed up on his Fehrenbach.

There’s a storyline that ties these sorts of criticisms together, and I think it’s an important one in terms of working against Bush in the 2004 election. People like me are already going to vote against Bush, at least if we can avoid sinking into depressed apathy. But the swing voters who will actually decide the election aren’t going to care about a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Bush lied? BFD. They want someone who can protect the country against a scary world. So do I, for that matter.

So talk about the combination of arrogance and naivete that leads people like Bush and Rumsfeld to ignore the warnings of the career military types when deciding when and how to go to war. Weird ultralefties who froth about cabals and conspiracy theories are easy to dismiss. Generals with decades of military experience who question Bush & Co.’s ability to avoid Vietnam-style quagmires may get more of a hearing.

Here’s a whimsical little headline I saw on NTK today. I’m no expert on the editorial practices of major news sites, so I don’t know if it was pulled from MSNBC due to a brief moment of good judgement, or if that’s just policy for AP stories that are a week old — but god bless news.google.com for pointing out plenty of other places that carry the same story.

Here’s a nice smoking-gun piece from Fair.org, courtesy of those excellent link-suggesters Glen & Pilar: Dissent, disloyalty & double standards. Basically shows how people like Hannity, Limbaugh, and Savage apply radically different standards for what constitutes “patriotic dissent” and what constitutes “treasonous backstabbing of our men and women in uniform,” based on which party’s president ordered the troops into harm’s way.

Not like this is a shocking revelation or anything, but it’s good to get the examples down in black and white for those few who might be both unaware of this kind of deception and capable of being influenced by having it exposed.

Jay Bookman has a piece at Information Clearing House (again, suggested by Glen & Pilar), that does a really good job of laying out the background of the PNAC folks, and explaining just why Bush might have chosen to invade Iraq: The president’s real goal in Iraq.

It’s not as easy to reduce to a picket sign as those “blood for oil” and “he tried to kill my daddy” explanations, but it has the benefit of actually accounting for the available evidence (or, in the case of the WMD justification, the available non-evidence).

Again, this particular piece won’t give any shocking revelations to anyone who has been paying attention, but it does a really nice job of “connecting the dots.” (Heh. We can use that expression, too.)

It’s interesting to watch the process play out. Isolated bitching is turning into a steady chorus: Bush and the members of his team lied shamelessly to exaggerate the Iraqi WMD threat in the months before the war. Those making these claims don’t just have a “smoking gun,” they have a whole smoking arsenal.

Bush, on the other hand, has bupkis, and has begun the process of backtracking. Answering questions during one of those Reagan-esque not-quite-a-press-conference exchanges that allows him to pick and choose a question or two to answer, then feign deafness to follow-ups, Bush said yesterday he remains “absolutely convinced” that we will uncover evidence that Iraq had a “weapons program.” Not weapons, mind you, but a weapons program. He used the phrase three times in one brief response. From the LA Times: Bush tempers talk of weapons.

Right. But see, that wasn’t what you said, repeatedly, emphatically, and without qualification, in selling the war.

Checking in with the columnists: From Robert Scheer: Bad Iraq data from start to finish. From Paul Krugman: Who’s accountable? And from Geov Parrish: The impeachable offense.

From British tabloid The Sun, courtesy of Daypop: Face up to the facts, Mel. Not Michael Jackson yet, by a long shot, but yeah, scary.

The AP has published the results of a preliminary accounting of the number of non-combatant fatalities in Iraq: AP tallies 3,240 civilian deaths in Iraq.

The approach they used makes this very much a lower boundary, rather than a complete count. What they did was to go to about half the hospitals in the country, including most of the largest ones, and do interviews and examine death certificates. People whose bodies never made it to a hospital didn’t get counted. People who died in hospitals that didn’t distinguish between combatant and non-combatant casualties didn’t get counted. People who died before March 20 or after April 20 didn’t get counted. Overall, this sounds to me like it matches up pretty well with the earlier estimates of between 5,000 and 10,000 civilian dead.

That’s a lot of innocent dead people. I remember driving my daughter to school on September 11, 2001, and having her ask me on the way why it was such a big deal that those buildings had collapsed. I told her, “Because when they collapsed they were full of thousands of people.” Seeing the realization dawn on her 10-year-old face of what that meant isn’t the worst of my memories from that day, but it’s one that has stayed with me.

So hey, congratulations, America. In our fear and anger over those events, we’ve managed to inflict a comparable toll on the innocents of one country (Afghanistan) whose leadership arguably had some measure of responsibility for the events of that day, and a toll two to three times higher on the innocents of another country (Iraq) whose leadership arguably had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of that day.

So can our national scared/angry-toddler routine be over already? Have enough 5-year-olds had their bodies turned into bloody hamburger to appease our collective reptilian hindbrain?

Sigh. Thanks to janus/onan for the link. I guess.

From Danthar comes word of this droll link: The 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference. Heh. See you there!

The Christian Science Monitor has a thought-provoking piece on how Fearless Leader, who once mocked Democrats for their nation-building proclivities, has managed to commit us to not one, not two, but three such projects, all at the same time: Building three nations at once (referring to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine).

Bush has high hopes for the last one, at least, despite the events of the last few days (see this piece from the BBC, for example: Bush upbeat on Mid-East peace plan). Of course he does; he’s still in that first manic flush of energy, when he believes that his innate Texan directness can cut through all those thorny complications that have thwarted previous efforts. We haven’t gotten to the ugly stage when his political handlers begin to separate him from the process, to disassociate him from the emerging failure, to shift the blame, to change the subject, to raise the National Terror Alert Level to REALLY, REALLY BRIGHT ORANGE or maybe even PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BURGANDY.

Sigh. Someone clearly needs to stop obsessing about this stuff for the day, and take the kids bird watching.

Time for the morning batch of Smirking Chimp-derived articles about the administration’s WMD problem. From Jules Witcover: Not buying revisionist sales job on Iraqi weapons. Richard Gwyn: Bush’s weapons of mass deception. John Prados: Hoodwinked. Rupert Cornwell: Accountability missing in Bushland.

And a bonus link: From Salon: Can Bush be toppled? It’s a collection of Democratic pols weighing in on Bush’s beatability next year. The article itself is only borderline worth enduring the lame Microsoft ad to get the “one-day pass”, but the illustration of a Bush statue being pulled down before cheering crowds is definitely worth a look. Heh. Kudos to Bob Watts, Salon’s art director.

Here’s one of those things that you come across during random surfing (apologies for having lost track of where I came across the link) that just makes you lean back in your chair and say, “whoa.” Anyway: HumanDescent’s page at b3ta.com. Update: Oh; the real site of the user in question, with even more wackiness, is here: HumanDescent.

Steve Gilliard of Daily Kos is moving up the timeline yet again for when he thinks the situation in Iraq will have reached the stage that can be justifiably characterized as “civil war”: Delusions. Following up on a USA Today article (Official: US not read for Iraq chaos), he discusses the difficulties we’re likely to have in rounding up peacekeeping troops from the other members of our much-ballyhooed “coalition”, given the extremely negative attitude toward our war and occupation in those countries.

To recap: On April 10, Gilliard specifically did not predict civil war, but laid out the signs that would let us know one was coming: How Iraq could devolve into civil war. On June 6, he said the situation would indeed be a civil war “well before September”: No end in sight. And then today, this latest prediction of a civil war by July 4.

I’m not sure that the sky is really falling. Rumsfeld would no doubt dismiss this with some weirdly sarcastic mixed metaphor. But we’ve got an easy test: if the violence in Iraq settles down noticeably over the next three weeks, Rumsfeld wins a point. If it ramps up, with the size of the engagements increasing, point to Gilliard. If it stays more or less the same… I guess we get to keep arguing about what it all means.

I think this is probably one of the strongest statements I’ve seen yet regarding Bush’s lies on Iraqi WMDs. It’s the full text of a letter sent by Henry Waxman to Condoleeza Rice yesterday, demanding an explanation for why Bush made WMD claims in the State of the Union address that were based on obviously forged documents: Waxman: ‘Explain why you cited forged evidence’.

Some additional congressional maneuvering is discussed in this USA Today story: McCain: Don’t delay Iraq hearings.

Granted, with both houses of Congress in Republican control, the deck will be stacked against those trying to use hearings as a forum for presenting the truth on this stuff. But the lies were so blatant, I just can’t see how they can successfully sugarcoat it.

I’m not linking to anything today. There’s plenty of news on the subjects of my various obsessions, but I don’t feel like commenting on any of it. I especially don’t want to get caught in the trap of picking some part of a downward spiral and claiming it is the point of origin, thereby laying blame for the whole mess on one side or the other.

I’m taking a tim