Check out these two nifty graphs showing the same data (more or less) in two completely different ways, in order to make two diametrically opposed arguments. First, from Samizdata: We are winning, in which US and British fatalities in Iraq are plotted over time, with a breakdown into combat and non-combat deaths. Then, after you’ve chewed on that for a while, check out this chart from Professor Ed Stephan at Western Washington University: US fatalities in the conquest of Iraq (thanks to Warblogging for the link).

Cool, huh?

The whole Plame-outing story continues to generate vast quantities of weblogging, with lots of good coverage from CalPundit and Talking Points Memo, among others.

Even more interesting to me, though, is the meta-issue of how right-leaning webloggers are dealing with the story. For us Angry Lefties the story isn’t earth-shaking; we’re happy to see some of the Bush spin coming unspun, but our worldview hasn’t been turned upside down or anything. But for those who admire Bush & Co. as patriots, and who accept the word of right-wing journalists like Robert Novak as gospel, this whole thing is really problematic.

Some, predictably, are bending over backwards to come up with innocent explanations for their guys, while finding ways to argue that a) it isn’t a big deal, anyway, and b) if it is, it will turn out to be Clinton’s fault. Others, though, are betraying a heart-tugging degree of intellectual honesty as they struggle to make sense of the discordant data.

Like poli sci professor Daniel W. Drezner, who came out strong a few days ago: What could cause me to switch parties, and has since backtracked a little, but is still sounding very unsatisfied with any of the curves he’s been able to draw to fit the known facts. Similarly, I was impressed by the way Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping commented early on, though in his case the reality-distortion field seems to have re-established itself pretty firmly, at least for now.

The rock band Hell of Earth is planning to allow an onstage suicide “live” at their next show in St. Petersburg, Florida. As you would expect, this has caused quite a bit of controversy, but my favorite part of the whole thing, is that the city council needed to pass a special law, making it illegal to: “conduct a suicide for commercial or entertainment purposes, and to host, promote and sell tickets for such an event.” Apparently, they had to pass the special law, becuase otherwise they had no legal grounds to try and stop the show — no one in the band is planning to “assist” this anonymous individual, they’re just going to let him come on stage and do his thing.

The show must go on however, the lead singer promises that the show will happen at an undisclosed location within city limits, in front of a select few die-hard fans (pun intended) and it will be broadcast live on their website.

Thanks to the graphics skillz and generous nature of ymatt, along with those schemers after global domination at Cafe Press, you can now plunk down some plastic and buy your own little piece of Lies.com at the Lies.com online store. Buy a Rumsfeld coffee mug today!

In related housekeeping news, I did a little tidying up in the blogroll. Some sites I’ve been visiting were added, while some others I’d mostly stopped visiting were removed. Woo! Exciting, eh?

Inspired by the ease of setting up Cafe Press storefronts, and by my favorite piece of virtual clothing in the Ishar mud, I proudly (well, sorta) bring you the *Fuck* Internet Explorer Store. Shop early, shop often.

I was working on an entry of my own for Donald Sensing’s contest to present a case demonstrating that Bush intentionally misled people into linking Saddam Hussein with 9/11, but I ran out of time. But that turns out to be no big deal, since I would have lost anyway, to the really excellent winning entry from expat-American-in-Oz Scott Forbes: The Contest.

While I detest the role he has played in undercutting open, honest debate in this country, I still feel sorry for Rush Limbaugh, given the private hell he’s apparently been living with for some time, and the sudden transformation of it into a very public hell. But anyway, this timeline from Kynn at Shock & Awe makes fascinating reading: Rush Limbaugh hearing loss timeline.

So, here we are, three months later, and the fearsome David Kay report, the definitive report on Iraqi WMD that was going to force all us peaceniks to eat crow, the one with all the “surprises” Kay was hinting about back in the day, has been delivered to congress. And… he’s got bupkis. Which may well be surprising for those who believed Bush’s case for war, but isn’t much of a shock for those of us who realized early on that it was basically horseshit.

Anyway, George Paine of Warblogging sums things up nicely: 1,200 inspectors; 90 days; $300MM: no WMD

Paul Krugman, as usual, gets right to the heart of the issue. Don’t expect to find any of Bush’s defenders actually addressing the argument he makes in his latest column, because they can’t. Instead, they’ll pass lies about his character and say his words should simply be ignored by anyone sensible.

Don’t believe them. Read the column: Slime and defend.

Among other fun verbal paradoxes Devo delivered over the years, the song “Enough Said” from New Traditionalists contained this gem: “The next thing I say to you will be true / The last thing I said was false.” That song popped into my head when I wrote the headline for this item, although in thinking about it, I don’t think it actually has much to do with what I’m about to say.

No, what I really wanted to mention was David Kay’s preliminary report to Congress, and the way his remarks are being spun this way and that, and the way an abbreviated version of some piece of information (a headline, say), represents a golden opportunity to misrepresent that something.

Hm. Let me give a more concrete example of what I mean. Back in April, as our boys were swooping down on previously inaccessible document troves in Baghdad, the good little minions at the Daily Telegraph ran the following story: Bush always suspected Saddam was behind 9/11. Which would have been quite a story, don’t you think? Except that wasn’t really what the article was about. No, it was about a bunch of documentation allegedly showing high-level cooperation between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda, with said documentation having been allegedly discovered by Telegraph reporters rummaging through the wreckage of the Iraqi intelligence service’s headquarters. That, too, would have been pretty newsworthy if it had held up to scrutiny, but apparently it didn’t. At least, it seems to have subsequently disappeared from public discussion.

But back to the headline. At one point, the piece made the following, unsourced assertion:

In the days immediately following the attacks, President George W Bush confided to colleagues that he believed that Saddam was directly involved in the attacks. “He probably was behind this in the end,” he said.

The article pretty much says nothing else about that. But that’s the part they chose to put in the headline. Cool, huh?

Fast-forward to the recent delivery of US weapons inspector David Kay’s preliminary report to Congress. You can read the whole thing, thanks to the helpful webmasters at the CIA, who have run the transcript of Kay’s statement under what I assume was its original title: STATEMENT BY DAVID KAY ON THE INTERIM PROGRESS REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP (ISG) BEFORE THE HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, SUBCOMMITTEE ON DEFENSE, AND THE SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE.

Heh. In order to be effective at drawing in readers, a headline probably should distill things down a bit more than that. Unless your aim is to discourage people from reading your statement, since the statement itself consists of a rambling, hyper-detailed account that seeks to obscure, rather than highlight, its central point. I think maybe David Kay has been visiting Kuro5hin, where the following piece is currently prominent: HOWTO: write bad documentation that looks good.

But even thus obscured, David Kay’s statement still reveals that actually, he hasn’t found any of those WMD that Hussein was supposed to possess at the time of the invasion. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, Beltway Bandit offers a nice summary that ties in the report’s key passages with pre-invasion statements by the administration: Comparing Bush regime rhetoric on Iraq to reality.

Nonetheless, righties are spinning as hard as they can to avoid answering the question of whether the Bush people were criminally dishonest (because they sold the public on a pre-emptive war using intentionally doctored WMD evidence) or criminally inept (because their own ideological reality filters caused them to misinterpret that evidence). Like Andrew Sullivan, who writes (in Read the report):

The administration claimed that Saddam had used WMDs in the past, had hidden materials from the United Nations, was hiding a continued program for weapons of mass destruction, and that we should act before the threat was imminent. The argument was that it was impossible to restrain Saddam Hussein unless he were removed from power and disarmed. The war was legally based on the premise that Saddam had clearly violated U.N. resolutions, was in open breach of such resolutions and was continuing to conceal his programs with the intent of restarting them in earnest once sanctions were lifted.

Oh, that’s what the president was saying a year ago at this time. Silly me. I must not have been paying attention. Thanks for clearing that up for me, Mr. Sullivan.

Rev. Donald Sensing comments on the Sullivan story, helpfully putting the gist of the argument in his headline: Kay report upholds administration position. Hmm. I suppose that would depend on what your definitions of “upholds,” “administration,” and “position” are. See also Sensing’s subsequent entry, in which he outlines his theory that it was all the CIA’s fault: The administration, Iraqi WMDS, and the cause of war.

Kevin Drum of Calpundit has a great piece on the current effort by Bush’s supporters to hijack the public discussion about the outing of Joseph Wilson’s wife: The real scandal.

I caught Wilson’s appearance on Meet the Press today, along with Bob Novak’s (yay for having Tivo again!), and boy, if that wasn’t ever a contrast. Wilson came off as sharp, principled, and deadly serious about this stuff. Novak, on the other hand, came off as a total sleaze. He reminded me, more than anything else, of Max Mercy, the sportwriter character Robert Duvall plays in The Natural.

So, the intelligent talk on the Plame-outing scandal continues to outstrip the blather. From Kevin Drum at CalPundit: Bush gets serious. But of course Bush isn’t really serious. Or rather, he’s serious, but not about defending the nation from the risks of an out-of-control political operation that would jeopardize national security just to win some votes. No, he’s serious about minimizing the political damage of someone on his staff having committed a crime. In other words, Bush’s reaction is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that his White House is willing to risk national security for such self-serving ends, and the reaction to the Plame scandal is making that more clear with each passing day.

More good commentary, as linked to by Drum: From Mark A. R. Kleinman: Betrayed, and, shortly thereafter: Game over: Bush admits Plame revelation was a crime. Bush admitting it’s a crime is a big deal, I suppose, in that it takes the wind out of the sails of those who have been trying to assert that there was nothing other than “politics” going on here. But as Kleinman speculates, the president’s admission has a sinister side. It could be (almost certainly is, to my way of thinking) a clever ploy to dominate the news cycle with an admission of something that everyone (well, everyone who’s being honest about the evidence) already knew. Meanwhile, the more sinister story is pushed off the TV news and into the back pages of the newspapers: that the president’s lawyer is going to sift through the statements of the White House staff for two weeks before handing them over to the Justice Department. All in the name of national security, of course.

Continuing to follow the trail of weblog bread crumbs, Kleinman links to Digby of Hullabaloo, who has a nifty theory about who the Deep Throat is who gave the all-important interview to the Washington Post: Who’s the good guy? The question he’s looking at is, who was the unidentified source for this article, which said that “two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.” That confirmation was really important, because it helped give the story more horsepower in the early going, when people like Bob Novak were busy spinning their wheels in reverse, trying to make it go away.

So who is this Deep Throat? You can bet Bush wants to know. When you hear those clench-jawed comments from the White House about tracking down “leaks,” you have to know that this is the guy they want to nail. Digby’s theory is that it could be Andrew Card. Which would be wild, but would also make a certain amount of sense. Digby links to an excellent profile of Karl Rove, which I hadn’t seen before, by Mark Suskind: Why are these men laughing?:

…last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s resignation: “I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.”

One senior White House official told me that he’d be summarily fired if it were known we were talking. “But many of us feel it’s our duty — our obligation as Americans — to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations — mostly from Karl’s shop — to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy’s cry for help.”

I know I tend to paint with a broad brush when I criticize Bush and the people around him. But the fact is, there are lots of grown-up Republicans in this country, people who disagree with me on most of the lefty causes I rant about, but who nevertheless are appalled at what Bush is doing. Some of those people are inside the White House.

I just read this interesting article over at Buzzflash about the soon to be completed recall election in California, as well as Orrin Hatch trying to push for a constitutional ammendment to enable Arnold to someday run for President.

Who would the VP be then, Sylvester Stallone?

If the United Nations is often viewed as misguided and irrelevant in world politics, then Liberal-minded bloggers and media members may be their equivalent! Why? Because their stubborn, obsessive pursuit of ghosts and moot arguments when it comes to the Bush Administration has long since registered a collective shrug from the arena of public opinion, and they are too blinded by their hatred of “Dubya” to see it!

From the “Bush lied about Saddam” camp, to the lost souls still barking about how Bush’s presidency is illegitimate, these electronic town criers continue to push “revelations” that carry no more weight with the general public than your local street corner prophet. But what really is the goal of those making these accusations? Is it simply to seek acknowledgement from those of the opposing ideology that there is truth to their arguments, or do they wish to build momentum toward an uneasiness with, and distrust of, Bush by the voting public so that sweeping changes can occur next fall, with the ushering in of a Democratic presidency?

I’ll go out on a short limb here and assume it is the latter choice.

If so, then why don’t those in the Liberal blogosphere focus on matters that actually resonate with those whom they wish to influence? After months of daily hashing and rehashing of statements, quotes, reports, allegations, and investigations from political figures and organizations, what do we really know about how the ramp up to war came to pass? Despite what the most impassioned anti-Bush bloggers want to push as “facts”, the worst that can definitely be pinned on him is that his Administration took a collective assessment of intelligence information that would, at best, indicate a plausible likelihood that Iraq still had some active weapons programs and/or unaccounted-for WMD, and then stated this “likelihood” as a certainty to the rest of the world, to bolster the “WMD broker/user” rationale for quicker action in removing Saddam from power.

The problem is, that regardless of whether some people want to argue that this was an outright lie, an immoral distortion, a calculated assumption based upon inconclusive data, or an overstatement of the facts, this issue isn’t, and hasn’t been, of any real importance with the general US public for some time now! Even I thought that if Bush can’t prove at least a dormant network of weapon development existed, that he would feel the wrath of public anger. But now I know he won’t (at least, for that reason).

Most polls still have shown a fairly consistent majority (around 60%) of the public typically feels that the war itself was justified, if simply to remove Saddam’s regime from power. Where the Bush Administration is actually getting eroding support is on the question of how much continued military and monetary commitment the US should make in Iraq. The more Bush’s opponents chase the “pre-war justification” ghosts endlessly, the more they help Bush deflect attention from the post-war challenges with which he is struggling. And, although it’s a less sexy topic, the current jobless recovery that is happening under Bush’s watch is a key negative influencer on the voting public that the anti-Bush crowd seems uninterested in emphasizing. Nothing gets feet moving into voting booths faster than issues of the wallet. Bush will be at his most vulnerable if the public blames him for the money drain going outside the Country and for the economic lethargy within it.

But the light in the tunnel for Bush and the Republican Party is that public opinion is still not being effectively galvanized to those weaknesses, either by Liberal opinion-makers or by any truly viable, dynamic, consensus-building Democratic candidate. So, go ahead Bush haters. Keep chasing the fruitless “Bush lied” stories. The only thing that will topple him is the political Perfect Storm next summer of a lack of significant progress in Iraq, a stalled economic recovery, and the emergence of a Democratic candidate who isn’t too scary for the moderate swing voters to embrace.

Here’s a really interesting piece that discusses the fact that Bush’s poll numbers, far from being bolstered by his taking time out to push the “things are going great in Iraq” story with a live presidential address last month, actually accelerated their dive for the basement: Bush’s sinking feeling (reading the full version requires getting the free one-day Salon registration, but I think this one’s worth it).

An excerpt:

What’s so unusual about the impact the speech has had is that neither Democrats nor the press jumped on Bush immediately following the address. In real time, on the night of Sept. 7, TV pundits generally gave a wobbly thumbs-up — nothing unusually harsh — while assembled politicians gave their predictable, partisan assessments. (Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told CNN, “it was a terrific speech.”)

Instead, over the next few days there seemed to be a collective “holy shit” moment for an awful lot of Americans contemplating the cost of the war and the occupation’s duration. From Erie, Pa., to Berkeley County, W. Va., and other key swing voting districts, the reviews were in, and Bush got panned.

“It was the moment when White House spin collided with the public’s appreciation [of] reality,” says Joseph Cirincione, author or “Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction.” “It tipped the scale and made people realize we were in Iraq too deep. Nothing the president said gave public hope we’d soon get out of this.”

I don’t think there’s any way out of this for Bush. He’s run up against that old “can’t fool all of the people all of the time” thing. The middle has figured out what he’s up to, and they’re just not buying anymore.

Here’s a profile of a great American from the Washington Post: The spy next door.

The latest spin from the White House on Plame’s outing seems to be that the initial leak to Novak was the work of some obscure flunky they’ll never be able to find. But the phonecalls by two top administration officials to at least six different journalists mentioned by the Washington Post was perfectly legal, since at that point her cover had already been compromised by the leak to Novak, even though the Post says those calls were made before Novak’s column was published.

To me, this is far worse than the legalistic parsing that gave us Clinton arguing, “I can receive a blow job without my ‘touching’ the person giving it to me.” In this case, we’ve got the assertion that once someone has committed the felonious, and arguably treasonous, act of compromising the cover of a CIA operative working on WMD proliferation, there’s nothing wrong with the White House phoning up reporters in an effort to get the story wider play. Under the provisions of the statute, only the initial revelation is a crime. Trying to push the story after that is perfectly legal.

Maybe it is. But it still sucks. And the people who did it should be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of Washington on a rail. There was a time in this country’s history when anyone who fancied himself a patriot would have happily volunteered to do just that.

I was six graphs deep in this before I realized I’d been had: Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women. The tip-off? Quoting someone named “Dr. Inserta Shafteer”. Moral: Always check the URL. Design elements do not a CNN web page make.

By Tad Friend, here’s a really good article from The New Yorker on people who commit suicide by leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge: Jumpers.

Here’s a nice retread of an old idea: depicting large numbers in a way that lets people actually grasp their significance. In this case, the $87 billion that Bush wants to fund Iraq reconstruction for the next year: $87,000,000,000.00.

Ralph Peters, writing in the New York Post, says the media are a key player, perhaps the key player, in determining the success or failure of the US effort to rebuild Iraq: Not so innocent. Peters has a good point: terrorism would lose its effectiveness if there were no media to report on it. It’s pretty much the same case Michael Moore makes in Bowling for Columbine (though I doubt Peters would appreciate the comparison): that the media’s interest in tapping into fear as a way to gather more eyeballs to sell to advertisers outweighs whatever higher purpose they might otherwise serve, making a lie out of their claims to being objective eyes and ears laboring on behalf of the pubic good.

I’ll grant Peters that the media has a vested interest in portraying the dramatic failure of the US effort in Iraq. But that’s the same media dynamic that Bush and his people were only too willing to exploit in hyping the largely baseless charges of Hussein’s imminent WMD threat during the run up to war. The media is what it is. (Are what they are?) It has an institutional bias to report the new, the dramatic, the frightening, while downplaying the old, the commonplace, the mundane. Sometimes it helps the side Peters is on; sometimes it hurts it. Deal with it.

The Bush people are apparently focusing on this as the next Big Message to hammer home: things are going great in Iraq, but the media just aren’t telling you about it. Well, maybe. But I remain suspicious. Just as I’m suspicious when an HMO, confronted by market research that shows people view it as relentlessly profit-oriented and uncaring, chooses to mount an advertising campaign in which a white-coated actor who oozes bedside manner smiles down at a young patient, handing her a teddy bear while her grateful parents look on. As opposed to, you know, actually addressing the real problems in their patient care that led to the negative public perception in the first place.

Successfully spinning the media into portraying a failure as a success might well help Bush hold onto political power. But it won’t actually help with any of the real issues we’re facing. Wouldn’t it be great to have a president who cared a little more (like, at all) about actually solving our problems, and a little less about manipulating the media in order to fool us into thinking he already had?

Arnold Kling takes Paul Krugman to task in this piece at Tech Central Station: An open letter to Paul Krugman. Kling distinguishes between two types of arguments: “Type C” arguments, which are about the consequences of a proposed policy, and “Type M” arguments, which are about the inferred motivations of the people advocating that policy. Kling makes the eminently reasonable point that Type C arguments are inherently preferable to Type M arguments. He even makes his case in the form of a Type C argument. Good job.

If there were a way to restrict both sides in the public debate in this country to using only Type C arguments, well, we’d have a much higher quality of debate. Unfortunately, there isn’t, and we don’t. And what Paul Krugman’s willingness to engage in Type M amounts to is an acknowledgement that restricting yourself to Type C when the other side is relentlessly hammering away at you with Type M is a good way to lose an argument.

This is exactly what happened in this country over the last 30 years. (See? I’m talking about consequences. It’s a Type C argument. Woo!) Right-wing politicians and media figures launched an all-out assault on liberal policies and those who advocated them, using Type M arguments as their weapon of choice. The response from the liberals consisted mainly of high-minded Type C stuff.

Well, guess what? We liberals lost the debate, and the current Bush presidency is one of the more horrifying results. So we’re done with the self-imposed limitations. We’ll go back to the Type-C-only arguments when the other side demonstates a willingness to do the same. Until then, forget it. It’s a sucker’s game.

My sister-in-law Mary forwarded me a fun item from Buzzflash’s David Sirota: Bush swears he’ll hunt down Osama and Saddam, but says he can’t find a treasonous betrayer in his own administration because it’s too big. Cartoonist Jack Ohman of the Oregonian, as pointed to by CalPundit’s Kevin Drum, makes more or less the same observation in graphic form.

Do I feel a 30-second TV spot for next year’s Democratic challenger coming on? Yeah, I think I do. Sweet.

From Bravo comes a link to this nifty image that was reposted as The Cellar’s Image of the Day: Word usage maps. There’s a link to the original source in the comments, with that original source being a Harvard site: Dialect survey results. (Quick digression, apropos the headmaster at my daughter’s school’s habit of telling everyone he meets about his time at a certain Ivy League location: Q: How can you tell when someone’s been to Harvard? A: They tell you.)

Anyway, it’s very much worth some poking around. If you do so, you’ll learn many fascinating facts about your fellow Americans. For example, there’s a cluster of people in and around Rhode Island who call a drink made with milk and ice cream a “cabinet”. And nearly 11% of survey respondents call the gooey stuff that collects in the corners of your eyes an eye booger. Who knew?

Apparently the US military is taking this “Army of One” idea to new levels. As mentioned at MetaFilter in the item Not very clever, are they?, the same lengthy, text-identical letter is appearing in small-town newspapers all over the country, touting the success of the Iraq operation. An excerpt:

The fruits of all our soldiers’ efforts are clearly visible in the streets of Kirkuk today. There is very little trash in the streets, many more people in the markets and shops, and children have returned to school. This is all evidence that the work we are doing as a battalion and as American soldiers is bettering the lives of Kirkuk’s citizens. I am proud of the work we are doing here in Iraq and I hope all of your readers are as well.

That heartfelt missive from Pfc. David Deaconson appeared in his hometown newspaper, the Beckley (WV) Register-Herald, on September 21. Signed by Spc. Nathan Whitelatch, it appeared in the Connellsville (PA) Daily Courier on September 11. Signed by Sgt. Shawn M. Grueser, it appeared in the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail on September 10.

The Olympian (of Olympia, WA) was especially blessed; it received two copies of the letter, from different soldiers. They didn’t run them in their letters to the editor section, but they did contact a half-dozen soldiers whose names had appeared below the letter in various papers, confirming that the soldiers had not actually written them: Many soldiers, same letter.

Witih Google, these things are pretty easy to sniff out. You notice a suspiciously erudite letter to the editor in the local paper, plug the phrase into Google, and bam: instant debunking. Kind of makes you wonder how many of these passed unnoticed back in the day.

Thanks to Adam at Words Mean Things for the pointer.

Apparently the link I’d been using for Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Point Memo site was semi-broken, in that I was linking to www.talkingpointsmemo.com, which wasn’t updating with new material, rather than to plain old talkingpointsmemo.com, which was. Oops. (Update: Problem solved. The site changed IP addresses recently, and I had an old lookup cached in my browser for the ‘www’ version of the hostname. I restarted, and everything is great now. Funny: I never had that problem before I switched to OS X. Under Windows it was rare to go a day without crashing, or at least needing to restart my browser. But I’d been running the same instance of Camino for a week or so. Heh.)

The silver lining to this cloud is that last night I found a big batch of Marshall’s commentary that I’d previously missed, including lots on the outing of formerly covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

One particularly interesting aspect of Marshall’s commentary is the interpretation he’s offered of presidential spokesperson Scott McClellan’s statements on the matter at the twice-daily White House press briefings. See Marshall’s comments here, here, and here.

Marshall notices that McClellan’s “denials” of involvement by key White House players are being delivered as if by parrot: the individuals in question (Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Elliot Abrams) were not involved in “leaking classified information.” The action is always referred to in that precise way; regardless of how the question is framed. The reporters keep asking for something clearer, and McClellan keeps answering-while-not-quite-answering, issuing the same “non-denial denial.” Lately it’s been getting pretty funny:

QUESTION: Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

MCCLELLAN: Those individuals — I talked — I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that’s where it stands.

QUESTION: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

MCCLELLAN: They assured me that they were not involved in this.

QUESTION: Can I follow up on that?

QUESTION: They were not involved in what?

MCCLELLAN: The leaking of classified information.

Marshall speculates that this may mean that the White House has carved out what they think is a legally defensible position that the leaking of Plame’s name might not have constituted a leaking of “classified information.” By couching the denials in this precise way, they thereby preserve a legal refuge if/when it can be demonstrated that one or more of the Rove/Libby/Abrams trio actually did leak Plame’s name.

It seems to me that a less-sinister (or at least, a differently sinister) explanation would be that this is part of the White House’s ongoing effort to portray this as no big deal. Everyone in Washington leaks classified information from time to time. To the extent this act can be cast in those general terms, it helps make this into the non-story that Bush & Co. would obviously much prefer it to be. Donald Sensing does his part to push the administration line on this in response to a comment of mine on his weblog, where he describes this whole affair as quite typical.

But it’s not. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because it appears very likely that there was a coordinated effort on the part of the White House political operation to punish a whistle-blower by going after his wife, in the process significantly compromising CIA efforts to fight the proliferation of WMD. And what that reveals about the quality of the decision-making in this White House, about their sense of proportion, is really, really disturbing.

It adds one more item, and a big one, to the growing pile of evidence that the Bush administration is out of control. It’s the Mayberry Machiavellis, the kids on Big Wheels, running roughshod over anyone who gets in their way. It’s not about governing. It’s not about solving problems, fixing the economy, or protecting the American people from terrorism. It’s not about leading the world’s sole superpower in a responsible manner.

It’s only about one thing: getting your guy elected. And when you pursue that goal to the exclusion of everything else, you’re prone to disasterous screwups like this one. And guess what? The fact that they’re spinning as hard as they can to pretend it didn’t happen means nothing is going to change.

SmokeFreeMovies recently came to my attention when my girlfriend told me about a lecture (PPT) she’d just attended by Stan Glantz. Dr. Glantz is somewhat of an eccentric in the Public Health community and started the project on a lark, knowing that Big Tobaco has a history of working with major movie studios — but then he discovered that smoking in movies does significantly stimulate smoking in kids.

Personally, I thought the idea was a little goofy, but he presents some pretty interesting statistics (like: characters in movies smoke 300% as much as people in real life) and their goals are very modest, and seem completely reasonable to me. In particular, they’d like to see smoking given the same consideration as profanity and alcohol in determining if a movie should get an R Rating.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to see some of the Ads the organization has run in industry publications to promote their cause within the Hollywood system. (They are listed in reverse chronological order, so I suggested starting at the bottom and reading up). Of particular interest to me was the Ad they made after finding out about the letter writting campaign of a group of High School kids in New York who wrote 202,000 letters to various Hollywood big shots and got only two replies: one refusing delivery, and one from Julia Roberts’s people threatening legal action if they sent any more letters.

Thanks to Yian for tipping me off to the really hilarious Fresh Air interview with Bill O’Reilly. If you like Bill O’Reilly, you’ll really enjoy this interview. If you loathe Bill O’Reilly, you’ll also really enjoy this interview, though in a completely different way. Go thou and listen likewise!

Proving once again the benefits of carefully crafting headlines to maximize one’s Googlerank, my previous entry, Rush Limbaugh: Addict is currently #1 on a search for that phrase, and the profusion of comments on the page is the result.

Most of the comments are predictable serves-him-right snark. But looking afield for other comments, I noticed the following from David Frum: Rush and Us, II (you have to scroll down a bit past the actually somewhat apt commentary on liberal hypocrisy during Monicagate). Here’s an excerpt:

To these gloatings, there are two things that should immediately be said.

First, if the only people allowed to argue in favor of moral standards are people without moral imperfections, then there will be nobody to do the job at all. Every one of us on the conservative side of the great moral and cultural divisions of the day is riddled with faults, flaws, and failings.

Second, on the drug issue in particular – who knows better than the drug addict how seductive and deadly drugs can be? In light of Rush’s own dependency, his attacks on drug use and drug legalization resound more powerfully than ever. This is not hypocrisy: It is conviction grounded in painfully acquired personal experience.

I can appreciate, on a certain level, the artistry that goes into crafting an up-is-down assertion that does a good job at maintaining internal self-consistency. And given the overwhelming power of human belief, there doubtless are fans of Frum’s who read that passage (in its original home, at the National Review Online, at least, if not here) nodding their heads in sober agreement.

Tools.

Rush got caught in flagrant hypocrisy. You either recognize that, or you’re deluding yourself. I’d wager pretty much any amount that Frum falls into the former category, rather than the latter, so I lump him in with the rest of those willing to knowingly deceive others in pursuit of their larger aims.

If you haven’t seen it already, you might be interested in the anonymous confession site grouphug.us. Janus seems to believe my interest in it is based on a desire for an “other-people-are-pathetic ego boost,” which may be true, but if so, I can’t tell from my end.

Bill Maher rules. In particular, in his latest weblog entry: Rush Limbaugh. Makes a nice counterpoint to the David Frum blather I was mocking earlier.

I have a deep and abiding fascination with the proposition that two arguments can be both compelling and mutually exclusive. A really nice example of that is the following sequence of posts, currently running on Daniel Drezner’s weblog: The post-war debate about the pre-war rhetoric: Part I, Part II, and Part III.

The posts in question have actually been authored by two frequent commentators on Kevin Drum’s CalPundit site, one of whom generally supports Bush’s Iraq policies, the other of whom generally opposes them. Each is arguing for or against the following assertion: “It is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq.”

Drezner’s role in all this is that of a referee, chosen because both sides, apparently, acknowledge his essential intelligence and fairness (well, at least until he renders judgement, at which point one or the other of them will probably decide that they were mistaken in that regard).

It’s all pretty darn interesting. I confess to being really curious what the final judgement is going to be.

Interesting story from the LA Times about Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence: General casts war in religious terms. It seems the 13-year Delta Force veteran is an evangelical Christian prone to public remarks that feed into Islamic fears that the US is waging a War on Evil in which Muslims are the bad guys by virtue of their non-Judeo-Christian faith. The article is the straight-news version of an opinion piece by military affairs analyst William Arkin that is also running in today’s LA Times: The Pentagon unleashes a holy warrior.

Here are three stories that do a good job of highlighting the core failing of the Bush presidency: the way it is all about politics, style, and ideological filtering of reality, with everything else (like sound government policy, free speech, and even national security) subordinated to that end.

First up, from Helen Thomas: No wonder Bush doesn’t connect with the rest of the country. It’s about the disturbing fact (not joke, but fact) that Bush doesn’t read the newspapers, but instead just relies on his advisors to summarize for him whatever it is they think he needs to know. Because, you see, Bush thinks the information he gets that way is more objective.

Next, from Salon (requires viewing the commercial to get the free one-day pass, but it’s worth it): Keeping dissent invisible. This one’s about how the Secret Service works with local police to systematically remove protesters from the site of presidential and vice-presidential appearances, caging them up in out-of-camera-range “free speech zones,” and arresting those who refuse. As one arrestee so-aptly put it, “Isn’t the whole country supposed to be a free speech zone?”

Finally, from Wired: Spies attack White House secrecy. It’s about how the Bush administration’s over-the-top enthusiasm for classifying information is actually making us less, rather than more, secure.

In one way or another, all these stories are about the same thing. The Bush presidency rests upon a single extremely childish, but extremely dangerous, idea: that if we all squeeze our eyes tightly shut and wish very, very hard, we can make our problems go away.

Didn’t work when you were five. Isn’t going to work today. It’s time to let grownups run things for a change.

Thanks to Hiro, by the way, for links two and three.

From Glen and Pilar, my hands-down favorite link suggesters of all time: Bush orders officials to stop leaks. The money quote:

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he “didn’t want to see any stories”
quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if
he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official
who asked that his name not be used.

The Onionization of reality is complete.

Aside from the obvious comic value, the article is actually pretty interesting. It sounds like Bush is really starting to come unhinged. Which is either very good or very scary news, depending on how you view it.

Here’s a fun little analysis from Kynn of Shock & Awe: “I demand photographic evidence!” It goes into how a particular critic of his employed very different standards for evaluating news stories based on whether those stories agreed or disagreed with his own preconceptions.

Which isn’t an earth-shaking revelation, I realize. But this is still a nice example of it. As a bonus, Kynn’s analysis features a debunking of that “$60 million worth of Iraqi WMD were intercepted while being smuggled into Kuwait!” story you may have heared about a while back.

You’re having a conversation with someone, or reading something someone’s written, or watching someone on TV, and you’re thinking, “This person is pretty sharp/has interesting ideas/knows what he or she is talking about.” And then the person strays into expressing an opinion about something that he or she knows very little about, but that you happen to be (at least relatively) expert in, and they say something that is just totally, ridiculously, naive.

Maybe you call them on it. Maybe you don’t. It might not be worth it. Maybe the naive thing they said wasn’t just some random opinion, but something that has a lot of emotional resonance with them, for whatever reason. And since they lack the firsthand experience that would allow them to recognize how ridiculous their assertion is, you’re basically counting on an appeal to your authority, or your ability to craft a logical-sounding argument and their willingness to listen to it, if you want to change their mind.

I feel this way when the militarily-astute types I’ve been paying attention to lately start talking about how our current Iraq endeavor is an appropriate step in a grand scheme to “drain the swamp” of Arab terrorism. When you draw them out, their argument basically comes down to a belief that the blunt application of military force will allow us to “win” a cultural/religious war with the whole of the Arab world, or the whole of Islam (they tend not to distinguish between the two), making “them” over to be very much more like “us,” at which point the problem will be solved.

It’s a naive fantasy.

Similarly, when the Prime Minister of Malaysia addresses the opening session of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and basically describes a global conspiracy whereby a small group of Jews is pulling the levers of power to keep Muslims down, it comes off as ludicrous. At least, that’s the way Daniel Drezner portrays it here: The state of Islam — 2003. And he has a point. From an outside perspective, those parts of the speech were clearly naive and racist.

Other parts were pretty insightful. The Muslim leaders at the conference ate it up, giving the speech extended ovations.

The cycle continues. I didn’t point to it back in July when it appeared, but I’m reminded of that recent study into the physiological basis of conflict escalation. See this write-up, for example: Too much force may be with you.

Someone pushes us. We push back — harder. At each stage the injuries worsen, the perceived gulf between us and them widens. We care less about those on the other side, are more willing to inflict pain in retaliation.

My son went to a really wonderful preschool. When something like this happened on the playground, this is what the very wise director of that school would do. First, of course, she would intervene to stop the violence. But having used whatever minimum amount of force was needed to achieve that, she wouldn’t follow up with some kind of stern lecture or punishment. Instead, she’d get down on the combatants’ level, and ask one of them (typically, the one who had been responsible for the latest round of escalation) to look at the other one. “Look at his face. What do you think he’s feeling right now?”

We are all connected. There is no them. There’s only us. We will march down this road of escalating violence exactly as long as it takes us to figure that out. Maybe we’ll figure it out today. Maybe we’ll figure it out after some angry preschooler nukes Mecca.

I vote for today.

Robert Byrd gave yet another awesome speech to the Senate on Friday: The emperor has no clothes. It’s simple, powerful stuff. No wonder Bush’s defenders are reduced to attacking the messenger over his association with the Klan during his first Congressional campaign in the 1940s. They have no response to the substance of his argument.

Michael Kinsley has a piece in Slate that makes some pointed observations on George Bush’s approach to the news: Filter tips.

Kevin Drum of Calpundit takes a look at the current Iraq situation, trying to divine the truth from the various competing storylines: How are we doing in Iraq? His conclusion? Things aren’t going very well. Hard to dispute his logic.

I was watching John McCain and Bob Graham yacking at each other on Meet the Press yesterday, and good lord, this is sounding more like Vietnam all the time. It won’t be long before we’ll have politicians talking about “peace with honor” and secret plans to end the war.

And that reminded me of something I’d been meaning to do for a while. Whenever I bring up a Vietnam/Iraq comparison, fans of the current war point out that casualty rates in Vietnam were way beyond anything we’ve seen so far in Iraq. Which is true, if you’re talking about the Vietnam war at its peak. But there was a long run-up during which Vietnam simmered along at much lower casualty rates. I keep meaning to put together some charts to compare the two wars in terms of the US death toll, and now I’ve done that.

For my Vietnam statistics I used the excellent Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, where there is an advanced search tool that lets you query the database of war dead by month. For the Iraq statistics I used Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties.

In each case, I counted all US deaths in the war zone, rather than only counting combat fatalities. In the case of the current month (October 2003), I took the fairly morbid step of estimating that the current monthly total of 24 deaths would rise to 32 deaths over the next 10 days. (Here’s hoping that estimate turns out to be high. I’ll revise the charts at the end of the month to reflect the true total.) (Update: Sadly, I was low. The actual number of US deaths in October was 42. I’ve updated the charts accordingly, and have posted some new observations in this item: Iraq war deaths.)

For the first chart, I plotted deaths for the first 12 months of the Vietnam war, and the 8 months to-date of the Iraq war. I picked December of 1961 as the “starting point” for the Vietnam war mainly because that was the month in which SP4 James Davis of Livingston, Tennessee, was killed by the Viet Cong, with Lyndon Johnson later referring to him as “the first American to fall in defense of our freedom in Vietnam.” (See this interesting timeline of the Vietnam war.) Note, though, that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial currently lists Capt. Harry Griffith Cramer, who died in October of 1957, as the earliest Vietnam war death.

Since my main interest in putting this graph together was to think about (and stimulate thinking about) politicians’ and citizens’ perceptions of war-related death tolls, I figured that Johnson’s willingness to identify a particular death as the “first of the war” was as good a starting point as any.

Anyway, here’s the graph (note that you can click on any of these images for a larger version):

It’s interesting to me how the Iraq war, so far at least, shows dramatically more US deaths per month than the Vietnam war did at a comparable point in its political lifetime. Yes, I realize that there were far fewer troops in Vietnam at this stage of the war than we currently have in Iraq. I grant that the two wars have followed very differerent scenarios so far. What I’m really interested in here is the domestic political picture, and its relationship to the ongoing death toll.

Let’s get a little more perspective. Here’s the same chart, but with the numbers for Vietnam extended out to December of 1965, by which time, armed with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (passed in August, 1964), Johnson had dramatically increased the number of US troops on the ground:

Finally, here’s a version of the chart that shows the entire extent of the Vietnam war, ending with the fall of Saigon and the evacuation of the US Embassy in April of 1975:

You can spin the data depicted in these charts however you like. For myself, I view them with concern. When politicians are allowed to launch wars for ill-defined reasons, with vague exit strategies and ever-shifting criteria for success, you have a formula for tragedy. That’s what happened back in the 1960s, and I can’t see any reason to believe it isn’t happening again today.

Note: I’m completely aware that this comparison is not normalized for number of US troops present in each conflict. This is not a comparison of death rate per unit of troop strength, and it doesn’t claim to be. If you want that, you’ll have to make a different graph. See discussion below, and on the following pages. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.

• Iraq war deaths
• November: The cruelest month
• 41 US Iraq war dead in December
• Post-Saddam death toll up slightly
• February death toll down for us, up for them
• Thirteen months in
• Record US deaths in April
• US War Dead in Iraq for May
• US Iraq Deaths Down in June
• US Soldiers Continue to Die in Iraq
• Eighteen Months In
• Another Month’s Progress
• The Bush Legacy in Iraq
• 141 Dead in November