Recently in Dubya Diplomacy Category

"'To the extent there are gaps in our laws,' Holder continued, 'we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say...that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that's ongoing."

After another embarrassing document dump by Wikileaks -- this time diplomatic cables, next time Bank of America? -- Attorney General Holder threatens the prosecution of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen -- most likely under the Espionage Act, the same catch-all 1917 law used to lock up Eugene Debs back in the day.

First of all, Gawker's John Cook has already explained why this attempted line of prosecution doesn't work. However docile the "nation's watchdogs" remain on any other given day, the newspapers that published these leaks would have to be considered co-conspirators in any Espionage Act-related indictment. "We think its fairly obvious that the Department of Justice won't go after the Times or any of the other papers involved in the story. But if it doesn't, that's just evidence that its attempt to use the Espionage Act to go after Assange isn't about enforcing laws: It's about retribution, harassment, and rattling sabers."

Secondly, if Assange wants to avoid federal prosecution, perhaps he should just...I dunno...torture somebody? Or maybe rip off the American people for trillions of dollars? Or how 'bout just spying on Americans via warrantless wiretap? Apparently, disclosing those kinds of secrets is one of those look-forward-not-backward kinda things.

Let's get real here. There's no threat to our troops in these leaks -- Even the Pentagon admits that. (A more overlooked problem, as a friend pointed out, is what this leak might mean for human rights workers.) Wikleaks' methods are of the blunderbuss variety, yes. (That probably speaks in their favor: They don't seem to tailor their leaks to suit a predetermined spin. They just dump data. And, hey, somebody should be doing the media's job.) And, sure, Assange comes off as more than a bit pretentious, but what of it? If being a jackass were a crime, our prison system in this country would be completely broken...oh wait, it already is.

In the end, as Glenn Greenwald well put it, "our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat." You'd think an administration that ran on unparalleled transparency in government might feel the same way. But, sadly, like its predecessor, the only crime this administration really seems to hate is whistleblowing.

"When historians look back to the moment when the post-Cold War reign of American power ended, they may well settle on 2010 as a crucial year. Everywhere, it seemed, there were signs that the long-predicted "rise of the rest" had finally occurred, whether in the newfound assertiveness of fast-growing China or the impatient diplomacy of new powers like Brazil and Turkey. Foreign Policy's second annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers fully reflects that new world."

As above, Foreign Policy has picked its Top 100 Global Thinkers of the year. And, while there are some really atrocious choices on here (for example, the man at #33, who much more deservingly made the list in the next entry too), the article is worth a perusing regardless. (FWIW, #65, #68, and #80 seem really iffy to me as well.)

"Decision Point: Is it a good idea for me to land on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit with a sign that says 'Mission Accomplished'? Key Decision: How is it not a good idea?" On the announcement that former President Bush's forthcoming memoirs will be called, um, Decision Points, the wags at the Gawker crime lab have some fun with Photoshop. (Speaking of decision points, I will concede that it's very smart of the GOP powers-that-be to wait until the week after Election Day to remind America of the Dubya years.)

"First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.

And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now -- and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance -- would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies."

This is a bit late by now, but regardless: As you all know, President Obama made the case last week for sending 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan. At this point -- and like Fred Kaplan -- I'm conflicted about our continued involvement there...but I'm leaning toward withdrawal. Everything I've heard about the war lately has had that "Vietnam in '66" sense to it: A corrupt government as our ally; trouble winning "hearts and minds"; The US stepping half-blindly into a conflict that's been simmering for centuries (in Southeast Asia, it was the endless Vietnamese war against interlopers; here it's long-simmering ethnic rivalries between the Pashtuns and everyone else.) And now, our new progressive-minded president tells us: If we just commit X more troops (where, now X=30,000), we can win, close up shop, and go home. Uh, really? I think I've already seen this movie a few times.

Obama's shout-out above to basically token international support doesn't assuage my fears. And, as far as the threat posed by Vietnam: True, Tonkin never happened, but obviously policymakers of that era were less sanguine about a Communist victory in South Vietnam than we are today -- The threat of the Enemy can always gets unduly amplified in the heat of the moment. (Speaking of said Reds, it should sober us to acknowledge that all we've done so far in Afghanistan is basically manage to re-create the Soviet experience in the region. Iirc, that didn't end so well.)

Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, yes, and if we could weed them out and destroy their capacity to attack again, all the better. (And always remember: If Dubya, Rummy et al had just finished the job properly in 2002 rather than salivating over Iraq, we would be in a lot better position right now.) But Al Qaeda is also in Somalia, Tajikstan, Yemen, the Philippines, Kosovo...all over the place. We don't have the resources to play whack-a-mole in all these nations anymore, particularly when every whack usually just works to create new moles. (You'd think we learn that the Hydra sprouts two more heads every time you cut off the wrong one.)

The biggest argument in favor of increasing our military position in Afghanistan would be the continued stability of neighboring Pakistan. (There's Vietnam again -- it's another variation of the Domino Theory.) But, there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that more troop increases by us will only inflame the situation and further destabilize Pakistan. In which case, I'm not sure what we're doing over there, and what we could possibly accomplish in 18 months that we haven't gotten done the last seven years.

In short, it seems to me like we had our shot in Afghanistan, and Dubya blew it. I could be wrong, of course. But, to my mind, now feels like a good time to recognize that fact and stop chasing good money after bad.

Some folks in this film would probably call me a right bleedin' tosser (and much, much worse) for starting off this post as such. But Armando Iannucci's hilarious In the Loop, which I caught Sunday morning, has only one real flaw -- It feels like it's coming out a few years too late. This faux-documentary-style disquisition into Britain and America's joint lead-up to war in the Middle East, and the shrewd, venal bureaucrats who got us there, can't help but feel very 2003. (Which is not to say Washington politics is now a beacon of optimism and good faith in the Obama era, only that the political zeitgeist has shifted some since the events depicted here.)

But, that one small caveat aside -- and to be fair, In the Loop is apparently based on a British TV show (The Thick of It) that was more timely (and is going in the Netflix queue) -- this is a gut-bustingly funny film. I honestly can't remember the last time I laughed so hard in a theater. (Alas, it was probably 21 Grams, and that was for all the wrong reasons.) True, given that this is a sharp-edged, basically anti-Dubya political satire that goes out of its way to reward pop-culture geekery (Frodo, Ron Weasley, and the White Stripes are all used as epithets at one point or another), I'm probably as close to a target audience for this sort of movie that's out there. Nevertheless, if your sense of humor runs anywhere from squirmathons like The Office UK or Curb Your Enthusiasm to sardonic political comedies like The Candidate or Bob Roberts to the current-events commentaries of Stewart and Colbert, this movie is a must-see. (And if you don't find hyperarticulate Scotsman Peter Capaldi spewing forth rococo profanities funny just yet, you probably will after watching In the Loop.)

Iannucci's film begins with another day in the life of Malcolm Tucker (Capaldi), the tough-as-nails, take-no-guff director of communications at 10 Downing St. (Think Rahm Emanuel, but funny.) This particular morning, Tucker quickly becomes enraged by the latest slip-up by the seemingly ineffectual Minister for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, best recognized in America from the Pirates sequels.) To wit, Foster responded to a direct press question about an impending Mideast conflict by blurting out that "war is unforeseeable." This is not "following the line," as Tucker puts it, but after a stern rebuke, the Minister -- and his communications team, new guy Toby (Chris Addison) and competent veteran Judy (Gina McKee) -- only compound the error. Foster gets completely lost in the thicket at a follow-up press avail, and soon manages to mangle his way through to an even more unwieldy soundbite: "To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict." (Tucker's livid response to this policy breach: "You sound like a f**in' Nazi Julie Andrews.")

Nonetheless, this sort of Zen pronunciamento is exactly the sort of thing the big boys in Washington want more of, even if no one (least of all Foster) seems to know what exactly he was driving at. Soon both the Hawks (represented by a Rumsfeldian David Rasche) and the Doves (mainly State Dept. deputy Mimi Kennedy and peacenik general James Gandolfini) think they've found an ace-in-the-hole in the confused minister. Meanwhile, this being Washington, a town that's "like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns," there's another tier of shenanigans brewing under the principals. State Dept. aide Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky) has penned a career-killing memorandum -- soon acronymed, in DC fashion as "PWIP PIP" -- that outlines the few pros and many cons of the imminent war. And Foster's new man Toby has managed to inadvertently leak the real name of the War Committee to his friend at CNN -- naturally, it was the committee with the most boring-sounding title.

Throw in a few more byzantine political subplots -- more aides, committees, leaks, and whatnot -- and simmer, and you have what amounts to the smartest, funniest political satire I've seen in a good long while. This is also clearly a movie that will reward repeat viewing, and I could see In the Loop someday being quoted as often and as lovingly in certain circles as The Big Lebowski. It may not be everyone's cup of bile, I suppose, but if you're generally a reader of this site, I'm guessing you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did. So, if this movie is still playing in your area, go check it out...or brave the unholy wrath and frightening verbiage of Mr. Tucker. War may be "unforeseeable" -- your enjoyment of In the Loop is not.

"To paraphrase Al Pacino in 'Godfather III,' just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can't. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration's high ambitions." In today's NYT, Frank Rich makes the case for a full investigation into Dubya-era crimes (as, in a switch, does Maureen Dowd -- with some unattributed help from TPM's Josh Marshall.)

Also linked in Rich's piece is a damning profile of Donald Rumsfeld's tenure at Defense by GQ's Robert Draper, which happens to include these bizarre and, diplomatically speaking, blatantly idiotic Christian-minded cover sheets created especially for Dubya's briefings. "This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine...At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout--as one Pentagon staffer would later say -- 'would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.' But the Pentagon's top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush's public standing...Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible."

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing, Winston could not see what the thing was. "The worst thing in the world," said O'Brien, "varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by implement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal...In your case," said O'Brien, "the worst thing in the world happens to be rats."

And, sometimes, here in our own Room 101, it's insects. As breaking everywhere this afternoon, the President authorizes the release of four long-awaited CIA memos that detail the rationalizing and application of Bush-era torture policies. [No. 1 | No. 2, No. 3a/3b | 4a/4b.] And, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes, they seem to suggest that even the parties-that-be knew what they were doing constituted torture. ("Each year, in the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the United States condemns coercive interrogation techniques and other practices employed by other countries. Certain of the techniques the United States has condemned appear to bear resemblance to some of the CIA interrogation techniques...The State Department's inclusion of nudity, water dousing, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation among the conduct it condemns is significant and provides some indication of an executive foreign relations tradition condemning the use of these techniques.") But, they approved these already-condemned practices as legal anyway, with the caveat that they "cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion." Yeah, you think?

Well, let's hope the courts get a chance to decide either way. While releasing these documents today, Pres. Obama and Attorney General Holder also made clear that the CIA interrogators involved will not be prosecuted for these acts. "'It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,' he said in a statement." Um, I'm of the opinion that it would be unfair to get strung up in a, cough, "stress position" by a bunch of Cheney-authorized CIA yahoos and then see no legal recourse for it. (And, hey, "just following orders" -- what a novel legal defense. Who were the ad wizards that came up with that one?)

On the other hand, as the WP points out: "Today's carefully worded statement left open the possibility, however, that agents and higher-level officials who may have ventured beyond the strategies approved by Bush lawyers could face legal jeopardy for their actions." That still closes too many legal doors, imho. The strategies approved by Bush lawyers are horrible -- and illegal -- enough. But, at least we can still hold out the minute possibility that the real, top-level architects of Dubya-era torture policy will face some sort of prosecution for their crimes, above and beyond their inevitable condemnation in the history books. (President Obama may argue that "[t]his is a time for reflection, not retribution," but, the law is the law. And, as he should know, pardoning Nixon didn't do Gerald Ford any favors.)

Either way, let's be clear: These memos prove beyond a shadow of a doubt -- as if there were any doubt left -- that it was the stated and directed policy of the Dubya-era CIA to engage in acts they knew to be torture. That is unacceptable, completely antithetical to our ideals, and exceedingly worthy of a criminal investigation. If, in the name of national unity or CIA morale or whatever, the president wants to give a pass to the flunkies who actually held the victims down as they flailed, choked, or writhed in agony...well, that just means somebody else higher-up has to pay. Fine. But, if the rule of law means anything anymore, and I believe it does, the people responsible must be held to account.

"This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house - Sept. 11, 2001." Now, there's a surprise. To be honest, there's not much to be said about Dubya's dismal farewell speech last night, which had been touted earlier in the week as potentially something interesting. [Transcript.] Rather than go the statesman route a la Eisenhower, Dubya chose to spend his last few moments with the nation's ear dispensing trite, self-serving, and patently idiotic bromides about the world that will do nothing to alter his status in history as one of our worst presidents, if not the worst president, to-date.

I hope to spend very little blog-time in the future attempting to parse the immature, inchoate worldview of this soon-to-be ex-president. But, for example: "When people live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror." Uh, they don't? (No, then it's called regime change. [rimshot].)

By the way, was America not "free" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or were Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and other duly-elected architects of ugly institutions like indian removal and slavery all just part of ye old axis of iniquitye? Now, put your keyboards down, crazy right-wing Freeper-types. (How'd you end up here anyway?) I'm not arguing that the U.S. is evil -- I love America (I just hate flag pins.) But I am arguing that it's never been satisfactorily proven by world events that ostensibly freedom-loving people aren't capable of horrible atrocities from time to time.

This is the same ridiculous note Dubya struck constantly in his second inaugural ("Freedom, yeah!"), and it still rings false. When people live in freedom, they can willingly choose anything they want, including paths and policies deeply at odds with the direction we -- or even common humanity -- might want them to go. News flash: Dubya's windbreaker-clad nemesis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is -- along with being a certifiable, Holocaust-denying nutjob -- the freely-elected president of Iran. So let's stop pretending that the introduction (or imposition by force) of a western-style democracy to a region is a sudden and immediate cure-all for that area's problems. Even after eight years in the world's most powerful office, Dubya once again showed us last night that he harbors the black-and-white, absolutist worldview of a child...or an ex-alcoholic. Good riddance.

Update: See also DYFL on this Dubya chestnut last night: "Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere. Um, yeah.

Speaking of those ostensibly terror-despising free peoples, I haven't written here on the depressing situation in Gaza, but friend and colleague Liam of sententiae et clamores concisely and elegantly summed up my basic sentiment toward recent events the other day: "it seems that almost all the discussion and reporting on the issue is one-sided and simplistic. Let me state my position: I am pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, anti-Hamas and against current Israeli policy. I oppose what the Israeli government is doing now in the same way I opposed my own government's war against Iraq: not only is it immoral, heartless, and cynical, but actually increases the long-term security problems for Israel, much like our invasion of Iraq has weakened our own security situation."

Given what little I know about what's going on, that's basically my view of it as well. On the one hand, Israel is responding to an untenable security situation -- Hamas rockets being fired into neighborhoods and cities -- that we wouldn't tolerate for a second. (In fact, we invaded Iraq on a much flimsier security pretext.) Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that Israel is trying to run the table right here right now, in the twilight moments of the Dubya presidency, because they know they have carte blanche from 43 to do what they will. And I suspect this particular neocon-run advance, like all the rest of 'em in recent years, is doomed to failure -- if anything, I'd wager, it's just swelling the ranks (and the coffers) of Hamas.

Regardless, the Obama administration and Secretary of State Clinton are going to have their work cut out for them. I'm not one who believes particularly that conflicts with roots in millennia-long religious strife can get "solved" in one or two US presidential terms. But let's at least hope, under their watch, we can start to achieve the type of broader range of discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that you can find in...say, Israel. It's both embarrassing and extremely counterproductive for our nation to be seen -- and to continually be used -- as a knee-jerk diplomatic dupe that will always blindly support policies initiated by the most conservative factions in Israeli politics.

"I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a 'Mission Accomplished' on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake. I've thought long and hard about Katrina -- you know, could I have done something differently..."

After eight long years, the end is in sight, and the Idiot Wind is at long last subsiding. For the 43rd president of these United States, George Dubya Bush, gave his final press conference today, during which he finally conceded that "there have been disappointments." Why, yes, yes, there have. "Abu Ghraib obviously was a huge disappointment during the presidency. Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment. I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were -- things didn't go according to plan, let's put it that way." Um, yeah.

At any rate, don't worry: I'm sure we'll be getting one last round of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 before closing time, when Dubya delivers his "farewell address" on Thursday. One can only hope that it turns out to be Eisenhoweresque, and not one more final, futile attempt to rewrite the history books. But I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

"We hope the new vice president will not reverse his commitment to the Senate’s constitutional authority." Uh, the new one? What about the old one? First it was Karl Rove discovering the virtues of executive transparency. Now the walrus and the carpenter of Dubya apparachiks, Johns "Bomb Iran" Bolton and "Torture at will" Yoo respectively, actually have the temerity to sing the praises of congressional oversight in foreign policy. "If Mr. Obama were to submit either of these agreements for approval by a simple majority of the House and Senate, his actions would pose a serious challenge to American principles of law and democratic governance." Oh, a "serious challenge" to law and democracy, eh? These assholes have no shame.

"I didn't know what the guy said, but I saw his sole." Say what you will about the 43rd president -- and, no doubt, the history books will -- the man has cat-like reflexes for his age. The story of the weekend was, of course, the shoe incident in Baghdad, which ended up clearly overshadowing Dubya's remarks and reason for his visit -- the signing of a Status of Forces agreement -- and serving as an exclamation point of sorts for the president's, shall we say, fraught relationship with the nation and people of Iraq. I have to give him credit, tho' -- Bush not only handled the incident with agility, aplomb and a surprising amount of sang-froid, but generally struck the right tone about it afterward. "Okay, everybody calm down for a minute. First of all thank you for apologizing on behalf of the Iraqi people. It doesn't bother me. And if you want some -- if you want the facts, it's a size 10 shoe that he threw. (Laughter.) Thank you for your concern, do not worry about it."

In the wake of the biggest shoe-related world incident since Nikita Khrushchev (or perhaps Richard Reid), there's been some discussion of late about the legitimacy of shoe-throwing as a form of political protest. (Throwing shoes into machines, a.k.a. "sabot-age," is already generally considered a no-no.) It's not hard to understand, or even empathize with, the anger that drove Muntadar al-Zaidi to this act of protest. Here's a journalist who's been covering airstrikes and Abu Ghraib, who has seen the "collateral damage" of this war-of-choice firsthand, and who himself was briefly arrested by American security forces at one point. That being said, to my mind, any attempted act of physical violence against the president -- even something as seemingly innocuous as shoe-throwing -- cannot be countenanced. Now, I'm not saying the guy needs to rot in jail for the rest of his life -- far from it -- but let's not start pretending that that this form of protest is "ok." It's not. End of story.

Plus, keep in mind that a horrible situation was averted by Bush here just by his underreacting estimably to the incident. I don't think it's a stretch to think that al-Zaidi may have put his life in danger by making a threatening lunge at the president. The Secret Service are -- and have to be -- a hair-trigger bunch. Ok, al-Zaidi was only armed with a shoe...anybody ever heard of Amadou Diallo? All too often, tragedy results from a simple misunderstanding of intentions. Mr. al-Zaidi made his point, no doubt...but it was still a stupid and dangerous stunt, by any reckoning.

And besides, It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

"'The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own,' the panel concludes. 'The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." A new bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee lays the blame for detainee abuse squarely on Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputies. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Also of note, the statement today by Sen. John McCain, the ranking GOP member who signed off on the investigation: "The committee’s report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody. These policies are wrong and must never be repeated." It's good to be on the same page again, Senator.

"'We have a text,' Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after a day-long visit Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice." How badly do the Republicans want to keep the White House? Apparently enough that the Dubya administration, contrary to its earlier stance (and to McCain's promises of "100 years" in Baghdad), seems to be on the verge of signing a withdrawal accord with Iraq that would have all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011. (Not that we have much choice in the matter, given that Baghdad has already made it clear it wants us gone.) Well, however politically influenced, this is clearly a step in the right direction...but it's way too late in the game to save the GOP now. It's not like we're all going to forget who started -- and enabled -- this disastrous sideshow.

"How could Saakashvili have made such a catastrophic misjudgment? The answer is that he stepped into an elephant trap set for him by Russia. Moscow-backed Ossetian rebels had been provoking the Georgians for weeks with artillery attacks and raids. Saakashvili took the bait. He sent in his army for an all-out grab. But the Georgian offensive gave Russia just the excuse it needed to send troops and tanks into Ossetia. More importantly, the fact that Georgia launched the first attack has robbed Saakashvili of the moral high ground...Russia has once again proved itself a master of the brutal art of colonial politics."

As Russian President Medvedev announces he is halting military operations (although, apparently, not quite yet), the Daily Mail's Owen Matthews explains what's happened in Georgia...and what's at stake. "The only non-Russian controlled oil pipeline from Central Asia and the Caucasus runs from Azerbaijan through Georgian territory to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan...It is too late for Russia to do anything to stop the existing pipelines -- but a destabilised Georgia would doubtless undermine Western confidence in non-Russian gas supplies...[In addition] It's impossible that NATO will accept Georgia as a member as long as its rebel regions are occupied by Russian troops - so in invading South Ossetia, Russia has effectively drawn a line beyond which NATO cannot expand."

"'I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia,' Bush said. 'We strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia.'" As Georgian forces pull back from South Ossetia in the face of a full-scale Russian assault, the US, UN, and European Commission increasingly condemn Russian attacks across all of Georgia.

Meanwhile, Medvedev argues that Russian operations are winding down, but that troops will stay in South Ossetia for awhile. "Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a colonel-general on Russia's General Staff, said at a Moscow news briefing that Russia was not intending 'to invade Georgia' and that a 'key principle' of the current operation was that troops remain inside South Ossetia -- ostensibly to protect a population it said was under assault by the Georgian military, as well as its own peacekeepers stationed there." Update: Russia pushes into Georgia.

"Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes...Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want." While much of the nation watched The Dark Knight, Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al-Maliki shook up our election considerably, perhaps even decisively, over the weekend by publicly backing Obama's troop withdrawal plan in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The Dubya White House immediately tried to lean on Al-Maliki to get him to walk back his remarks, but some hemming and hawing aside, they would seem to stand. In fact, they were reinforced today by Ali al-Dabbagh, Iraq's government spokesman, upon Sen. Obama's arrival to the region: "We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq."

In other words, even the Iraqis believe Obama is right and McCain is wrong on our future in Iraq. Which means the McCain campaign has just lost one of their critical tentpole issues, and has no place to go now except scream "surge, surge, surge." "Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, 'We're f**ked.'"

Of course, McCain's bleeding on the Iraq issue might be better staunched if he didn't publicly refer to the non-existent Iraq-Pakistan border...

"Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States...'The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,' said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation."

In the NYT, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde explore how, despite all their endless bluster and unconstitutional behavior, the Dubya administration is losing the war against Al Qaeda, and has apparently given up on catching Bin Laden. "By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end...'You had a very finite number' of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. 'Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.'"

"The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. 'The oversight process has not kept pace -- it’s been coöpted' by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. 'The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.'"

In related news, The New Yorker's venerable Sy Hersh reports that the Dubya administration has been stepping up covert activities in Iran...and Congress is once again going along for the ride. "In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership...were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy."

"This can be a moment of opportunity for North Korea. If North Korea continues to make the right choices, it can repair its relationship with the international community -- much as Libya has done over the past few years. If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and our partners in the six-party talks will respond accordingly." In a Rose Garden statement yesterday, Dubya announces the lifting of trading sanctions against North Korea, on account of Pyongyang seemingly agreeing to nuclear disarmament as outlined in recent multilateral talks. But don't get the wrong idea, folks: Talking to our enemies is still an act of horrible, dirty appeasement. Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan surveys the deal.

"'The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (September 11, 2001) attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,' intelligence committee Chairman John Rockefeller said in written commentary on the report. 'Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false pretenses.'"

In the stating-the-obvious department, the "Phase II" report by the Senate Intelligence Committee -- delayed by the GOP since before the 2004 election -- finds once again that the Dubya administration lied us into war. Y'know, back in the day, this would be considered an impeachable offense.

"'Over that summer of 2002,' he writes, 'top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war...In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage ...What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.'" The other big political story of my move week: In a new political tell-all, former Dubya Press Secretary Scott McClellan turns on his former White House masters, accusing them of ginning up the case for war and lying outright to him about the Plamegate affair. "'Over time, as you leave the White House and leave the bubble, you're able to take off your partisan hat and take a clear-eyed look at things...I don't know that I can say when I started the book that it would end up where it was, but I felt at the end it had to be as honest and forthright as possible.'"

Welcome to the reality-based community, Scott. In the meantime, the White House is claiming McClellan was motivated by "sour grapes" (whatever that means -- why would he want to keep a gig he seemed to hate?) while other Dubya stalwarts, blindsided by the tome, have also gone on the attack. (But, don't fret -- of all people, McClellan knew what was coming.)

"If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I'm happy to have any time, any place, and that is a debate I will win, because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for." Looks like Sen. Borah will get another news cycle from beyond the grave...Given a golden opportunity to further tie McCain to Dubya, Sen. Obama pushes back hard on Borahgate. "They're trying to fool you, trying to scare you, and they're not telling you the truth because they can't win a foreign policy debate on the merits. It's not going to work this time."

Meanwhile, deeming Obama's wry, measured remarks a "hysterical diatribe," Sen. McCain is now trying to claim that Dubya wasn't even talking about Obama. He is, of course, lying.

And, hey, don't look now, but -- at long last -- the general election has begun!

A busy day traffic-wise here at GitM: In a speech before the Knesset today, Dubya compared Obama to Sen. William Borah of Idaho (and not in complimentary fashion, although that case could be made too.) Here's GWB: "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Now, as it turns out, Sen. Borah was the subject of my undergraduate thesis and features prominently in my dissertation. So, notwithstanding the self-serving idiocy and sad invoking of Godwin's Law in Dubya's words, I do want to take a moment to defend Sen. Borah, before -- just as Philip Roth Cheneyed up Burton Wheeler -- he disappears down the memory hole and is reinvented as simply a kneejerk reactionary. (I know Dubya brought him up to bash as a weak-kneed surrender-monkey, but I've also read several left-leaning comments out and about today that make note that Borah was a Republican, and thus belongs in Dubya's camp. He really doesn't.)

However wrong he was about Hitler in his final years, and obviously he was very, very wrong (although not perhaps as wrong as George Prescott Bush), Sen. Borah is neither the apostle of appeasement nor the GOP stooge that Dubya and folks pushing back would respectively make him out to be today. With La Follette and Johnson, Borah was one of the leading progressives in the Senate for decades, and one of its strongest civil liberties advocates in the years after World War I. In fact, if Dubya wants to ponder aloud the words of Borah, may I suggest the following?

"It may seem incredible to many, but to me the most vital problem in American politics at the present time is the preservation of the great guarantees of civil liberty, found in our constitution, and so long supposed to be secure and indispensable...One of the most common traits of the political pharisees – the man who is always professing great devotion to the Constitution and always betraying it, or disregarding it – is that of constantly expressing the fear that the people may have their minds poisoned by false doctrines.” – Borah to the American Legion, 1921.

"Everybody is in favor of the Constitution when it favors them, but too many are willing to trample upon it when it gets in their way. The war disclosed that the great principles and guarantees of the Constitution are vital to a free people and at the same time are easily disregarded in an hour of passion or crisis." -- Borah to S.S. Bailey, 1921.

"I have no use for the ‘reds,’ nor for the lawless nor for the anarchists, but I have infinitely more respect for the man who stands out and is willing to suffer and sacrifice for his cause than for the miserable hypocrite who professes to be an American and is at the same time perfectly willing that every guarantee in the Constitution shall be trampelled under foot.

The men who are destroying American institutions and who are a menace to American principles are not the ‘reds,’ nor the anarchistic...but rather the men who, professing like Augustus the Great, to preserve our Constitution, are subtly and with sinister and selfish purposes, undermining them." -- Borah to Frank Morrison, 1921.

But, civil liberties aside, what should we take from Sen. Borah's unfortunate remarks about Hitler (which he made at the age of 75, less than a year before his death?) Well, to me, it might suggest that age can cloud the judgement of all of us, even long-standing Senate mavericks much-beloved by the media. It's just a good thing that ancient, venerable lion of the Senate didn't win the election of 1936, eh?

"The aging Vito Corleone, emblematic of cold-war American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11. Even more intriguingly, each of his three 'heirs' embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought—liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism—vying for control in today’s disarranged world order." In The National Interest, John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell compare America's post-9/11 foreign policy to The Godfather. What they neglect to mention is that Dubya diplomacy in practice has been Sonny by way of Fredo.

"Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Do you remember the Iraq War of 2003? Remember those heady days of euphoria when it ended two months later, with only 139 American lives lost? Journey back with me -- TIME-LIFE style, if you will -- to the scene of our triumph: "Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a 'hero' and boomed, 'He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.' PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was 'part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.' On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, 'The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military.'"

Well, today marks the five-year anniversary of our glorious victory, the day that "splendid little war" came to a close. Among those honoring the day, and the remarkable achievement of our Commander-in-Chief:

Sen. Barack Obama: "Five years after George Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ and John McCain told the American people that ‘the end is very much in sight’ in Iraq, we have lost thousands of lives, spent half a trillion dollars, and we’re no safer. It’s time to turn the page on Washington’s false promises and failed judgments on foreign policy, so that we can finally ease the enormous burdens on our troops and their families, and end a war that should’ve never been authorized."

Sen. Hillary Clinton: "The fifth anniversary of President Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech comes the same week as a chief architect of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq conceded 'We were clueless on counterinsurgency.' That statement confirms what we have all known: the planning and strategy was flawed. Our troops deserved and deserve better."

DNC head Howard Dean: "The real mission George Bush is trying to accomplish is passing the torch of his failed Iraq policy to John McCain, who has made it clear he's willing to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years against the wishes of the American people. This November the choice will be very clear: if you want to get out of Iraq responsibly, save lives and invest in America, vote for a Democrat."

Sen. John McCain: “To state the obvious, I thought it was wrong at the time [SIC]...all of those comments contributed over time to the frustration and sorrow of Americans because those statements and comments did not comport with the facts on the ground. In hearing after hearing in the Armed Services Committee and forums around America I complained loud and long that the strategy was failing and we couldn’t succeed … Obviously the presidents bare the responsibility. We all do. But do I blame him for that specific banner? I have no knowledge of that. I can’t blame him for that.”

The White House: "'President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,' White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. 'And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.'"

The American people: "A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president. 'No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,' said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland."

3925 American lives: ...

"Judging from Gen. David Petraeus' Senate testimony today, our military commitment to Iraq is open-ended and unconditional...Their unwavering stance amounted to this: Further pullouts might trigger defeat; the costs of defeat are too horrible to ponder; therefore, we shouldn't ponder further pullouts." Slate's Fred Kaplan takes the measure of yesterday's Petraeus hearings, and the performances of Senators Obama [transcript | video], Clinton and McCain respectively. "Near the end of the afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats' likely presidential nominee but a junior member of the foreign relations committee, finally got his turn to ask questions -- and he homed in on one of the administration's key conceptual failures...'I'm trying to get to an end point,' he said. 'That's what all of us are trying to do.' This is what many critics and thoughtful supporters of the war have been trying to do for five years now. The Bush administration hasn't addressed the issue. And, ultimately, neither did Petraeus or Crocker today."

The first family set, Oliver Stone's W picks up some Dubya admin hangers-on: namely, Thandie Newton as Condi Rice and Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair. Those are both solid. "Among the key "W" roles yet to be cast are those of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove."

A personal plug: Also out in stores this week, my fourth collaboration with Democratic pundit Bill Press (1, 2, 3): Trainwreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and not a moment too soon). If you couldn't guess from the title, it basically argues that, just as the New Deal era lasted from 1932-1968, the Age of Conservatism that began in '64 with Goldwater, hit its stride in the 70's and 80's, and gave us the likes of Reagan, Gingrich, and, of course, Dubya, has now hit the proverbial, inevitable, historical brick wall. So let's survey the wreckage: On one hand, from Katrina to Abramoff and Ed Meese to Alberto Gonzales, right-wing attempts at governance over the past thirty years have usually degenerated into dismal experiments in cronyism and/or incompetence. On the other, conservatism has strayed so far from its ideological roots in the Reagan and particularly Dubya eras that the likes of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley would never even recognize it. (Case in point, the Ron Paul candidacy, wherein a traditional Taft conservative ended up being treated by his esteemed Republican contemporaries in every debate as either a fringe joke or a terrorist-sympathizing dupe.) Either way, the right-wing ascendancy is over, and it's our time again now (and, though it's not reflected in this tome, I think y'all know who I'd prefer to be carrying our progressive standard into battle in 2009 and beyond...)

"It's not a case of good vs. evil. It's just another crevice in the widening earthquake called Iraq." As violence flares up in Iraq once more, Slate's Fred Kaplan summarizes the current situation: "[I]t is 'a power struggle' between rival 'Shiite party mafias' for control of the oil-rich south and other Shiite sections of the country. Both sides in this struggle are essentially militias. Both sides have ties to Iran. And as for protecting 'the Iraqi people,' the side backed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (and by U.S. air power) has, ironically, less support -- at least in many Shiite areas, including Basra -- than the side that he (and we) are attacking."

"President Bush believes that every life is precious, and he spends time every day thinking about those who've lost their lives on the battlefield." And well he should: Following soon after our fifth anniversary in Iraq, a roadside bomb kills four soldiers on Easter Sunday, and the American death toll in Iraq reaches 4000, 3863 of which were killed after Dubya's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003.

I said when the death toll hit 2,000 in October 2005 that " [t]wo thousand US men and women have been killed in the line of duty, and this blatantly amateurish administration still has no plan either to win or to disengage from a conflict they orchestrated, other than 'stay the course.'" Two and half years and 2000 lives later, it's sadly still true. Worse still, Dubya's heir apparent, John McCain, now advocates extending this administration's catastrophic incompetence into another presidential term. This is not a good idea.

"To my close compatriots...I say that I will not aspire to nor accept -- I repeat, I will not aspire to nor accept -- the office of President of the Council of State or Commander in Chief." After nearly fifty years in power, Fidel Castro steps down in Cuba. Hopefully, this will encourage our leaders to begin advocating a more reasonable and sane policy towards our neighbor in the Caribbean.

So, as you may have heard, George W. Bush delivered his final (a lovely word, isn't it?) State of the Union address last night. [Transcript.] I actually saw it two and a half times, as I had CNN running in the background while I websurfed well into the evening. And, maybe I've been getting ruined by the recent slew of memorable Obama-related speeches but, for the life of me, it didn't make an impression at all. Right around the time Dubya made that goofy and somewhat undignified joke about the IRS accepting checks and money orders, something in my brain went *click*, and all I could hear was a lame duck quacking. So, if Dubya actually managed to say anything of substance, or discuss a program that might actually happen this year, please let me know. Update: Sen. Obama's response. Update 2: James Fallows offers his usual worthwhile post-mortem.

"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005." Uh, y'know that whole Iran is the new face of evil, imminent-WWIII thing we've been hearing about? Well, never mind. It's time to update those lyrics, Senator McCain: A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report -- which, it seems, Cheney may have held up for a year -- finds that Iran actually stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. "Even if Iran were to restart its program now, the country probably could not produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single weapon before the middle of the next decade, the assessment stated. It also expressed doubt about whether Iran 'currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.'"

This happy piece of information obviously puts our Saber-Rattler in Chief in a bit of a bind -- In a news conference this morning, he was reduced to spluttering, "'What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?'" What indeed...perhaps we should bomb them anyway, is that your point? Well, probably not. Says Slate's Fred Kaplan of the NIE: "If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero....Skeptics of war have rarely been so legitimized. Vice President Cheney has never been so isolated." Still, just to keep the timeline in perspective, Dubya made that dubious WWIII comment months after being apprised of this information. So, in effect, he was lying to us yet again.

As for the 2008 contenders, the campaigns are all taking the news pretty much in stride, although Chris Dodd got off a pretty good zinger on Clinton: "It's easy to say 'fool me once, shame on George Bush,' but when she's been fooled twice, shame on her."

"All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of ­human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now ­repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes."

To their credit, those left-wing hippie radicals at National Review said as much way back in 1996, and HBO's The Wire has dramatized the dismal consequences of the conflict for several years now. Now, coming to the same dour conclusion in 2007, Rolling Stone's Ben Wallace-Wells explains how America lost the War on Drugs, and argues that continuing to perpetuate it in its current fashion -- with its "law and order" emphases of crushing supply, international interdiction, and mandatory minimum sentencing -- is tantamount to flushing money and lives down the toilet. "Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade...The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats -- the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government." (Found via Jack Shafer's endorsement at Slate.)

"The consequences of Bush and Rice's passivity were disastrous. Israel didn't lose the war, but it didn't win, either, and that's what it had to do to maintain its image of invincibility, which has long deterred hostile neighbors from contemplating aggression. Hezbollah didn't win, but all it had to do was not lose, and it clearly achieved that goal, enhancing its reputation as the power that had stood up to the Zionists and faced them down." In his discussion of the recent Mideast summit in Annapolis (which publicly aimed to kickstart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and privately aimed to pry Syria further away from Iran), Slate's Fred Kaplan brings up a crucial -- and missed -- opportunity for diplomacy last year, during the Israel-Lebanon crisis. "(By the way, this may have been the genesis of a new Israeli verb, lecondel—in Hebrew, 'to Condel,' short for 'to Condoleezza' -- meaning, as the New York Times' Steven Erlanger has explained, to come and go for meetings that produce few results.)" And, speaking of political linguistics, it turns out that Annapolis, however picturesque, might not have been the best place to hold the summit -- In Arabic, "Annapolis" roughly translates to "I am the Police."

"'I hear you're looking for me,' he said. 'You wanna go mano a mano right here?'" In excerpts from his new book, Fall of the House of Bush, published in Salon, Craig Unger examines the ideological divide between Bush father and son and tells the true story of Dubya's coming to Jesus. "One way of examining the growing crisis could be found in the prism of the elder Bush's relationship with his son, a relationship fraught with ancient conflicts, ideological differences, and their profound failure to communicate with each other...According to the Bushes' conservative biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, family members could see [Bush 41's] torment. When his sister, Nancy Ellis, asked him what he thought about his son's plan for the war, Bush 41 replied, 'But do they have an exit strategy?'" This goes a long way toward explaining the elder Bush's recent spate of (really depressing and hard to watch) public crying jags. (See also Joan Walsh.)

"'The train is derailed and off the tracks,' said Stephen P. Cohen, author of 'The Idea of Pakistan.' 'We have to give ourselves a share of the responsibility for this. We placed all of our chips on Musharraf.' At this point, Cohen added: 'I don't think there is anything we can do. We are not big players in this anymore.'" Dubya diplomacy takes another huge hit as a power-hungry President Musharraf declares martial law in Pakistan to ensure his continued reign, sparking nationwide protests and leaving the Bushies between a rock and a hard place. "One adviser traveling with Rice saw a silver lining in the rapid turn of events. 'Thank heavens for small favors,' the official said. Compared to Pakistan, 'Iraq looks pretty good.'" Oh, joy.

Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan weighs in. "The state of emergency in Pakistan signals yet another low point in President George W. Bush's foreign policy -- a stark demonstration of his paltry influence and his bankrupt principles. More than that, the crackdown locks us in a crisis -- a potentially dangerous dynamic -- from which there appears to be no escape route...The Bush foreign policy was neither shrewd enough to play self-interested power politics nor truly principled enough to enforce its ideals."

"Service in Iraq is 'a potential death sentence,' said one man who identified himself as a 46-year Foreign Service veteran. 'Any other embassy in the world would be closed by now,' he said to sustained applause." Want to join the Foreign Service? Here's your chance...US diplomats appear to be on the verge of mutiny over forced postings in Baghdad. "Foreign Service officers swear an oath to serve wherever the secretary of state sends them, but no directed assignments have been ordered since the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War...A poll conducted this month by the American Foreign Service Association found that only 12 percent of officers 'believe that [Secretary of State Condaleeza] Rice is fighting for them'."

"'We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president [then George H.W. Bush] believes he'll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it,' he quotes Wolfowitz lamenting [in 1991]. 'But we did learn one thing that's very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us. And we've got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us ... We could have a little more time, but no one really knows.'" According to Salon's Joe Conason, Wesley Clark's new book suggests the existence of a smoking-gun 2001 memo that outlined in full the neo-cons' delusional ambitions for the Middle East before the Iraq War. "'Six weeks later, Clark returned to Washington to see the same general and inquired whether the plan to strike Iraq was still under consideration..."Oh, it's worse than that," he said, holding up a memo on his desk. "Here's the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We're going to take out seven countries in five years." And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran.' While Clark doesn't name the other four countries, he has mentioned in televised interviews that the hit list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan."

"In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran...The President’s position, and its corollary -- that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians -- have taken firm hold in the Administration." With that in mind, and with Secretary of State Rice citing Iranian "lying" about their nuclear program, here's one from a week or so ago: The New Yorker's Sy Hersh evaluates the current prospects in the administration for a war with Iran. "I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the 'execute order' that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning...'They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,' one recently retired C.I.A. official said."

"If you're really worried about Iran, do you want to put your faith in the United States, the country that bungled Iraq? If you really care about Islamic fundamentalism, do you want to be led by the country that, distracted by Iraq, failed to predict the return of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan?" Why has the world soured on America of late? The real reason, argues Slate's Anne Applebaum and the data she surveys, is that, thanks to seven years of Dubya, we're starting to look incompetent. "And even if the surge works, even if the roadside bombs vanish, inept is a word that will always be used about the Iraqi invasion."

Speaking of US-international relations, with Frost/Nixon, The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and rewrites of State of Play and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy under his belt, British writer Peter Morgan now plans a sequel to The Queen "which will examine former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's relationships with U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush." Michael Sheen is set to reprise his role as the PM, although director Stephen Frears is not returning.

Paging Yuri Orlov: By way of Dangerous Meta, a new Congressional study finds the US atop the leaderboard in terms of selling weaponry to the developing world. "Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers...The study makes clear also that the United States has signed weapons-sales agreements with nations whose records on democracy and human rights are subject to official criticism."

"The problem is that no one seems quite sure what law, if any, would apply to security firm contractors, and any potential applications are untested and would be vigorously challenged." A murky incident involving Blackwater USA over the weekend, which resulted in the deaths of eight alleged Iraqi civilians, raises questions about the legality of private security firms working in Iraq (on whom the well-being of most American diplomats in the region depends.) "Should any Iraqis ever seek redress for the deaths of the civilians in a criminal court, they will be out of luck. Because of an order promulgated by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the now-defunct American occupation government, there appears to be almost no chance that the contractors involved would be, or could be, successfully prosecuted in any court in Iraq." Needed or not, having privately-held American militias operating outside the bounds of the Iraqi legal system isn't going to elicit much respect for the rule of law in the region.

"Since your testimony at the Committee's hearing on July 26,2007, current and former
employees of the Office of Inspector General have contacted my staff with allegations that you
interfered with on-going investigations to protect the State Department and the White House
from political embarassment...The allegations made by these officials are not limited to a single unit or project within your office." In a detailed and damning letter to the suspect, Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announces it is investigating attempts by the Dubya State Department's Inspector General, one Howard J. Krongard, to shield the administration from political trouble. "One consistent element in these allegations is that you believe your foremost mission is
to support the Bush Administration, especially with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than
act as an independent and objective check on waste, fraud, and abuse on behalf of U.S.
taxpayers." Innocent until proven guilty, of course, but this sounds all too plausible, given what we've already seen from this bunch.

Declaring that "the military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met" (an assertion which rests, of course, on how one jukes the stats and skews the benchmarks), Army General David Petraeus, Dubya's most recent man in Iraq, tells Congress he's recommending a drawdown of troop levels in Iraq to pre-surge levels -- around 130,000 troops -- by July of next year. [Transcript.] Not a huge surprise -- As Fred Kaplan noted both a few weeks ago and in his quality preview of today's testimony, the Army would run out of troops by April anyway, so this was a foregone conclusion. Also, obviously, not what you'd call a real withdrawal (although the WP story's cited experts suggest it may be taken as the "beginning of the end" by interested parties in Iraq...and Iran.) So, in effect, Petraeus punted to next July.

For his part, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker backed Petraeus' "Things are Getting Better" remarks in his own testimony, and intimated that the surge had staved off a near-total collapse. He also warned the nation about the nature of our continuing commitment there: "'There will be no single moment in which we can claim victory,' and any turning point will be recognized only 'in retrospect.'"

"There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001." Every time he thinks he's going to wake up back in the jungle...In a fit of self-serving revisionism, Dubya attempts to reinvent the lessons of Vietnam before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, arguing that our problems really began because we withdrew from Southeast Asia too early. (Also, apparently we lost the war because of Graham Greene's The Quiet American. So, on the bright side, it looks like Dubya is progressing along his high-school reading list.) As you might expect, this line of argument is not sitting well with many historians, among them the venerable Robert Dallek: "What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion,' he continued. 'We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.'"

Ratcheting up the sabre-rattling, the Dubya administration adds Iran's Revolutionary Guard to its official list of terrorist organizations. "The Revolutionary Guard would be the first national military branch included on the list, U.S. officials said -- a highly unusual move because it is part of a government, rather than a typical non-state terrorist organization." Hmm. This ought to go over like gangbusters. "'It would greatly complicate our efforts to solve the nuclear issue,' said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Center for American Progress...All of us want to back Iran into a corner, but we want to give them a way out, too. [The designation] will convince many in Iran's elite that there's no point in talking with us and that the only thing that will satisfy us is regime change."

"The historic depth of Bush's public standing has whipsawed his White House, sapped his clout, drained his advisers, encouraged his enemies and jeopardized his legacy. Around the White House, aides make gallows-humor jokes about how they can alienate their remaining supporters -- at least those aides not heading for the door." Round the decay of that colossal wreck, nothing beside remains: The WP contextualizes Dubya's dismal presidential approval ratings. "The emerging strategy is to play off a Congress that is also deeply unpopular and to look strong by vetoing spending bills."

"The White House report released today, on how far Iraq has progressed toward 18 political and military benchmarks, is a sham." Well, Dubya may point to the split-decision Iraq interim report as grounds for optimism, but Slate's Fred Kaplan, for one, ain't buying it: "[A] close look at the 25-page report reveals a far more dismal picture and a deliberately distorted assessment...The report card was rigged from the outset by how the White House defined 'satisfactory.'"

"OPEC would like you to believe that it's an international agency dedicated to world peace and economic development, like the United Nations or the World Bank. But of course, OPEC is a cartel." Tim Noah examines a new bill before Congress that would work to bring OPEC's behavior under American antitrust law. "The White House Office of Management and Budget says it opposes the NOPEC bill 'adamantly.' Perhaps this is because, as I've noted before, OPEC is just about the only international organization that President Bush has any regard for."

"Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow center, put it well in an insightful article in Foreign Affairs, published a year ago. 'Until recently,' he wrote, 'Russia saw itself as Pluto in the Western solar system, very far from the center but still fundamentally a part of it. Now it has left that orbit entirely. Russia's leaders have given up on becoming part of the West and have started creating their own Moscow-centered system.'" With Dubya on the road for the G8 summit, Slate's Fred Kaplan surveys the state of US-Russian relations, concluding that "something is happening...[but w]e're not -- or at least there's nothing inevitable about our becoming -- enemies."

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." Jimmy Carter calls out Dubya's foreign policy as the worst ever. (As noted earlier, several prominent historians have already come to that conclusion.) "Asked how he would judge [Tony] Blair's support of Bush, Carter said: 'Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.'" Well, maybe he'll do better at the Bank. Update: Or does he? Carter backs down.

"'I disagree with Obama on the war but I don't think it is a test of his patriotism,' Martin says. 'Obama has a message of hope for the country.'" Come on aboard, you won't hurt the horse: Disillusioned Republicans wander over to the Obama bandwagon, including "Power and Weakness" author Robert Kagan. "In an article in the Washington Post, Kagan wrote approvingly that a keynote speech by Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was 'pure John Kennedy', a neocon hero of the cold war...'Personally, I liked it,' Kagan wrote." And, really, after seeing what the Republicans have to offer at the first debate last week, can you blame him or anyone else for defecting?

"Within the next few weeks I won't be the prime minister of this country. In all probability a Scot will become prime minister of this country and that's someone who built one of the strongest economies in the world and who I've always said would make a great prime minister." With recent tough defeats for Labor in Scotland punctuating his closing weeks, Tony Blair announces he will make an announcement tomorrow concerning his forthcoming resignation and likely replacement by Chancellor Gordon Brown. And, across the channel, France elects Nicolas Sarkozy as its new president, a conservative who's seen as both US-friendly and Dubya-friendly. Meanwhile, E.J. Dionne wonders what recent events mean for European -- and American -- progressives. Update: Tony Blair announces his last day: June 27.

"None of those 76 senators, who include the current Republican leader and whip, acted to jeopardize the safety and security of U.S. troops in Somalia. All of them recognized that Congress had the power and the responsibility to bring our military operations in Somalia to a close, by establishing a date after which funds would be terminated." In an editorial for Salon, Sen. Russ Feingold invokes GOP behavior on Somalia in 1993 to make the case for Congress cutting funding in Iraq. "Since President Bush has made it painfully clear that he has no intention of fixing his failed Iraq policy, it is no longer a question of if Congress will end this war; it is a question of when."

With an international dispute over 15 seized British sailors simmering to a boil in Tehran and Ahmadinejad cancelling his trip to New York in protest, the UN Security Council unanimously opposes sanctions against Iran for its continuing nuclear program (details.) "'The impact is primarily political rather than practical,' said Abbas Milani, the director of Stanford University's Iranian studies program. The financial and military restrictions are 'rather limited and toothless,' but they are having a profound psychological impact on investors and eroding Ahmadinejad's standing in Iran, he said."

"'[Y]ou can already feel the stability,' said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles F. Wald, formerly the deputy U.S. commander in Europe." A few months into his stint at Dubya's second SecDef, Robert Gates is "greeted as a liberator" in and around the Pentagon. "'How much of it is Bob Gates as a personality, manager and leader, and how much of it is Rumsfeld being gone, is hard to say,' said [Brent] Scowcroft, who has known Gates for 30 years. 'Rumsfeld was a difficult man to work for.'"

"What all of this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be. But it does mean that the next chapter in Basra's history can be written by Iraqis." While the Dubya administration continue to press for its "surge," Prime Minister Tony Blair announces the withdrawal of 1600 troops from Iraq, leaving approximately 5,500 British soldiers in the now Shiite-controlled region of Basra. [video.] "Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said though the British and American strategies appear to be opposite, they will achieve the same end: a consolidation of Shiite power in Iraq. The British have already acquiesced to a 'situation of quiet sectarian cleansing' in the south, and their decision to pull out of Basra simply marks 'acceptance of a political reality' of Shiite control in the region."

Although the House passed it last week by a margin of 246-182, the Democratic resolution opposing Dubya's surge fails to win an airing in the Senate. Although seven Republicans joined the Senate Dems in advancing the bill, it fell short by four votes of the 60 required to initiate debate. "Both sides instead are girding for the next phase, a confrontation over war funding, with some Democrats determined to exercise the power of the purse to influence Iraq strategy."

"'We stand together to tell this administration that we are against the escalation, and to say with one voice that Congress will no longer be a blank check to the president's failed policies,' said freshman Rep. Patrick J. Murphy (D-Pa.), who was a captain with the 82nd Airborne Division in Baghdad. 'The president's plan to send more of our best and bravest to die refereeing a civil war in Iraq is wrong.'" The House begins three days of debate on a resolution opposing Dubya's proposed "surge." "The Democratic resolution is not binding on the administration, and both sides of the debate agreed that the real fight will come next month, when Democrats are to move to attach to a $100 billion war spending bill binding language that would limit future deployments to Iraq and begin to bring troops home."

In a welcome bit of good news on the international front, negotiators strike a deal in North Korea that lays down a plan for nuclear disarmament by Kim Jong Il's regime. But all is not rosy yet: "In a harbinger of the potential for difficulties ahead, the official North Korean news agency said the agreement required only a temporary suspension of the country's nuclear facilities...The agreement also seemed likely to face opposition in Washington by conservatives who remain unconvinced that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, ever intends to relinquish his nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Bush administration faced criticism from Democrats who charge the administration that broke away from the Agreed Framework in 2002 ended up five years later with a roughly similar accord."

Meanwhile, in related but considerably more depressing news, a European Union report argues that it is now too late to prevent Iran from developing its own nuclear weaponry. "The admission is a blow to hopes that a deal with Iran can be reached and comes at a sensitive time, when tensions between the US and Tehran are rising. Its implication that sanctions will prove ineffective will also be unwelcome to EU diplomats."

"[A]s those who believe that he is following a wise course shrink to an almost insignificant remnant, as the very architects of the policies he now defends repudiate their own work, as the political cost of his current path becomes increasingly apparent to almost any sentient person, Bush -- who may still have time to redeem at least some part of his legacy -- still appears to be oblivious both to the downward spiral of his presidency and to his own likely place in history." Ted of The Late Adopter points the way to New York Magazine's roundtable discussion of Dubya's mindset these days, which includes a diagnosis by my advisor/employer, Alan Brinkley. (Other notable participants include Dahlia Lithwick, Frank Foer, Jonathan Alter, Ted Sorenson, Melvin Laird, and Gary Hart.)

Now, here's a guy who hopes there's something to this Blue Monday business: On the eve of the State of the Union, Dubya faces the lowest poll numbers of his presidency. "Bush's overall approval rating in the new poll is 33 percent, matching the lowest it has been in Post-ABC polls since he took office in 2001...Equally telling is the finding that 51 percent of Americans now strongly disapprove of his performance in office, the worst rating of his presidency."

"Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me." I'm still furiously playing catch-up, so I'm obviously a day or two behind on blogging this...Then again, Dubya's just as obviously three or four years behind in announcing it, so I'll call it a wash. Nonetheless, after finally admitting that his administration has seriously screwed up in Iraq, Bush --- sidestepping the suggestions of the Baker-Hamilton commission -- calls for sending 21,500 more troops to the region, in what's being billed as a "surge." (Re: "escalation.") When you get right down to it, Dubya's basic argument in his televised address on Wednesday was this: "Through wishful thinking and outright incompetence, I've dug two nations into a huge hole. Please, please, please let me keep digging..."

Here's the thing -- A massive troop increase would've made a good deal of sense in 2003, during those crucial days just after the fall of the Hussein regime. A show of power then -- and a quicker restoration of order and basic services -- would have paid huge dividends down the road. But, now, all these years later, after so much infrastructure has been destroyed and so many sectarian schisms have been allowed to fester? 21,500 troops -- many of them not fresh recruits but wearied soldiers returning to the region or having their tours extended -- isn't going to make a dent in the Whack-a-Mole game we've been playing against insurgents since 2003. At best, this escalation is a show of good faith to the al-Maliki government, which seems to be not much more than a brittle political arm of Shiite extremists (Exhibit A: the manner of Saddam's hanging; Exhibit B: the refusal to do anything -- until now -- to rein in Al Sadr's Mahdi Army.) Yes, folks, throwing more troops at a losing situation, backing a shaky government that can't handle its own security issues, rattling the saber at Cambodia/Iran...who says Dubya isn't a student of history?

Fortunately, for the first time since the beginning of the war, Congress isn't having it, with even some Republicans joining Dems in rallying against the proposed troop increase and today venting their wrath at Condi Rice before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (No doubt the poll numbers against Dubya's plan is helping to stiffen some GOP spines.) Still, Dubya has some allies in this fight -- While the Dems are universally opposed to the escalation gamble [Dem Response by Durbin | Biden | Clinton | Dodd | Edwards | Feingold | Obama | Pelosi] and a not-insubstantial number of Republicans are balking, some key GOP pols are still supporting Dubya's move (most notably John McCain, who's been calling for a troop increase since day one, and Rudy Giuliani, likely trying to right the 2008 ship after his recent devastating document dump.)

In not-unrelated news, the Dubya White House shuffles its deck to make ready for divided government, replacing failed Supreme Court bid Harriet Miers as White House counsel (likely in favor of someone more aggressive, so as to counter Dem subpoenas), kicking national intelligence director Nicholas Negroponte over to State (to be replaced by Vice Admiral Mike McConnell), appointing Thomas D'Agostino as new nuclear chief (the old one, Linton Brooks, seems to have been of the "Brownie" school of management), putting Iraq ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in John Bolton's former position at the UN (his job goes to Ryan Crocker), and overhauling their top military team in Iraq. As the WP's Dan Froomkin reads the tea leaves, "I see a possible theme: A purge of the unbelievers."

Other important leadership shifts, these in and around New York: Having officially replaced Kofi Annan at the UN earlier this week, new general secretary Ban Ki-Moon cleans house, announces his own team and sets the Darfur crisis as a top priority. And, over in Albany, New York governor (and future presidential contender?) Elliot Spitzer delivers both his first Inaugural [text] and his first State of the State [PDF]: "In an hourlong address that was largely a repudiation of the policies of his predecessor, George E. Pataki, the new governor said he would seek to broadly overhaul the state's ethics and lobbying rules. He said he would make prekindergarten available to all 4-year-olds by the end of his term, overhaul the public authorities that control most of the state's debt and make New York more inviting to business by reducing the cost of workers' compensation."

"'We're not winning, we're not losing,' Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, 'Absolutely, we're winning.'" While calling for an expansion of the army and marines, Dubya comes close to finally declaring the obvious in Iraq.

The buck stops here? Not hardly. Grasping for historical validation wherever he can find it, Dubya has apparently begun to fancy himself a modern-day Truman. "James G. Hershberg, a Cold War historian at George Washington University, said he doubts that history will judge Bush as kindly as it has Truman, saying Truman's roles in fostering European recovery and building the NATO alliance were seen as solid accomplishments at the time. 'Bush, by contrast, lacks any successes of comparable magnitude to compensate for his mismanagement of the Iraq war and will be hard-pressed to produce any in his last two years'."

"As [Harry] Truman said, 'We must, once and for all, prove by our acts conclusively that right has might.' That's why this country has historically been in the vanguard of the global human rights movement. But that lead can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When it appears to abandon its own ideas and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused." As Kofi Annan bids farewell to his post at the UN, he offers some words of wisdom to America -- and to Dubya -- on our nation's role in the world.

Apparently none too pleased with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the Dubya administration tries to conjure up alternative policies for Iraq: "The major alternatives include a short-term surge of 15,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces. Another strategy would redirect the U.S. military away from the internal strife to focus mainly on hunting terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda. And the third would concentrate political attention on supporting the majority Shiites and abandon U.S. efforts to reach out to Sunni insurgents."

"From now on I'll be busy, Ain't goin' nowhere fast..." In what will hopefully amount to both a transformation in the debate over the war and a much-needed moment of clarity for the Dubya administration (alas, not likely), the Baker-Hamilton Commission officially releases its Iraq report (Exec Sum/Assessments). While perhaps vague on the details, it calls the situation in Iraq "grave and deteriorating" and argues that a "slide toward chaos" is a very real possibility (if, in fact, it hasn't already happened.) "Despite a list of 79 recommendations meant to encourage regional diplomacy and lead to a reduction of U.S. forces over the next year, the panel acknowledges that stability in Iraq may be impossible to achieve any time soon."

"'What we heard this morning was a welcome breath of honest, candid realism about the situation in Iraq,' Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said during a midday break." The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved Robert Gates, who helped his case considerably by admitting the obvious fact that Iraq's looking ugly, as Rumsfeld's replacement at the Pentagon yesterday. Among those impressed with Gates was Slate's Fred Kaplan: "I've been watching defense secretaries in confirmation hearings for 30 years, off and on, but I don't think I've seen any perform more forthrightly than Gates did this morning." Update: Gates goes through, 95-2.

Happy day at the UN (if not at the White House): Facing unbeatable opposition on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (thanks to outgoing Senator Lincoln Chafee, to his credit, joining the Dems against him), interim UN ambassador John Bolton is forced to resign as predicted. Good riddance. "'The president now has an opportunity to nominate an ambassador who can garner strong bipartisan and international support and effectively represent the interests of the United States at the United Nations at a time of extraordinary international challenge,' [incoming committee chairman] Biden said. 'If the president nominates such a person, I look forward to scheduling hearings promptly in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.'"

"Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." Hewing closer to the McNamara paradigm than I'd earlier thought, Rumsfeld apparently questioned the Iraq war's course on his way out the door. "Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the revelation of the memo would undercut any attempt by President Bush to defend anything resembling a 'stay the course' policy in Iraq.'When you have the outgoing secretary of defense, the main architect of Bush's policy, saying it's failing, that puts a lot more pressure on Bush.'"

"Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history." Columbia's Eric Foner makes the case for Dubya as the worst president ever. Also weighing in on the question: Columbia PhD (and Slate columnist) David Greenberg, Douglas Brinkley, Michael Lind, and Vincent J. Cannato. (I discussed Dubya's ranking briefly here.)

"So the choice is between a terrible decision and one that is even worse. The terrible decision is just to begin leaving, knowing that even more innocent civilians will be killed and that we'll be dealing with agitation out of Iraq for years to come. The worse decision would be to wait another year, or two, or three and then take that terrible course." While parsing the forthcoming recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission (which, among other things, calls for Iraqification of the war (sound familiar?) and a near-complete troop withdrawal by early 2008), journalist and Blind into Baghdad author James Fallows changes his mind about the merits of maintaining our military presence in Iraq: "If it is not in our power to prevent these disasters, then it is better to do as little extra damage to ourselves as possible before they occur."

"To talk of grand schemes -- partitioning Iraq or pressuring Maliki to form a 'reconciliation government' and amend his constitution -- is, quite apart from their merits, plainly absurd, because we have no control over what the Iraqis do. We still have some control, though, over what we do and, maybe, over what we can persuade others to do with us." In related news, Slate's Fred Kaplan, who seems to advocate hunkering down for the long haul over withdrawal, ponders what to do should the Maliki government in Iraq fall apart.

Considered historically horrible by the ever-expanding reality-based community, Dubya and his advocates plan to remedy the damage by buying their way into the hearts of historians. "Bush's institute will hire conservative scholars and 'give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies,' one Bush insider said." Hmm...don't expect too many Bancroft winners out of that bunch. (Via The Oak.)

"It's not quite clear what George W. Bush wants Robert Gates to do. But it's doubtful Gates would have come back to Washington, from his pleasant perch as president of Texas A&M, if the job description read 'staying the course on Iraq.'" Invoking Clark Clifford to make his case, Slate's Fred Kaplan suggests what incoming SecDef Robert Gates may be able to accomplish over the next two years.

"I frankly think it's a natural default from the failure of this advice of the people they had. It was impossible to argue anymore that some of the people who got us into this mess were giving good advice." With Dubya's White House in shambles, will Bush 41's team ride to the rescue? Let's hope so -- I much prefer those guys to the militant neocon wing that's been holding the reins the past six years. Still, as one observer pointed out: "Bush's mind works differently from the normal political mind...Maybe these Baker guys can talk him off the ledge, but nobody's done it yet."

"I never saw a real enthusiasm on the Republican side to begin with. There's none on our side." The next GOP casualty of the 2006 elections? If the Dems can hold off a vote through the lame-duck Congress, it might just end up being UN rep John Bolton. "The White House formally renewed its request that the Senate take up Bolton's nomination. But Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they continued to resist Bolton's confirmation and 'he is unlikely to get a vote any time soon.'" Update: To his credit, outgoing Senator Lincoln Chafee, who earlier announced his opposition to renewing Bolton, is sticking to his guns and siding with the Dems against Dubya on the issue. So Bolton looks to be gone in December...Koo koo kachoo.

Christmas in November continues for the reality-based community: Along with recent editorials in the Army Times, the Dem's Election 2006 takeover claims another high-profile GOP victim in Donald Rumsfeld. He'll be replaced by former CIA chief Robert Gates -- an old papa Bush hand and current member of the Baker-Hamilton commission -- for Dubya's last two lame duck years. Dubya claimed in his press conference that Rumsfeld would've been gone regardless of the election returns...I'm not sure I buy that. Still, this is a very welcome move -- one that should've happened years ago.

Every single Dem incumbent returned to office. At least 26 more seats in the House. The nation's first woman Speaker. Six new governorships. At least four Senate seats. And, if all goes well in Virginia (which, at 5am EST, is looking likely -- Webb's up 8,000, which is a pretty solid lead heading into a recount) and Montana (which seems positive for us, albeit less so -- Tester's up 5,000 with 85% reporting), perhaps even control of Congress...Yessir, all-in-all, it was a pretty grand night for us. So, Dubya and Karl...how you like them apples? Update: Make that 28 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate....soon to be six. Congress is ours!

Jeffrey Sachs, take note: A new report finds that the best way to get the US to pony up some foreign aid for impoverished nations is to get that country on the Security Council, and pronto. "A two-year seat on the Security Council, for instance, can generate a 59 percent spike in U.S. assistance, according to a study by two Harvard University scholars that tracked U.S. economic and military assistance from 1946 to 2001. In times of crisis, U.S. aid to some member countries has increased by as much as 170 percent. Those aid levels tend to recede after the country leaves the 15-nation council." So, great news, Panama...You just hit the jackpot.

It's true in the West, it's true in the Southwest, it's even true among the reddest of the red. And, in perhaps the final straw for the GOP this November, a new poll puts independents breaking for the Dems 59%-31%. Yes, y'all, it looks like a wave is coming...(provided, of course, Diebold doesn't ride to Dubya's rescue.)

"Sen. John McCain has skidded his Straight Talk Express off the highway into a gopher's ditch of slime." As Dubya rejects bilateral talks with N. Korea, Slate's Fred Kaplan puts the lie to John McCain's recent attempt to carry water for the Bushies on the Korean nuclear issue. "McCain's version of history goes beyond 'revisionism' to outright falsification. It is the exact opposite of what really happened."

"So, here we are. The two major powers in this confrontation are led by blunderers; the provocateur is a chronic miscalculator. It doesn't look good." Oh, so there's the WMD: As John Bolton pushes for aggressive sanctions at the UN against the Kim Jong-Il regime, Slate's Fred Kaplan parses several ugly scenarios that could unfold after North Korea's nuclear gamble on Monday (the same day, coincidentally, that South Korean Ban Ki-moon won official Security Council backing to replace Kofi Annan. Looks like he'll be working overtime right out of the box.) By the way, if you're keeping score at home, Dubya & co. now seem to have grievously mishandled all three prongs of the "axis of evil" trifecta. Sigh. That's great, it starts with an earthquake...

"The disclosures so far have been devastating. The book paints the administration as clueless, dishonest, and dysfunctional." Slate's John Dickinson surveys the likely political impact of Bob Woodward's State of Denial, which broke today (in the NYT, strangely enough) and which is apparently much more critical of the neocons than his last two puff pieces, Plan of Attack and Bush at War. Of course, we've all known that the Dubya White House is chock-full of scheming, untrustworthy, incompetent loons for years now, but apparently, when Bob Woodward finally figures it out, it's suddenly newsworthy. Oh well, I'll take it.

"Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq 'jihad;' (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims -- all of which jihadists exploit." In a sorry attempt at a document-dump diversion, the precis of the National Intelligence Estimate report cited over the weekend has been declassified by order of the Dubya administration, so as to help blur one of its central contentions in the public mind (point #2 above): The Iraq War has served to fuel the expansion of terrorism against the US and its allies. (Update: If you're here from Daniel Drezner's blog, welcome, and have a look around.)

"'It's a very candid assessment,' one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. 'It's stating the obvious.'" A new classified report written by US intelligence agencies and unearthed by the NYT declares that Dubya's Iraq sideshow has made us weaker in the War on Terror. Gee, you think?

Now, in our country there is problem. Despite being British, Sasha Baron Cohen, a.k.a. Borat, sparks a mild diplomatic situation between the US and Kazakhstan, one that the administration will try to alleviate with White House talks. To be honest, I think I'd prefer Borat representing my country over Dubya.

"It is no secret that I have serious questions about this Administration's policies in the Middle East." Desperate to shore up his maverick cred before the GOP primary next week, Sen. Lincoln Chafee puts a hold on the GOP's planned Bolton coronation. (Of course, the UN would never have had to put up with Bolton in the first place were it not for Chafee's capitulation last year.)

"As for Iraq, it's no news that Bush has no strategy. What did come as news -- and, really, a bit of a shocker -- is that he doesn't seem to know what 'strategy' means." Slate's Fred Kaplan tears apart another dismal Dubya press conference. At this point, it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it?

A day after Scotland Yard announces it managed to prevent a major terrorist incident (with the help of Pakistan), terror is back on the menu here at home, with the GOP invoking 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and Lieberman -- absolutely wallowing in shamefulness now -- actually calling Lamont's recent victory a boon for plane-bombers. This was a terrifying near-event indeed -- were it not for top-notch intel work by British authorities, the world might've experienced another horrific day akin to September 11 in very short order. But, look closely, and you'll find this plot by homegrown British terrorists bears the likely marks of Al Qaeda, which, last I recall, we left somewhere near Afghanistan to go dink around in Iraq. Crossover Joe and the GOP can shout terror to the heavens, but the fact is that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are more of a threat to us today because of Dubya's non-sequitur Iraq sideshow. Make no mistake: America is less safe because Dubya and the neocons chose to cut and run in Tora Bora so they could prosecute their war of choice in Baghdad.

"There's a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bush administration's present jam throughout the Middle East and in other danger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealing with Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria or Iran (namely, it's an evil regime, and we don't speak with evil regimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered and spilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would have died, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scary territory." In light of yesterday's foiled plot, Slate's Fred Kaplan points out one of the critical flaws of Dubya Diplomacy (which, thankfully, the British do not share.)

"Once again, Bush demonstrated that he doesn't understand what makes young democracies flourish or why Hezbollah has appeal even to many nonterrorists. He doesn't seem to realize that democratic governments require democratic institutions and the resources to make them thrive. He evinces no awareness that the longer Israel bombs Beirut into oblivion, the harder it becomes for Siniora (who has few resources) to retain legitimacy -- and the easier it becomes for Hezbollah (which has many more resources) to gain still greater power." Slate's Fred Kaplan parses yet another dismaying press performance by Dubya regarding the current international scene.

Update: "Scholars who enter the chambers of power should use their training as a tool to help them make decisions. Condi Rice is using hers as a chant to wish away the consequences." In a related piece, Kaplan examines Condaleeza Rice's tendency to hide behind her PhD when faced with tough questions. Well, she may be a "student of history," but as Sean Wilentz noted earlier, she's never been a very good one when you get right down to it (although, to her credit, she has been very busy creating work for future members of the profession.)

"This has constrained U.S. foreign policy in many damaging ways...The United States does not have effective diplomatic channels for managing the situation, much less resolving it." Former members of Bush administrations past and present criticize the Dubya White House for their complete lack of diplomatic avenues with Syria, Iran, the Palestinians, or anyone else that might be able to mitigate the current Middle East crisis. "As unattractive as they are, the Syrians are in a position to affect U.S. interests in Iraq and Lebanon...We should be having a broad-based dialogue with them -- not as a favor to them but as a favor to ourselves."

"'What about Kofi Annan?' Bush asked Blair. 'I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and everything else happens.'" Dubya and Tony Blair get caught (apparently) off-guard and on tape discussing the escalating crisis in the Middle East. "Bush said that he feels 'like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and make something happen. We're not blaming Israel, and we're not blaming the Lebanese government.'" (A lot of news sources seem to be fronting Dubya's use of the S-word -- "See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over." -- but, really, who gives a shit about his language?) "Bush also told Blair that he would be sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region soon. 'She's going,' Bush said. 'I think Condi's going to go pretty soon.'" Update: Watch it online, just to get a sense of how boorish and out-of-his-depth our president seems on the world stage. (Exhibit B: Dubya's ill-fated and cringeworth back-rub attempt.)

My thoughts exactly.

More grim news in the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket department: So, obviously, there now seems to be a full-fledged firing war going on between Israel and Hezbollah, one which has already set back Lebanon years and threatens to bring in Syria and Iran as official combatants (a.k.a. Hezbollah's main backers) if it keeps up. For his part, other than having Bolton spike a UN resolution condemning Israel for "disproportionate use of force," Dubya has been basically AWOL in terms of world leadership -- in fact, he's been more effusive about a German pig of late than he has a conflagration that threatens nothing less than full-scale war across the Middle East. Where have you gone Bill Clinton, our nation turns it lowly eyes to you?

"'It's difficult to think of many other times and many other presidencies when so many dangerous events were happening at once,' says Wendy Sherman, a State Department official under President Clinton. 'But there's so much going on in every global hot spot because the Bush Administration really opened up Pandora's box with little-to-no plans to support their actions.'" TIME Magazine composes a cover story obit for the Bush doctrine. Good riddance: "As it turns out, Iraq may prove to be not only the first but also the last laboratory for preventive war. Instead of deterring the rulers in Tehran and Pyongyang, the travails of the U.S. occupation may have emboldened those regimes in their quest to obtain nuclear weapons while constraining the U.S. military's ability to deter them."

In a happy day for the rule of law, and following the Supreme Court's recent decision in Hamdan, the Dubya White House and Pentagon reverse themselves and announce that the Geneva Conventions will now apply to Guantanamo detainees. Yes, good news indeed...Still, given that this administration can so rarely be taken at its word, vigilance will be required to see if the treatment of detainees actually changes at all: "Neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided any immediate details as to what would be done differently or how the decision would effect the controversial policies on interrogation, which have provoked an international outcry as well as considerable domestic controversy."

"George Bush's luck hasn't run out just yet. North Korea's Fourth of July missile fizzle is the biggest diplomatic break that the president has caught all term -- and the biggest setback ('catastrophe' wouldn't be too strong a word) that his most-loathed nemesis, Kim Jong-il, has suffered in years." Slate's Fred Kaplan sees good news for the US in yesterday's North Korean rocket launch, as, in effect, "Kim Jong-il shook the dice and rolled craps." Still, "[w]hat happens next is worthy of nail-biting."

A belated happy 230th Independence Day to you and yours, and here's hoping the recent spate of scary news (North Korean missiles, incipent war in Gaza) didn't detract too much from the festivities in your parts. (Also, with regards to more joyous fourth of july rocket launches, congrats to the crew of Discovery STS-121 on a successful return to space yesterday.)

"Saying, 'Bring it on'; kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. 'Wanted, dead or alive'; that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted. And so I learned from that." In a joint press conference, Dubya and Tony Blair own up to some mistakes in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib -- "the biggest mistake", according to Dubya -- and de-Baathification, according to Blair. "The prime minister's examples appeared to be a direct rebuke of both the Pentagon's insistence that a detailed "nation-building" plan was unnecessary before the invasion and the push by key members of Bush's administration for broad de-Baathification."

As seen on Medley's Furl, Columbia PhD, Rutgers professor, and Slate "History Lesson" columnist David Greenberg reexamines the current divide between liberal internationalists and anti-imperialists among the Dems -- and seems to think more of Peter Beinart's recent "Cold War Liberal" argument and the protective camouflage DLC-types than I do -- in the Boston Globe.

"The State party should cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible, ensuring that they are not returned to any State where they could face a real risk of being tortured, in order to comply with its obligations under the Convention." A day after an ugly prisoner uprising, the UN Committee Against Torture implores the US to close the prison at Gitmo. The report (PDF) also calls for the US "to expressly ban controversial interrogation techniques, and to halt the transfer of detainees to countries with a history of abuse and torture."

"It's ironic that President Bush is now endorsing a diplomatic stance toward Iran so similar to the stance that President Clinton took toward North Korea. When he first took office, Bush so feverishly opposed the Agreed Framework with North Korea in large part because Clinton had produced it." Slate's Fred Kaplan wonders whether President Clinton's Agreed Framework with North Korea might help to contain Iran. The verdict? Possibly maybe, particularly given that we have no real alternatives.

"In short, [the letter] provides a perfect opportunity for Bush to do what he should have been doing for the last few years -- to lay out what America stands for, what we have in common with Muslim nations, and how our differences can be tolerated or settled without conflict." Also in Slate, Fred Kaplan offers some sage advice on how to respond to Admadinejad's recent letter. "Bush and Ahmadinejad -- two of the world's most stubborn, self-righteous leaders. It's at once hopeful and pathetic that the next step in their confrontation -- whether it intensifies or slackens -- could be determined by whether Bush answers or brushes off a goofy letter."

"The most important aspect of the president's comment isn't just that he acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Gitmo is a disaster and must be closed; or even that he acknowledged that detainees have a basic right to some adjudicatory process. These two concessions are momentous, but they pale next to his admission that he is in any way bound by the decision of the high court -- that the court will have the last word on anything to do with the war on terror." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick dissects some surprising recent comments by Dubya on Guantanamo Bay, and ponders the future of the Gitmo Gulag. "[Recent] silent mass releases do suggest that Donald Rumsfeld's famous 2002 claim, that the then-760 prisoners at Guantanamo were 'the worst of the worst,' was something of an overstatement. They were probably closer to 'the best of the worst,' or as I've suggested, 'the least lucky of the middling.' The actual worst of the worst have been relegated to a whole other secret prison system that actually makes Guantanamo look rather attractive."

"'This administration may be over,' Lance Tarrance, a chief architect of the Republicans' 1960s and '70s Southern strategy, told a gathering of journalists and political wonks last week. 'By and large, if you want to be tough about it, the relevancy of this administration on policy may be over.'" Are we at the turn of the tide? As even committed conservatives and right-leaning observers start sticking a fork in the Dubya administration, newly confident Dems begin to prepare for a return of the House. Foremost in their plans is "a legislative blitz during their first week in power that would raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls...a Democratic House would [also] launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration, beginning with the White House's first-term energy task force and probably including the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq."

As y'all have probably heard by now, controversial CIA chief Porter Goss was forced to quit his post yesterday, no doubt to much rejoicing at Langley. "As the normally mild-mannered Ivo Daalder, a former staff member at the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, put it, 'Porter Goss was such an absolute disaster for the agency and our national security that his departure comes not a day too soon.'" Goss chalked up his abrupt dismissal as "just one of those mysteries," but other reports suggest the real reason -- bribes, poker, and prostitutes -- is less mysterious than it is just plain unsavory. "'It's all about the Duke Cunningham scandal,' a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation." As for his replacement, Dubya has tapped former NSA chief Michael Hayden, which may mean the warrantless wiretaps may soon get another hearing in the Senate.

"'The president's military advisers felt that the size of the force was adequate; they may still feel that years later. Some of us don't. I don't,' Powell said. 'In my perspective, I would have preferred more troops, but you know, this conflict is not over.'" In a slap at Rumsfeld, Cheney, and his other one-time nemeses in the Dubya White House, former Secretary of State Colin Powell airs some of his grievances with the build-up to war in Iraq. "'At the time, the president was listening to those who were supposed to be providing him with military advice,' Powell said. 'They were anticipating a different kind of immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad; it turned out to be not exactly as they had anticipated.'"

"[F]or all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great. Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme." In keeping with the intellectual territory he staked out after the 2004 election, former TNR editor Peter Beinart makes the case for a return to Cold War liberalism in a NYT excerpt of his new book, The Good Fight (also discussed in the recent Atlantic Monthly.)

I couldn't agree more with Beinart's paragraph above, but I don't think the lack of a sufficiently robust national security emphasis is really the defining element missing among today's Dems. Are there really Democrats out there who don't agree with Beinart's three main assessments here, that (a) America faces a real enemy in Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist terror networks, (b) our foreign policy should be less hubristic and more attuned to both local contingency and international institutions, and (c) our national sense of self should emphasize our own fallibility at times? Beinart would probably target the MoveOn crowd, but as Eric Alterman noted in the last round of this back-and-forth, that's just a DLC straw man, roughly akin to Joe Klein's cadre of phantom lefty consultants in the last update.

Plus, I think there are two significant historical problems with the Cold War liberalism Beinart unreservedly espouses, which he fails to discuss here. For one, Cold War liberals could very easily be seen as best inattentive to and -- at worst complicit in -- the excesses of McCarthyism. If the enemy abroad becomes the central defining focus of your national narrative, then the enemy within is undoubtedly going to start eating at you as well. For another, (and as John Gaddis, among others, has pointed out) -- for all its early sense of diplomatic complexity and limited, realistic goals -- the Cold War liberalism Beinart promotes all too readily (d)evolved into the guiding rationale for wildly wrongheaded foreign policy interventions, most notably in Vietnam. (You'd think Beinart would pay more lip service to this issue, particularly as he himself made much the same mistake in shilling for the Iraq war in The New Republic.)

In short, I agree with Beinart's assessment that the Dems lack a sense of usable past, but the problems with his argument can be encapsulated by his ideal of a what a good, hawkish, Cold War liberal Democrat should look like these days: That, if Beinart's tenure at TNR is any indication, would be Joe Lieberman, a politician who's not only been flagrantly cheerleading for the administration during the current war, but has exhibited little interest in today's wartime civil liberties issues. Simply put, Joe Lieberman would hardly be my choice of template for the Democratic party. (Who would? That's easy: Russ Feingold, who's displayed a strong commitment to preserving both national security and civil liberties at home, while arguing for a more level-headed, less-in-your-face American foreign policy.)

"I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq." In a must-watch (or at least must-read) event, the inimitable Stephen Colbert took it to Dubya hard at last night's White House Correspondent's dinner, and Bush, according to press reports, was not amused. Great stuff throughout:

* "I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible -- I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical. And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be it Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe our infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior."

* "Now, I know there's some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias...Sir pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash."

* "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

* "I'm sorry, but this reading initiative. I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen. What's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914. If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American. I'm with the president, let history decide what did or did not happen. The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday, that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."

* "But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they're superdepressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew."

* "But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction."

* "I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg."

* "See who we've got here tonight. General Mowsly, Air Force Chief of Staff. General Peter Pace. They still support Rumsfeld. You guys aren't retired yet, right? Right, they still support Rumsfeld."

* "Jesse Jackson is here. I had him on the show. Very interesting and challenging interview. You can ask him anything, but he's going to say what he wants at the pace that he wants. It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is." (Note: YouTube has smaller clips, too.)

"We say that this fake regime [Israel] cannot ... logically continue to live." How 'bout some WWIII grandstanding to go with your Monday coffee? In a press conference early this morning (EST), Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes more freakshow statements about Israel, and Israel, rightly, is not amused: 'Of all the threats we face, Iran is the biggest. The world must not wait. It must do everything necessary on a diplomatic level in order to stop its nuclear activity,' [Defense Minister Shaul] Mofaz told a conference on Iran at Tel Aviv University. 'Since Hitler we have not faced such a threat,' he added."

US officials find repeated instances of detainee abuse at six more Iraqi prisons, and -- unlike last time -- are not removing all the tortured prisoners from their place of custody, thus violating a promise made by Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace last November. "Pace said at a news conference Nov. 29 with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, 'It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it.' Turning to Pace, Rumsfeld responded: 'I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it.'" Now, why make that distinction, Rummy?

"Observers describe Bush as 'messianic' in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, 'The Almighty has His own purposes.' Invoking also Lincoln's remarks on the Mexican War, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. laments the rise of preemption, senses dark forebodings in Dubya's saber-rattling with Iran, and concludes that "there is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war."

Ladies and gentlemen, meet our crack foreign policy team, who apparently decided to catch some Z's during the slight-happy official state visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao. China...sure, this one's not important. Might as well get some shut-eye.

"Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities." As seen all over the place, historian Sean Wilentz wonders aloud in Rolling Stone if Dubya is the worst president in American history.

To my mind, the only other president that even comes close is James Buchanan. Sure, Warren Harding was lousy, but he knew it ("I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don't seem to grasp that I am President."), and thus didn't go out of his way to be actively terrible like Bush has been. (Plus, for all the corruption of the Ohio gang, Harding's cabinet also included Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover, all impressive in their own right.) Speaking of Hoover, both he and Ulysses Grant have been given a bad shake. Even if the Depression basically ate his administration alive, Hoover -- once renowned as the "Great Engineer" -- was a more innovative president (and empathetic person) than he's often remembered. And Grant's administrations, although plagued by corruption, at the very least tried to maintain Reconstruction in the South. (In fact, I'd argue that Grant's sorry standing in presidential history is in a part a reflection of the low esteem in which Reconstruction was once held by the now-woefully obsolete Dunning School.) Regarding the other Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson is assuredly down near the bottom too, but to be fair, he faced an almost impossible situation entering office in the time and manner he did, and -- as with Clinton -- his impeachment was a bit of a frame-job. And Richard Nixon, for all his many failings, had China (as well as the EPA despite himself, and, although it didn't pan out, the Family Assistance Plan.) Nope, I think it's safe to say that we may be experiencing perhaps the most blatantly inept, wrong-headed, and mismanaged presidency in the history of the republic. Oh, lucky us.

"There are two likely outcomes from serious American efforts to negotiate, both good. First, if Iran cooperates with the talks, then it might suspend its nuclear program in exchange for economic benefits. Second, if Iran doesn't cooperate, then the Bush administration will have made its case to China, Russia, and Europe that the regime is dangerous and untrustworthy. At that point it will be much easier to impose the economic sanctions that will scare the Iranians into better behavior." With the military strike option looking increasingly ill-conceived, if not suicidal, Slate's Fred Kaplan makes the case anew for a diplomatic solution to our current problems with Iran. Update: Dubya the Decider declares, "All options are on the table." (Yes, that includes nukes.)

As you likely heard, the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Special kudos go to the WP team of Susan Schmidt, James Grimaldi, and R. Jeffrey Smith for helping to expose Casino Jack; to the Post's Dana Priest for disclosing Dubya's secret gulags; to the NYT's Nicholas Kristof for his consistently excellent commentary on world issues that merit more US (and GitM) attention; to historians David Oshinsky, Kai Bird, and Martin Sherwin for their recent books on polio and J. Robert Oppenheimer respectively; and to the inimitable Edmund Morgan -- one of my favorite historians -- who won a special citation for his "creative and deeply influential body of work" over the last half-century.

While the Pope, Kofi Annan, Richard Clarke, and others try to stem the increasing saber-rattling over Iran, more trouble brews in Tehran: Along with possibly expanding their nuclear fuel plants and upgrading their centrifuges, the "Iranian government has intensified efforts to illegally obtain weapons technology from the United States." Well, let's at least hope the White House isn't helping them this time...

"Surveys consistently show that Americans are viewed as arrogant, insensitive, over-materialistic and ignorant about local values. That, in short, is the image of the Ugly American abroad and we want to change it." Concerned about the "worryingly accurate" international stereotype of boorish Americans abroad, the State Department and several corporate partners create a handy etiquette manual for would-be world travelers. Some sample advice: "Listen at least as much as you talk. (By all means, talk about America and your life in our country. But also ask people you're visiting about themselves and their way of life.)" Hmm...can we get a copy to Dubya?

"Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation." In response to the growing calls for Rumsfeld's resignation among retired top brass, Dubya chooses instead, as per his usual M.O., to hug Rummy tighter to his breast. (full text.) And, in related news, Salon's Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin argue that Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in at least one questionable interrogation at Gitmo in 2002.

Add one more lie to the pile: "On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile 'biological laboratories.' He declared, 'We have found the weapons of mass destruction.'...But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true." The Washington Post recounts step-by-step the tale of Dubya's fake WMD trailers, sending White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan into a paroxysm of aggressively circular spin. As it turns out, even though Dubya had been notified the trailers were a red herring two days before his above comments, "for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories."

"God may smile on us, but I don't think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen." Although Dubya is personally dismissing the report as "wild speculation", The New Yorker's Sy Hersh argues in a terrifying piece that the administration is actively planning for "regime change" in Iran, and -- no joke -- the use of tactical nuclear weapons (particularly "bunker-busters") is on the table.

No doubt about it, this is trouble. A nuclear Iran would represent a grievous threat to the region (and particularly Israel), and must be prevented by diplomatic means if at all possible. But, after the Iraq WMD debacle, this administration has become the boy who cried wolf, and -- just as the US is facing perhaps its thorniest diplomatic issue yet, neither our European allies nor many US observers trust Dubya's motives or credibility any more, to say nothing of his basic competence. ("Speaking of President Bush, [one] House member said, 'The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.'.") And, needless to say, if Dubya and the neocons screw this one up, the consequences for both the entire Middle East and the war on terror -- as well as our own homeland security -- could be nightmarish. "If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us...If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle."

Update: ""I'm announcing officially that Iran has now joined the countries that have nuclear technology." The situation darkens with Iran's successful (increased) enrichment of uranium. "Iran had previously enriched uranium to a level of about 2 percent, using a smaller cascade, and separately enriched uranium to about 15 percent during laser experiments in 2002. Bomb-grade uranium must be enriched to a level of well over 80 percent...Though it is technically possible, most nuclear experts agree it is unlikely Iran would be able to make bomb-grade uranium with the[ir current] 164-centrifuge cascade." Still, Russia and Britain are decrying the advance, and Secretary Rice wants "strong steps" by the UN Security Council in reply.

"In the wake of Bosnia and Rwanda, the assumption is that ethnically divided countries can never function. But countless countries at risk of civil war have been able to avoid going over the cliff...So, how have divided countries kept the peace? Here are a few successful strategies." With Iraq seemingly on the precipice of civil war, Princeton professor Gary Bass (who was one of my teaching fellows at Harvard back in the day) briefly summarizes possible ways to stem the sectarian violence in Slate.

"The president's consistent refusal to try the Guantanamo detainees before criminal courts or courts-martial leads a reasonable observer to conclude that the government's case would fail if it were subjected to scrutiny by an impartial adjudicator. And if that is the only justification for military tribunals, it must be rejected. No one denies that the war on terror presents new challenges to the rule of law. But prosecuting someone with a crime that does not exist, before a commission that does not have rules, simply does not constitute justice under any set of circumstances." Slate files several dispatches on the important case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the Supreme Court (without Chief Justice Roberts, who has recused himself...as should probably Scalia) will hear today. Emily Bazelon finds that GOP Senators Kyl and Graham seem to have tried to deceive the Court about the legislative history of their Detainee Treatment Act, while Ariel Lavinbuk suggests a compromise solution: the Supreme Court could "find that 'conspiracy' -- the only charge against Hamdan -- does not violate the law of war."

Update: The Court hears the case, and it seems a majority -- Scalia and Alito notwithstanding -- are not amused with the Dubya administration: "Without Chief Justice John Roberts...the argument seemed lopsided against the government." Still, as was expected to be the norm on the Roberts Court,"the outcome of the case will likely turn on moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy."

"In recent weeks, a startling realization has begun to take hold: if the elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich...told TIME that his party has so bungled the job of governing that the best campaign slogan for Democrats today could be boiled down to just two words: 'Had enough?'"

TIME previews the increasingly nightmarish electoral landscape for the GOP, and the "signs suggest an anti-Republican wave is building, says nonpartisan electoral handicapper Stuart Rothenberg... 'The only question is how high, how big, how much force it will have. I think it will be considerable.' In addition, "administration officials say they fear that losing even one house of Congress would mean subpoenas and investigations--a taste of the medicine House Republicans gave Bill Clinton."

"The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein." The NYT relates the details of a January 2003 pre-war meeting between Bush and Blair, and it's not pretty. Not surprisingly (and like the July 2002 Downing Street memos, the recollections of Paul O'Neill, and countless other sources), this new material confirms that Dubya and the neocons wanted a war in Iraq, come hell or high water.

"'There seems to be a disconnect between the rhetoric in Washington about what this is all about and what we hear here,' Feingold said. McCain responded that he did 'not want to get into a back-and-forth with one of my best friends.'" While visiting Baghdad, Senators McCain and Feingold argue "cordially and pointedly" over Iraq. "Feingold...said he was dismayed not to hear any of the military commanders he met with mention al-Qaeda as a source of the problems in Iraq. The Bush administration and U.S. officials here often point to the radical group as a major source of instability in the country."

"It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction." In a must-read LA Times editorial, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright witheringly dissects Dubya Diplomacy. (Via Medley.)

Remember "We'll be greeted as liberators"? How 'bout "I think they're in the last throes...of the insurgency"? As the administration reaps the dividends of a severe credibility gap on Iraq, Dubya ventures forth once again to tell the nation about all the progress we're just not seeing over there. "'I understand people being disheartened when they turn on their TV screen,' Bush said, adding that 'nobody likes beheadings' and other grim images."

He's a uniter, not a divider...Watch America turn blue (once again) with contempt over the ineptitude and dishonesty of the Dubya administration, from month to month. (Via Medley.)

"If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." As the war in Iraq enters its fourth year (US casualities) and civil war appears increasingly likely on the ground, Dubya and Cheney trod out the same stale talking points we've been hearing since "Mission Accomplished" (while Rummy attempts variations on a theme.) Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan surveys the mistakes.

"We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes.'" Several internal Downing Street memos, recently obtained by the Guardian, suggest that our British allies have been wary of US mismanagement in Iraq since at least 2003, when Baghdad envoy John Sawers called the US post-invasion operation "an unbelievable mess." (By way of Dateline: Bristol.)

"'It seems to me the United States is not studying the history of Iran very carefully,' Pourostad said. 'Whenever they came and supported an idea publicly, the public has done the opposite.'" As Fred Kaplan pointed out several weeks ago (and as indicated by the results of the last Iranian election), many democratic activists in Iran believe that Dubya's ham-handed approach to promoting reform is backfiring in a big way.

"Leave it to Rumsfeld to invoke memories of Vietnam as others in the administration are trying to dispel such comparisons. Leave it to the Senate to miss the slip-up." In yet another sad example of the AWOL Senate of late, Slate's Fred Kaplan watches the Appropriations Committee flub a hearing with Rumsfeld and Rice on Iraq.

By way of a friend, the State Department releases its mandated yearly human rights report for 2005 (here), finding cause for alarm in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Burma, North Korea, Belarus and Zimbabwe and (surprise, surprise) progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report doesn't delve into human rights violations here at home (although China tries to fill that gap in response every year), but it does unequivocally state -- in bold, no less -- that "countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators." Hey y'all might be on to something. Deadpans the head of Amnesty International: "The Bush administration's practice of transferring detainees in the 'war on terror' to countries cited by the State Department for their appalling human rights records actually turns the report into a manual for the outsourcing of torture."

Well, this might explain the recent discrepancy in casualty numbers. Backed by a recent UN human rights report saying much the same thing, an anonymous Iraqi ministry official claims that a Shiite party representative "ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings."

"'Listen, this is a very big political problem,' said House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), explaining that he had to give his rank-and-file members a chance to vote. 'There are two things that go on in this town. We do public policy, and we do politics. And you know, most bills at the end of the day, the politics and the policy kind of come together, but not always. And we are into one of these situations where this has become a very hot political potato.'" Content to curl up like lapdogs when civil liberties are on the table, Republicans remain livid over Dubaigate, with House leaders setting up a voice vote to kill the port deal in the next few days. Update: It has begun -- the House Appropriations Committee votes 62-2 to add a block of the deal to a war funding measure.

Thanks to the ugly public machinations of Casino Jack and Boss DeLay, GOP courting of the "September 12" vote stalls out. "'September 12 Republicans' were Jewish Democrats and independents who would switch their allegiance because of their concern over national security and their appreciation of President Bush's stalwart support of Israel."

"While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as 'preventive war,' 'benevolent hegemony,' and 'regime change.' Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. 'Opposition to utopian social engineering,' Fukuyama writes '...is the most enduring thread running through the movement.' Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray -- and lead the country -- so far off course?"

Um, well, maybe 'cause a lot of 'em read Fukuyama's The End of History back in the day? Jacob Weisberg reviews Francis Fukuyama's new book, America at the Crossroads, and, while it's good to see principled conservatives take this administration's egregiously inept Iraq policy to task, it's also hard to believe that the neocons didn't share Fukuyama's earlier contention going in that "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" was both an historical inevitability and in full flourish. Fukuyama can play the aggrieved realist now, but that's definitely not how he made a name for himself.

"A behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the ports deal's rapid evolution from obscurity to uproar shows how Bush was blindsided by the same emotion-laden politics of terrorism that he used to win elections in 2002 and 2004. It also raises anew questions of why the White House message machine, so sharply effective in the first term, seemingly has gone dull in the second." As the Dubai Port World deal goes under 45-day review, the Post assesses the Dubya administration's dismal PR performance during Dubaigate.

"The bigger problem is that U.S. funding will discredit the very people we seek to encourage. Many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, despise their rulers. They yearn for democracy. To a degree unmatched in any other Middle Eastern nation besides Israel, they even like the United States. However, as anyone who knows anything about Iran's history would emphasize, these same Iranians deeply distrust outsiders -- including American ones -- who try to interfere in their domestic affairs...By openly calling for regime change and backing it up with money (however trifling a sum), the Bush administration is playing into Ahmadinejad's hands." Slate's Fred Kaplan assesses the Dubya administration's new Iran strategy, and finds that they're repeating the same amateurish tone-deafness that helped propel Ahmadinejad into office in the first place. (Perhaps Dubya might get it if someone reminded him of the Guardian's experiment in Ohio in 2004.)

Members of both parties, including now the GOP governors of New York and Maryland, question government approval of the sale of a British port security firm (which operates six major U.S. ports) to Dubai Ports World, a company based in the United Arab Emirates. "Dubai Ports will not 'own' the U.S. facilities, but will inherit the P&O's contracts to run them, with no changes in the dockside personnel or the U.S. government security operations that currently apply to them." Hmm. The transaction should be looked at carefully, sure, but, as the TIME article notes, the fact that this company is based in Dubai is much less important than the broader issue of port security standards. Update: Strange bedfellows: Carter backs Dubya, Frist doesn't. Update 2: Port security link via Medley.

"'The suspicion is we would undermine the policy,' said one of the officials who have felt sidelined. 'That is what all of us find most offensive. We are here to serve any administration.'" Career State Department officials tell of a punitive "reorganization" by Dubya political appointees to "punish long-term employees whose views they considered suspect"...and to close a back door channel that once bypassed ideological wingnut John Bolton. "About a dozen top experts on nonproliferation have left the department in recent months, with many citing the reorganization as a reason."

"We've always said that Guantanamo Bay was something that shouldn't have happened." A report by the UN Human Rights Commission argues that the US should shut down the Gitmo gulag immediately, a conclusion shared by Kofi Annan and -- apparently -- the British government. As to be expected from this gang, the White House is shrugging the criticism off.

To the consternation of the Dubya administration, the Sydney Morning Herald posts more horrifying and previously unpublished pictures from Abu Ghraib. (Warning: They're grisly, as you might expect.) Why doesn't Cheney want to ban this flagrantly unAmerican behavior again? He must realize this type of national disgrace makes us hypocrites before the world. [First seen at Ed Rants/Blivet.] Update: Walter Shapiro: "Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison." Salon has more.

"'I look around,' Mr. Lott said, 'and think, "Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid?"'" Hearings into Katrina, foreign affairs, and other matters of state are postponed as the Senate commits to a day of stunt votes by both parties, mainly because Catkiller Frist had more pressing business -- a fundraiser, of course -- the prior evening. "Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said, 'It's sort of arrogant of us, isn't it, scheduling them and then not keeping our appointments?'"

A quick note on Tuesday's State of the Union: I actually think Dubya has delivered some well-crafted speeches (1/23) in the past, even if I disagree with almost all of their content. This wasn't one of them. Except for the "America is addicted to oil" line (which Jimmy Carter basically said over 25 years ago) and the "human-animal hybrid" goofiness (which, as Crooked Timber points out, might mean trouble for diabetics), there wasn't a single memorable moment throughout, just more of the same "9/11" and "freedom, yeah" grandstanding. (And Kaine was no better -- I like to think I'm more interested in politics than most people, and I was bored stiff after a minute or two. Nice fireplace, tho'.) If the White House was looking for this address to reverse their ailing fortunes, a la Clinton in '98, my guess is that they failed. (Pharyngula link via Now This.)

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." That flaming liberal Dwight Eisenhower's somber farewell address to the nation is the historical and thematic anchor for Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight, a sobering disquisition on American militarism and foreign policy since 9/11. In essence, Why We Fight is the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 should have been. Like F911, this film preaches to the choir, but it also makes a more substantive critique of Dubya diplomacy and the 9/11-Iraq switcheroo, with much less of the grandstanding that marred Moore's earlier documentary (and drove right-wing audiences berzerk.)

Sadly, the basic tale here is all-too-familiar by now. Ensconced in Dubya's administration from the word go, the right-wing think-tank crowd (Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, etc.) used the tragedy of 9/11 as a pretext to enact all their neocon fantasies (spelled out in this 2000 Project for a New American Century report), beginning in Iraq. Taken into consideration with Cheney the Military-Contractor-in-Chief doling out fat deals to his Halliburton-KBR cronies from the Vice-President's office, and members of Congress meekly signing off on every military funding bill that comes down the pike (partly because, as the film points out, weapons systems such as the B-1 or F-22 have a part built in every state), it seems uncomfortably clear that President Eisenhower's grim vision has come to pass.

To help him rake this muck, Jarecki shrewdly gives face-time not only to learned critics of recent foreign-policy -- CIA vet Chalmers Johnson, Gore Vidal (looking unwell) -- but also to the neocons themselves. Richard Perle is here, saying (as always) insufferably self-serving things, and Bill Kristol glows like a kid in a candy store when he gets to talk up his role in fostering Dubya diplomacy. (Karen Kwiatkowski, a career military woman who watched the neocon coup unfold within the corridors of the Pentagon, also delivers some keen insights.) And, when discussing the corruption that festers in the heart of our Capitol, Jarecki brings out not only Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity but that flickering mirage of independent-minded Republicanism, John McCain. (In fact, Jarecki encapsulates the frustrating problem with McCain in one small moment: Right after admitting to the camera that Cheney's no-bid KBR deals "look bad", the Senator happens to get a call from the Vice-President. In his speak-of-the-devil grimace of bemused worry, you can see him mentally falling into line behind the administration, as always.)

To be sure, Why We Fight has some problems. There's a central tension in the film between the argument that Team Dubya is a corrupt administration of historical proportions and the notion that every president since Kennedy has been party to an increasingly corrupt system, and it's never really resolved satisfactorily here. Jarecki wants you to think that this documentary is about the rise of the Imperial Presidency across five decades, but, some lip service to Tonkin notwithstanding, the argument here is grounded almost totally in the Age of Dubya. (I don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily, but it is the case.) And, sometimes the critique seems a little scattershot -- Jarecki seems to fault the Pentagon both for KBR's no-bid contracts and, when we see Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas salesmen going head-to-head, for bidding on contracts. (Still, his larger point is valid -- As Chalmers Johnson puts it, "When war becomes that profitable, you're going to see more of it.")

Also, the film loses focus at times and meanders along tangents -- such as the remembrances of two Stealth Fighter pilots on the First Shot Fired in the Iraq war, or the glum story of an army recruit in Manhattan looking to turn his life around. This latter tale, along with the story of Wilton Sekzer, a retired Vietnam Vet and NYPD sergeant who lost his son on 9/11 and wants somebody to pay, are handled with more grace and less showmanship than similar vignettes in Michael Moore's film, but they're in the same ballpark. (As an aside, I was also somewhat irked by shots of NASA thrown in with the many images of missile tests and ordnance factories. Ok, both involve rockets, research, and billions of dollars, but space exploration and war are different enough goals that such a comparison merits more unpacking.)

Nevertheless, Why We Fight is well worth-seeing, and hopefully, this film will make it out to the multiplexes. If nothing else, it'll do this country good to ponder anew both a president's warning about the "disastrous rise of misplaced power," and a vice-president's assurance that we'll be "greeted as liberators."

"Judge Alito's record and his testimony have led me to conclude that his impulse to defer to the executive branch would make him a dangerous addition to the Supreme Court at a time when cases involving executive overreaching in the name of fighting terrorism are likely to be such an important part of the Court's work." Although the Senate Judiciary Dems (including Feingold) lined up against him, Sam Alito made it out of committee on a 10-8 party-line vote. Now, with his nomination before the full Senate, and with Nebraska Dem Ben Nelson joining the GOP majority, it seems, unfortunately, that the "worst nightmare of liberal democrats" will come to pass, and Alito will join the Roberts court. (For what it's worth, Nelson wasn't alone in his apostasy: Santorum challenger Bob Casey also came out for the judge.) Well, let's hope Justice Alito takes a less forgiving look at executive encroachment than has Judge Alito. (Casey link via Medley.) Update: While the NYT says filibuster, Dems Robert Byrd and Tim Johnson back Alito. (Of course, if the NYT hadn't sat on the NSA story for a year, perhaps we could have nipped Alito in the bud back in November 2004.)

"So, here's the big question: If diplomacy is the only rational solution to this problem yet the Iranians just want nukes -- in other words, if there is no deal (or at least no deal that the United States would realistically offer) that would compel them to give up their dream -- what's the next step?" Slate's Fred Kaplan admits to being stymied on the troubling question of Iranian nukes.

"> EXAMINE CHAIRS

They are two several chairs arranged around the center of the room, along with two couches. Under one couch you find Clinton's shoes.

> FILL SHOES

You are unable to fill Clinton's shoes."

This may be the funniest political Internet post I've seen since the Cheney poker game: By way of WebGoddess and from the brain of Defective Yeti, it's the George W. Bush text adventure. Beware of lurking grues, special prosecutors, and that goshdarned Constitution.

Team Dubya spent the weekend on the offensive regarding the recent disclosure of illegal NSA wiretaps, with Bush saying over and over again that disclosing the wiretaps was "a shameful act" that "damage[d] our national security." Sheah. That Dubya and his cronies would try to pass off these egregious violations of civil liberties and due process with more dissent is disloyalty garbage (and a frisson of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11) speaks once again to how corrupt and out-of-control this administration has become. Let the investigations commence. Update: Newsweek's Jonathan Alter weighs in: "Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story -- which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year -- because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker...If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced."

"The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets." In the world-gets-even-scarier-department, Iran's hardliner president publicly indulges in Holocaust denial. Clearly, Iran is living up to its axis-of-evil appellation these days, but remember: Ahmadinejad's election was in part blowback from Dubya's amateurish and tone-deaf Middle-East policy in the first place. At any rate, it's clear that our Iran situation is worsening, and that Iranian possession of nukes is a truly frightening scenario.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq." In his final speech on Iraq before tomorrow's elections, (text) Dubya admits the case for war was FUBAR, while insisting it was a good idea anyway. ("The United States did not choose war -- the choice was Saddam Hussein's.") Of course, Bush neglected to mention that it was he, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al who cherry-picked through the available intelligence and continued to recite claims they knew to be false. Still, for someone who's seems pathologically incapable of accepting reality at times, this has to be considered a step forward.

An ugly day for American values around the world: In Iraq, an investigation inaugurated after the recent discovery of secret prisons in Baghdad uncovers at least 120 victims of torture and/or abuse in prisons run by the new Iraq Interior Ministry. "Prisoners had their bones broken and their fingernails pulled out, were subjected to electric shocks and had burning cigarettes crushed into their necks and backs, said the Iraqi official." And, elsewhere, a European investigation suggests that the CIA were in fact holding prisoners illegally in Europe, until they were surreptitiously moved to North Africa after the story broke. Charming. So is this what Dubya meant when he said "we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty" to the world? If so, I'd remind him of the Lincoln quote he used in the same inaugural address: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

Shunned by Dubya and spurred on by Bill Clinton, the rest of the world comes together to limit greenhouse gases and extend the Kyoto treaty. "Brushing aside the Bush administration's fierce protests, all the industrialized nations except the United States and Australia were near an agreement Friday night to embark on a new round of formal talks aimed at setting new mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the existing pact known as the Kyoto Protocol expires."

"The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion, and both President Bush's new strategy and the Democratic responses to it dangerously miss the point...[T]he Shiite clerics in Iraq have achieved fundamental political goals: capturing oil revenues, strengthening the role of Islam in the state, and building up formidable militias that will defend their gains and advance their causes as the Americans draw down and leave. Iraq's neighbors, then, see it evolving into a Shiite-dominated, Iranian buffer state that will strengthen Tehran's power in the Persian Gulf just as it is seeks nuclear weapons and intensifies its rhetoric against Israel."

By way of Dangerous Meta, former Dem candidate Wesley Clark argues for a revised strategy in Iraq, one centered on border control, the reduction of Iranian influence in the region, and the use of carrots rather than sticks to defang insurgents.

"Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism." According to today's NYT and in keeping with the Dubya administration's penchant for rigging the media, it appears the Pentagon has been paying for planted propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. "'You show the world you're not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility.'"

"It is symptomatic of everything that's gone wrong with this war that, after two and a half years of fighting it (and four years after starting to plan it), the White House is just now getting around to articulating a strategy for winning it." Fred Kaplan surveys yesterday's Dubya speech, one full of sound and fury about winning the war but, apparently, signifying nothing.

"In short, Bush could pull a win-win-win out of this shift. He could pre-empt the Democrats' main line of attack against his administration, stave off the prospect of (from the GOP's perspective) disastrous elections in 2006 and '08, and, as a result, bolster his presidency's otherwise dwindling authority within his own party and among the general population." Slate's Fred Kaplan argues that, despite the administration's demagogic attacks of the past few weeks and recent reports of faith-based blinders, Dubya may well bow to reality and announce a phased withdrawal from Iraq in a speech tomorrow.

Update: Dubya sets the stage: "'We will make decisions about troops levels based upon the capability of the Iraqis to take the fight to the enemy,' Bush said in El Paso, Texas. 'I will make decisions on the level of troops based upon the recommendations of commanders on the ground.'"

Update 2: Dubya makes his speech, and, in keeping with his usual MO, it's basically just "stay-the-course" for now. Although, as suspected, he did argue that Iraqi forces have made great strides of late, which leaves the door open for withdrawal by Election Day 2006, as Murtha, Kaplan, and others have predicted.

As the State Department stalls for time, the European Union considers suspending the voting rights of those member nations which were home to secret CIA gulags. (Human Rights Watch has said that Poland and Romania are the most likely suspects, although many other nations may have witnessed CIA flights go to and fro.)

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that 'God put me here' to deal with the war on terror. The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that 'he's the man,' the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose." By way of Salon's War Room, The New Yorker's Sy Hersh scrutinizes the terrifying dogmatism and tone-deafness at work in the White House with regards to Iraq.

Here's more: "[Rove and Cheney] keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. 'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,' the former official said, 'but Bush has no idea.'"

Update: According to the Daily News, who published a similar story yesterday, the White House won't comment on the Hersh piece.

As seen at many fine blogs this past Thanksgiving week (including FmH & Medley), some nice visual data to be thankful for (and for all those red state/blue state dualists to ponder): One year after Election 2004, America's blue over Dubya.

"I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn't work." If it's any consolation, Dubya, we all feel just as trapped. In one of those resounding visual metaphors that capture a presidency and that life occasionally kicks up for all to see (the last one being Dubya's fiddling during Katrina), our leader gets stymied by a locked door while trying to evade a reporter's questions about his China trip (which were pretty softball, given all the things he could've been asking these days.)

In somewhat related news, in the relatively sanguine Post story about the door incident, the following depressing information is included: "In five years in the presidency, Bush has proved a decidedly unadventurous traveler...As he barnstormed through Japan, South Korea and China, with a final stop in Mongolia still to come, Bush visited no museums, tried no restaurants, bought no souvenirs and made no effort to meet ordinary local people...[Laura Bush] once persuaded him to go to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, only to see him burn through the place in 30 minutes. He dispensed with the Kremlin cathedrals in Moscow in seven minutes. He flatly declined an Australian invitation to attend the Rugby World Cup while down under."

"This was a huge 'Congress getting into the ballgame' week,' Mr. Graham said. Mr. Warner said wryly, 'You know, Congress is a co-equal branch.'" Well, make no mistake: They're no Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. Still, the NYT takes a gander at the self-named "Little Triumvirate" of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, three "Gang of 14" members who've become the locus of GOP discontent with Dubya in the Senate.

"What was striking about Cheney's assault was that while denying critics' charges of manipulation and dishonesty involving prewar intelligence, he resorted to exactly the tactics that inspired the criticism. As he did with the prewar intelligence, Cheney told no outright lies, but he exaggerated the case, picked only evidence he liked, and ignored the caveats." In case it wasn't obvious, Slate's John Dickinson explains how Cheney is still misrepresenting the lead-up to war. (In fact, he did it again today, although at least he didn't join his congressional colleagues in their recent spate of Murtha-bashing.) But, really, can we expect any less from the administration that brought us imaginary WMDs and the phantom Iraq-9/11 connection? Like George Costanza at his worst moments, these jokers have been lying so long they've lost sight of the truth.

"Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done. It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country." On the day after the GOP-controlled Senate tightened the reins on Dubya, President Clinton reasserts his contempt for this administration's rank amateurism in Iraq and the Middle East.

Another week, another secret torture center...anyone else sensing a pattern? Tensions in Iraq simmer to a boil as a secret prison holding 173 Sunnis is uncovered in Baghdad. "The discovery...created a new aura of crisis for American officials and Iraqi politicians who hold power in the Shiite-led transitional government. For many Iraqis, the episode carried heavy overtones of the brutality associated with Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated government."

Whatsmore, the head of the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia suspected of pulling the strings and wielding the implements in this center, says: "This bunker is run by the Interior Ministry, the Americans are there every day." Whether or not that's true (and for the love of Pete, let's hope not), it's obvious that recent events, from Abu Ghraib to the Frist-sanctioned CIA black sites to the al-Jamadi murder, have seriously damaged our credibility as opponents of torture, in this prison and around the world.

Wary of increasing public opposition to the Iraq war and spurred to action by a Democratic amendment advocating a specific timetable for withdrawal, Senate Republicans craft legislation calling for an Iraq exit strategy. "On the Iraq resolutions, the Democratic and Republican proposals say that '2006 should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi security forces taking the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq, thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq'...The White House is also directed 'to explain to Congress and the American people its strategy for the successful completion of the mission in Iraq.'" Unfortunately, with the exception of quarterly reports to Congress on the war effort, the language of the proposal is not binding. Update: It passes, 98-0 (Lamar Alexander and Governor Corzine didn't vote.)

"President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence. Neither assertion is wholly accurate." Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan parses Dubya's speech further.

"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he is more concerned about the leak of information regarding secret CIA detention centers than activity in the prisons themselves...'I am not concerned about what goes on [in the prisons] and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that,' Frist replied." Unbelievable. The same guy who blew a gasket over a closed-door Senate session last week couldn't care less what goes on behind closed doors in secret, illegal CIA gulags. (I guess he figures it couldn't be much worse than your average day at the Frist family animal shelter.)

As McCain calls for changes in Dubya's Iraq strategy, White House National Security advisor Stephen Hadley inaugurates Dubya's comeback plan, which will get more run in a presidential speech today. Step One: Call the Dems out on their pro-war votes. "'Some of the critics today,' Hadley added, 'believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people.'" Well, yes, but if Dems were relying on faulty and doctored intelligence to come to that supposition in 2002, that only brings us back to the $64,000 question: What exactly happened to our prewar intelligence once it reached the White House?

Republicans...they never stop surprising me. The nation discovers that, contrary to our most basic principles, the CIA has a series of secret, illegal gulags around the world, and how do GOP leaders respond? They want to know who told the press. (Mind you, this is after stonewalling investigations into prewar intelligence and the Plamegate leak for many a year.)

To be fair, not all GOP Senators are with them on this. Said Gang of 14 member Lindsey Graham (R-SC): "Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. The real story is those jails...I'd like to know why we've got secret prisons and what oversight precautions we have." And Trent Lott (R-MS) believes that a Republican is likely responsible for the leak, after hearing about the prisons from Mr. Torture himself, Big Time Dick Cheney. "'Every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper,' Lott said. 'We can't keep our mouths shut.'" But, perhaps Catkiller knows this, and suspects one of his probable primary opponents? (LA Times story via Quiddity.) Update: Wheels within wheels...Was the leak investigation letter accidentally leaked? Regardless, Pat Roberts has put the kibosh on a congressional investigation...for now.

Typical Dubya Doublespeak: Just as Bush tells the world, "We do not torture," his vice-president continues his quest to exempt the CIA from a congressional torture ban, which would obviously be an unnecessary action were Dubya's remarks truthful. In related news, the Dems want a wide-ranging inquiry into pre-war intelligence, and members of both parties are concerned about increased "terrorism" inquiries under the Patriot Act.

"After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long." The NY Times editorial staff come out swinging against Dubya.

"There has never been more frustration with the war in Iraq, and less clarity about our mission there, than we face today...And while we haven't heard the administration clearly articulate our military mission in Iraq, there is another silence that is just as deafening -- the lack of a debate in Congress about how and when that mission will be brought to an end." Over at Salon, Sen. Russ Feingold argues for a timetable in Iraq, or at the very least a congressional debate on the issue.

As the Cheney-Addington gang work to strip the Geneva Convention from prisoner treatment manuals, the Washington Post uncovers an overseas network of CIA "black sites," a.k.a. gulags, some of which actually use old Soviet compounds in Eastern Europe(!) "It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas...Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing."

Whatsmore, these gulags, created under this administration since 9/11, "were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities." There's no other way to look at this: By appropriating the tactics of our enemies, as John McCain warned earlier this month, we have abandoned our most fundamental principles and shamed our nation. Evildoers? Please. Dubya need look no further than his own White House and CIA. Update: Congress and the EU want answers.

As if the revelations of Syria's role in the Hariri assassination weren't disturbing enough, now the recently-elected president of Iran, a state with nuclear ambitions, is making nightmarish and freakshow statements reasserting the goal of Israel's destruction. With rhetoric escalating and five years of Dubya's "with-us-or-against-us" diplomacy helping to shore up hardliners across the Middle East, it seems Iraq may soon be the least of our problems in the region.

As Iraq announces the approval of its draft constitution (which passed in a manner Slate's Fred Kaplan has deemed "the worst of both worlds"), the war claims its 2000th US military casualty. (Of these, 357 were under 21, 487 were National Guard, and 1863 -- over 9 in 10 -- have died since Dubya's "Mission Accomplished" fiasco.) We're still well under the casualty rate for Vietnam, true, but what comfort is that to the families of the fallen? Two thousand US men and women have been killed in the line of duty, and this blatantly amateurish administration still has no plan either to win or to disengage from a conflict they orchestrated, other than "stay the course." As with so much else under this president, the conduct of this war from its inception has been shameful and unacceptable -- in short, a national embarrassment.

"'The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney,' Mr. Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. 'I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore.'" As Cheney consigliere Scooter Libby preps for a likely Plamegate perp walk, the NYT refocuses on the broader question of our entry into the Iraq war. And, as the Scowcroft quote attests (and as Medley also notes), prominent Republicans are starting to pile on. "'Iraq was at core a war of choice, and extraordinarily expensive by every measure - human life, impact on our military, dollars, diplomatically,' said Mr. [Richard] Haass, a former senior State Department official under President Bush."



Or, as former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson puts it, "[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my study of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy didn't know were being made."

Update: Jeffrey Goldberg discusses his Scowcroft piece, and Slate's Fred Kaplan evaluates it, noting that George H.W. Bush is also something of a Dubya critic in the article. Speaking of Scowcroft, Dubya Sr. says: "He has a great propensity for friendship. By that, I mean someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear....[He] was very good about making sure that we did not solely consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not." Listen up, sonny...Papa just learned you.

"'This is simply the beginning,' said Farid El-Khazen, a Lebanese lawmaker and political scientist. 'There is little room for maneuver left...Syria doesn't have a middle-ground option." Hmmm. This is not good.

"The blend of businessmen's aversion to government regulation, down-home cultural populism and Christian moralism that sustains today's Republican Party is a venerable if loosely knit philosophy of government dating back to long before the right-wing upsurge that prepared the way for Reagan's presidency...Insofar as perennial themes shape our politics, it is remarkable how so many of contemporary conservatism's central ideas and slogans renovate old Whig appeals."

By way of Cliopatria, historian Sean Wilentz compares today's GOP to the Whig Party of the 1830's and '40s. Food for thought, but, as Wilentz himself admits, the general lack of state power back then -- and, more importantly, the absence of corporate consolidation in the antebellum era -- significantly changes the rules of the game. While laissez-faire policies more likely meant increased competition and economic growth in the 19th century, it means something else entirely in today's world, when long-standing, fully-formed corporate behemoths are ready and willing to fill any power vacuum left by less government regulation. (That's why the Gilded Age analogy, I think, still makes more sense -- It's business cronyism, and not economic competition, that drives Dubya republicanism.) Update: Via The Late Adopter, Eric Foner, the centerpiece of a weekend conference around these parts, reviews Wilentz's new tome in The Nation.

"Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, 'I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town.... We were talking. And Pat said, "You know, this war is so f***ing illegal." And we all said, "Yeah." That's who he was. He totally was against Bush.'" By way of a friend of mine from high school, The Nation's Dave Zirin explains how the Dubya administration's use of slain NFL safety (and Chomsky fan) Pat Tillman as poster boy for the Iraq war was, like so much else in the lead-up to this conflict, built on lies.

"We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation." Behind Sen. John McCain, who knows as well as anyone why we must set limits on our interrogation policies, the Senate votes 90-9 to rebuke the White House and constrain future interrogation abuses at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and around the world. For his part, Catkiller Frist earlier tried to smother the amendment, but ultimately ended up voting for it. Wouldn't want a vote for torture on our 2008 transcript now, would we?

"President Bush's speech this morning, billed as a major statement about Iraq and the war on terror, was a sad spectacle -- so ripe with lofty principles, so bereft of ideas on what to do with them. He approached the podium amid growing disapproval of his performance as a war president, ratcheting chaos and violence in Iraq, continuing terrorist attacks worldwide -- and pleaded for nothing more than staying the course, with no turns or shifts, for a long, long time to come." Slate's Fred Kaplan surveys, and bemoans, Dubya's "big" Iraq speech this morning.

"It's a significant breakthrough. But it could easily have been accomplished two and a half years ago, had President George W. Bush been willing...Had he signed this rather innocuous joint statement back then (it wouldn't have harmed our national interest to forgo an option -- invading North Korea -- that we were never going to exercise in the first place), the next steps toward an arms-control treaty would have been much easier than they will be now." Slate's Fred Kaplan realistically assesses the good news -- and work ahead -- in North Korea.

With the administration's numbers in a continuing death spiral ever since their sheer incompetence, blatant cronyism, and general heartlessness was exposed by Katrina, several recent anti-Dubya speeches of note:

President Clinton: "Now, what Americans need to understand is that means every single day of the year, our Government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts. We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else...We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong."

John Kerry: "'Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq, what George Tenet is to slam-dunk intelligence, what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad, what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy, what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning, what Tom DeLay is to ethics and what George Bush is to 'Mission Accomplished' and 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'"

John Edwards: "I might have missed something, but I don't think the president ever talked about putting a cap on the salaries of the CEOs of Halliburton and the other companies . . . who are getting all these contracts...This president, who never met an earmark he wouldn't approve or a millionaire's tax cut he wouldn't promote, decided to slash wages for the least of us and the most vulnerable."

Bill Maher: (I forgot where I saw this one first, but it's a toss-up between Booknotes and Follow Me Here.) "On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.' "

A study in contrasts at the UN: While Clinton tries to save the world, Dubya needs a bathroom break.

"It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop." 700 Club guru and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson calls for the head of Venuezela's Hugo Chavez. (Venezuela is obviously livid, and the Dubya administration, for their part, quickly disavowed the idea.)My, isn't he just the model of Christian forbearance? Some words of wisdom, Pat: Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. (Matthew 26:52)

Well, that's that, then. As expected (and although he may be late to the party), Dubya has appointed Bolton to the UN ambassadorship by fiat. Well, the Dems pushed as hard as they could on this one, and only George Voinovich ended up seeing the light. Shame on supposed moderates Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel for letting this freakshow get out of committee in the first place.

Chalk up another X against Dubya's UN nominee: It now turns out John Bolton lied to Congress about his part in the investigation of the Iraq-Niger claim. (He claimed he hadn't been interviewed...He had.) Regardless, Dubya still has plans to appoint Bolton by fiat after Congress skips town. After all, what's one more liar in this truth-starved administration? He should fit right in.

"An independent panel headed by two former U.S. national security advisers said Wednesday that chaos in Iraq was due in part to inadequate postwar planning. Gee, you think? At any rate, both Berger and Scowcroft are already on record as critics of Dubya's foreign policy, so I doubt this new report will turn too many heads.

Stymied by the Senate, Dubya looks to sneak Bolton into the UN with a recess appointment, perhaps as early as this Friday. "Senate Democratic leaders have removed a possible hurdle by signaling that they would not use a recess appointment of Bolton to hold up Bush's nomination of John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court." Update: Next week?

Much to the consternation of the Dubya White House, a handful of GOP Senators, including Gang of 14'ers John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), are trying to establish congressional oversight over prisoner treatment at Guantanamo and elsewhere. McCain's proposed amendments include restricting interrogation techniques to what's in the Army field manual, stopping the practice of "extraordinary rendition," forcing the government to register all detainees with the Red Cross, and prohibiting "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody no matter where they are held." For his part, Graham's amendment appears just to rubber-stamp the current Dubya policies...but apparently even that's too much legislative oversight for Cheney, Rummy, and the rest of the admin whip-hands, who are trying to enlist their Senate allies to offer up a watered-down, smoke-and-mirrors version instead. For shame.

Although he's been upstaged of late by O'Connor and Rove, potential UN freakshow John Bolton still waits in the wings, and is prepared to accept a recess appointment by Dubya sometime next month. In fact, he's already acting like he owns the place. "Two months ago, while his confirmation was in trouble, Bolton began efforts to double the office space reserved within the State Department for the ambassador to the United Nations."

"'I don't know how the Bolton nomination stands,' said Danforth, who resigned in January. 'But she could certainly do that job and anything else.'" While the Bolton nomination withers on the vine, it seems career diplomat and acting US Ambassador Anne Patterson is handling the UN position with all the grace, aplomb and savvy Bolton lacks. Can we keep her?

"This is a war of the unknown warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty." Only a day after Olympic euphoria, London suffers its worst attack since the Blitz, resulting in 38 dead and 700 wounded. Many condolences to the people of London and the families of the fallen, and I hope these cowardly and reprehensible bombings won't overly divert Tony Blair and the G8 from their larger agenda (even if Dubya refuses to play ball on global warming.)

As Dubya heads off to G8 (although not before pushing back on Gonzalez), Washington DC continues to gird for the Supreme Court fight ahead, with Senators of both parties airing their respective views on questioning candidates, the Post previewing the fall 2005 Supreme slate, and everyone else trying to guess Dubya's probable pick. Of course, even a hardline conservative may not decide as Dubya intended...although that'll be small consolation for the Dems should one get through.

"Our troops deserve better: they deserve leadership equal to their sacrifice." In the NY Times, John Kerry offers some advice to Dubya on tonight's Iraq speech. Update: That's your speech? Terror, terror, terror, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, all over again? Pathetic and shameful.

Down, down, down for Dubya.

"Current U.S. space policy presents a paradoxical picture of high ambition and diminishing commitment...Pursuit of the NASA Plan, as formulated, is likely to result in substantial harm to the U.S. space program." A new report by experts at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy finds the Dubya space program is a mess. The two writers (both active during the Clinton years) do praise new NASA head Michael Griffin, who may be the only Bush appointee out there that I have positive feelings for. But, in keeping with the general unilateralism of Dubya's tenure, the scientists bemoan the demise of international cooperation in recent years, with our move to weaponize space a particular stumbling block.

Since the White House still won't cough up the necessary info, the Dems (and Sen. Voinovich) manage to keep Bolton out of the UN once again, prompting Dubya to consider putting him there by recess appointment fiat. (As Fred Kaplan wryly noted, that should teach those evildoers abroad what we mean by democracy up in these parts.) And the big winners in this affair thus far? The State Department, who no longer have Bolton as a "roadblock" against diplomacy.

"'Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality,' said Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. 'It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq.'" Two quality links via the consistently splendid Follow Me Here: First, Republican Senators McCain and Hagel call out Dubya on the war. Between this and "Freedom Fries" Jones, are the floodgates opening in GOP-land?

And, on an altogether different note, physicists cast doubt on the possibility of time travel paradoxes "When Greenberger and Svozil analysed what happens when...component waves flow into the past, they found that the paradoxes implied by Einstein's equations never arise. Waves that travel back in time interfere destructively, thus preventing anything from happening differently from that which has already taken place." (Well, looks like time-traveling historians won't need to worry about any Primeresque recursions, then.)

"'Unknowingly, (Bush) pushed Iranians to vote so that they can prove their loyalty to the regime -- even if they are in disagreement with it,' said Hamed al-Abdullah, a political science professor at Kuwait University." As per the usual with this tone-deaf administration, it appears recent remarks by Dubya may well have spurred support for the Iranian ultraconservatives and further weakened reformers in Iran. "The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday's election -- with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency."

With Social Security privatization going nowhere and Bolton still in mothballs until the White House coughs up the requested info, Dubya gets testy about Democratic "obstruction" at a GOP fundraising affair. Well, it's good to hear the right-wingers are rattled, but at some point, the Dems do need to get a proactive agenda on the table, so the "road block" schtick doesn't stick.

"'A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise.' The authors add, 'As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point.'" Using the Dubya administration's blatant lack of postwar prep as their news-peg, the Washington Post finally headlines the Downing Street Memo on their front page, over a month after the story broke overseas. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

"When is it time to start referring to Bush as an unpopular president? When his approval ratings are solidly below 50 percent for at least three months? Check. When his approval ratings on his signature issues are in the red? Check. When a clear majority of Americans say he is ignoring the public's concerns and instead has become distracted by issues that most people say they care little about? Check." Dubya's numbers continue to plunge. Want some unsolicited advice, Mr. President? Let's hear more about Third World debt relief, and fewer blanket endorsements of the Patriot Act. Update: In not-unrelated news, faith in the newsmedia also hits a low.

Last Friday, the Pentagon admitted that a Quran -- and detainee -- were in fact urinated on by a guard at Guantanamo. But, according to the eagerly dismissive White House, there's no need to court-martial anybody or anything. (Heck, you should hear about Dubya's crazy pledge days.) In the meantime, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) took time off from castigating Howard Dean to call for the closing of Guantanamo.

"Now in terms of the requests for the documents, I view that as just another stall tactic, another way to delay, another way not to allow Bolton to get an up or down vote." As per his usual my-way-or-the-highway approach, Dubya announced he's decided to stonewall the Dems by withholding the requested intelligence documents bearing on Bolton. Given that this UN appointment seems a done deal in terms of votes, you'd think our "uniter, not a divider" prez might've relished an opportunity to appear magnanimous and thus replenish some of his squandered political capital. But perhaps he didn't want to put another feather in McCain's cap so soon after the nuclear compromise...or perhaps these documents confirm anew that Bolton is unfit for his post. (Video link via Freakgirl.)

Even more troubling, in keeping with the administration's attempts to make Amnesty International this week's Newsweek, our president also put the blame for the "absurd" recent Amnesty report about our dismaying recent proclivity for torture squarely on the shoulders of "people who hate America." As Sidney Blumenthal notes, "It may be of minor ironic interest that before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cited Amnesty International's reports on Saddam Hussein's violations of human rights as unimpeachable texts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often claimed Amnesty as his ultimate authority."

"The pattern of the South's Reconstruction, more than the pattern of Japan's, has anticipated occupations elsewhere -- above all in Iraq, where some supporters of the old regime participate in a campaign of terror even as a long-oppressed and newly enfranchised group struggles to claim power. What are the lessons of our own self-reconstruction?" By way of The Late Adopter (who, darn it, beat me to the great "Fables of the Reconstruction" post-title), historian and Promise of the New South author Edward Ayers discusses the applicability of Reconstruction to current events.

"'There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly,' said an influential Republican member of Congress. 'The term I hear most often is "tin ear," ' especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gasoline prices. 'We could not have a worse message at a worse time.'" The WP wonders aloud if Dubya's already in lame duck territory. One can only hope. Update: Dubya pushes back.

The Bush administration announces they're going to reevaluate their anti-terrorism strategies. To put it mildly, "[t]he policy review marks what many experts regard as a belated shift." Well, perhaps a good place to start would be looking harder at who we sell weapons to, so we as advocates of freedom around the world aren't forced to explain away situations like the recent massacre in Uzbekistan. (2nd link via Looka.)

Still waiting in vain for the White House to turn over some crucial intelligence documents regarding Dubya's pick, the Dems succeed in holding off the Bolton vote until next week. The GOP moderates still don't seem to be joining Voinovich in apostasy, though, so it looks like Bolton will soon be representing us before the world. For shame.

A day after Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) excoriated the pick in print, the Bolton nomination goes before the full Senate. (Alas, despite Voinovich's letter, the GOP looks likely to fall in line.)

"After hours of deliberation, telephone calls, personal conversations, reading hundreds of pages of transcripts, and asking for guidance from Above, I have come to the determination that the United States can do better than John Bolton." Nevertheless, Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) will let the Bolton nod go to a floor vote, arguing he has "every faith in [his] colleagues" to do the right thing. (Sen. Chafee (R-RI), for his part, already reluctantly folded.) "Voinovich called Bolton 'the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.' He said Bolton would be fired if he was in the private sector." Update: Fred Kaplan has more: "A special place in the halls of cowardice should be reserved for Sen. Lincoln Chafee, the Republican from Rhode Island."

"Bush stopped short of accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill of outright perfidy, but his words recalled those of hardcore FDR- and Truman-haters circa 1945...Bush's cavalier invocations of history for political purposes are not surprising. But for an American president to dredge up ugly old canards about Yalta stretches the boundaries of decency and should draw reprimands (and not only from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.)" Slate's David Greenberg outlines Dubya's recent mischaracterization of the Yalta conference. Well, Dubya doesn't even seem to understand diplomacy now, so why would he understand it then?

"If the president believes what he said, he doesn't comprehend the nature of either crisis. If he doesn't believe it and was just reciting the usual grab bag of cliches, what was his point?" As more questions arise about John Bolton's temperamental fitness for UN ambassador, Slate's Fred Kaplan wonders aloud if Bolton's boss "gets" diplomacy either.

Meanwhile, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee inquiry into John Bolton widens, a deeply concerned Dubya and the GOP now threaten to sidestep the concerns of Dems and moderate Republicans completely by bringing Bolton's nomination to a floor vote, regardless of the committee's recommendation. Hopefully Senators Voinovich, Hagel, and Chafee, as well as other independent-minded Senators in the Republican Party, will take serious umbrage at this attempt to ride roughshod over the committee's usual advise & consent prerogatives.

As more ugly details leak out about John Bolton's private war with dissenting intelligence analysts, Newsweek reports that England (and Jack Straw) think he's a jackass too. Is it time for Dubya & Cheney to pull the plug? Many observers think so. Update: Arlen Specter wonders aloud about Bolton's prospects on CNN Late Edition.

Dubya & Cheney may still love the guy, but right-wing freakshow John Bolton has clearly irked former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who bore the brunt of Bolton's obfuscation in the past. Will Powell's not-very-off-the-record contempt be enough to sway Sens. Chafee, Hagel, and Voinovich?

Now that Sen. Voinovich has bravely put his foot in the door, GOP Senator Lincoln Chafee also declares he's less likely to vote for John Bolton at this point. But, judging from his remarks today, Dubya isn't getting the message. After embracing the Hammer earlier this week, one wonders how many more radioactive liabilities the White House is willing to continue accommodating. At a certain point, even this administration's considerable arrogance of power will have to bow to political reality.

"It's a good guess that one of two things is going to happen in the coming days and weeks: Either Bolton goes down -- or we start learning a lot of unpleasant things about Sen. George Voinovich." (And, right now, it's looking like the latter.) To his credit, Senator Voinovich (R-OH) follows his conscience and admits "real concern" about John Bolton, forcing the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to forestall the vote on Bolton's nomination. And, if Slate's Fred Kaplan is correct and Bolton has perjured himself, Dubya had better start warming up another right-wing freakshow for the post.

More troubling information piles up about John Bolton, Dubya's dubious UN pick -- Apparently, along with trying to spike the careers of analysts who talk back to him, Bolton has been blocking the flow of important information to Dubya's Secretaries of State. It's gotten to the point where Chuck Hagel (R-NE), one of the more rational Republicans in the Senate, has begun to voice his doubts about the candidate, although he still plans to vote for him tomorrow.

"'I'm as conservative as John Bolton is,' Ford said. 'But the fact is that the collateral damage and the personal hurt that he causes is not worth the price that had to be paid.'" A former State Department intelligence chief, described in the WP as "a loyal Republican, a staunch supporter of Bush and a 'huge fan' of Vice President Cheney," entreats the Senate to reject Bolton as UN Ambassador. (Alas, the GOP members don't seem to be biting.)

"In short, John Bolton came off as strikingly lacking in the credibility, values, and basic commitment that, especially these days, the job of U.N. ambassador requires." Slate's Fred Kaplan, a frequent critic of Dubya's freak show choice for UN ambassador, sizes up Bolton's performance before the Senate today.

"The case against Bolton, which has been made here a few times, rests not so much on his ultra-neoconservatism (an insufficient disqualification on its own) or on his past criticism of the United Nations (the organization merits criticism). Rather, it boils down to his long-standing attacks on the principles underlying the United Nations and to his wholesale rejection of the legitimacy, propriety, and even the political expediency of international law, which, after all, is the United Nations' currency of enforcement." With an editorial Hail Mary, Slate's Fred Kaplan pleads with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote down on John Bolton as UN Ambassador. We can only hope.

"I'd give it a 50-50 shot that you could find it somewhere underground. But then that's a guess." The NYT surveys the current thinking about prospects of Martian life, and how astrobiologists plan to go about proving or disproving its existence. (To wit, the European Space Agency plans to send an tricked-up rover to the red planet after 2011...hopefully, it'll get past the Dubya Pentagon's rash of Moonraker weapons.) Update: In somewhat related news (to the second story), Slate's Fred Kaplan assesses the Pentagon's overly enthusiastic vision for ground-based future tech.

R.I.P. George Kennan 1904-2005. The nation has lost one of its senior diplomatic statesmen, at a moment when men and women of his wisdom, judgment, and foreign policy experience are needed in the public arena more than ever. He will be missed.

While the GOP may have bent the rules to facilitate passage of the ANWR drilling bill (set for a vote today), it appears they face a Senate shutdown by the Dems if they keep pressing on Dubya's wacko judicial appointees. And why not? Dubya has revealed he's not going to relent on Social Security PSAs, despite their unpopularity, and he continues to appoint controversial right-wing neocons like Paul Wolfowitz to top positions (in this case, the World Bank.) If Dubya and the Right don't want to compromise, then we Dems shouldn't play ball. It's 1993 all over again. (That being said, it's probably wise of Reid to keep legislation "supporting our troops" out of the boycott...FOX News would have a field day with that one.) Update: By a 51-49 vote, the Senate opens ANWR to drilling, with Dems Daniel Akaka, (D-HI), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) putting the GOP over the top.

Update 2: Slate's Fred Kaplan has more on the Wolfowitz pick.


Update 3: Conservative George Will warns against GOP tampering with the filibuster rule.

It's been Extreme Makeover time lately for the GOP, with Antonin Scalia acting chummy in hopes of landing the Chief Justice spot, Boss DeLay dismissing the recent allegations of incessant boondogglery, Karen Hughes coming out of mothballs to sell the Islamic world on Dubya, and the administration trying to sell the rest of us on pre-packaged news. I'm not buying any of it.

"There's no such thing as the United Nations...if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." So Dubya has picked John Bolton as our new UN ambassador and, guess what? Yep, he's a right-wing freakshow. Said avowed UN enemy and former Sen. Jesse Helms (no, not yet) of Bolton: He's "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon." Brilliant. (CLW link via BookNotes & Digby) Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan has more.

Despite inducing peals of laughter with his "ridiculous" doublespeak on Iran, Dubya's "We're Team Players" European tour continues to generate mostly good international press for the administration. Along those lines, I particularly liked this gem from the LA Times: "Talk of Bush is often imbued with suspicion. But unlike two years ago, German critics are less likely to compare him to Hitler." Hey now, that's progress.

I was at the movies during Dubya's State of the Union address -- I tried to watch it online this evening after my Radicalism sections, but Quicktime died in mid-sentence, so I just ended up reading it. And, while I thought it was very well-written as per the norm, my thoughts on the address have been colored even more than usual by the punditocracy. So, with that in mind, I'll avoid being derivative and just direct y'all to the following:

• Fred Kaplan: "Some of the president's statements on national security were simply puzzling. Again on Iran, he said, 'We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium-enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing.' This is just false."



• Chris Suellentrop: "You could call Bush's idea the Screw Your Grandchildren Act...This was the Greatest Love of All speech, in which Bush asserted that The Children Are Our Future. But before you sign on to Bush's proposal, be aware that what he's offering is pretty tough love."



• Will Saletan: "Tonight's State of the Union Address demonstrated again that President Bush is a man of very clear principles. He's just flexible about when to apply them."



• Joe Conason: "Although George W. Bush and the White House aides who craft these public spectacles become increasingly adept at manipulating the feelings of his audience every year, their underlying method remains the same: to shade inconvenient realities with rhetorical vagueness and outright deception."



• E.J. Dionne: "Our country could profit from an honest debate about the future of Social Security. Judging from President Bush's State of the Union address, that is not the kind of debate we are about to have."

"The sources of this anarchism [the Columbine massacre] are 30 years of liberal social policy that has put our children in day care, taken God out of the schools, taken Mom out of the house, and banished Dad as an authority figure from the family altogether." Slate's Fred Kaplan introduces us to J.D. Crouch, conservative freakshow and, naturally, the new deputy national security adviser. In case you were wondering about his foreign policy inclinations, Crouch also appears to be against missile treaties and, er, pro-chemical weapons.

"Auschwitz, great...are the Packers playing?" By all that is good and holy, what was Dick Cheney thinking? It's the 60th anniversary of liberation from that Hell on Earth, and our veep, as the Post wryly put it, "was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower." Even at occasions where it seems well nigh impossible to make the US role in world affairs look bad, this administration plays the Ugly American to the hilt. For shame.

"'I really don't like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly,' Mr. Dayton said." In a display of dissent that bodes well for the Dems' outlook in the coming term, several Senate Dems -- most notably Ted Kennedy, Mark Dayton, Carl Levin, Evan Bayh, Robert Byrd, and Barbara Boxer -- use the Condi hearings to call out the administration on Iraq. (Newcomer Ken Salazar and Joe Lieberman, on the other hand, rolled over immediately.) Update: She's through, but not before racking up the most No votes (13) in 180 years (since the "Corrupt Bargain" backlash against Henry Clay in 1825.)

Alright, enough partying...let's get it on! In keeping with the conclusions of Sy Hersh's recent New Yorker piece, Cheney stops by Imus before the inauguration to rattle the saber at Iran (using Israel as the bad cop.) I can see it now -- Iran: We're really pretty sure this time they've got WMD. Update: Iran rattles back.

"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." Really? Well, dang, that was easy. But who's going to break the news to China, Russia, and the Saudis, for starters? As per many of Michael Gerson's Big-Moment speeches, Dubya's Second Inaugural was a well-crafted piece of prose with some nice rhetorical flourishes and an eye to history. But, stylistic flair aside, Dubya might as well have been declaring himself the President of Mars, for all the grounding this speech had in contemporary reality.

"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Freedom...I can dig it. Reminds me of the end of Braveheart. But, as Slate's Fred Kaplan already aptly questioned, "What is this thing called 'freedom'?...Does 'freedom' always mean a Western-style, or pro-American, democracy? Whatever freedom is, how do we go about spreading it?" And, for that matter, isn't this the guy who once told us there "ought to be limits to freedom?"

I know we shouldn't expect nuance from this president, but today's speech was even worse than usual (as well as being somewhat distasteful, given the very real problems with "freedom" Iraq is facing right now.) The only things I learned from Dubya's speech are that freedom rains down like a benediction (in fact, exactly like a benediction) on the peoples of the world, and, whatsmore, that evildoers hate them some freedom. And that was about it. Seriously, he sounded like he was kicking off that goofy rave in the second Matrix.



On the domestic side, I was somewhat surprised that Bush didn't push the Ownership Society meme a little harder -- he only mentioned it once -- but I guess that'll probably get more run in the upcoming State of the Union. (Perhaps he didn't want anyone reminded of Colin Powell's "You Break it, You Own it" Pottery Barn rule when they were supposed to be drinking in the sweet, sweet freedom.) That being said, Bush did manage to squeeze in some Grade-A chum for the pro-lifers -- "always remember that even the unwanted have worth" -- which he then half-heartedly tried to mask with a plea to end racism. (Freedom, yeah! Bigotry, no! Serenity now! I think I got it.)

All in all, the inaugural wasn't an embarrassing speech as delivered -- Gerson's too good at his job for that. But, like too much in this administration, it was all style and no substance, offering false simplicity and sanctimony in the place of good ideas or hard-won truths. In short, it was just like Dubya.

Monica who? On the eve of Dubya II, Salon's Peter Dizikes offers a short but comprehensive list of this administration's scandals thus far. Thirty-four and counting...not that you'd know it from watching the evening news.

As a US general cautions of "spectacular" attacks prior to the Iraq election, the commander of our forces declares that 4 of 18 Iraqi provinces are not secure enough to hold the vote, and even Bush I consigliere Brent Scowcroft warns of an "incipient civil war" to follow them, what does Dubya do? Well, what do you expect? "'Democracy is hard,' Mr. Bush said in a brief question-and-answer session...'I know it's hard, but it's hard for a reason. And the reason it's hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.'" Dang them evildoers, always making foreign affairs so needlessly complex.

All the news that's fit to print...According to the NYT, "Mr. Bush never lingers at much of anything, but he really doesn't linger in museums and at historical sites." Nope, can't say that's much of a shocker.

For those of you who've considered moving to Canada after recent events, sorry...it looks like Dubya beat y'all to it. As with his recent trip to England, "Bush will not make a customary speech at the House of Commons in Ottawa where the sometimes raucous Parliament has been known to heckle speakers." Well, you know how the Prez gets all kinds of incoherent in front of unscreened audiences, even with that strange bulge taped to his back.

"Intent on using his capital to secure his place in history, Bush may finally pass a right-wing social agenda, an entitlement reform agenda and a neoconservative foreign policy...And by enacting his program, Bush may dash conservatives' hopes for a lasting Republican majority." With trouble already brewing among House conservatives, Columbia PhD, former FCC colleague, and Gipper scholar Matthew Dallek contrasts Dubya's governance with that of Reagan, and finds the former wanting, to say the least.

Stick a fork in him, and say goodbye to what semblance of multilateralism has existed in the Dubya era. To Rummy's relish (and to no one's surprise) Colin Powell's ignominious tenure at State is through. Seemingly well-intentioned but weak and sidelined most of the time, Powell's tour at State will probably be best remembered for his losing battles with the Neocons and his embarrassing and misleading performance before the United Nations in 2003.

Following Powell out the door are Education Secretary Rod Paige, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Margaret Spellings, Dubya's domestic policy advisor, is taking Paige's gig...I dread to think who else will sign on for Dubya II. Ken Lay at Energy? John Danforth has been mentioned as a possible Powell replacement, but, heck, why not pull Helms out of mothballs? Update: Looks like it's Condi...and more of the same.

The dollar tanking? No problemo for this administration, who see a weak dollar as key to offsetting our ballooning trade deficits. "The unsettling worry, however, is what could happen if foreigners suddenly lost interest in holding dollar-denominated investments. The outward rush from U.S. stock and bond markets could send stock prices crashing and interest rates soaring." Well, at least my college loan debt isn't in Euros.

Hope is on the...wait, what's this? Oops, sorry about that. Turns out Hope took a wrong turn and got lost somewhere back there in Idiotville. Welcome to Despairtown, baby.

So, that's that, then...the Idiot Wind blows anew. The American electorate has spoken and -- despite all the shadiness and incompetence of the past four years -- has given Dubya and his cronies the imprimatur to go hog-wild. 51-48%...this is pretty much a mandate, folks. (Big of those Red Staters to ensure that we will be woefully unprepared for the next terrorist attack on a Blue State.) Y'know, H.L. Mencken's whole Tyranny of the Booboisie schtick has always grated on my lefty sensibilities, but at this point I have to admit he may have been on to something.

Ugh. I'm too young to remember 1984 very well, but I'm curious as to how last night and this morning compared for America's Left. (I've since been reminded by several people I trust that 1968 and 1972 were much more grievous blows.) Thing is, 2004 started out with such promise over here. But, right around the time I ended up on crutches in May, events personal and political took a nasty turn, and the past few months have been some of the most dismal I can remember. Now, it seems, I may just look back on this time as relatively calm and worry-free.

But, ok, enough wallowing...let's start taking it frame-by-frame. Given the war, the economy, and Dubya's obvious incompetence, how on Earth did we lose this election? Well, give credit where credit is due...all this exit-talk of "moral values" proves that Karl Rove pulled off his gambit: He got the extra 4 million evangelical votes he was targeting, partly, it seems, by judiciously invoking rampant anti-gay hysteria. Yet, for some reason or another -- a lousy ground game, perhaps? -- the Dems inexplicably didn't counter with extra votes of our own.

Where do we go from here? The Dems are facing an ugly Rule of Four...We lost four seats in the Senate, at least four seats in the House, and likely four seats in the Supreme Court. Whatsmore, we now appear officially dead in the water in the South and Midwest. And, with Kerry and Daschle gone, our standard-bearers now appear to be Hillary Clinton (about whom the country has already made up its mind), John Edwards (whom I still admire, but he couldn't carry his home state), and Barrack Obama (who's probably too inexperienced to make much headway in 2008.)

Obviously, it's now well past time for the serious party overhaul we should've began last cycle, when Al Gore had an election stolen from him that he should have won hands down. Daschle & Gephardt are already in the dustbin of history, and Terry McAuliffe should probably follow them there. I for one don't think Howard Dean was or is the answer, but he's one of the only people injecting new blood and enthusiasm into the party right now, so he should have a seat at the table. Right now, I think Edwardsian populism is our strongest ideological card, but as I said, it didn't seem to make much headway last night.

Silver lining? Yeah, right. Well, as this Washington Monthly forum noted in September, second terms are notoriously scandal-prone (Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica), partly out of press boredom, and Dubya's ilk seem particularly scandal-worthy...perhaps we'll finally hear a little more about Halliburton. I'm sure there'll be no shortage of horrifying policy decisions emanating from this administration that'll keep lefty blogs like this one in business. And, on a purely selfish note, my likely dissertation topic on the fortunes of progressivism in the twenties is now seeming much more sexy in the wake of last night's 1928-like cultural divide. Of course, none of these are really any consolation at all.

At any rate, I generally believe that America tends to get the president it deserves. So, God help us, we've brought this upon ourselves. And now, for we 48%, the hard work begins...we have to lick our wounds, get our act together, and figure out how we can best combat the rightward drift that's afflicting our nation. Alas, I fear Dubya will do much of the heavy lifting for us, by running the nation further into the ground over the next four years. Still, we gotta keep on keeping on, y'all. I do not believe this darkness will endure.

By way of Looka and The Nation, 100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration. If you know any undecideds out there, this might be a good one to share.

Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor and consigliere to Bush I, decries Dubya's diplomacy in the Financial Times, calling Iraq a "failed venture" and questioning this administration's penchant for unilateralism.

"The senator now says we'd have to pass some international truth standard." Um, well, yes, we do. As Will Saletan points out, in the final three weeks of the campaign, Dubya is now explicitly running against reality. The reality is, it's time for this faith-based administration to go.

An hour after tonight's town hall debate in St. Louis, the immediate spin seems to be that it was a draw, mainly because Dubya didn't scowl and sputter to the extent he did last time around. (The "soft bigotry of low expectations" strikes again.) But it must be a Two Americas thing, 'cause that's not the debate I saw...most of the time I was waiting for Rove and Cheney to run on stage, hold a light to Dubya's eyes, and squirt some water in his mouth. As before, John Kerry radiated calm, determination, and a quick, roving intelligence. In a word, leadership. Dubya, on the other hand, was once again all hat and no cattle, trying to shirk, smirk, weasel, bluster, and lie his way through the proceedings. "Flip-flopper," "global test," tax-and-spend, etc...Dubya sought to evade every single question about his dismal record with a insult or a threat, even going so far as to throw around "Liberal" desperately, a word still verboten since his Daddy ran it through the mud in '88.

Kerry's been surging since last Thursday, and I expect it'll continue after tonight. But I confess, I really can't wrap my mind around how anyone could have watched tonight's event and think Bush would be the better choice between these two men. With the possible exception of the canned Red Sox quip, there wasn't a moment when Kerry didn't seem presidential and didn't hold the upper hand. And, as for Dubya...based on tonight, I wouldn't trust this guy to run the local chapter of the Elks, much less the Oval Office. No mistakes made at all, Mr. President? Who wants a President so blatantly unreflective about life-and-death decisions? I mean, he could have at least tried to look one up on the Internets. Would forgetting about your timber company count as a mistake?

That being said, I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that, when considering the inevitable Supreme Court appointments over the next four years, Dubya has at least promised not to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford. Phew! Say what you will about Dubya's godawful judicial nominees, at least we know they'll hold up the Thirteenth Amendment. (Civil rights and civil liberties, of course, are another matter...) Update: Ok, now I get it. It was a coded pro-life message to the right-wing fundies. (Via Blivet.) Update 2: Tim Noah talks more about Dred.

Well, to my partisan eye, Dick Cheney proved time and time again in tonight's sole veep debate that he's not only an inveterate liar but a major-league asshole. (Yeah, big time.) Iraq ("It's going great!"), Osama ("We never stopped going after him!"), the homefront ("Things are looking up!"), you name it...the guy just seems to have no compunction about dissembling flat-out to the American people. Said the veep early on, "The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." Really, Dick? How were we supposed to take Saddam "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda" then? Similarly, the audacity of Dick Cheney attacking John Kerry for voting against weapons systems he himself opposed is simply staggering.

From lies to misdirection. How did Cheney try to explain away Halliburton's sweetheart no-bid Iraq contracts, and the subsequent looking askance at their egregious overbilling of the American people? "Um, John, I've never seen you around the Senate before." (Not true, of course, but nice of Dick to send voters to the Soros-run FactCheck.com rather than FactCheck.org, though.) And, when Edwards skewered the veep with his own voting record from back in the day -- no to Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and the Education Dept, no to MLK Day and to condemning apartheid(?!) -- what was Cheney's answer? "Oh, I think his record speaks for itself." You're damn right it does, as does yours.

All that being said, I thought Edwards missed a few chances to put the hurt on Cheney in the early going, and should have responded harder to the ridiculous "facing-up-to-Howard Dean" riff. And he didn't really hit his stride until the domestic-policy-oriented second half, when less-interested swing voters out there had probably started tuning out. (Conversely, I thought Cheney self-destructed for awhile there, mumbling about No Child Left Behind in a question about jobs.) So, while my gut (and the insta-polling) say Edwards took this one, I'm guessing the numbers in the next few days will show a draw, if only because Cheney seemed at least somewhat cognizant of the world around him, unlike his running mate. Next stop: Friday.

Well, to give credit where it's due, Dubya has clearly improved as a debater since 2000. While occasionally flustered and often seeming petulant, he never seemed as confused and inarticulate as he did in his jousts with Gore...in fact, I'd go so far to say that he even occasionally seemed wily. Still, given the artifice of the format, it's hard to see how John Kerry could have done much better in tonight's first debate. After the first question or so, Kerry seemed calm, collected, forceful and resolute, and he managed to make succinct and readily understandable distinctions between he and Dubya throughout. For undecided voters who imbibed all the RNC's garbage a month ago and were expecting another Dukakis Dem in John Kerry, I suspect they may have begun reevaluating him tonight. And, when you consider that the terrain of this debate most facilitated Dubya's "9/11, 9/11, 9/11" strategy, Kerry's got nowhere to go but up.

Aside from the Philippines, Nigeria, and Poland, the world wants John Kerry by a landslide. Undecided voters out there, you know how you can "Ask the Audience" on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire when you're stumped? Consider it like that.

"Democracy matters are frightening in our time precisely because the three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy." By way of Rebecca's Pocket and DangerousMeta, Princeton philosopher (and Matrix Elder) Cornel West weighs in on the dangers of Dubyaism.

"'We're at the height of the Roman Empire for the Republican Party...[but i]f we continue to lose 90 percent of the African American vote -- and I got 7 percent -- if we continue to lose 65 percent of the Hispanic vote, we're toast...Just look at the electoral map.'" With or without a second term for Dubya, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel see trouble ahead for the GOP. Notes Hagel: "The Republican Party has come loose of its moorings."

Well, with talk of deregulation, privatizing Social Security, tax code "simplification", anti-gay and pro-life rhetoric, "Hollywood value" and "activist judge" hectoring...all punctuated by that off-putting and consistently out-of-place chimp smirk, you can't say Dubya didn't warn us about his plans for a ultra-conservative second term last night. (And for a man who was heroic enough to stop circling Nebraska and venture down to Ground Zero three long days after 9/11, he seemed amazingly ready to bolt-and-run at the sign of one measly protestor.)

Not much was said about Dubya's first four years in office, of course, aside from 9/11 (9/11, 9/11) and the usual conflation of Al Qaeda and Saddam. But, really, what can he say? Deficits through the roof, the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover, 1000 men and women dead in a needless diversion of a war...His administration has been an embarrassment of historic proportions. And it is time for him to go. (Dubya video via I'm Just Sayin'.)

As the dust settles from the GOP convention and Tom DeLay emerges from hiding, the truth starts coming back to light. Naturally, Dubya's speech had serious problems with reality and the GOP severely distorted Kerry's voting record. Obviously, Cheney and the Zellout were full of it. More surprisingly, however, Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently doesn't know Austria from a hole in the ground.

"If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican." If you believe that rich people deserve tax breaks while the middle-class struggle harder and the poor send their kids to war, then you are a Republican. If you believe that cutting First Responder, Homeland Security, and Nunn-Lugar funding, lying bald-faced to our allies before the UN, letting Osama Bin Laden disappear into the caverns of Afghanistan, and contriving a casus belli to start a war in Iraq that has further alienated the moderate Muslim world is sound anti-terror strategy, then you are a Republican. If you believe an extramarital blow job is an impeachable offense, but dissembling to the American people about war is hunky-dory, then you are a Republican. If you believe God loves you, but He hates gays, liberals, and foreigners, then you are a Republican. If you're an immigrant bodybuilder who made it to the top of his field through hard work, discipline, and the judicious application of enough steroids to kill a small horse, then you are a Republican. And if you're a serial groper who was befuddled enough to think Nixon was a good idea in 1968 and who somehow earnestly believes that the GOP hasn't moved much further right since the days of Tricky Dick, then you are Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Iraq's Olympic soccer team ask to be removed from Bush re-election ads. "'My problems are not with the American people,' says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. 'They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything.'" Sorry, y'all...it's just that Dubya has very little to fall back on these days. It's not like he can campaign on his domestic record.

"Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so." Ron Reagan eviscerates George W. Bush in Esquire.

Postponing Election Day?!? You must be joking. Are "the terrorists" going to infiltrate every middle school gymnasium and public library in the country, counting extra votes for Kerry and offsetting Dubya's Diebold advantage? We held elections in this nation in 1864, 1944, 1968...surely we can handle 2004.

Whatsmore, what's all this talk of terrorists determining the election anyway? When are the Bushies going to realize that Osama Bin Laden and his ilk probably prefer Dubya in office? No other man could have so brazenly squandered the enormous international reservoir of post-9/11 goodwill, so thoroughly fractured the natural alliance of the West against terrorism, or so decisively set the moderate Muslim world against the United States. For Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush is a godsend. For three and a half long years, he's been a divider, not a uniter.

Postponing Election Day...my Lord, what tripe. Yes, I know Homeland Security is covering its bases by arguing that they're just thinking out loud. Well, it's still a terrible idea, and a particularly tone-deaf one coming from an administration who came into office so ignominiously with Bush v. Gore. Forget Warren Harding or even Richard Nixon -- this presidency has earned its place since that 5-4 decision as the most corrupt in our nation's history. They have to be shown the door on Election Day, and not a day later.

Well, I'm a bit behind on this one, but I finally got out of the apartment to catch Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday afternoon. And the verdict? Well, it's undoubtedly an extremely powerful piece of cinema. And, judging from the reactions of the afternoon crowd, it looks as if it might do some real good in crystallizing popular discontent with the Bush administration outside of the blog-world echo chamber. Still, even though I know Moore is playing by the rules set by right-wing freak shows like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, I found myself wishing at times that he had played F911 a little straighter. Simply put, Dubya and his cronies are guilty of so much blatant incompetence and documentable malfeasance that it's disappointing that Moore feels he has to rely on cheapshots and push-button emotions some of the time.

If you've been keeping up with pretty much any lefty blog since 2000 (including this one), the central and most powerful allegations made here -- that Dubya and the Neocons played bait-and-switch on the American people in Iraq and used 9/11 as a pretext for all kinds of terrible legislation, while doing pathetically little to minimize the actual threat of terrorism -- will not come as a surprise. Still, when the data is laid out before you here like ducks in a row, from the Florida fiasco in 2000 through to the recent stonewalling of the 9/11 commission a few weeks ago, the continued pattern of incompetence and mendacity that has characterized this administration becomes unmistakably clear. As the story unfolds, Moore offers plenty of intriguing footage -- Bush's 7 minutes of Pet Goat superfluousness may perhaps be overemphasized by now, but it's still out-and-out eerie. Equally damning is footage of Dubya at the ranch a month prior to 9/11, in which he has absolutely no clue what his agenda is for the day and, whatsmore, doesn't seem to much care (particularly when contrasted with his obvious enthusiasm for armadillos exhibited a few scenes later.)

But while there are plenty of blows landed, I ultimately thought that Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been much more impressive if it had focused more closely on the facts and avoided the more obvious attempts at sentiment. For example, instead of examining in detail the clear civil liberties transgressions occurring at the Gitmo Gulag and elsewhere under the Patriot Act, or noting the discrepancies in its enforcement (no gun checks?) under Attorney General-cum-balladeer John Ashcroft, Moore spends too much time interviewing an aging weightlifter and various Fresno peace activists -- all of whom have run afoul of goofy anti-terrorist inquiries -- for laughs. Similarly, instead of talking about Dubya's spiking of the Nunn-Lugar act or his continued cutting of First Responder funding, the film dinks around Western Oregon with two underfunded deputies - as a result, I thought the larger point about Bush's failure to protect the homeland was lost.

As the film moves overseas, the problems with F911 become more evident. Regarding the war in Afghanistan, Moore talks about a proposed UNOCAL pipeline to the exclusion of virtually anything else, which I think invites charges of shrillness (Exhibit A: The Bonanza riff) and blurs one of the most serious charges against this administration - that it gave up a chance to catch Osama Bin Laden in order to play regime change in Iraq. Speaking of Baghdad, I think Moore would have done better to talk more about missing WMD and lies to the UN and spent less time with Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a deceased US soldier. This last section of the film is undeniably powerful, but it also feels extremely manipulative, particularly as it's hard to envision very many situations where a mother's grief wouldn't be harrowing to behold. (The same goes for the grisly scenes of charred bodies and horrifically wounded Iraqi children.)

Still, what do I know? Perhaps Fahrenheit 9/11 needs these human touches to get its point across to a larger audience, a goal which it so far seems to be accomplishing with great aplomb. The fact is, Michael Moore can undoubtedly be a blowhard with grating populist pretensions, but if we had any semblance of a functioning national media these days, Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been a non-event. In the absence of anything like an independently critical television press, and given the existence of such a well-oiled, well-funded right-wing propaganda machine these days, perhaps somebody out there had to co-opt conservative talk-radio techniques to get the message out. I'm more of a "destroy the ring" than a "use the ring" kinda guy, but, as I said, what do I know? I could write in this space a hundred times over and still never reach an infinitesimal fraction of the people who will see this film and be newly angered by the idiotic and unethical behavior of this administration.

In short, if a picture is worth a 1000 words, this film is worth 10,000 blogs - by stringing so many of the Bush-bashing beads together in such entertaining and moving fashion, Fahrenheit 9/11 should bring the heart of the anti-Dubya critique right to the Heartland. I just wish it had covered its flank a little better by sticking to the cold, hard facts about the national embarrassment of historic proportions that is George W. Bush, rather than indulging every so often in cheap laughs and reflexive sentiment.

In the dead of night (EST), and quieter than the Teddy Bear's picnic, the Bushies handed Iraq over to the interim government two days early. I agree with Slate's Fred Kaplan - this actually seems like a good call for once by the Bushies. I guess they already figured out how much trouble the "Mission Accomplished" banner can cause.

Unfortunately, the diplomatic savvy on display in this surreptitious Iraq transfer hasn't extended to other world hotspots, as Kaplan notes with North Korea. "By his own careless arrogance," writes Kaplan, Dubya "has stunningly mishandled this confrontation. He has allowed North Korea—the most rickety spoke on his "axis of evil," a dangerous regime by any measure -- to reach the crest of becoming a nuclear power. He has dismissed numerous opportunities to nip this disaster in the bud. And now he comes up with an old formula that evades the recent shift in the balance." (The disarmament deal proffered by the Bushies now is insubstantially different from the one suggested by President Clinton a decade ago, the one pooh-poohed by Dubya upon his arrival into the Oval Office.)

Cheney drops an F-bomb in the Senate and likes it (naturally, the GOP moral arbiters don't care, despite their tsk-tsking Kerry after an earlier outburst.) Meanwhile Dubya loses his temper on Irish TV when asked relatively basic questions about the failures of his Iraq policy. Yes, folks, these people are in charge.

Dubya jumps in the polls after Reagan's photo-op funeral, and decides to celebrate by lying about Iraq and 9/11 all over again. C'mon, y'all Republican moralists out there...Where's the outrage? Clinton was impeached for far less, and we already know the Baptists won't put up much of a fuss.

The 9/11 commission concludes that Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and the planning of the September 11 attacks. Wow, are you serious? Who knew?

"Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted." A bipartisan group of 26 diplomats and military men call out Dubya Diplomacy for causing irreparable harm to the republic, and the statement is heady stuff. "The Bush Administration has shown that it does not grasp these circumstances of the new era, and is not able to rise to the responsibilities of world leadership in either style or substance. It is time for a change."

In a speech before graduates of the Air Force Academy, Dubya compares the war on terror to WWII. And, a day after being called out by Dana Milbank for his straw men, Bush is at it again: "Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours." Is that really the central argument being made by those dubious of our foray into Iraq? I don't think so.

Well, it's a well-run campaign, midget'n broom'n whatnot. The Washington Post scrutinizes the Bush campaign's continued resort to misleading attacks and outright lies when discussing Kerry's record. And, in related news, Dana Milbank (one of the co-writers of the article above), surveys Dubya's penchant for bashing straw men. "Bush is obviously not the first politician to paint his opponents' positions in absurd terms...But Bush has been more active than most in creating phantom opponents...[and]There seems to be no end to the crazy positions the straw men take."

"The problem is not that George W. Bush is discussing policy with people who press right-wing solutions to achieve peace in the Middle East, or with devout Christians. It is that he is discussing policy with Christians who might not care about peace at all - at least until the rapture." Rick Perlstein uncovers the Bush administration's recent meetings with Apocalyptic Christian zealots to discuss shifts in Israel policy.

"As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he's something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool." Slate writer and collector of malapropisms Jacob Weisberg psychoanalyzes Dubya's mental deficiencies and finds that Bush is less simple-minded than he is just intellectually lazy...and the Daddy issues don't help.

"Woodward reports that in July 2002 Bush ordered the use of $700 million to prepare for the invasion of Iraq, funds that had not been specifically appropriated by the Congress, which alone holds that constitutional authority. No adequate explanation has been offered for what, strictly speaking, might well be an impeachable offense." Sidney Blumenthal sees the behavior underlying Reagan's Iran-Contra fiasco revived, while law professor Cass Sunstein delves deeper into the illegality and unconstitutionality of Dubya's likely misappropriation of funds.

Did the awful 3/11 train bombing decide the recent Spanish election? Not so fast. My friend Luke of Expats against Bush happened to be visiting Barcelona during the recent attack, and his experience conforms closely with this Post article. Namely, it was Aznar's lousy spin job as much as the bombing which decided the election. And, let's be real -- Given that 90% of Spain was against continued involvement in the Iraq war prior to the attack, it's not as if the new government is coming out of nowhere with its decision to withdraw Spanish troops. Obviously, this act of terror didn't help matters for the Popular Party, but the foundation of this decision by the electorate was paved long before by George W. Bush's amateurish diplomacy. Instead of seeing common cause with our nation after a horrible terrorist attack, the Spanish people have been more repelled by Dubya's preemptive sideshow and his continued insults to international intelligence. At this point, if Bush really wants to figure out which world leaders would prefer John Kerry, all he has to do is look around.

In honor of President's Day (and by way of LinkMachineGo and WebGoddess), it's every politically-minded fanboy's favorite party game, Bush or Palpatine? Their overconfidence is their weakness.

In case you missed the State of the Union address last night, this cartoon anticipated the upshot: terror, terror, terror, 9/11, 9/11, fear, fear, fear, steroids, thank you, good night, and God bless the USA. It's wonder they didn't pass out little bloody shirts for the Congressional GOP to wave in unison. Well, while this New York Times news analysis of the speech sounds like it was written by the Bush campaign (he "quickly turned" to domestic issues? What is Todd Purdum talking about? Dubya was blathering on about scary, scary terrorists for at least 40 minutes), I gotta think that this speech might've played badly to any voters out there concerned about the economy, and this year as always, it's still the economy, stupid.

Building on the recent revelation by Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the administration started planning a war in Iraq immediately upon taking office -- a revelation that dovetailed all-too-well with the recent Carnegie Endowment report on the administration's WMD deceptions -- Senator Ted Kennedy puts the war in perspective. "President Bush said it all when a television reporter asked him whether Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction, or whether there was only the possibility that he might acquire them. President Bush answered, 'So what's the difference?' The difference, Mr. President, is whether you go to war or not. No President of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war. In doing so, the President broke the basic bond of trust between government and the people. If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war." Quite a good speech and worth a read, if nothing else than because no less a right-wing freak show than Tom De Lay found it "sad" and "disgusting."


In related news, Rick Perlstein examines Dubya's electoral exit strategy: "George Bush is selling out Iraq. Gone are his hard-liners' dreams of setting up a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic republic, a light unto the Middle Eastern nations. The decision makers in the administration now realize these goals are unreachable. So they've set a new goal: to end the occupation by July 1, whether that occupation has accomplished anything valuable and lasting or not. Just declare victory and go home...Such is the mess this president seems willing to leave behind in order to save his campaign."

In a hole in the ground lived a Hussein...until today. (There's also a Gimli joke in here somewhere, but let's not be too flippant.) Any way you cut it, this is excellent news. By capturing Saddam, we've struck a considerable blow against the continuing Iraqi resistance (even if this capture won't faze many anti-American groups joining in the fight.) By capturing him alive, we've prevented his martyrdom. By turning him over to an international tribunal, we can now help bridge the widening gaps between the US and the world on Iraq. (And, for the Dems, it's better for Saddam to have been found now, eleven months before the election, than for a October surprise later down the road.) Of course we still haven't found anything to suggest our WMD casus belli was legitimate, but hopefully this capture will make the situation in Iraq much more stable and less deadly for our troops abroad. And, while it might be too much to ask, perhaps it will encourage the Bush administration to refocus on capturing America's public enemy #1, Osama Bin Laden, before they launch any more military sideshows.

The Dubya administration ticks off the world again by attempting to freeze non-coalition countries out of rebuilding Iraq. They're dividers, not uniters.

As expected, Dubya is forced to capitulate on his earlier steel protectionism. "Employing relatively untested powers, the eight-year-old World Trade Organization authorized European and Asian nations to devise retaliatory tariffs against the United States, just 11 months before a presidential election. Not surprisingly, the Europeans pulled out an electoral map and proudly announced they would single out products made in the states Mr. Bush most needs to win a second term." Clever, clever.

So, unless Dubya capitulates to the WTO, it looks like his botched protectionist ploy for steel state votes is going to result in an all-out trade war with the EU. Nice going, y'all...exactly the type of leadership we've come to expect from the Bushies. My bet is they back down - After all, Florida orange-growers are a juicier segment of the electorate than West Virginia steelmakers.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, generally a straight shooter (despite being on the wrong side of campaign finance), calls out Congress for abdicating to Dubya's foreign policy. "We probably have given this president more flexibility, more latitude, more range, unquestioned, than any president since Franklin Roosevelt -- probably too much. The Congress, in my opinion, really abrogated much of its responsibility." Well said, Chuck...now when is your buddy John McCain going to say the same?

Facing the lowest numbers of his presidency and a increasingly troubling lack of WMD, Dubya fails to garner any new international support for the reconstruction of Iraq. And what did he expect, after waltzing into the UN and insulting the intelligence of the world? Amateur hour continues at our nation's peril.

In the bookmarks for awhile: James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom and current head of the AHA, criticizes Dubya's use of revisionist history and "revisionist history."

Not unlike most of the policies articulated by this administration, Dubya's protectionist steel tariff has backfired in every way possible. "The strategizing was 'too clever by half,' [Bruce] Bartlett, the [conservative] economist, said. 'It presupposed that nobody was watching what we were doing, and it presupposed that our credibility was of no importance.'" Sound familiar? But, hey, give credit where credit is due...under the Bushies, the rich are getting richer.

While Dubya tries in vain to muster international support for his "save the US" Iraq bailout plan, the NY Times portray the chilling consequences of his blunt unilateralism. For, in only two short years, the administration has completely squandered the considerable reservoirs of international goodwill that followed the wake of 9/11. It's troubling to think what a President with some understanding of the art of diplomacy could've accomplished in this time. Instead we've had a rank amateur at the helm, poisoning the image of our nation in the eyes of the world. In so doing, the Bushies have done America -- and American values -- a great disservice.

While he's still abusing the terrorism angle to hoodwink us on Iraq (As Howard Dean noted yesterday, the only indisputable thing Iraq has to do with terrorism is that we've now chosen it as the place where terrorists can attack us), Dubya at least admitted on nationwide television that unilaterally, we're in over our head, which I suppose amounts to what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity. Yet, with the necessary Iraq funds -- even lowballed as they are -- threatening to blow the deficit to $525 billion, I do hope that the Bushies realize that the responsibility and sacrifice they're expecting from the American people, our somewhat skeptical allies, and everyone but themselves in prosecuting this war should preclude any more discussion of a tax cut in the coming year. After all, why shouldn't America's wealthiest citizens also have to pay the heavy price for Dubya's blundering, incompetent, and hubris-ridden diplomacy on the road to war?

"As Paul Wolfowitz has all but admitted, the 'bureaucratic' reason for war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was not the main one. The real reason was to rebuild the pillars of American influence in the Middle East. Americans may have figured this out for themselves, but it was certainly not what they were told. Nor were they told that building this new pillar might take years and years. What they were told -- misleadingly and simplistically -- was that force was justified to fight 'terrorism' and to destroy arsenals of mass destruction targeted at America and at Israel." In a wide-ranging article for the NYT Magazine, Michael Ignatieff offers an historical critique of our currently muddled intervention policy, and outlines his own best-case-scenario proposal for US-led UN reform. "Putting the United States at the head of a revitalized United Nations is a huge task. For the United States is as disillusioned with the United Nations as the world is disillusioned with the United States. Yet...Pax Americana must be multilateral, as Franklin Roosevelt realized, or it will not survive."

Trapped in a quagmire of their own making, the Bushies beg the UN to help out in Iraq. Well, although he may not admit it now, I guess Sec. Powell deserves some cred for seeing the writing on the wall and trying to end a failed policy. But, let's be serious -- do we really expect the international community to snap to and take over the body count after the White House tried so hard to demean them and to undermine the UN as an institution along the road to war? Sheah. Although the GOP probably never expected it'd come to this, I'm afraid we will now reap the bitter rewards of Dubya's amateurish diplomacy.

�Up through January of 2003, the cooperation was topnotch,� a former State Department official said. �Then we were going to do Iraq, and some people in the Administration got heavy- handed. They wanted Syria to get involved in operational stuff having nothing to do with Al Qaeda and everything to do with Iraq. As Dubya accuses Syria of harboring terrorists, Sy Hersh examines the rise and fall of US-Syrian cooperation after 9/11.

Two interesting editorials in today's Globe: Derrick Jackson wonders aloud about the GOP's double standard on Presidential lies, while H.D.S. Greenway laments the diplomatic damage wrought by Dubya's ill-advised "axis of evil" rhetoric. Dishonest and incompetent...the total package.

What happened to free trade under Dubya? According to this article, it appears Bush prefers the frat trade approach -- help your buddies, stiff everyone else. Also in TNR, political scientist Daniel Drezner examines Dean's foreign policy, and finds more rigorous thinking than critics have given him credit for.