I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the number of US dead for May, 2004. The number was down from April’s record; the number of fatalities (78) was just short of the second-worst month so far (November of last year, with 82).

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first fifteen months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to say anything about the relative lethality of the two conflicts. I am completely aware that the number of dead produced by each of these wars correlates closely with the number of soldiers on the ground at any given time. Nor am I trying to make a case that the Iraq war is somehow equivalent to, or worse than, the Vietnam war. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. Those of you who like to defend the Iraq war by pointing out that many more US troops died each month at the peak of the Vietnam war than are currently dying in Iraq are welcome to make that case using the data shown above. Those of you who want to explain why I’m an idiot are likewise welcome to contribute via the comments.

You can view more discussion of these charts on the following pages, if you’re interested. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.

• US deaths in Vietnam and Iraq by month
• 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

Billmon of Whiskey Bar has a great post honoring soldiers past and present: Memorial Day.

Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes (who has been on quite a roll lately) offers a frighteningly apt extended quotation from 1984: Doublethink. A small excerpt:

It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

Those who forget Orwell are condemned to experience him IRL, I guess.

The former intern alleged to have had an affair with John Kerry gives her side of the story. Scary stuff: Alexandra Polier’s account.

Several months ago there was a brief news report floating around, based on an item in a British medical journal, that described how a Mexican woman had performed an emergency Caesarean section on herself using a kitchen knife. I remember talking about it with some folks at the time, but apparently I failed to post it to lies.com. Now an enterprising AP reporter has caught up with the woman, resulting in the following article: Woman describes self-Caesarean.

Eesh.

Yeah, I think this pretty much explains it all: The Iraq war: A play in one act.

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time on this site, you know I don’t think much of George Bush. But as I’ve previously posted, there are, in fact, some things I like about him. And while I pretty much do think he’s a narcissistic lackwit who has no business being president, I’m aware that that view is far from universal. I consider it possible, and maybe even probable, that my negative view of Bush has more to do with my own ideological perspective than it does with Bush’s actual shortcomings. Similarly, there are lots of folks with a different ideological perspective who think he’s the greatest thing that ever happened to this country.

But we ideologues are basically crazy. Forget about us. What about those people in the middle? What do they think of Bush? It’s an important question, since those are the people who are going to decide whether he gets another four years in office.

A lot of folks are working very hard to convince those people that Bush is (or isn’t) fit to be president. And interestingly, news photographs seem to be playing a prominent role in that process. The camera doesn’t lie, after all. Give a person a compelling image, and he or she can hang an idea on it. Dukakis as Snoopy in the tank; that sort of thing.

Bush gave the commencement address today at the Air Force Academy. And boy, did he talk for a long time about the War on Terror. I mean, I’m pretty obsessively interested in his public statements on that topic, and I’m having a hard time getting through it. I seriously feel for the people who had to sit through the speech in real time. (And I’m forced to wonder what lies.com author Craig would think of Bush’s apparent willingness to hijack the commencement and turn it into a platform for his political views. But that’s a separate issue.)

Fortunately, most of us didn’t need to actually listen to the speech. Instead, we can just enjoy the stirring images that emerged from the event. Like this one, helpfully provided by the fine people at whitehouse.gov:

Even I have to admit that he looks pretty good in this picture. Just the right attitude. Way better than he looked in this one, for example. He’s obviously getting the hang of this saluting thing.

Here’s another nice one:

That’s my Commander-in-Chief!

As long as we’re on the subject of symbolic images, I’d like to include a few more. As he was boarding the helicopter at the White House for the trip to Colorado, it was stormy out, so he completed his presidential wardrobe with an umbrella. He looked pretty good with it, too. Check it out:

And this one, too; look at the way he strides purposefully into the oncoming wind. The picture is powerful with symbolism: Bush the war president, facing the storm:

Unfortunately, the symbolism that emerged from the next stage of his journey, when he reached the airport and had to walk to Air Force One, was a little different:

Whoa! Hang on, Mr. President! That storm is turning out to be stronger than you expected!

Erm, well, okay; let’s see. We seem to have a bit of a problem here. Any of you boys from the UN know how to get one of these back together?

Well, crap.

Now, I realize that anyone can have their umbrella blow out. Just because it happens to Bush doesn’t mean he’s a doofus. The picture isn’t actually symbolic of anything.

Unless it resonates.

But I get the feeling that for middle-of-the-road voters, that last image actually is fairly representative of their emerging view of Bush. Yeah, he’s a good guy. He’s a straight-shooter who believes in the same fundamental values they do. He’s ended up in a storm he couldn’t have anticipated, a storm that would have tested the most capable of leaders. And he’s given it his best, and deserves his nation’s gratitude for the effort he’s put in.

But however reluctantly, they are concluding that his best just isn’t good enough. Maybe this Kerry fellow has what it takes; maybe he doesn’t. Guess we’ll find out. But Bush, son, I’m afraid we’re going to have to make a change.

From Bravo, provider of the best links in the known universe: The infinite cat project.

Josh Micah Marshall is one of my favorite webloggers. Sometimes I almost forget that he’s also a real journalist with a PhD in history. Then something like this new article he’s written for The Atlantic Monthly comes along: Kerry Faces the World.

Wow. There are no pretty pictures, but the analysis is razor-sharp. Marshall looks at Kerry’s advisors, and attempts to divine what a Kerry administration’s foreign policy would look like. In the process, he thoroughly lays to rest the notion that there “wouldn’t be any difference” between Kerry’s and Bush’s approaches to the world.

An excerpt:

Democratic foreign-policy hands tend to be less ideologically driven than Republican ones. Their strengths lean toward technocratic expertise and procedural competence rather than theories and grand visions. This lack of partisan edge is best illustrated by the fact that two of Kerry’s top advisers served on Bush’s National Security Council staff as recently as last year (Beers as senior director for counterterrorism, and Flynt Leverett as senior director for Middle East initiatives). The team that advised candidate Bush in 1999 and 2000–the so-called “Vulcans”–was practically the mirror opposite of the Kerry team. Though all its members had served at least one stint in government, most had held political appointments rather than working for decades in the security bureaucracy, as Beers did. And whereas Kerry’s team is the embodiment of the nation’s professional national-security apparatus, key members of Bush’s team, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had spent entire careers trying to overthrow it.

There’s lots more, and it’s really, really good. All I can say is, my God; can I please have government by grownups again?

Nice, succinct example of Bush’s casual acquaintance with the truth: Lying liars.

Here’s an important piece from John S. Carroll, editor of the LA Times: The Wolf in Reporter’s Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America. Good stuff on how the make-believe “journalists” at Fox News, among others, are polluting the river of public discourse in this country.

Here’s a really nicely done site that sets itself the challenging task of documenting each and every lie made by the Bush presidential campaign: Bush campaign lies.

I’ve linked to pieces about Ray McGovern a few times before; he’s an ex-CIA guy who likes to make fairly alarming accusations about how the current group of people running the US intelligence operation are not to be trusted. Which isn’t to say that his accusations aren’t accurate. But they definitely lean in the tinfoil-hat direction. And what’s not to like about that?

Anyway. From Democracy Now: 27-Year CIA Vet Ray McGovern On George Tenet’s Surprise Resignation

“…the Illinois legislature adjourned earlier this week without extending the Aug. 30 deadline for presidential candidates to be certified by the state elections board and qualify for the Nov. 2 ballot. …
The relatively late dates of this year’s Republican Party convention, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, mean that Bush will not be the official nominee until after the deadline … As a result Illinois, is the only state where Bush could be left off the ballot. ”
Update: whoops, yeah the source URL would have been a good thing to post. (This is why you shouldn’t post in a rush.)

Joshua Micah Marshall is one of many who are commenting on a Wall Street Journal article that describes a Defense Dept. report on legal justifications for engaging in torture and near-torture: The Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary article… At issue is the report’s profoundly anti-democratic argument that the president, by virtue of his commander-in-chief status, can in fact set aside any law that he wants to.

Not in my country he can’t.

I don’t care if Bush never paid attention when this point was covered in the McClasses he specialized in at Yale. (I love that story, by the way, about how one of the jocks, checking the signup sheet during registration, started crowing delightedly when he noticed that then-undergraduate George W. Bush was in a class he’d signed up for, because it meant the course would be easy.) The fact is, neither the president nor anyone else in the US is above the law. That’s one of the key principles, perhaps the key principle, of our system of government, a system that generations of Americans have fought and died to defend, a system that Bush himself is sworn to defend.

For the good of the Republic, Bush seriously has to go.

Paul Krugman points out one of the ways in which Bush isn’t like Reagan: The great taxer.

The Washington Post editorial writers speak truth to power with this amazing editorial: Legalizing torture.

The question in my mind is, what happens now? They’ve called them on it. Anyone who cares to read the source materials floating around knows what’s going on. Truly, as I wrote some time ago, the upcoming presidential election is going to be about something. It’s going to be about what kind of country we choose to live in.

We have faced great threats in this country before. We were threatened by the armies of King George III, and for a time our country-to-be’s future hung by a thread. We were threatened during the War of 1812, when a British invasion fleet sailed up the Potomac and burned Washington. We waged war among ourselves to the tune of 800,000 dead in the Civil War. We suffered the blow of the Pearl Harbor attack, and the ensuing onslaught by Japan, Italy, and Hitler’s Germany. We faced down the threat of nuclear annihilation through the long years of the Cold War.

Through these, and many other challenges, our country endured, and its fundamental principles endured. We faced great danger, but we rose above our fears, and banded together, and did extraordinary things. And through it all, we remained true to our national character.

Now that’s being threatened. Not by Osama bin Laden and his followers; they can’t threaten us. Not really. We’re too strong for that. No, this threat comes from within. Our real enemies, driven by a lust for power, are using fear, secrecy, and torture to try to turn this country into something not-America. They are an infection in our body politic, and you, I, and millions of other decent, honest citizens are the antibodies.

I don’t care if you call yourself a Republican, or a Democrat, or an independent, or a non-voter. Your country needs you right now. It needs you to drag yourself from your sofa and your television and your video games and your Internet porn and do a couple of simple things: 1) register to vote, and 2) go to your polling place on election day and indicate what kind of country you want to live in.

Do it.

Another way in which Bush isn’t like Ronald Reagan: Reagan was “the great communicator,” able to connect with the common man via television. Bush… isn’t. Case in point: this interview he did with Tom Brokaw as part of the D-Day event in France: Echoes of Iraq war as Bush marks D-Day.

Dennis Hwang of Google gives a little detail about the altered logo artwork that Google runs from time to time: Oodles of doodles.

From the very good people at Music for America comes Partisan Jab: Ashcroft Fear Remix. I really like this.

Josh Micah Marshall has some very apt commentary on a fascinating phenomenon: The way the official Bush campaign web site seems extremely anxious these days to talk about Kerry, and (lately) Reagan, or anything, apparently, other than George W. Bush: A few days ago I noted a divergence…

From an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, here’s Richard Cohen saying exactly what needs to be said about the Bush administration’s foray into torture: A plunge from the moral heights.

Rivka of Respectful of Otters has been doing a great job tying together the various strands of the torture-justification story. See “America is a shining city on a hill…” and The Justice Department memo: A commentary round-up.

From Sequential Tart comes this really cool interview with Wil Wheaton, late of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Not Just a Geek, part II. Even if you don’t care about Star Trek, and his recent writing activities, you should still read it. Just invert his advice, and skip to the political commentary toward the end. Heh. (Wil’s own commentary on his commentary available on his weblog: is this not what you expected to see?)

So, apparently Bush couldn’t avoid being asked a question or two about the steady flow of evidence that his administration is hip-deep in the use of torture as an interrogation method. Josh Micah Marshall has a good round-up: From the front page of Friday’s Post… And George Paine of Warblogging does a good job of focusing on the key issue in Bush’s non-denial denial issued yesterday: President Bush and torture.

I realize I’m sounding like a bit of a broken record lately. But there’s a big, festering, malodorous carcase in the middle of the Oval Office rug, and I think we, as a people, need to take notice and do something about it.

Brad DeLong posts an email he received from someone who’d seen a talk given by Abu Ghraib-exposer Seymour Hersh: Torture and rumors of torture:

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, “You haven’t begun to see evil…” then trailed off. He said, “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”

He looked frightened.

It’s been interesting to me how webloggers who support Bush have been dealing with the Abu Ghraib story. Mostly, they haven’t. The two I link to from my blogroll, Michael Williams and Donald Sensing, have covered Abu Ghraib very little, and not at all lately. When they did choose to mention it, it was in the context of pointing out how liberals were hypocrites for making a bigger deal out of the prison abuses than about the Berg beheading, or how Lynndie England’s presence in the photos highlighted the question of whether having women in the military leads to a breakdown of discipline.

Which just boggles my mind. It’s like when the Plame outing happened. At the time, I was really expecting that stalwart patriot and anti-terroist standard-bearer Donald Sensing would have to take a moment and go, whoa; the White House blew the cover of a spy working on WMD proliferation issues? Just to go after the credibility of a critic? That’s pretty lame.

But no; he saw nothing much wrong with it at all. Just politics as usual, he said. These things happen. Ho hum. Move along.

Now he and Michael, with their silence, are in essence saying the same thing about Abu Ghraib. Which is their prerogative, of course. But seriously: kids tortured in front of their mothers, to try to get those mothers to talk? You guys are willing to give your tacit okay to that?

Wow.

Winston Smith of Philosoraptor gets it exactly right in his analysis of Condoleeza Rice’s interview by Wolf Blitzer over the weeked: Rice, torture, evasion.

An excerpt:

What follows might sound a bit cynical, but it isn’t. I’m not cynical, I’ve just learned that we can’t trust this administration to shoot straight and tell the truth. If they don’t answer a question directly, they’re almost certainly trying to mislead us. If they sound like they might be bullshitting, they’re bullshitting.

Note that Blitzer asks Rice a direct question:

Did the president of the United States authorize what some might call torture against certain suspected terrorists being held by the United States?

Rice does not answer this question. Instead, she says:

Wolf, what the president authorized was that everything would be done within the international treaty obligations and within U.S. law. Those were determinations made by the Justice Department. That’s the guidance that he gave, and that’s the guidance that he expected people to follow.

Blitzer asks whether Bush authorized torture, and, instead of answering that question, Rice changes the subject slightly, asserting that everything Bush authorized was legal. We could give many administrations the benefit of the doubt here, but we’ve learned only too well that this is not such an administration. The fact that Rice refused to say ‘no’ means that, in all probability, the answer is ‘yes.’ That is, it strongly suggests that it is likely that the president of the United States, George W. Bush, did authorize the use of torture against helpless prisoners in the custody of the U.S.

Setting aside my ideological agenda as best I can, I don’t see any holes in the logic. The Bush supporters who’ve been questioning my objectivity in the comments here lately will insist that the truth really isn’t all that clear, but they’re wrong. It is clear. It is completely, shockingly transparent.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum agrees with me, and disagrees, it would seem, with those who persist in believing they can vote for Bush with a clear conscience: So torture is legal?

I’m trying to understand those who are still willing to make excuses for Bush on this stuff. Is it that you believe he really wouldn’t have sanctioned torture, so this must have just happened spontaneously on his watch, without his having anything to do with it? Or is it that you believe we’re morally justified in arresting random people and holding them incommunicado and preventing them from speaking to lawyers and hiding them from the Red Cross and starving them and beating them and letting dogs maul them and so on and so forth? Or do you maybe think that all this torture stuff is a myth, an invention of the vast left-wing media conspiracy?

There are two or three of you who’ve been making comments here about my bias. And I want to say, I really appreciate your willingness to show up and plow through stuff you disagree with and give me your feedback. I mean that sincerely.

I’d like to hear more. The righty webloggers I frequent don’t seem to want to talk about all this torture stuff. Could you maybe tell me, from your perspective, what you think about all this? Is it really just not a big deal? Nothing to see, move on…

Is it sort of like those folks who founded MoveOn.org, when they thought the right-wing obsession with Clinton’s penis had gone far enough? In your view, are Bush-haters like me letting our personal animosity toward the guy deceive us into seeing this story as significant, when it really isn’t?

Scott Forbes of A Yank in Oz has a nice, succinct piece quoting George Bush on how wrong it is for evil regimes to hide prisoners from international human rights monitors, and then quoting the recent New York Times story on how Donald Rumsfeld, acting on the request of George Tenet, did exactly that: Elaborate deceptions.

I don’t have much to say about it; I think maybe I need to start rationing my outrage so I have something left to use when still-worse news comes to light. Because at this point, I have no hope at all that the news is going to get better anytime soon.

Kevin Drum provides a little fact-check for the grown-ups in the audience: Bush and Zarqawi. See also this editorial from the New York Times: The plain truth.

Speaking of grown-ups, I just finished reading Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies. Those of you who sympathize with the sentiment expressed in “9/11: Never Forget” bumper stickers owe it to yourselves to read this book. As you’re reading it, keep in mind that when it appeared, the best the Bush administration could do in terms of countering its criticisms was to put Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh to claim that Clarke “wasn’t in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff.”

In other words, the best the Bush people could do was lie shamelessly in the hope that people would just ignore what Clarke was saying.

Don’t ignore him. Read his book. If you care even a little bit about the threat of terrorism in this country, read his book. You don’t have to agree with his opinions. Read it for his facts — facts, again, that the Bush people were unable to refute. And then tell me, in light of those facts, how you can even for a moment consider voting for Bush in November.

Kevin Drum has a brief blurb about an upcoming book in which an anonymous US intelligence officer says Bush is blowing it bigtime: Losing the war.

The book’s author points out that bin Laden might engineer a terrorist attack late in the presidential campaign in an effort to keep Bush in office, and Drum points out that he suggested the same thing two weeks ago, in a post titled the Osama factor.

Heh. Long-suffering lies.com readers will recall that I wrote the same thing more than nine months ago: How Bush could get (re-)elected.

Lies.com: Your one-stop source for paranoid speculation. We. Rant about it. First.

Here’s a great piece from Dave Neiwert comparing evidence of hatred from the left and the right in this country: The hate these days.

Washington Post staff writer Joel Achenbach puts about the best spin possible on Bush’s deer-in-the-headlights performance at the elementary school that morning: On 9/11, a telling seven-minute silence. Lefty bloggers are grumbling about the piece’s description of Bush as the nation’s “spiritual leader,” and the way it talks about him “courageously” throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game shortly after the attacks. (Some of the better grumbling can be read in this piece by Xan at Corrente: Hollowed be thy name.) And I have to admit, Achenbach’s story does have an odd tone for a straight news piece. But I’m basically okay with it.

Sure, put the event in the best light you can. Let the Bush people talk about how he was thinking of the kids, wanting to project “calm” and “strength.” Millions of people are still going to be sitting there in darkened theaters over the next few months, watching the uninterrupted footage during Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. And I don’t care how much pro-Bush spin you apply before and after, I’m confident that a solid majority of those watching that footage are going to come away from the scene with just one thought in their heads: That man had no fucking clue whatsoever.

Now, you Bush supporters can make all the excuses you want. We were all shocked and befuddled on that awful day; I know I was. But that footage is going to resonate, and in the privacy of the voting booth it’s going to bubble up again. As it should.

Daviid Corn does a good job on the way Bush has reacted to the 9/11 commission’s conclusions on the (non-)link between Hussein and al Qaeda: Bush sticks to misrepresentations on the al Qaeda link. From Corn’s conclusion:

At this point, if Bush–who keeps mischaracterizing the Zarqawi connection–wants anyone to believe him rather than the 9/11 commission, he better present hard and clear evidence. All that he offers is assertions and misrepresentations. No wonder he initially opposed the creation of the 9/11 commission. It can be awfully irritating to be confronted with a factual record and reasonable analysis.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has some really interesting analysis of the story about how our boy Ahmed Chalabi was caught telling the Iranians we had broken their intelligence code–because the Iranians used the compromised code to communicate the fact that he’d done so: Breaking Iranian codes.

There’s a giddy Pynchon-esque recursiveness to the story, and to the whole notion of compromising the other side’s secrets, but then pretending that you haven’t in order to keep the other side from knowing that you’ve done so. An excerpt:

If the Iranians knew that the U.S. knew, why didn’t they pretend not to know and feed the U.S. false information? Or maybe they’ve been doing that for years, and the U.S. finally figured out that the Iranians knew. Maybe the U.S. knew that the Iranians knew, and are using the fact to discredit Chalabi.

The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler, a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors in the encryption machines it sold to Iran — at the request of the NSA. He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for his freedom — then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money. At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.

So maybe Chalabi’s information is from 1992, and the Iranians changed their encryption machines a decade ago.

Or maybe the NSA never broke the Iranian intelligence code, and this is all one huge bluff.

In this shadowy world of cat-and-mouse, it’s hard to be sure of anything.

Daniel Drezner links to a couple of newspaper articles detailing the failings of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: Ugly CPA autopsies. (See also Drezner’s earlier piece: More on CPA recruitment.) In particular, Drezner talks about the hiring practices of the people who staffed the CPA, and who seem to have very much valued Republican ideological purity and personal loyalty to Bush over actual expertise. The result? A bumbling operation staffed by fresh-faced 20-somethings being paid back for work they did in the 2000 Bush campaign. Notably absent: people who spoke Arabic, had worked in the region before, had demonstrated organizational or administrative skills, or knew anything at all about the difficult work of nation building.

This highlights something I’ve noticed before: the way the Bush administration’s focus on rewarding loyalty over competence has affected everything the administration has (and hasn’t) been able to accomplish.

I’ve seen this myself in the workplace: Managers who reward loyalty over performance, building organizations that look capable enough from the outside, but which are curiously paralyzed in the face of real-world challenges.

It’s not just that the wrong sorts of people get hired. It’s that those people are retained even in the face of demonstrated incompetence. Worse, the right sorts of people get systematically driven out. People with actual expertise have an annoying habit of disagreeing with the poor decisions of the loyalty-valuing but competence-challenged person atop the hierarchy. But that sort of emotionally insecure leader isn’t looking for underlings who will challenge him with their own unique perspectives. He’s only looking for yes-men (and -women) to help him stave off those who would expose his failings.

That’s the Bush administration all over. In Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke talks about the revolving door atop Bush’s counter-terrorism operation, where person after person with demonstrated ability has been driven out by a culture that punishes those willing to identify and fix problems, rather than competing to see who can praise the leader’s infallibility the loudest.

Key positions in the Bush administration are staffed by people who have failed again and again, yet who retain the president’s support for a single reason: they remain loyal to Bush. Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft: All of have made horrific mistakes while working for Bush, and have done so repeatedly. But they’ve also done the one thing that keeps them in their positions of awesome responsibility: remained loyal to Bush, focusing 100% of their effort and attention on the key task of shoring up his reputation in the face of a hostile universe bent on exposing his incompetence.

The problem with this, of course, is that our government faces much more important challenges than the preservation and embellishment of the fiction that Bush deserves to be president. But as long as key positions are staffed by people focused 100% on that particular Sisyphean task, those challenges will continue to go unmet.

I think it says something about how low my opinion of Dick Cheney has become that I barely even consider an item like this post-worthy. But anyway: Vice President Dick Cheney…

So, Cheney lies with a straight face on national TV. And the interviewer just gives him a polite “OK” and moves on.

Damn that liberal media, anyway.

Christopher Hitchens, who broke with fellow liberals in order to support the war in Iraq and has been having a very public near-nervous breakdown trying to justify that position ever since, ratchets up his rhetoric another notch in order to take on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore.

Not having seen the movie, I’m not in a very good position to criticize Hitchens’ criticism. But what I can say is this: Hitchens is seriously losing it.

Hitchens compares Moore to Rush Limbaugh, which I suppose is fair on some level. Both men are partisans with a gift for weaving a certain kind of spell, one that combines a little information with a lot of entertainment in a way that helps true believers chuckle while their pre-existing views are reinforced.

Which wouldn’t be bad in and of itself. But along with the information comes a certain amount of disinformation. In Limbaugh’s case, I’d say that amount goes well beyond what an honest person, partisan or not, would include. In other words, I think Rush Limbaugh is completely aware that he’s misleading people, and does so intentionally and aggressively.

In Michael Moore’s case, though, I think the stray embellishments and misdirections are more innocent. Not because I happen to agree with Moore’s positions, or not only because of that, but because I think Mooore himself is more or less sincere in the conclusions he presents.

I’ve looked carefully at the arguments Moore’s critics have previously offered of Bowling for Columbine, and comparing those criticisms to the actual movie, I think the critics are making a mountain out of a molehill. I’m fairly confident that I’ll end up thinking the same thing about Hitchens’ criticisms of the latest movie, once I’ve had a chance to see it.

In the meantime, if you feel strongly one way or another about Michael Moore, you should read Hitchens’ piece and see what you think. Hitchens tries to weave a spell of his own with a combination of information, exaggeration, and embellishment, but it doesn’t have the power of the stuff Limbaugh and Moore do. There’s an air of desperation in Hitchens’ arguments, a sense that what we have here is a guy who’s hanging on by a very thin thread. While there’s a certain entertainment value in that, it’s a different kind of entertainment from what you get in a Michael Moore movie.

I’m not sure I can point to any particular point in Hitchens’ screed where he reveals his own fundamental insecurity. It’s more a sense that emerges from the piece as a whole, from the extended run-on assertions, the racing from one half-formed thought to the next, the hypercharged emotion.

Moore, Hitchens charges again and again, is not “serious”. (The word, or a variation of it, appears six times in the review.) But it is Hitchens who comes off as unhinged, incoherent, unserious. Or maybe it’s that he’s too serious, too caught up in defending his own increasingly untenable intellectual position on the war.

Check out this nifty chart, and accompanying discussion, from the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute: When do workers get their share? It seems that the current much-ballyhooed “economic recovery” is off the charts in terms of conferring its benefits on corporate shareholders, rather than actual workers, when compared with other recent economic recoveries. All the benefits are coming in the form of corporate profits. Hardly any are coming in terms of labor compensation. And when you factor out the portion of the increases in labor compensation that are going to things like more-expensive healthcare benefits and pension payouts, workers are actually losing ground. Yikes. Guess what happens when the “recovery” finishes, and we get another economic contraction?

I realize the conventional wisdom is that the economy won’t be a factor in the upcoming election; people are more concerned about security and terrorism and suchlike. But when the Bush team tells you about the fabulous job they’ve done in ushering in the current recovery, remember the chart.

Are we tired of the subject of torture yet? Just imagine how someone standing hooded in a stress position for this long would feel.

The latest White House move in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game with world opinion, as covered by the Washington Post: Memo on interrogation tactics is disavowed.

President Bush’s aides yesterday disavowed an internal Justice Department opinion that torturing terrorism suspects might be legally defensible, saying it had created the false impression that the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law.

Responding to pressure from Congress and outrage around the world, officials at the White House and the Justice Department derided the August 2002 legal memo on aggressive interrogation tactics, calling parts of it overbroad and irrelevant and saying it would be rewritten.

In a highly unusual repudiation of its department’s own work, a senior Justice official and two other high-ranking lawyers said that all legal advice rendered by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel on the subject of interrogations will be reviewed.

As part of a public relations offensive, the administration also declassified and released hundreds of pages of internal documents that it said demonstrated that Bush had never authorized torture against detainees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the administration revealed details of the interrogation tactics being used on prisoners, an extraordinary disclosure for an administration that has argued that the release of such information would help the enemy.

The piece also includes a link to the full text of the released documents.

I think I may be getting close to my own saturation point on the whole torture-authorization story. There’s no real question any more (in my mind, at least) that the people at the top thought torture would be a good way to get more information out of detainees, and set out to create the conditions in which it would happen. I’m willing to accept that Bush himself, even if held naked in front of a barking, unmuzzled dog, might stick with the story that no, really, he personally didn’t think he was doing anything illegal or morally wrong. But you know what? I’m getting really tired of having my nation’s strategic judgement and moral stature reduced to a size that can fit between Bush’s ears. The “Hey, I’m stupid. Don’t hold me accountable” defense is getting old.

Someone should tell Rich Lowry, who wrote the following on the National Review Online yesterday, in reference to this poll showing Bush in a dead heat with Kerry on dealing with terrorism:

This Washington Post poll is disturbing today. A year or so ago, Bush critics set out to undermine Bush’s credibilty and to undermine his standing on the war on terror. With help from events outside anyone’s control–especially no WMDs in Iraq–they have now made major progress on both fronts.

What a tool. It would be funny, if it weren’t so pathetic. Actually, it still is pretty funny.

Yes, thank you, Mr. President. I think we all understand the situation now. It wasn’t your fault; you really were doing the very best you could. It’s just that your very best sucks.

The LA Times’ Kenneth Turan is normally a pretty tough reviewer. He occasionally gets a bee in his bonnet and trashes something I actually think is pretty good, but I’m not sure I can remember a single time when he liked a film that I ended up thinking wasn’t worth my time. So the crass Bush-hater in me is happy to see that Turan is impressed with Michael Moore’s latest: Fahrenheit 9/11. An excerpt:

What Moore has constructed in “Fahrenheit” is more ambitious and more complex than anyone had reason to expect.

This film isn’t about the Bush family relationship to Saudi Arabia, the excesses of the Patriot Act or the pitfalls of the invasion of Iraq, though it touches on those topics. Instead we get a full-blown alternate history of the last three-plus years. Moore makes a persuasive and unrelenting case that there is another way to look at things beyond the version we’ve been given.

What anger Moore has left over after savaging the administration is directed at the mainstream media for being too in thrall with the official line (”Navy SEALs rock!” exults “Today’s” Katie Couric in one clip.)

The core of “Fahrenheit’s” appeal comes in Moore’s alternating familiar images with footage many Americans may not have seen. The resulting mosaic, the cumulative effect of experiencing everything together in one place, is easily the most powerful piece of work of Moore’s career. Though it’s more likely to energize a liberal base than cause massive switching of parties, anyone who is the least bit open to Moore’s thesis will come away impressed.

Bush supporters: you have a problem.

As you probably noticed, I couldn’t summon the energy required to refute Christopher Hitchens’ anti-Michael Moore screed point by point. And guess what? I didn’t have to, because now Hollywood Bitchslap’s Chris Parry has done just that: Slate’s Chris Hitchens does a hatchet job on Michael Moore.

Paul Krugman has a really interesting column on Attorney General John Ashcroft’s low-profile response to the arrest last year of William Krar, who gives every indication of being a real-live WMD-wielding terrorist. Why would the AG downplay such a thing, when he’s clearly willing to call a press conference at the drop of hat to announce non-developments in any number of other cases? Well, maybe it’s because Krar isn’t a muslim, but is instead a white supremicist from Texas, and highlighting homegrown terrorism doesn’t advance his boss’s political agenda in the appropriate way.

I don’t know; maybe I’m just paranoid. Anyway, here’s Krugman: Noonday in the Shade

Just in case you thought my obsession with Michael Moore had completely supplanted the one with the Bush administration’s sordid relationship with torture, here are a pair of stories to restore your faith in my ability to stay focused.

First, from the editorial writers of the Washington Post, an in-your-face comeback to the criticism their earlier editorial had elicited from Donald Rumsfeld: Torture Policy (cont’d).

Since Mr. Rumsfeld referred directly to The Post, we believe we owe him a response. We agree that the country is at war and that we all must weigh our words accordingly. We also agree that the consequences of the revelations of prisoner abuse are grave. As supporters of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been particularly concerned about the ways that the scandal — and the administration’s continuing failure to come to terms with it — could undermine the chances for success. We also have warned about the uses that might be made of it by captors of Americans. What strikes us as extraordinary is that Mr. Rumsfeld would suggest that this damage would be caused by newspaper editorials rather than by his own actions and decisions and those of other senior administration officials.

What might lead us to describe Mr. Rumsfeld or some other “senior civilian or military official” as “ordering or authorizing or permitting” torture or violation of international treaties and U.S. law? We could start with Mr. Rumsfeld’s own admission during the same news conference that he had personally approved the detention of several prisoners in Iraq without registering them with the International Committee of the Red Cross. This creation of “ghost prisoners” was described by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, as “deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law.” Failure to promptly register detainees with the Red Cross is an unambiguous breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention; Mr. Rumsfeld said that he approved such action on several occasions, at the request of another senior official, CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Heh. Point WaPo.

Also, those of us who don’t live in the City by the Bay can only enjoy these posters from afar. But thanks to Robert Mailer Anderson, SF residents get them up close and personal:

Interesting meta-discussion going on regarding the different rules of engagement that the right and the left are using in political debate these days. I think it’s best summed up by this piece from Dave Neiwart of Orcinus: A little bit about blogging. He links to a more-extensive item from Matt Stoller (Partisanship versus partisansheep), which in turn is a commentary upon this actually fairly vile New York Post opinion piece from Dick Morris: Terrorists for Kerry.

Neiwart and Stoller’s argument is that the left is taking the high road, arguing issues and assuming that the other side has a legitimate place at the bargaining table. The right is taking the low road, doing whatever it can to de-legitimize the other side — and, more significantly, undercutting the very essence of democratic government in the process.

Now, I’m on the left, and the fact that I find this argument compelling can be explained in two ways: Either the perception is true, and I’m being rational. Or the perception is merely the product of a partisan’s one-sided view of reality, and I’m actually being irrational.

But the fact that I