More Good News From Iraq

I was reading this article about all the recent violence in Iraq -- 10 American troops killed in two days -- and this paragraph jumped out at me:

Two Iraqi officials said that at least 250 gunmen were killed outside of Najaf during an intense battle. Iraqi officials said the gunmen were planning to attack the Shiite holy city of Najaf and assassinate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's top Shiite cleric. Contradictory reports emerged about the group, with some officials saying they were Sunni insurgents and others claiming they were members of various Shiite cults, including one that believes it can hasten the dawn of a new age by committing sins.

That's just great -- first our troops had to deal with the insurgency, and then an Iraqi civil war was added to the mix. Now the U.S. military has to also deal with a cult which believes that sinning is ultimately a good thing. If peace talks ever take place in Iraq, I hope these guys get a seat at the negotiating table. I'd love to hear some of their demands.

And what's up with this cult? Do all sins count as the same, or do really bad sins work to bring about the new age more quickly? And what if a member does a good deed for someone -- are acts of kindness frowned upon in this cult? Would too many acts of kindness somehow delay the onset of this new age?

Another Great Picture Of Comet McNaught

This one is also from Australia (now I understand why some folks down there mistakenly called this in as a fire):

Movie Version Of "The Road" In The Works

I've just finished reading "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. It's a rather bleak novel about a man and his young son struggling to survive in post-apocalyptic America. As I was reading this excellent book, I kept wondering whether someone would try to make it into a movie. The subject matter is pretty grim.

But it looks like a film version is in the works:

[P]roducer Nick Wechsler has rolled the dice and picked up film rights for what could be McCarthy's most controversial book yet, The Road.

Wechsler will use independent financing to put together the pic, which already has John Hillcoat (The Proposition) onboard to help develop and eventually direct. But why is it so controversial? Well, according to Variety's description, story revolves around a "post-apocalyptic nightmarish road trip of a man who tries to transport his son to safety while fending off starving stragglers and marauding packs of cannibals." Yeah, it appears the whole cannibal angle scared off potential studios, and so Wechsler set out to package this puppy up on the outside, something he's already used to. He says, "I've done quite a few movies lately this way, and it gives you the creative freedom and a more promising upside, especially on the DVD front."

Anyone who has both read "The Road" and seen The Proposition should be pleased that Hillcoat will be directing the screen version of McCarthy's novel. Although The Proposition was set in late 1800s Australia, it had the feel of a movie about a post-apocalyptic era. Guy Pearce played the lead in it, and I think he'd be a perfect choice to play the father character in the film version of The Road. In fact, the only thing he'd need to do differently is speak in an American accent.

If you haven't seen The Proposition (which is likely, given that it was only released in 200 American theaters last year), Roger Ebert's review can be found here. Ebert had some interesting things to say about it:

Have you read Blood Meridian, the novel by Cormac McCarthy? [The Proposition] comes close to realizing the vision of that dread and despairing story. The critic Harold Bloom believes no other living American novelist has written a book as strong and compares it with Faulkner and Melville, but confesses his first two attempts to read it failed, "because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage." * * *

Why do you want to see this movie? Perhaps you don't. Perhaps, like Bloom, it will take you more than one try to face the carnage. But the director John Hillcoat, working from a screenplay by Nick Cave, has made a movie you cannot turn away from; it is so pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence, that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from. The actors invest their characters with human details all the scarier because they scarcely seem human themselves. * * *

Sounds like they might have found the right director for The Road, given that Hillcoat's last movie was compared to a Cormac McCarthy novel.

And one thing about the aforementioned cannibalism in The Road: although there was a lot of references to cannibalism in the book -- the main characters were, after all, doing their best to avoid "marauding packs of cannibals" -- it just wasn't a big part of the story and it shouldn't have to be a big part of any film version either.

Maybe A Quick Trip To The Southern Hemisphere Might Be In Order

Comet McNaught from Australia (photo from SpaceWeather.com):

OK, So I Was Wrong About The Scooter Libby Trial

I thought the Scooter Libby trial wouldn't be worth following because Bush would certainly pardon Scooter if he was convicted so why waste any effort paying attention to it.

Man, was I wrong.

First of all, we get that remark made in opening statements by Scooter's attorney that Libby was sacrificed to save Karl Rove. This made me think that perhaps a pardon was not in Libby's future. And yesterday, we get this from the Washington Post:

Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you.

This delicious morsel about the "Meet the Press" host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under "pro," she wrote: "control message."

"I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used," Martin testified. "It's our best format."

OK, so that revelation wasn't exactly a bombshell, but it's certainly fun to hear it coming from a former BushCo insider -- I thought we'd have to wait years to hear about this type of stuff. And I really liked this part from the WaPo article: "With a candor that is frowned upon at the White House, Martin explained the use of late-Friday statements. 'Fewer people pay attention to it late on Friday,' she said. 'Fewer people pay attention when it's reported on Saturday.'" Plus, the whole Ari Fleischer immunity deal is pretty interesting. You can read more about all of this here.

But what has struck me most about this trial so far is how hyper-focused Cheney and the rest of the Bush Regime was in going after Ambassador Wilson. Sure, I knew it was a big issue for BushCo -- I've stated on this blog that if the Bush Regime dedicated a mere fraction of the time they spent going after political opponents to actually working to solve problems, then this country wouldn't be in the mess it is now -- but I am truly shocked by the extent of the administration's obsession with Ambassador Wilson. They obviously knew back then that Wilson was right, and history has, of course, proven that Wilson was correct.

Scooter's apparent defense to the perjury and obstruction charges is that he was so busy saving the country from terrorists that he simply forgot who said what and when it was said with regard to what he considered to be a very minor issue. It would be like Jack Bauer from "24" forgetting what kind of sandwich he was eating while he was torturing a suspect who knew the location of a suitcase nuke which was about to go off in downtown Los Angeles.

But the story that is coming out after a few days of trial is that this was a huge issue for Cheney and the rest of his administration, so it's going to be pretty hard for Scooter to convince a jury that he simply forgot a few minor points and wasn't actually lying to prosecutors, given that discrediting Wilson appeared to be a top priority for them at the time.

And with regard to Cheney, this is pretty interesting (although also not too surprising):

Vice President Dick Cheney exerted "constant" pressure on the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to stall an investigation into the Bush administration's use of flawed intelligence on Iraq, the panel's Democratic chairman charged Thursday. * * *

* * * Rockefeller said that it was "not hearsay" that Cheney, a leading proponent of invading Iraq, pushed Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to drag out the probe of the administration's use of prewar intelligence.

"It was just constant," Rockefeller said of Cheney's alleged interference. He added that he knew that the vice president attended regular policy meetings in which he conveyed White House directions to Republican staffers.

Republicans "just had to go along with the administration," he said.

In an e-mail response to Rockefeller's comments, Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea McBride, said: "The vice president believes Senator Roberts was a good chairman of the Intelligence Committee."

Let me see if I got this straight: Cheney pushed Sen. Roberts -- a Republican who was bending over backward to protect the Bush Regime and probably would have released a watered-down report anyway -- to stall the investigation. Kind of makes you think that Cheney and the rest of them have something to hide.

Bill Kristol Needs To Shut The Fuck Up

I apologize for the language, but I've had it with these people. Here's what Kristol had to say last Sunday on FoxNews (via Think Progress):

This morning on Fox News, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said that opponents of escalation in Congress are “leap-frogging each other in the degrees of irresponsibility they’re willing to advocate.” Kristol said, “It’s just unbelievable. … It’s so irresponsible that they can’t be quiet for six or nine months,” adding, “You really wonder, do they want it to work or not? I really wonder that.”

I said it before and I'll say it again -- idiots like Kristol have been wrong with regard to Iraq even before Day One, and they really need to stop talking now. And the same goes for those GOP Senators yesterday who wouldn't vote for the anti-surge resolution because they didn't want the enemy to get the impression that the country was divided on this issue.

Say what? Don't you think that the little thing we had a while back called the Mid-Term Elections might have given our enemies a clue that our Deserter-in-Chief has little if any support with regard to his debacle in Iraq? And what's all this crap about Americans being "divided" on this issue? Last I heard, something like 70% of the country oppose Bush's plan to escalate the Iraq War.

In other words, we're finally more or less united on something, and all it took was an idiot in the White House to do it.

The Paklid Presidency

In a speech on the House floor a couple of weeks ago, Oregon Democratic Rep. David Wu claimed that the White House had been "taken over by Klingons." Wu stated that when it came to Iraq, Bush only listened to Vulcans, which is a term that neo-fascists like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz use to describe themselves. But Wu went on to say:

"These aren't Vulcans -- there are Klingons in the White House. But unlike the Klingons in Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own. Don't let faux Klingons send real Americans to war! It's wrong."

OK, it was a silly speech, but I agree with Wu that members of the Bush Regime do not resemble Klingons. There is, however, one alien race from Star Trek which closely resembles the Bush Regime and its apologists. These aliens first appeared in the Next Generation episode called "Samaritan Snare." It was, for the most part, a forgettable episode, but part of the show did make it into pop culture -- or perhaps into a subpart of pop culture. That episode, after all, gave us The Paklids, and, like the members of the Bush Regime, these aliens turned out to be militant idiots.

The Paklids first got the Enterprise's attention by faking that their ship was disabled and was in need of repair (kind of like how Bush faked a lot of people into thinking he was a "compassionate conservative)." The Paklids used simple phrases like "Our ship is broken," "We are far from home," "Can you make our ship go?" "He is smart," "Will our ship go now?" and "We look for things -- things to make us go."

I've always thought The Paklids would make great spokespersons for Ex-Lax, but I digress. Anyway, Riker sends LaForge over to help these folks out, but just as Geordi is finishing up his repairs to their ship, the Paklids become violent. They shoot Mr. LaForge with a phaser, and then begin making demands on the Enterprise ("We need your computer things") and start saying stuff like: "You think we are not smart -- we are smart," "Make us strong," and, who could forget the most famous Paklid line: "We like shields."

The Paklids' ship really wasn't broken -- they were just pretending it was disabled so they could trap the Enterprise into helping them (pretty much in the same way BushCo pretended that Saddam was a threat to us so they could get the American people to support an invasion of Iraq).

So you see, the Bush Administration and The Paklids have a lot in common, especially the whole idiocy part. But when everything goes wrong for The Paklids and their plan to take the Enterprise's computer core fails, they have enough courage to admit failure and their leader actually utters the memorable line: "We are not strong."

And that's where The Paklids differ from the Bush Regime.

Some Global Warming Symmetry

Last month, I linked to an article which reported that an inhabited island off of India is now underwater thanks to rising oceans. Well, it looks like global warming is giving us some new islands in return:

There's a newly discovered piece of land in Greenland, according to The New York Times. It's one of the new islands being found around the Arctic as shoreline glaciers melt away. This new island in Greenland was first noticed in 2005. Old maps show it as part of an ice-covered peninsula. No longer.

Cartographers can't keep up. Several new islands in Greenland have been recently uncovered, literally. And there's at least one new island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago. * * *

Of course, the lunatics who claim that global warming is a good thing will find some way to use this news to their advantage. But they better hurry up, because I have no doubt that rising oceans will eventually submerge these "new" islands.

Toles

The McCain Doctrine (With Update)

Here is an excellent Move-On.org commercial (thanks for the link, JB). Unlike GOP attack ads, this one tells the truth, and the timing couldn't have been better.

It is great to see Democrats and progressives doing the framing for a change. Senator Edwards started it with his "McCain Doctrine" remark, and Move-On is carrying it further. The Democrats should distribute their own talking points telling everyone in the party to start referring to Bush's surge plan as the McCain Doctrine.

McCain and the rest of the GOP are in big trouble over Iraq, and they know it. Bob Novak wrote this the other day (via Daily Kos):

The gloom pervading the Republican Party cannot be exaggerated. The long-range GOP outlook for 2008 is grim. The consensus is that U.S. troops must be off the ground of Iraq by next year to prevent an electoral catastrophe in the next election [...]

Iraq, one of Bush's top political advisers now notes, is a black hole for the Republican Party. A nationally prominent Republican pollster reported confidentially on Capitol Hill after the President's speech that if U.S. boots are still on the ground in Iraq and U.S. blood is still being spilled there at the end of the year, the GOP disaster in 2008 will eclipse 2006.

Although I look forward to a "GOP disaster in 2008," I feel sorry for all the troops who will be sacrificed in the coming months just because Bush is too cowardly to admit his mistake with regard to Iraq and order a withdrawal.

And speaking of the GOP, here's a piece that you can place in the "yeah, no shit" file:

Rep. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, admitted to Roll Call today that his party was running low on ideas, making it difficult for the Republican Party to move forward while it is in the minority.

Susan Davis's article finds the Ohio Republican bemoaning the current state of the party he is leading since it lost its 12 year majority in the House of Representatives. He told her that "We’re still in that listening mode, and we’re going to have to come to some decision on how to proceed here soon."

The House Minority Leader also admitted that there was a definite cause for the failure of his party to retain the majority. "You could say that our reservoir of new ideas is low ... to some extent, you could argue that we got lazy," he said in the interview with Davis.

You're just figuring that out now, Boehner? I'm glad the Republicans don't have any new ideas, because it will take this country decades to recover from their old ones.

UPDATE: Here is some great news from New Hampshire (via Political Wire):

The Boston Herald's Brett Arends got an advance look at a new American Research Group poll from New Hampshire that shows Sen. John McCain’s popularity among New Hampshire’s independent voters "has collapsed."

"For seven years, conventional wisdom has said that the state’s pivotal independent voters would line up behind maverick Sen. John McCain, as they did so famously in the 2000 GOP primary. But new polling data, to be released later this week, will suggest that might no longer be the case."

Said ARG's Dick Bennett: "John McCain is tanking. That’s the big thing [we’re finding]. In New Hampshire a year ago he got 49 percent among independent voters. That number’s way down, to 29 percent now.”

I Like This

This is a good start:

Continuing its march through an agenda of popular legislative initiatives, the Democratic-led House is considering cutting interest rates on some college student loans in half.

The House was scheduled to vote Wednesday on the measure, which would help an estimated 5.5 million students who get need-based federal loans.

The government pays the interest that accrues on those loans while students are in college. Students pick up the payments after they leave school.

The rates would drop from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent in stages over a five-year period under the House proposal. That would cost nearly $6 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

To avoid increasing the deficit, the bill's cost would be offset by reducing the yield on college loans the government guarantees to lenders and cutting the guaranteed return banks get when students default. Banks also would have to pay more in fees.

The House was expected to approve the bill, though its future is uncertain beyond that. The Bush administration and some top Republican lawmakers oppose it. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., head of the Senate's education committee, plans to pursue broader education legislation that addresses the proposed interest rate cut.

The Democrats should proclaim that education is key to the security of this nation, and that anyone who opposes this bill must also oppose the security of the United States and must therefore hate America.

Bright Comet Will Be Visible This Evening . . .

. . . but tonight will be your last chance to see it if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. After tonight, Comet McNaught will be too close to the sun to view, and then will become visible only in the Southern Hemisphere.

Look west very close to the horizon just as the sun is setting (thanks for the heads-up, Blade).

Idiocracy

God help us (thanks for the link, JB):

This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth." After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film. The movie consists largely of a PowerPoint presentation by former Vice President Al Gore recounting scientists' findings.

Al Gore's documentary about global warming may not be shown unless the teacher also presents an "opposing view."

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

The members of the Federal Way School Board need to go have their heads examined. Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for this Frosty character (Frosty?) believing in pretty much whatever he wants to believe in. But when a school board starts giving in to idiots like this guy -- morons who actually believe the Earth is only 14,000 years old -- then I call bullshit on that. In fact, by letting people like Frosty have their way, the Federal Way School Board is essentially taking the position that there is actually a real debate on global warming when there isn't one.

Global warming is real. In fact, I'm still waiting for the extreme right to start arguing that global warming, although real, is so far along that there is nothing we can do about it so why try to stop it (i.e., it's God's will). I expect we'll be hearing such an argument a lot in about a year or two.

And speaking of idiots, I watched "Idiocracy" on DVD last night. It's the latest movie by Mike Judge, who also made "Office Space." It is about this "average" dude who volunteers for a hibernation experiment and ends up being revive 500 years in the future when the Earth is populated by complete idiots and he turns out being the smartest guy in the world. The movie is hilarious, yet for some reason it was only released in 130 theaters last September and grossed less than $500,000 in North America.

Needless to say, Idiocracy never made it to any Central Oregon theaters. I figured that it wasn't any good, given that the studio did very little to market the film and then only released it in a handful of cities. But I realized two things after watching about 10 minutes of the movie: (1) it is a very good film, and (2) there is no way Corporate America could have promoted something like Idiocracy because the whole movie is basically a vicious -- and completely on-the-money -- attack on Corporate America. Even Democrat-leaning corporations like Costco aren't spared.

I won't give anything away, but it is definitely worth seeing, even though it is pretty clear that a lot of the scenes weren't as polished as Judge would have liked them to be, undoubtedly due to the scant support he received from his studio.

When Total Failure Just Isn't Enough (Plus John McCain's Own Personal Quagmire)

Juan Williams started something a few weeks ago on FoxNews and I hope we see a lot more incidents just like it in the coming months. Williams went after Brit Hume and Bill Kristol for their criticism of Iraq War opponents. Here's what he had to say:

[S]ometimes I just want to scream. You guys have been going on since this thing began. I mean, you don't give credit to people, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Barbara Lee, people who said from the start this is a mistake. You put them down. Now it's everybody's a surrender monkey or impatient or squeamish or weak. Why can't you say, hey, there's a real problem in Iraq?

Williams' comment really hit a nerve with me. People like Bill Kristol were cheerleading the Iraq War before it started. As Eric Alterman noted recently: "Literally no one has been more consistently wrong about Iraq than Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol."

Yet imbeciles like Kristol are still invited back to spew their bullshit ideas with regard to that debacle. Indeed, TIME Magazine just hired Kristol as a "part-time columnist," despite his pathetic track record on Iraq.

A frustrated viewer summed up the problem this way during an online chat with CNN talk show host Howard Kurtz a few weeks ago:

"Why do we keep having people who were wrong on Iraq giving advice on TV? MTP this week had a politician and two Times columnists who have been consistently wrong. Why not have Russ Feingold, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert who were and still are right?"

Those are good questions. Dan Rather's career was ruined because he didn't authenticate certain documents that merely purported to substantiate something that everyone in the world already knew to be true, namely, that George W. Bush deserted his post during the Viet Nam War. If Rather could be drummed out of the business over that, folks like Kristol and others could at least not be invited back to television news shows to talk "authoritatively" about a catastrophe that they helped create.

But this would never happen, because the Corporate Media love the Extreme Right and dislike anyone who speaks out against the regressives. What happened to Senator Obama recently is a great example of this particular bias at work. Media Matters has the goods here:

During MSNBC's special election coverage on November 7, co-anchor Chris Matthews remarked that Obama's "middle name is Hussein" and suggested that it would "be interesting down the road."

On November 27, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson referred to radio host Bill Press as "a true member of the Barack Hussein Obama fan club."

During the November 28 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Republican strategist Ed Rogers referred to "Barack Hussein Obama."

On the December 5 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, senior political correspondent Carl Cameron told viewers: "Though he's written two books about himself already, most people know very little about Barack Hussein Obama Junior's uncommonly privileged life."

CNN is also getting into the act. Wolf Blitzer recently "apologized" for this incident:

During the Jan. 1 broadcast of Wolf Blitzer's nightly news program, a pre-commercial preview of the show's next segment included a story on the hunt for Al Qaeda's leadership. Over a photo of Osama Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Blitzer stated, according to the transcript, "Plus, a new year, but the same mission. Will 2007 bring any new changes in the hunt for Osama bin Laden?"

But instead of asking "Where's Osama?" the graphic over the two Islamists read "Where's Obama?" referencing the surname of popular Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama.

One could overlook this incident on CNN if it was an isolated one. Unfortunately, it was not:

On a Dec. 11 broadcast of Blitzer's show, other moves suggested an effort to sustain a meme on Obama's Islamic links. First, a commentary by Jeff Greenfield asked "Is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does?" and answered, "Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." He thereupon described Obama as a "sartorial timebomb." Greenfield later insisted that his remarks were merely a joke.

On the same broadcast, CNN correspondent Jeanne Moos made the Osama-Obama link. She noted, "Someone could confuse Obama with Osama. Only one little consonant differentiates the two names. And as if that similarity weren't enough, how about sharing the name of a former dictator?"

Instead of reporting on something real, such as potential GOP candidate Rudy Giulani's marital infidelities or his association with the corrupt Bernie Kerik, the media focus on how Obama's name and style of dress are similar to those of certain Middle Eastern extremists. Great reporting, folks.

The bottom line here is that Democrats have a huge disadvantage when it comes to getting favorable coverage from the Corporate Media. Idiots like Bill Kristol will always be given air time, while folks like Frank Rich and Paul Krugman will consistently be ignored even though they were right about Iraq all along.

Given this disadvantage, the Democrats really have to do their own work on this front. That's why I really like what Sen. Edwards did recently. He struck the first blow with regard to the 2008 campaign by referring to Bush's plan to surge troop levels as the McCain Doctrine.

But McCain isn't the only contender for the GOP nomination. Giuliani is also in the running, and the Democrats must start seriously exploiting Guiliani's moderate positions on social issues as well as his aforementioned marital infidelities and connections to Kerick. Remember, Right-Wing Christian Nutjobs have a lot of power during the primaries, and all GOP contenders for president have to go through these extremists in order to get the nomination.

And most of all, the Democrats can't forget about Iraq. Both McCain and Guiliani supported that particular disaster. This must be rammed up them sideways at every opportunity, particularly given that the Bush Regime is currently trying to re-write the history of this catastrophe (from Josh Marshall):

According to the White House, the person to blame for Iraq is Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., the top American commander in the country. And Casey's so bad that President Bush is probably going to can him before his current tour concludes this summer. Probably as soon as next month.

In so many words, Casey's policy (which, reading between the lines, it's pretty clear Casey thought was Bush's desired policy) was maintain current troop levels and 'standing down as the Iraqis stand up'. You may have thought that was the Bush policy. But apparently not. "Over the past 12 months," the Times now tells us, "as optimism collided with reality, Mr. Bush increasingly found himself uneasy with General Casey's strategy."

Of course, this is complete horseshit on the part of the Bush Regime. Bush's current surge plan has little to do with military strategy. As a White House official recently admitted, this surge option is "more of a political decision than a military one."

I think Joe Biden got it right when he said this last week:

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

Caught in the middle of all this is John McCain. Bush will be out of the picture in a couple years, but McCain is running for president. I kind of feel sorry for him. Well, not really -- but it is funny that he came up with the McCain Doctrine probably because he figured that Bush would choose not to deploy more troops. That way, when Bush begins troop withdrawals and Iraq devolves further into hellishness -- which will happen (there is no easy way out of this particular mess, folks) -- then McCain figured that he could come out in early 2008 and say that BushCo should have followed his plan and actually put more American troops on Iraqi soil.

But now McCain is stuck with his statements concerning escalation, and in effect is stuck in a quagmire of his own creation. In fact, he is currently scrambling to distance himself from Bush by claiming that Bush isn't really following the McCain Doctrine because McCain actually wants to escalate and not surge (i.e., McCain was for the surge before he was against it).

Good luck with that, Senator.

So Long, Harriet

Harriet Miers (third from the left) has submitted her resignation as White House counsel.

I Guess Someone Forgot To Tell The Iraqis That The U.S. Election Was Over

Many moronic statements have been made over the last few years by members of the Bush Regime concerning the Iraq War. Perhaps the most famous words ever uttered with regard to the Iraq Debacle -- yes, even more memorable than "Bring It On" -- were Dick Cheney's words from May 2005, when he said that the Iraqi insurgency was "in its final throes."

One would think that Cheney would choose to keep his mouth shut after his "final throes" prediction completely missed the mark. But Dick really likes to say stupid things apparently. His latest idiotic remark with regard to Iraq was made a couple months ago:

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that insurgents in Iraq have increased their attacks in order to influence the upcoming US mid-term elections. He blamed a recent rise in violence on al-Qaeda and others trying to "break the will of the American people".

"They're very sensitive to the fact that we've got an election scheduled," he said, claiming the militants monitor US public opinion via the internet.

In October US forces in Iraq suffered one of their worst monthly death tolls.

OK, so if Cheney's statement was correct, that must mean that the death toll in Iraq last October was merely a spike brought on by the U.S. mid-term elections and that the situation in Iraq would stabilize once the polls closed in America. Right?

Nope. Wrong again (from a December 31 article in Editor & Publisher):

The U.S. military death toll in Iraq reached 3,000 on Sunday, with the reported deaths of two more Americans. It came on the day after the execution of Saddam Hussein. President Bush, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, mourned the death of the 3,000th U.S. soldier, the White House said.

More Americans have died this month -- at least 110 -- than in any month since November 2004. Spc. Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring, Texas, was killed Thursday by small arms fire in Baghdad, the Defense Department said Sunday, making him the 3000th to die.

There's been a lot of chatter coursing through the tubes of the Internets lately regarding who is going to get the blame for this catastrophe in Iraq, particularly now that Bush is planning to "surge" U.S. troop levels. Kevin Drum wrote this last week:

As regular readers know, I'm unequivocally in favor of withdrawing from Iraq, but this morning I suggested that I'd be secretly happy to see a surge happen since it would deprive conservatives of an excuse to blame the Iraq fiasco on something other than the war itself (i.e., bad execution, liberal perfidy, media bias, etc.). Both Matt Yglesias and Atrios disagree because, they say, conservatives will blame the loss in Iraq on liberals no matter what happens.

Believe me, I've got no argument with that. There's no question that conservatives will try to hang our failure in Iraq around liberal peacenik necks, but that's not what's important. What's important is whether they succeed. Public opinion is key, and if they go ahead and do their surge, and it fails, it's going to make the conservative story a lot harder to tell. The public just isn't going to buy it. * * *

But as DarkSyde over at Kos pointed out last week: "One thing BushCo did and did well was in branding this war an exclusively Republican War and cutting Democrats out of what they thought was going to be the credit for it." That is certainly a correct statement. Indeed, the GOP essentially screwed up just about everything when it came to the Iraq War, but they definitely nailed their "let's shut the Democrats out" strategy. As historian Sean Wilentz wrote last April:

No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

Maybe Bush should take up Satan worship -- this whole "talking to God" thing clearly isn't working for him.

Although I have no doubt that the Extreme Right will indeed attempt to blame liberals for the Iraq Fiasco -- they've already tried to share the blame with John "I Was For The War Before I Was Against It" Kerry -- the attempt to do so will fail because the fact that this is Bush's disaster is pretty much accepted by a majority of Americans. The Democrats were swept into power based on this perception, and I don't think that even liars as accomplished as those who populate the GOP can change voters' minds on that.