Here’s a little uplift, courtesy of lies.com reader and link-suggester extraordinaire Pilar: The recent commencement address delivered by Tim Wise at Grinnell College: Cleaning up the funk.

I never posted anything about the Baghdad-museum looting during the full-on phase of the war. It just didn’t seem as important to me as the stuff about actual people getting blowed up and all that. But now that it has turned out that a lot of the hand-wringing about the US troops standing by while priceless antiquities were being looted was not exactly accurate (or even just flat-out untrue), conservative war supporters are paying gobs of attention to it.

So, here you go, fans of equal-opportunity lie exposure. Courtesy of Andrea Harris’ Too much to dream, a trio of recent items on the Baghdad-museum non-looting: Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, John Malcom Russel in the Washington Post: We’re still missing the looting picture, and from The Guardian’s Rory McCarthy: Staff revolt at Baghdad museum.

Lots of people are linking to this article in the Washington Post, according to Daypop: Former aide takes aim at war on terror. Again, I’m seeing a big, powerful criticism of Bush emerging. It’s not just lefties concerned about Bush’s ferocious assault on progressive causes. It’s anyone who’s both concerned about terrorism, and smart enough to see that Bush’s approach to fighting it basically sucks.

Keeping the Bush administration’s track record perfect, a British government investigation has concluded that the two trailers in northern Iraq (the ones pointed to by Bush on the Polish stop of his recent European trip as the smoking gun in the Iraqi WMD hunt — “we’ve found ’em”) were in fact for producing hyrdogen gas for weather balloons: Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds.

Bush supporters seeking to reduce their cognitive dissonance are encouraged to focus on the source of this story (those left-leaning Brit journalists), or on the notion that the trailers were designed to be instantly convertible to bioweapons production at some hypothetical future date. But the pattern repeats, yet again: Big headline: POSSIBLE WMD DISCOVERY!!! Followup, weeks later: Oh, well, I guess not. But we’ll keep looking.

Yeah. You do that.

Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) gave a speech in the House of Representatives a week ago that The Smirking Chimp has reprinted in full: Bush administration deceptions about Iraq threaten democracy.

This is where the Republican victories in the 2002 elections come back to haunt us. We could really use a little checking and balancing right now, but with Republicans in control of pretty much the entire federal government, it just isn’t happening.

Speaking to a Democratic gathering in Atlanta recently, former Senator Max Cleland took the gloves off in attacking Bush’s record in the “War on Terror.” The full text of his remarks is given in the following column at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Max returns, with fire in his eyes.

Cleland, an ex-military man, sounds fairly pissed about all this. He points out that none of the leading lights of the Bush administration (with the exception of Colin Powell) has ever faced combat. He emphasizes the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam. He embraces the president’s assertions that we’re in a war against terrorism, then lays out how the president is failing to fight that war effectively.

Some of his suggestions for improvement leave me cold (revive the draft?), but I think it’s significant that it’s not just left-leaning peaceniks like me who are upset about the way things are going. We emphasize different aspects of the Bush train wreck, but we agree that that’s what it is.

So, Adam pointed out the following piece by Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo: I must confess. It’s a fairly detailed picking-apart of the fairly thoroughly dishonest op-ed piece by Robert Kagan of the Washington Post from last week (A plot to deceive?).

Yes, there have always been self-serving op-ed pieces that obscure truth in their attempts to shore up a particular position. There have always been lies in the public sphere.

What is new is that the tide of such sludge seems to have risen to the point where it is drowning out honest discussion. Blame whomever you want: talk radio, vast right-wing conspiracies, astroturf campaigns, kids raised by TV shows instead of responsible adults; I don’t know. Blame the “liberal media” and rampant political correctness, if those evils bother you more.

It doesn’t matter how our civil society got broken. We need to fix it. And we need to start now. I’m not just saying that because my team seems to have been “losing” the “debate” lately. I really don’t even care about that, so much. If we’d been having an honest debate, I wouldn’t mind if the majority of my fellow citizens ended up deciding that no, my views did not represent the best course of action.

But we haven’t even been having a debate. And in the absence of such a debate (by which I mean, people openly discussing the issues in an honest effort to arrive at an appropriate public policy), we’ve got nothing. No democracy. No freedom. Nothing.

Here’s an interview from the Library of Congress Veteran’s History Project: Stories of courage: Rhona Marie Knox Prescott. There’s audio available, too, if you click around a bit. It’s the interesting story of what one Army nurse experienced in Vietnam, and some of the problems she had to deal with after coming home.

Facts and figures can only communicate so much. It takes a human observer, a human voice, to communicate some truths. And we need to understand this truth, so we can do our part to help those suffering through the war in Iraq when they come home.

We’ve already repeated some of the mistakes of Vietnam with this war. We don’t need to repeat all of them.

Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos offers an extremely depressing analysis of the current situation in Iraq: McKiernan’s dilemma. I think if things are even half as bad as Gilliard says, this becomes a key issue in the 2004 elections. It took many years of US casualties to turn the tide of public sentiment against the Vietnam War, but this Iraq quagmire could give us Vietnam on a hyper-accelerated timeline.

You may recall a recent story on a Florida woman of Islamic faith who was legally challenging the State’s requirement to have her veil removed in taking her driver’s license picture. Of course, the ACLU was eager to support this outrageous example of religious discrimination. When the State Court decided against her claim, in part for compelling reasons of public safety, the ACLU Director remarked that infringing on the woman’s religious beliefs because of what others with actual terrorist intentions could do by using this form of concealment, “seems to be a funny kind of interpretation on how the law should apply”.

It appears that the actual “funny interpreters” were the ACLU and the Florida woman. And the “law” being misused was Islamic! This blogger notes an Arab News article which denies any such religious requirement to remain veiled for such legally-required documentation. Don’t you think the ACLU would at least check with authorities of Islamic law before breathlessly rushing to support a claim like this? That organization was, and could still be, such a viable voice for those who are victims of intimidation or discrimination. But its blatant political agenda has made it a parody of its former self, to the point of near irrelevancy.

Looks like the “Monkey-in-Chief” was trying to be on the cutting edge of technology, and took a spill while trying to navigate a Segway personal transporter.

I love seeing our tax dollars at work, with Dubya buying some new toys to try out the latest in technology, and almost busting his grape in the process.

I’ve been looking for things with more of a hopeful cast to them, and this certainly qualifies. Via Adam at Words Mean Things: Taylor Mali’s What teachers make.

Let’s check in with Ted Rall: They impeach murderers, don’t they? As usual, Rall pulls no punches.

Mark Morford has an interesting piece in SFGate: Your vegan, holistic president. He indulges in some heartfelt imagining about a country in which universally-dismissed-as-unelectable Dennis Kucinich sits in the Oval Office.

I remember watching on television as Jesse Jackson delivered his address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention. At the end of it I felt inspired. I felt the stirrings of a hope that eight years of the Reagan presidency had beaten down into a small, stunted thing inside me. And then, moments after the speech ended, the network commentators came on and basically said, well, Jackson has certainly scuttled whatever chances he had in American politics with that speech.

I’m tired of having my hopes and dreams filtered through someone else’s idea of what’s “possible.” I’ve paid little attention to Kucinich up to now, largely because he’s been dismissed by the media as an also-ran. Likewise with Dean; I’ve shied away due to people arguing that a Dean nomination would be a “disaster” for the Democratic party.

Well, screw that. It may well be that someone more mainstream, like Kerry or Gephardt, ends up getting the nomination. If so, I’ll doubtless vote for him. I want Bush gone in the worst way. But in the meantime I want to be a whole person, one not ground down by the certainty that things will never change. I want to decide myself whose vision I believe in, whose ideas I’m inspired by. It’s my birthright as an American.

It’s important to be practical. But it’s also important to dream. Thanks to Morford for reminding me of that.

From BuzzFlash, as reposted at Alternet: Al Franken and the lying liars. It’s a Q&A about (among other things) the appearance Franken did on CSPAN a short time ago, where he called Bill O’Reilly a liar over his (O’Reillly’s) repeated claims to have won Peabody Awards. Like the statements he made at the Book Expo, Franken goes beyond just griping about that specific lie to talk about the larger issue of the right-wing media “echo chamber”, and the need of the left to counter it by getting their own story out there.

Via This Girl Thinks comes word of this Alternet reposting of William O. Beeman: Barbershop wisdom says Bush is in trouble. It’s a thoughtful piece, and makes some interesting points about American attitudes toward war and how Bush may be on very thin ice as the sales job he did starts to unravel.

I think Beeman might be a bit too ready to pull this particular tea leaf out of the pile and divine the future from it, but it’s a future I’d like to believe in, too, so here’s hoping.

Allow me to add more to the steady drone of WMD talk.

This from an Iranian official, stating that Iranian intelligence also believes Iraq was hiding its weapons from U.N. Inspectors. Admittedly, a source that is not always a baston of truth and integrity.

This former Iraqi intelligence officer gives more fodder to the explanation of a merely dormant weapons program with the structure in place to become active quickly once the heat was off, and also lays out the level of creative deception that was occurring. He also provides a reason for Saddam not being forthcoming with the fact that his weapons were destroyed.

It will be interesting to see which path the evidence takes once things begin to be uncovered. If there really is solid proof regarding a weapons program on “stand-by” status rather than “active” status, with no appreciable amounts of usable WMD around, Bush will be stuck in a bit of a gray area. He can at least say that Saddam’s intent was never to disarm but merely to wait out world resolve before actively re-producing his lethal arsonal, for use or for sale. But he’ll still have to squirm mightly to explain to Congress, the American people and the world, why he said there was an imminent threat posed by active WMD that wasn’t really there. Was it an overstatement of a calculated assumption, based on the only pieces of the information puzzle that he had to work with? Or was it a deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence that showed slim likelyhood of any kind of active weapons threat in Iraq? Neither answer will be good, but Bush could survive the former scenario relatively well if he can at least prove a “spring-loaded” biological/chemical production infrastructure ready to go into action at any time.

Even so, the price would still be paid in a degree of erosion of US credibility in the world and an increased reluctance within the US for future pro-active military responses.

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 time out today. I’m asking myself what I want to do with the time I have left, however much or little that ends up being. I know I can’t fix everything that’s broken: the world, my country, my city, my circle of friends, my family, myself. I just want to move in the right direction. I want to travel along a spiral heading upward, not down.

I want to take a walk on the beach. So that’s what I’m going to do.

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.

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.