Two things:
On Hardball last night when they were cutting away after talking about the NSA spy scandal (or as Norah refers to it - the super secret spy scandal - she's nothing if not alliterative) they played the song Every Breath You Take by the Police. Fabulous
The McLaughlin Group. He is doing his 24th annual picks of the year. Destined for Political Obscurity - according to McLaughlin himself - Karl Rove. Not only because of Valarie Plame but Mr. McLaughlin says he may be ensared in the Abramoff scandal.
I'm sure my pal John will soon find a Simpson episode that explains it all to us.
Heck of a Job, Bushie
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A year ago, everyone expected President Bush to get his way on Social Security. Pundits warned Democrats that they were making a big political mistake by opposing plans to divert payroll taxes into private accounts.
A year ago, everyone thought Congress would make Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, in spite of projections showing that doing so would lead to budget deficits as far as the eye can see. But Congress hasn't acted, and most of the cuts are still scheduled to expire by the end of 2010.
A year ago, Mr. Bush made many Americans feel safe, because they believed that he would be decisive and effective in an emergency. But Mr. Bush was apparently oblivious to the first major domestic emergency since 9/11. According to Newsweek, aides to Mr. Bush finally decided, days after Hurricane Katrina struck, that they had to show him a DVD of TV newscasts to get him to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
A year ago, before "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" became a national punch line, the rising tide of cronyism in government agencies and the rapid replacement of competent professionals with unqualified political appointees attracted hardly any national attention.
A year ago, hardly anyone outside Washington had heard of Jack Abramoff, and Tom DeLay's position as House majority leader seemed unassailable.
A year ago, Dick Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators - although he hadn't yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes" - was widely admired for his "gravitas."
A year ago, Howard Dean - who was among the very few prominent figures to question Colin Powell's prewar presentation to the United Nations, and who warned, while hawks were still celebrating the fall of Baghdad, that the occupation of Iraq would be much more difficult than the initial invasion - was considered flaky and unsound.
A year ago, it was clear that before the Iraq war, the administration suppressed information suggesting that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to build nuclear weapons. Yet few people in Washington or in the news media were willing to say that the nation was deliberately misled into war until polls showed that most Americans already believed it.
A year ago, the Washington establishment treated Ayad Allawi as if he were Nelson Mandela. Mr. Allawi's triumphant tour of Washington, back in September 2004, provided a crucial boost to the Bush-Cheney campaign. So did his claim that the insurgents were "desperate." But Mr. Allawi turned out to be another Ahmad Chalabi, a hero of Washington conference rooms and cocktail parties who had few supporters where it mattered, in Iraq.
A year ago, when everyone respectable agreed that we must "stay the course," only a handful of war critics suggested that the U.S. presence in Iraq might be making the violence worse, not better. It would have been hard to imagine the top U.S. commander in Iraq saying, as Gen. George Casey recently did, that a smaller foreign force is better "because it doesn't feed the notion of occupation."
A year ago, Mr. Bush hadn't yet openly reneged on Scott McClellan's 2003 pledge that "if anyone in this administration was involved" in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity, that person "would no longer be in this administration." Of course, some suspect that Mr. Bush has always known who was involved.
A year ago, we didn't know that Mr. Bush was lying, or at least being deceptive, when he said at an April 2004 event promoting the Patriot Act that "a wiretap requires a court order. ...When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
A year ago, most Americans thought Mr. Bush was honest.
A year ago, we didn't know for sure that almost all the politicians and pundits who thundered, during the Lewinsky affair, that even the president isn't above the law have changed their minds. But now we know when it comes to presidents who break the law, it's O.K. if you're a Republican.
When I grow up I want to be Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga of the Daily Kos. This blogger has changed the atmosphere around grass roots politics. His interview with Newsweek about the upcoming elections is clear and savvy. He is a Democrat and proud of it - and so am I.
There is a great article in The Washington Post today about Mr. Abramoff. It's long but well worth the read.
Some highlights
Jack lobbied for the apartheid government of South Africa.
Jack was working to help oil companies in Sudan (he wasn't going to let those pesky human rights get in his way)
Jack was part of the Capital Athletic Foundation. A charity to help inner city kids through athletics. Surprise-none of the money actually went to inner city kids.
Read the article before you eat. It will make you sick.
I was listening to the Sean Heannity radio show (I have washed my hands so don't worry) and who ever is filling in for Sean said that a senator he spoke with said they had heard nothing from his constituents about the domestic spying. I don't know if it's true but let's change that.
Call your senators and representative and ask for an investigation.
If we are trying to spread democracy we should start here.
Read this article by Barack Obama and Sam Brownback
The Bush administration has helped reduce suffering in Darfur, but the situation is dangerously adrift. And when the history of this tragedy is written, nobody will remember how many times officials visited the region or how much humanitarian aid was delivered. They will only remember the death toll.
Call the White House 202-456-1414.
Ask the President to:
1. Protect the civilians of Darfur
2. Increase Humanitarian Aid
3. Hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable
4. Ensure the voluntary, safe and dignified return of refugees to their homes.
www.savedarfur.org
Call Senators Brownback and Obama and thank them for pushing this. Call your own senators and represenative and ask them to get on board.
We cannot be bystanders.
But we still have Richie!
My friend John with whom I write this blog is a very smart man. He said that from the moment Bush stepped on the plane to "save" Terri Shiavo the administration had jumped the shark.
Here's a little something to back him up:
After four years of galloping triumph for the conservative Republican agenda, the rush to pass Schiavo legislation marked a critical turning point in Washington, helping expand fissures in a Republican Party known for discipline, emboldening Democrats and derailing conservative social initiatives that had been expected to win easy approval in Congress this year.
The President who stayed on vacation after a devastating Tsunami decided that one woman was more important. The President who stayed on vacation (except for a couple of fund raisers) while New Orleans died. The President who appointed Browine and told him he was doing a heck of job. Yep, I think we all can compare and contrast.
Suddenly the strong leader with whom, apparently, people wanted to have a beer with seemed out of touch and a bit callous.
Then came the indictments. This can't be good. Tom Delay, Scooter Libby, Duke Cunningham and the possibilities of Rove and the Amramoff volcano of lava that is going to cover at least six Republicans prove that corruption is rife within the party.
Let's not forget John Bolton and Harriet Miers.
Jack Murtha and Cindy Sheehan. All the President had to do to diffuse The Peace movement outside of the ranch was walk down the block and meet with Ms. Sheehan. She would have gone home and he would have seemed like a decent fellow. Jack Murtha became the voice for all of us who support the troops but not the war. So when Jean Schmidt called him a coward she was calling all of us cowards. Granted, she may be right about me, but Mr. Murtha?His medals would prove otherwise.
Energy prices. Exxon had the largest quarterly profit of any company, EVER. People in the Northeast are paying an extra $600 a month to heat their homes. Mr Stevens from Alaska decided that when the Energy executives testified in front of congress they didn't need to be sworn in. Great for them since they lied about being on the Vice President' s energy task force.
Credibility not really rocking the house but the President wants us to trust him to listen in on all of our conversations without a warrant. If he is indeed listening to any of my conversations he'll know that the polls aren't wrong.
Bring on 2006. Get your impeachment supplies here.
From The New York Times today:
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
What will the White House say now?
What a strange world BushCheney have created. Go here to read a blog by a conservative who is apoplectic about the BushCheney powergrab. Liberty is at stake and the Left and the Right are coming together to protect us from the Neo-Con freak show in D.C. Three cheers for Mark Earnest.
The word is "impeachment" - say it loudly. Your liberty is at stake.
In my little paper this morning there was an op-ed by Cal Thomas. I can't link it so I'll quote the part that enraged me:
"Some senators expressed concern about damage to civil liberties. But civil liberties mean nothing if you're killed by a terrorist who has manipulated the Constitution to achieve his or her objectives."
OK - first off, the only person manipulating the Constitution is the President (and his faithful sidekicks).
Secondly, our country was FOUNDED to protect civil liberties. Please, Mr. Thomas, tell all the men who fought, bled and died during the American Revolution and that it wasn't worth it. Tell the men and women who died during the Civil War that granting civil liberties to the slaves was not worth their blood. Tell all the men and women who stopped Hitler that they wasted their time.
If Civil Liberties aren't worth dying for what is? If our Constitution is not worth defending what is? If we give up who we are and what we believe in to defeat terrorism haven't the terrorists already won?
George Bush begged the New York Times - from the Oval Office - not to publish the domestic spying story. Why? Within 48 hours he had admitted to a crime, and an impeachable offense.
Rating the President on his spread of democracy depends on how you define democracy.
Freedom of the Press - sure, but as the President has said, Freedom isn't Free. That's why we're paying the Iraqis, just like we paid Armstrong Williams.
Adhering to the Geneva Conventions. Gold Star for the Administration blocking the photos from Abu Ghraib because it would violate the prisoners' Geneva Conventions for us to see the photos of us violating their Geneva Conventions.
Torture - we closed Sadaam's torture chambers. Of course, we have opened our own and the Iraqis have opened theirs, too. Hurray for democracy.
Civil Liberties. The President did say he was a uniter, not a divider. He has united George Will and Russ Feingold. Lindsey Graham and Harry Reid. They all agree the President has broken the law. Success!
The Constitution. We're supposed to be thrilled that the Iraqis have a constitution. We can only hope that they actually follow theirs. Our President snubs the checks and balances. King George can do anything he wants because he's president. As President whatever he does in legal. How lucky for us that he hasn't started robbing banks.
In high school there was girl who's nickname was chicken salad - the easy spread. Mr. Bush' plan for spreading democracy is more like frozen butter on cold bread. Everything is breaking apart.
OK - consider this my conspiracy theory - and if someone has already come up with it - great minds.
The Patriot Act was up for renewal. Reasonable people said, hey, we really need to look at this, let's renew it for three months so we are not in a rush and can check it out after the holidays. Bush said NO INDEED. He also said we cannot go a moment with out it. He added that senators from New York, LA and Vegas will need to explain to their constituents why they filibustered the Act.
Is it just me or would everyone avoid LA, NY and Vegas for a while? Should we expect another attack which will be blamed on the senators who allowed the Patriot Act to lapse? When, in reality, it's the President who allowed the act to lapse.
Please let me be wrong.
Dangerous Territory
By BOB HERBERT
There has been some encouraging news lately for those who cherish freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
No, I'm not talking about last week's election in Iraq. I mean the recent developments here at home, in the United States.
President Bush, who bloodied John McCain in the brutal Republican primary in South Carolina in 2000, had to cry uncle last Thursday and accept Senator McCain's demand that the U.S. ban cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.
It was an embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration, which, in its high-handed approach to governing, has shown no qualms about trampling the fundamental tenets of a free, open and democratic society.
But worse was to come for the president. On Thursday night, The New York Times disclosed that Mr. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity "without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying."
Warrants? Why bother with warrants?
The Times article reminded me of the famous scene from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in which the character played by Humphrey Bogart asks to see the badges of a group of Mexican bandits posing as government officials.
Incredulous, one of the bandits says: "We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."
Mr. Bush apparently feels the same way about warrants. He said over the weekend that he had no intention of changing his eavesdropping policy.
Stubbornness is a well-known trait of this president. But increasing numbers of Americans are objecting to the administration's contemptuous attitude toward liberty and the law. On Friday, the Senate blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act because of its dangerous intrusions on privacy and threats to civil liberties.
The domestic eavesdropping authorized by President Bush was an important and at times emotional part of the floor debate over the Patriot Act. "You want to talk about abuses?" said Senator Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat. "I can't imagine a more shocking example of an abuse of power, to eavesdrop on American citizens without first getting a court order based on some evidence that they are possibly criminals, terrorists or spies."
Mr. Feingold worried that we were playing into the hands of terrorists by giving up such quintessentially American values as "freedom, justice and privacy."
The Bush version of American values, as least with regard to the so-called war on terror, has been a throwback to the Middle Ages. Detainees were herded like animals into the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where many were abused and denied the right to challenge - or even hear - the charges against them. Whether they were innocent or guilty made no difference. How's that for an American value?
Others were swept up in that peculiar form of justice called extraordinary rendition. That's when someone is abducted by Americans and sent off to a regime skilled in the art of torture. I spent a little time in Ottawa with Maher Arar, a family man from Canada who was kidnapped at Kennedy Airport and taken to Syria.
He wasn't a terrorist and he hadn't done anything wrong, but that was no defense against the sweeping madness of the Bush antiterror policies.
"It was so scary," Mr. Arar told me. "After a while I became like an animal."
Another blow to America's self- proclaimed standing as a pillar of moral values was the revelation that the C.I.A. has been operating a super-secret network of prisons overseas, presumably for terror suspects. If someone who is innocent gets caught in that particular hell, too bad. The inmates have been deprived of all rights.
This is dangerous territory, indeed. Nightmarish territory. These secret prisons are the dungeons of the 21st century.
The voices against the serial outrages of the Bush administration are growing steadily louder, and that's good news. It's widely understood now that the Bush crowd has gone much too far. When Americans cover their hearts and pledge allegiance, this is not the kind of behavior from their government they usually have in mind. This is not what the American flag is supposed to represent.
Bush has crossed the line and he must be stopped cold. By wiretapping Americans without a warrant he has violated the law. Period. Our nation is slipping away and patriots everywhere must defend it. Take action now.
Something ghastly is happening to us. I urge everyone to read the linked post above and TAKE ACTION.
My home, California, has at least one thing in common with Iraq: we both have elections with alarming frequency. Iraq had another one this week. I commend it. As a liberal who deeply opposes this war on moral, patriotic, and policy grounds (and just about any other grounds you can think of) I am still heartened by citizens going to vote. And for all the B.S. Bush has fed us about his reasons for his war, I will say this: forcing elections is an improvement over the way we controlled regions when the Soviets were the monsters on the horizon - assassinate or invade then set up the goon we like in the Presidential Palace.
Nevertheless, these Iraqi elections are beginning to feel like Ground Hog's Day - a loop of speeches by the American President, followed by hopeful pictures of things "going better than expected", widespread acclaim of the patriots who voted ( how many will be in the gallery for the State of the Union speech this year?)- then infighting, kidnapping, bombs, and the loop ends with the next "benchmark" being promoted and anticipated as the one in which we turn the corner.
Fine. I hope this election in Iraq does the trick. Maybe we can sweep into Iraq and graft a Jeffersonian Democracy on to our client. I find it laughable. But I am willing to be wrong. It seems likely that Bush believes his mission is just and true. He is not a stupid man, just a shallow man. But Cheney and Rumsfeld almost certainly do not buy this line. They created, packaged, and sold this war for very good reasons. Reasons Americans will not, and probably cannot, accept. We must have oil. We must have a hand in controlling the oil that is left in the world. That oil is not in Middle America. It is in the Middle East. The "Syrianna" thesis is the closest to the truth about this war. Either we can control the oil, or China can. Can any of us handle this truth? We are not fighting a "war on terror". We have begun the twilight struggle with China. Radical Islam is a consequence, not a cause.
If we continue to depend on oil the consequences are almost transparent and available for viewing most days on CNN. War dead, radicalized suicide bombers, encroaching and panicked government, energy prices that fluxuate widely, and yes- hurricane seasons as long as baseball seasons. This is all about our use of oil and where that oil comes from.
I am antiwar. Or at least anti-Iraq war. That means, in no uncertain terms, that I must also be anti-oil dependency. If we still want to live in what James Kuntsler calls the "Happy motoring society" then we must accept the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld war for what it is: a consequence of our choices.
If another consequence is a functional democracy in Iraq: good for them, and good for us. And if that, in turn, keeps the oil flowing West instead of East, then: good for us - at least until hurricane season.
Bush Meets St. Peter
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
If a meteorite crashed down on the White House today, the conversation at the Pearly Gates might go something like this.
"Oh-h-h. Where am I? St. Peter?"
"Welcome, Mr. President. I just need to see if you belong here."
"Well, St. Peter, you know I'm a born-again Christian. I pray every day. I'm very religious. I brought Bible study classes to the White House."
"That's terrific. And have you helped any lepers lately?"
"Not exactly. But my cuts in the top tax rates will create wealth that will trickle down and help lepers. I'm getting there indirectly, instead of barging through the eye of a needle."
"Hmm."
"And St. Peter, I've been upstanding in defending Christian values. We made sure that we call the tree at the White House a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. And we sent out 1.4 million White House Christmas cards!"
"Wow! But I don't suppose any Christmas cards went to lepers. Or to prostitutes or beggars."
"I don't send cards to Democrats."
"Mr. President, our checklist doesn't have anything about sending out Christmas cards, or putting up Christmas trees. It's more about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and housing the homeless."
"Well, my administration spent $8,000 for a drapery that was used for years to cover up a breast of a female statue. That was clothing the naked."
"That was so silly that Lady Godiva went on a ride to protest it. We always get irritated with religious blowhards who proclaim that faith is just a matter of covering up, saying grace, looking dour and denouncing others for being lax - the Taliban approach. This latest culture war over Christmas is a perfect example of religion based on denouncing others instead of loving them."
"But St. Peter, they're just trying to put Christ back into Christmas. They see how faith is threatened by people saying 'Happy Holidays,' instead of 'Merry Christmas.' Fox News has covered 'Christmas Under Siege,' and one of its anchors has a new book called 'The War on Christmas.' The American Family Association is boycotting Target, and the Catholic League threatened a boycott against Wal-Mart. This hasn't been my issue, but these are my people, St. Peter. They're doing this to glorify Christ."
"Frankly, Mr. President, here in Heaven, I say 'Merry Christmas,' but others prefer 'Happy Holidays.' Gandhi prefers it. And a Jewish rabbi told me that his family felt more comfortable with that as well. ..."
"But St. Peter, that's one rabbi. ..."
"Whose name is Jesus."
"Oops."
"Jesus says Christmas shouldn't be about picking fights and organizing boycotts. All that legalistic nitpicking just reminds him of the Pharisees. Do you really think that if Jesus returns to Earth tomorrow, his priority is going to be organizing a boycott of Target stores? You think he's going to appear on Fox to say, 'Worry about genocide and hunger later - first, let's battle with liberals over what holiday greeting to use'?"
"But St. Peter, I increased aid to Africa hugely. I launched a major program to fight AIDS."
"Yes, your aid programs have been almost divine. And your administration helped lead the way in fighting sex trafficking. On the other hand, Jesus has a particular thing about genocide, and you and Congressional leaders just cut out $50 million that was supposed to go to stop the slaughter in Darfur."
"Sorry, but it's been so hectic this month with 26 Christmas parties at the White House. I've just been too busy to deal with genocide."
"Which Gospel did you say you read each day? Up here, we canceled our Christmas party, and held a vigil for the victims of Darfur."
"St. Peter, you don't mean to say - how do I ask this? Jesus isn't ... isn't a Democrat, is he?"
"No, no. He's nonpartisan. His gripe isn't with conservatives or liberals; it's with blowhards. We're always cheering the National Association of Evangelicals because it spends its time fighting genocide, battling sex trafficking, struggling for religious freedom. And there are so many others, like Senator Sam Brownback, who win respect from everybody because their humanitarian work shows they are trying to live the Gospels, not play charades. They're the conservative Christians who make God look great."
"I guess I was just too busy with Christmas to pay attention to any of this."
"Up here, we just pray that Christmas could be more than cards, trees and greetings. Jesus is so upset that he's talking of suing the blowhards to regain control of Christmas."
It Takes a Potemkin Village
By FRANK RICH
WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As the administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt Goebbels, but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.
The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as reports from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single elegant banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest White House bumper sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian mitosis over nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and despite the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself - Americans believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval Academy pep talk, released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution still have larger constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next week's Iraqi elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating the readiness of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as "completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that the subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves. What raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation was the subsequent revelation that the administration's main stated motive for the address - the release of a 35-page document laying out a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt turkey the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two Thanksgivings ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was "an unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war's inception in "early 2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at whitehouse.gov could be manipulated to reveal text "usually hidden from public view." What turned up was the name of the document's originating author: Peter Feaver, a Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than six months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army, who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never seen this "National Strategy" before its public release last month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell on the same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor, the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat news articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm's way are desperate for Arabic translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we know that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam's W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help disseminate happy talk to his own country's press to further the illusion that the war is being won.
The Lincoln Group's articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq") are not without their laughs - for us, if not for the Iraqis, whose intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush's speeches. Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started stonewalling from a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John Warner and Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many press queries. We don't have the facts, they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group articles themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers' money for various Lincoln Group operations, and it can't get any facts? Though the 30-year-old prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from Andrea Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington, certain facts are proving not at all elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and under phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr. Bailey "was a founder and active participant in Lead21," a Republican "fund-raising and networking operation" - which has since scrubbed his name from its Web site - and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business address identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding procedures for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from "Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan valiantly continue their search for "the facts," what we know so far can safely be filed under the general heading of "Lay, DeLay and Abramoff."
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see it's failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the disastrous Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer's brother), so the White House doesn't exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it shells out to cronies for fake news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy sexual-harassment suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500 identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in 2003, the fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled quickly, as did last weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen's loved ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does. Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under Brownie three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her clarifications about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's latest Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and Mosul - still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released last week was Mr. Bush's approval rating for the one area where things are going relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his rating on Iraq. It's a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the Bush culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer believing.
That's what I'm talking about, baby!
I do not speak Spanish. Being in Los Angeles I have learned to understand quite a bit, which pleases me no end. I love the sound of it and know both Cubans who speak with a clipped precise rhythm and Mexican and Central American immigrants whose language flows more smoothly. The most idiotic and infuriating devolution of the Illegal immigration debate is the attack on native Spanish speakers speaking Spanish. Of course, people who move here should learn English A.S.A.P. And I admit little patience for any immigrant who does not learn the language in a reasonable amount of time. But I have met very few who do not make the effort. That is why this story is so disgusting.
Karl Rove knows he has an effective divisive issue in the 2006 campaign in going after illegal immigrants. But I hope everyone remains clear. The problem of illegal immigrants is caused by EMPLOYERS. The overwhelming number of Spanish speaking immigrants come here because there is work. Period. They come because they are hired. If those who hire these people, and break the law doing it, were arrested the problem would end. But the American Chamber of Commerce would not tolerate that.
This issue needs to be dealt with honestly. Rove and Bush will spend 2006 stoking fears to keep control of congress. The moment the election is over, they will drop it. Attacking those who so much as speak Spanish is exactly what Rove wants to start an election year.
Oh Arnold - you are making the elephants so MAD. Arnold ( no I am not on a first name basis with the man, but who can spell that last name? Maybe if he shortens it up a bit he could have a career in Hollywood) appointed a DEMOCRAT to be his chief of staff and The waffen GOP is madder that a roid raging cheerleader who has had her me time in the bathroom stall interrupted.
It gets worse. The appointee is named KENNEDY. (a rumor spread that her real first name is Hillary, when O'Reilly heard this he momentarily stopped eating his child flavored falafel and yelped "Nuke Austria!" - San Francisco is apparently safe for now).
I, for one, cannot get too upset about the GOP push to find a candidate to oppose Arnold. Debbie Gibson would make a fine Governor.
Will the Right wing ever grow up? While the country fights a real war ( though, the mission was allegedly accomplished quite some time ago.) the blathering elite, largely on Fox News and AM radio, have created a diversion out of whole clothe. They control the White House, and they yank the media around like an insolent dog on a leash. The Right Wing ideologues are at the peak of power - and yet, nothing is quite so satisfying as pretending to be a victim. So the evangelical Right and their squawk squad are now out in force attacking a problem that simply does not exist. Here is a quote lifted from Crooks and Liars referring to a horrific indignity: the White House yearly mass mailing is says "Holiday" instead of "Christmas".
"This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture," said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
Yup, that's right - the "worst elements in our culture" are those who say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Sorry I missed that. I thought maybe War Profiteers or child molesters might rank...
December 4, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
All the President's Flacks
By FRANK RICH
WHEN "all of the facts come out in this case," Bob Woodward told Terry Gross on NPR in July, "it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."
Who's laughing now?
Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom. (Been there, done that here at The Times.) Mr. Woodward says he wanted to avoid a subpoena, but he first learned that Joseph Wilson's wife was in the C.I.A. in mid-June 2003, more than six months before Patrick Fitzgerald or subpoenas entered the picture. Never mind. Far more disturbing is Mr. Woodward's utter failure to recognize the import of the story that fell into his lap so long ago.
The reporter who with Carl Bernstein turned a "third-rate burglary" into a key for unlocking the true character of the Nixon White House still can't quite believe that a Washington leak story unworthy of his attention has somehow become the drip-drip-drip exposing the debacle of Iraq. "I don't know how this is about the buildup to the war, the Valerie Plame Wilson issue," he said on "Larry King Live" on the eve of the Scooter Libby indictment. Everyone else does. Largely because of the revelations prompted by the marathon Fitzgerald investigation, a majority of Americans now believe that the Bush administration deliberately misled the country into war. The case's consequences for journalism have been nearly as traumatic, and not just because of the subpoenas. The Wilson story has ruthlessly exposed the credulousness with which most (though not all) of the press bought and disseminated the White House line that any delay in invading Iraq would bring nuclear Armageddon.
"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider window onto the White House flimflams and the press's role in enabling them. Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends.
Mr. Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam's W.M.D.'s. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz axis' early push to take on Iraq, of the president's messianic view of himself as God's chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that led to the war's catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if illuminating, piece.
In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.
What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.
Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.
Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby are omnipresent in the narrative, and Mr. Woodward says now that his notes show he had questions for them back then about "yellowcake" uranium and "Joe Wilson's wife." But the leak case - indeed Valerie Wilson herself - is never mentioned in the 400-plus pages, even though it had exploded more than six months before he completed the book. That's the most damning omission of all and suggests the real motive for his failure to share what he did know about this case with either his editor or his readers. If you assume, as Mr. Woodward apparently did against mounting evidence to the contrary, that the White House acted in good faith when purveying its claims of imminent doomsday and pre-9/11 Qaeda-Saddam collaborations, then there's no White House wrongdoing that needs to be covered up. So why would anyone in the administration try to do something nasty to silence a whistle-blower like Joseph Wilson? The West Wing was merely gossiping idly about the guy, Mr. Woodward now says, in perhaps an unconscious echo of the Karl Rove defense strategy.
Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli.
In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern "inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960." White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."
INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war."
Such critical stories - including those at The Post and The Times that were too often relegated to Page 17 - did not get traction until the failure to find W.M.D.'s and the Wilson affair made America take a second look. Now that the country has awakened to that history, it will take more to shock it than the latest revelation that the Defense Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print its propaganda. Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis.
 I'm just going to post an email I received from my co-blogger.
okay - do you know something - it occurs to me that we have just gone thru and watched from coast to coast one of the greatest seasons by any team ever in college football history. this offense will not happen again for 50 years. i look at the "best rivalries site and usc and ND and usc/ucla are in the top ten. they always put up the "best games" for each one up and the 55 unanswered points usc nailed on ND is always regarded as the best game for usc ever. I just saw that he added this years ND usc game as comparable.
Bring on the ROSES!
All the President's Flacks
By FRANK RICH
WHEN "all of the facts come out in this case," Bob Woodward told Terry Gross on NPR in July, "it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."
Who's laughing now?
Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom. (Been there, done that here at The Times.) Mr. Woodward says he wanted to avoid a subpoena, but he first learned that Joseph Wilson's wife was in the C.I.A. in mid-June 2003, more than six months before Patrick Fitzgerald or subpoenas entered the picture. Never mind. Far more disturbing is Mr. Woodward's utter failure to recognize the import of the story that fell into his lap so long ago.
The reporter who with Carl Bernstein turned a "third-rate burglary" into a key for unlocking the true character of the Nixon White House still can't quite believe that a Washington leak story unworthy of his attention has somehow become the drip-drip-drip exposing the debacle of Iraq. "I don't know how this is about the buildup to the war, the Valerie Plame Wilson issue," he said on "Larry King Live" on the eve of the Scooter Libby indictment. Everyone else does. Largely because of the revelations prompted by the marathon Fitzgerald investigation, a majority of Americans now believe that the Bush administration deliberately misled the country into war. The case's consequences for journalism have been nearly as traumatic, and not just because of the subpoenas. The Wilson story has ruthlessly exposed the credulousness with which most (though not all) of the press bought and disseminated the White House line that any delay in invading Iraq would bring nuclear Armageddon.
"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider window onto the White House flimflams and the press's role in enabling them. Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends.
Mr. Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam's W.M.D.'s. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz axis' early push to take on Iraq, of the president's messianic view of himself as God's chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that led to the war's catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if illuminating, piece.
In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.
What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.
Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.
Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby are omnipresent in the narrative, and Mr. Woodward says now that his notes show he had questions for them back then about "yellowcake" uranium and "Joe Wilson's wife." But the leak case - indeed Valerie Wilson herself - is never mentioned in the 400-plus pages, even though it had exploded more than six months before he completed the book. That's the most damning omission of all and suggests the real motive for his failure to share what he did know about this case with either his editor or his readers. If you assume, as Mr. Woodward apparently did against mounting evidence to the contrary, that the White House acted in good faith when purveying its claims of imminent doomsday and pre-9/11 Qaeda-Saddam collaborations, then there's no White House wrongdoing that needs to be covered up. So why would anyone in the administration try to do something nasty to silence a whistle-blower like Joseph Wilson? The West Wing was merely gossiping idly about the guy, Mr. Woodward now says, in perhaps an unconscious echo of the Karl Rove defense strategy.
Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli.
In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern "inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960." White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."
INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war."
Such critical stories - including those at The Post and The Times that were too often relegated to Page 17 - did not get traction until the failure to find W.M.D.'s and the Wilson affair made America take a second look. Now that the country has awakened to that history, it will take more to shock it than the latest revelation that the Defense Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print its propaganda. Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis.
W.'s Head in the Sand
By MAUREEN DOWD
In the Christmas spirit, the time has come for the reality-based community to reach out to the White House.
The Bush warriors are so deluded, they're even faking their fakery.
This week, the president presented a plan-like plan for "victory" in Iraq, which Scott McClellan rather pompously called the unclassified version of their supersecret master plan. But there would be no way to achieve victory from this plan even if it were a real plan. If this is what they're telling themselves in the Sit Room, we're in bigger trouble than we thought.
Talk about your unknown unknowns, as Rummy would say.
The National Strategy for Victory must have come from the same P.R. genius who gave President Top Gun the "Mission Accomplished" banner about 48 hours before the first counterinsurgency war of the 21st century broke out in Iraq.
It's not a military strategy - classified or unclassified. It's political talking points - and not even good ones. Are we really supposed to believe that anybody, even the most deeply delusional Bush sycophant, believes the phrase "Our strategy is working"?
The president talked about three neatly definable groups of insurrectionists. But as Dexter Filkins reported in yesterday's New York Times, there are dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, groups fighting the U.S. Army in Iraq, and they have little, if anything, in common.
Mr. Bush's presentation claimed that the U.S. was actually making progress in Iraq. But outside the Bush-Cheney-Rummy bubble, 10 more marines were killed by a roadside bomb outside Falluja, for a total of 2,125 U.S. military deaths so far.
The administration must realize it needs a real exit strategy, because it's advertising for one. The U.S. Agency for International Development is offering more than $1 billion for anyone - anyone at all - who can come up with a plan to pacify and rebuild 10 Iraqi cities seen as vital in the war.
Maybe the White House should apply - Usaid's proffer says the "invitation is open to any type of entity."
When Bush officials weren't telling us fairy tales about the big, bad W.M.D. in Iraq, they were assuring us that the unprovoked war would be a kindness for Iraq, giving it democracy. But they are not just failing to bring democracy to Iraq as they help Iranian-backed mullahs install an Islamic republic with Saddamist torture chambers. They are also degrading democracy in America.
They've tarnished American moral leadership with illegal detentions, torture, secret C.I.A. prisons in countries only recently liberated from the Soviet gulag, and Soviet-style propaganda both at home and in Iraq.
Guess the Bush administration didn't learn anything this fall when federal auditors said it had violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of its education polices. Bush officials got right back into the fake news business, paying to plant propaganda in the Iraqi press. They outsourced this disinformation campaign to something called the Lincoln Group - have they no shame?
You have to admire Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman. He kept a straight face when he called the U.S. "a leader when it comes to promoting and advocating a free and independent media around the world." He added, "We've made our views very clear when it comes to freedom of the press."
Exceedingly clear. The Bushies don't believe in it. They disdain the whole democratic system of checks and balances.
At the Naval Academy, President Bush talked about how well the Iraqi security forces were fighting. He claimed that 40 Iraqi battalions were taking the lead in the fight against insurgents, and that in the battle of Tal Afar this year, "the assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces - 11 Iraqi battalions backed by 5 coalition battalions providing support."
Anderson Cooper of CNN swiftly produced Time magazine's Baghdad bureau chief, Michael Ware, who was embedded with the U.S. military during the entire Tal Afar battle. "With the greatest respect to the president, that's completely wrong," Mr. Ware said, adding: "I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with Al Qaeda. They were not leading."
He also told Mr. Cooper: "I have had a very senior officer here in Baghdad say to me that there's never going to be a point where these guys will be able to stand up against the insurgency on their own."
Mr. Ware recalled that in a battle two weeks ago, he saw an Iraqi security officer put down his weapon and curl up into a ball when he was under attack. "I have seen that on - on many, many occasions," he said.
Curling up in a ball. Good National Strategy for Victory.
I met a woman today who's son has been in Iraq for nearly a year. He has never met his son. He told her today that he doesn't believe in God anymore. Because God is not in Iraq. He saw a little three year old girl burning to death and he wondered if he should shoot her to put her out of her misery - he couldn't do it. He saw a man drive a car up, his hands duct taped to the steering wheel and the back seat full of explosives. They cut him out, not knowing if someone would remotely blow up the car and he was so freaked out that once he got out the car he ran into a wall. He told them that if he didn't drive the car they would shoot his family. He told the Americans where they were.
I live in a small town, very red, and this woman said we need to get out of Iraq. She was not politically active. She said we are there for the President and the Senator's oil. She also said her son is going to need a lot of counseling when he gets home. I asked her what I can do? She said what can any of us do?
Well, consider this a call to action. We need to call our elected officals every day. We need massive protests. We need to show our support for the troops by ending the war. You can also donate to booksforsoliers.com and USO.org. We don't even provide our soldiers free phone calls. The USA has Operation Phone Home. Send them a couple of dollars. If you knit you can knit helmet liners. We are not asked to make any sacrifices. Let's make them ourselves.
Okay she won't post it - but I sure as hell will. Right after Murtha's great speech against the current non policy Bush Iraq policy, Lynne called Murtha's office in a moment of inspiration and said to an aid "Tell that old jarhead he rocks my world!" Then last night on the Daily Show House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said "right after he made that speech a young woman called in and said 'Tell that old jarhead he rocks my world!'".
coincidence? I THINK NOT!
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